As Director of Central Intelligence from 1991-1993, Robert M. Gates, the nominee to be the next Secretary of Defense, grappled with questions of government secrecy more than almost any other agency head and helped to inaugurate a decade of increasing openness in intelligence and elsewhere.

Though he said the term “CIA openness” was “an oxymoron,” Mr. Gates also expressed the view that the interests of the CIA would best be served by eliminating unnecessary restrictions on disclosure of Agency information.

He undertook several initiatives to increase openness in U.S. intelligence, some of which did not fail.

He directed the publication of unclassified and declassified articles from the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence; he began the process of declassifying records concerning major U.S. covert actions during the cold war; he signaled the CIA’s willingness to cooperate in a government-wide program of declassifying records pertaining to the assassination of President Kennedy; and he initiated a program of declassification of National Intelligence Estimates on the former Soviet Union.

“Over the years, CIA’s approach to dealing with the media and the public has been, at best, uneven,” he said in a 1992 speech. It “took place against a backdrop of overall continuing and undifferentiated secrecy…. This is going to change.”

Mr. Gates laid out his views on the subject and his new initiatives in “CIA and Openness,” a speech to the Oklahoma Press Association, on February 21, 1992.

Most of Mr. Gates’s changes in intelligence disclosure policy were incremental and did not fundamentally transform either internal or external communications. Many of the proposed changes were adopted half-heartedly or inconsistently, or later abandoned. Some were not implemented at all.

For example, at his 1991 confirmation hearing, Mr. Gates expressed support for the idea of declassifying the intelligence budget total, but he never did so.

An excellent proposal that he presented in his 1992 speech — to “publish on an annual basis an index of all documents [CIA] has declassified” — was never accomplished, though it remains a valuable and perfectly achievable objective, for CIA and other national security agencies.

Mr. Gates’ halting efforts to increase openness were explicitly motivated by bureaucratic self-interest, but they were not less effective for that reason. To the contrary, he seemed to understand what few agency heads do: that openness and responsiveness to the public can advance the interests of an agency over the long run.

Mr. Gates has also displayed an appreciation for the role of congressional oversight that may yet serve him and the nation well.

“I sat in the Situation Room in secret meetings for nearly twenty years under five Presidents, and all I can say is that some awfully crazy schemes might well have been approved had everyone present not known and expected hard questions, debate, and criticism from the Hill,” he wrote in his 1996 memoir “From the Shadows” (p. 559).

“And when, on a few occasions, Congress was kept in the dark, and such schemes did proceed, it was nearly always to the lasting regret of the Presidents involved. Working with the Congress was never easy for Presidents, but then, under the Constitution, it wasn’t supposed to be. I saw too many in the White House forget that.”

The role of special operations forces in the U.S. military is steadily increasing but relatively little is publicly known about the activities and performance of these specialized units.

A new U.S. Army manual (pdf) fills in some of the gaps in the public record with a description of the structure, capabilities and missions of U.S. Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF).

The manual has not been approved for public release, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News.

“ARSOF are specially organized, trained, and equipped military forces,” it explains. “They conduct SO [special operations] to achieve military, political, economic, or informational objectives by generally unconventional means in hostile, denied, or politically sensitive areas.”

According to the Army, special operations forces can leap tall buildings in a single bound.

“They provide to the Nation an array of deployable, agile, versatile, lethal, survivable, and sustainable formations, which are affordable and capable of rapidly reversing the conditions of human suffering and decisively resolving conflicts.”

Counterterrorism missions are a particular focus of special operations today.

“ARSOF are, and will be for the near future, continuously engaged against terrorists whose goal is the destruction of American freedoms and the American way of life,” the new manual says.

Special operations also support intelligence collection.

“ARSOF are a key enabler in the WOT [war on terror] by conducting SO, which obtain actionable intelligence…. The results of these activities may be fed directly to a commander or Country Team or may be input into the intelligence process for processing, analysis, and dissemination to military and other government agencies (OGAs).”

There is also a domestic component to Army special operations, though it is not clearly specified in the manual.

“The United States employs ARSOF capabilities at home and abroad in support of U.S. national security goals in a variety of operations.”

The manual spells out the principles of special operations warfare, including preemption, dislocation, disruption, and so forth.

“SO [special operations] are frequently clandestine or low-visibility operations, or they may be combined with overt operations. SO can be covert but require a declaration of war or a specific finding approved by the President or the SecDef,” the manual states.

(The asserted ability of the Secretary of Defense to authorize covert operations has not been explicitly claimed before, to Secrecy News’ knowledge.)

“Significant legal and policy considerations apply to many SO activities,” the manual observes.

The new Army manual is unclassified, but its distribution is formally restricted “to protect technical or operational information.”

In view of the possible sensitivity of the document, Secrecy News is only posting the preface and the first of the eight chapters from the 119 page manual.

See “Army Special Operations Forces,” U.S. Army Field Manual FM 3-05, September 20, 2006.

The Congressional Research Service noted earlier this year (pdf) that “The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) has called for a 15% increase in special operations forces beginning in FY 2007.”

A former Federal Air Marshal who was fired by the Transportation Security Administration last April for disclosing “sensitive security information” (SSI) to the press has filed suit against the government arguing that his disclosure was protected under the Whistleblower Protection Act.

SSI is unclassified information regarding transportation security that is protected from disclosure by statute.

“Your release of SSI to the media was unauthorized and not protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” a TSA official wrote (pdf) to Air Marshal Robert MacLean, notifying him of his termination.

But whistleblower advocacy groups, including the Government Accountability Project and the Project on Government Oversight, have rallied to the support of Mr. MacLean.

“The Federal Air Marshal Service is in blatant violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act, which protects the disclosure of unclassified information that an employee feels endangers public health and safety, and Robert certainly did that,” said Adam Miles, legislative director of GAP, in a Washington Times story.

See “Ex-air marshal to sue over ‘SSI’ label” by Audrey Hudson, Washington Times, October 30.

See also “Air marshal’s firing prompts whistleblower suit” by Stephen Losey, Federal Times, November 7.

A 2004 report from the Congressional Research Service on SSI is here (pdf). Recent Congressional action to limit the application of SSI was described in Secrecy News here.

U.S. intelligence policy on covert action, including presidential authorization and congressional notification requirements, is “less than clear,” according to a new report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service, and may need to be updated to encompass activities performed by the Department of Defense.

Covert action generally refers to CIA operations undertaken abroad against foreign targets in which U.S. sponsorship is concealed. But increasingly, some DoD special operations seem to fit the criteria for covert action.

“Senior U.S. intelligence community officials have conceded that the line separating CIA and DOD intelligence activities has blurred, making it more difficult to distinguish between the traditional secret intelligence missions carried out by each,” according to the new CRS report.

The Department of Defense contends that there is a difference between its “clandestine operations,” which do not entail any unique oversight requirements, and CIA “covert actions,” which cannot be conducted without a written presidential finding and congressional notice, mandated by a 1991 statute.

As explained by CRS, “a clandestine operation is an operation sponsored or conducted by governmental departments or agencies in such a way as to assure secrecy or concealment. Such an operation differs from a covert action in that emphasis is placed on concealment of the operation rather than on the concealment of the identity of the sponsor.”

In certain DoD special operations, however, “an activity may be both covert and clandestine.”

The CRS report presents a menu of policy questions for lawmakers to consider in evaluating whether to modify U.S. policy on covert action.

A copy of the report was obtained by Secrecy News.

See “Covert Action: Legislative Background and Possible Policy Questions,” November 2, 2006.

U.S. Army intelligence (G2) has developed a new methodology (pdf) for applying national security classification controls and for training personnel in the proper use of classification restrictions.

Failure to classify correctly has consequences, a tutorial on the new approach points out.

“Over-classification is costly, inefficient and can cause slow downs to development/operation. Under-classification can cause compromise, inadvertent disclosures and confusion.”

But getting it right is easier said than done, because it involves the conscious exercise of informed judgment.

“The descriptors used in addressing damage at the confidential (damage), secret (serious damage) or top secret (exceptionally grave damage) levels are subjective.”

The new Army methodology “provides a standardized method of making an objective decision about a subjective issue,” wrote Lt. Gen. John F. Kimmons, U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, in a cover memorandum.

See “Standardized Methodology for Making Classification Decisions,” Office of the Army Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2, October 25, 2006.

The U.S. Government suspended public access to an online database of captured Iraqi documents after the New York Times presented claims from some nuclear experts that the documents included sensitive nuclear weapons design information.

The documents had already been reviewed and cleared for public release, but the experts consulted by the Times said they should not have been disclosed.

See “U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer” by William J. Broad, New York Times, November 3.

Everyone agrees that proliferation-sensitive data should be protected. The Federation of American Scientists does not publish detailed blueprints of functional nuclear weapons, for example, though such records can be found in the public domain.

But in Secrecy News’ estimation, the New York Times story failed to include an appropriate note of skepticism about the significance of the disclosures.

According to the Times, experts say that the Iraqi documents “constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.”

This is a trope that has surfaced repeatedly for decades, from the publication of the Smyth Report in 1946 and the Los Alamos Primer (pdf) some years later to the Progressive Case in 1979 and even the declassification of inertial confinement fusion in the 1990s, each of which supposedly compromised the secret of the Bomb.

While it is no doubt true, as former Energy Department classification official A. Bryan Siebert told the Times, that there are still nuclear weapons secrets, the basics of nuclear weapons construction have long been publicly available. And in case anyone hasn’t noticed, proliferation of actual nuclear weapons has been proceeding apace in North Korea, Iran and elsewhere, with or without captured Iraqi documents.

William Broad is the best of reporters and his stories pack a punch even when they are not on the front page of the New York Times.

But he also has a penchant for telling and retelling a sensational, counterintuitive story that the government is failing to protect sensitive national security secrets.

A January 13, 2002, front page story by Mr. Broad reported that the government was selling declassified documents describing the production of biological weapons. That story, like the one today, also referred to the documents in question as “cookbooks” for weapons of mass destruction, a cliched term that grossly exaggerates their significance and utility, in Secrecy News’ opinion.

The earlier story prompted the removal of many thousands of declassified documents from public access, which was probably prudent. But it also triggered a continuing expansion of official controls on unclassified information, culminating in a March 19, 2002, memorandum from White House chief of staff Andrew Card on “White House Guidance on Safeguarding WMD Information and Sensitive Homeland Security Documents.” One has to expect that the latest story will aggravate the problem.

The current Administration is not known for reckless disclosure of sensitive data, to put it mildly. The Times and its reporters know this. But today’s story does not account for the government’s supposed departure from its normal stinginess with information and its move towards indiscriminate revelation of precious nuclear secrets, if that’s what happened. Having been publicly scolded by the Times for this little experiment in public disclosure, officials are now even less likely to defy well-founded expectations of secrecy.

Last week, coincidentally, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission published a proposal to export some 15 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (93% U-235) to Canada, thereby perpetuating international traffic in actual bomb-grade materials.

The proposal was not reported in the New York Times.

Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-Nevada) helped to direct millions of dollars of classified contracts to one of his major campaign contributors, according to an astonishing account in the Wall Street Journal. (“Congressman’s Favors for Friend Include Help in Secret Budget,” by John R. Wilke, Wall Street Journal, November 1, sub. req’d.).

Coming in the wake of the bribery scandal involving Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA), the latest report underscores the potential for corruption in classified defense and intelligence budgeting.

Yet Congressional leaders have stubbornly resisted efforts to reduce budget secrecy.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal followed up on this aspect of the Gibbons story in a report yesterday.

See “Experts critical of secret defense budgeting system” by Aaron Sadler, Las Vegas Review-Journal, November 2.

The specialized language of government information policy is itself a reflection of the intricacies and convolutions of that policy.

A newly updated and substantially expanded lexicon (pdf) of information-related terms, prepared by Susan L. Maret, provides a valuable map to the language and the terrain of U.S. government information policy.

Hundreds of entries, ranging from the well-known or obvious (“classified”) to the obscure and recondite (e.g., EPITS), are presented with lucid definitions and pointers to official source documents.

“These terms represent a virtual seed catalog to federal informationally-driven procedures, policies, and practices involving, among other matters, the information life cycle, record keeping, ownership over information, collection and analysis of intelligence information, security classification categories and markings, censorship, citizen right-to-know, deception, propaganda, secrecy, technology, surveillance, threat, and warfare,” Dr. Maret writes.

“The terms reported here — which have often been interpreted widely from one federal agency to another — play a significant role in shaping social and political reality, and furthering government policy.”

See “On Their Own Terms: A Lexicon with an Emphasis on Information-Related Terms Produced by the U.S. Federal Government” by Susan Maret, Ph.D., updated October 2006. (An MS Word version is here.)

The Office of Director of National Intelligence is holding a media roundtable today (pdf) to introduce “Intellipedia,” described as a Wikipedia for the Intelligence Community.

The event follows on a news story about Intellipedia and related initiatives in the current issue of U.S. News and World Report. See “Wikis and Blogs, Oh My!” by David E. Kaplan, U.S. News, October 30.

Processing of applications for security clearances by the Department of Defense continues to fall far behind official targets for improvement, according to the Government Accountability Office.

“Our independent analysis of timeliness data showed that industry personnel contracted to work for the federal government waited more than one year on average to receive top secret clearances,” a new GAO study said.

Among other things, the latest study provides a useful snapshot of the security clearance apparatus. It reports, for example, that approximately 2.5 million persons hold security clearances authorized by the Department of Defense.

See “DOD Personnel Clearances: Additional OMB Actions Are Needed to Improve the Security Clearance Process” (pdf) [GAO-06-1070], September 2006.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proposing a new rule on protection of “Safeguards Information” (SGI).

“SGI is a special category of sensitive unclassified information to be protected from unauthorized disclosure under Section 147 of the [Atomic Energy Act].”

“Although SGI is considered to be sensitive unclassified information, it is handled and protected more like Classified National Security Information than like other sensitive unclassified information (e.g., privacy and proprietary information).” Access to SGI, for example, requires a validated “need to know.”

The proposed NRC rule, issued for public comment, was published in the Federal Register today.

A new report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service synthesizes what is known, believed and speculated about the recent North Korean nuclear explosive test, and sketches out the options for U.S. policy.

“The most fundamental U.S. goals of the confrontation with North Korea are to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and to prevent an attack — either nuclear or conventional — on the United States or on its allies in the region,” the report says.

“The options available to U.S. policymakers to pursue these goals include the acceptance of North Korea as a nuclear power, bilateral or multilateral negotiations, heightened legal and economic pressure on North Korea, adoption of a regime change policy through non-military means, military action or threats, and withdrawal from the conflict.”

A copy of the new CRS report was obtained by Secrecy News.

See “North Korea’s Nuclear Test: Motivations, Implications, and U.S. Options,” October 24, 2006.

In an unusual investigation of improper secrecy involving unclassified information, an Inspector General report last week found that a Defense Department contractor marked records as “proprietary data,” thereby restricting their dissemination, even though the records did not qualify as proprietary.

Kellogg, Brown and Root Services, Inc. (KBR), a component of Halliburton, “routinely marks almost all of the information it provides to the government as KBR proprietary data,” the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found (pdf).

This is not consistent with Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), the IG said.

“The routine use of proprietary markings when the data marked is not internal contractor information… is an abuse of FAR procedures [and] inhibits transparency of government activities and the use of taxpayer funds…,” the Inspector General reported.

“The result is that information normally releasable to the public must be protected from public release…”

“In effect, KBR has turned FAR provisions designed to protect truly proprietary information … into a mechanism to prevent the government from releasing normally transparent information, thus potentially hindering competition and oversight,” the Inspector General concluded.

See “Interim Audit Report on Inappropriate Use of Proprietary Data Markings by the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program Contractor,” Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, October 26, 2006.

Halliburton’s Kellogg Brown & Root unit won a $17 billion contract in 2001 to provide services to the U.S. Army worldwide that includes over $15.4 billion for Iraq work, noted Tony Capaccio in a report for Bloomberg News. “While KBR has been criticized for its accounting practices, bills and estimates of future costs, this audit is the first to cite it for restricting information,” he wrote.

While national security classification procedures are governed by certain rules and procedures, including a degree of external oversight, the same is not consistently true of the dozens of control markings (such as “proprietary data” or “for official use only”) that are increasingly imposed on unclassified information.

So, for example, there are well-defined procedures for declassification of classified information, but there are no such procedures for lifting controls on many varieties of “sensitive but unclassified” information.

And while the Information Security Oversight Office is responsible for oversight of classification and declassification activity, no one is similarly responsible for monitoring restrictions on unclassified information that is withheld from the public. It would be surprising if such restrictions were not abused, since they can serve as a shield against oversight and accountability.

The new Inspector General report suggests that this is a function that might regularly be assumed by agency Inspectors General.

A House Government Reform Subcommittee held a hearing last March on the proliferation of controls on unclassified information and their consequences. The record of that hearing has recently been published.

See “Drowning in a Sea of Faux Secrets: Policies on Handling of Classified and Sensitive Information,” House Committee on Government Reform, March 14, 2006.