Review: 'Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State' by Dana Priest and William Arkin
Book Review By Richard Rhodes
WashPost
Published: October 14
From a strictly bureaucratic point of view, the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 was a disaster for official Washington. Government institutions from the Pentagon to the National Security Agency and beyond shed budget and manpower. Even the privileged nuclear-weapons complex lost a large piece of its purpose when the nation’s longstanding primary enemy disappeared. Among hawks in the early 1990s — in then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s Pentagon in particular — there was a scramble to invent a new Cold War with China which might justify restoring defense appropriations to their former plenitude. China, however, chose not to enlist. In the unforgettable words of Colin Powell during his chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs, we were “running out of enemies”; he was, Powell said ironically, “down to Fidel Castro and Kim Il Sung.”
Then came 9/11, courtesy of al-Qaeda, followed by the anthrax letter attacks the next month. A panicked leadership under President George W. Bush, lacking a more targeted strategy, set the intelligence community loose tracking potential terrorists with every surveillance tool it could devise. “A culture of fear,” write journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin, “had created a culture of spending to control it, which, in turn, had led to a belief that the government had to be able to stop every single plot before it took place, regardless of whether it involved one network of twenty terrorists or one single deranged person.” The resulting “security spending spree,” they report, “exceeded $2 trillion.”
“Top Secret America” originated in a 2010 Washington Post series of the same name that set out to enumerate how many Americans held top secret clearances — about 854,000, the Post’s investigative team found, more than the population of Washington. The book is far more ambitious than was the series, however, and makes the team’s investigations available in detail to those of us who live beyond the Beltway.
Throwing money after security turns out to be a classic example of the law of diminishing marginal utility. Serialized intelligence reports might be helpful, for example, but 50,000 of them published annually under 1,500 titles? A “senior intelligence officer” broke security rules to show Priest a classified list of them digitally and an overflowing inbox of their printed counterparts and “grew visibly angry” as he did so. Too much, too slow, too late, he told her. The result, she and Arkin write, was that senior officials didn’t even try to read the reports but relied on their personal briefers who, equally overwhelmed, relied on only the output of their own shops. “Thus a post-9/11 goal of breaking down walls to give decision makers a broader analysis, all easily accessible online, was completely defeated.”
(More here.)
WashPost
Published: October 14
From a strictly bureaucratic point of view, the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 was a disaster for official Washington. Government institutions from the Pentagon to the National Security Agency and beyond shed budget and manpower. Even the privileged nuclear-weapons complex lost a large piece of its purpose when the nation’s longstanding primary enemy disappeared. Among hawks in the early 1990s — in then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s Pentagon in particular — there was a scramble to invent a new Cold War with China which might justify restoring defense appropriations to their former plenitude. China, however, chose not to enlist. In the unforgettable words of Colin Powell during his chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs, we were “running out of enemies”; he was, Powell said ironically, “down to Fidel Castro and Kim Il Sung.”
Then came 9/11, courtesy of al-Qaeda, followed by the anthrax letter attacks the next month. A panicked leadership under President George W. Bush, lacking a more targeted strategy, set the intelligence community loose tracking potential terrorists with every surveillance tool it could devise. “A culture of fear,” write journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin, “had created a culture of spending to control it, which, in turn, had led to a belief that the government had to be able to stop every single plot before it took place, regardless of whether it involved one network of twenty terrorists or one single deranged person.” The resulting “security spending spree,” they report, “exceeded $2 trillion.”
“Top Secret America” originated in a 2010 Washington Post series of the same name that set out to enumerate how many Americans held top secret clearances — about 854,000, the Post’s investigative team found, more than the population of Washington. The book is far more ambitious than was the series, however, and makes the team’s investigations available in detail to those of us who live beyond the Beltway.
Throwing money after security turns out to be a classic example of the law of diminishing marginal utility. Serialized intelligence reports might be helpful, for example, but 50,000 of them published annually under 1,500 titles? A “senior intelligence officer” broke security rules to show Priest a classified list of them digitally and an overflowing inbox of their printed counterparts and “grew visibly angry” as he did so. Too much, too slow, too late, he told her. The result, she and Arkin write, was that senior officials didn’t even try to read the reports but relied on their personal briefers who, equally overwhelmed, relied on only the output of their own shops. “Thus a post-9/11 goal of breaking down walls to give decision makers a broader analysis, all easily accessible online, was completely defeated.”
(More here.)
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