For Official Use Only

The bad news is that they are coming back. They will be here in September, and I think we can expect a brief respite over Labor Day, but they are going to be here in earnest come the second week of the ninth month. H.L. Menken said one time that regardless of how much we pay them, it is worth it for the entertainment.

I am talking about Congress, of course, and despite all the press releases, most of the Members have been elsewhere through the month of August. They are coming back with an agenda, which is a horrifying prospect. They are going to implement some form of the 9/11 Commission. They claim they will, in the words of Trent Lott, “reform our intelligence services in order to better protect the country from terrorist threats.”

You will remember Mr. Lott. He lost his job as the Senate Majority Leader over some ill-considered remarks applauding the service of former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. Strom was turning 100 at the time, and in the traditional phrase, was leaving Washington “to spend more time with his family.”

Or families, rather.

Trent’s remarks of praise could be construed to the effect that the right people down South knew how to take care of things, and if the Civil War had turned out a little different we wouldn’t have the problems we enjoy today.

Wara are funny. We are seeing the power of Vietnam still playing out in our near-geriatric candidates. These conflicts seem to be eternal, lingering across the generations, outliving even the victors and the vanquished. Former Senator and triple amputee Max Cleland appeared at the gate of President Bush’s ranch yesterday in his wheelchair to protest the  savaging of Senator Kerry’s war record. Such is the power of a war long over.

What was interesting about Trent’s remarks, and the firestorm that accompanied them, was that Strom had a secret. It involved a daughter conceived with the maid at the family mansion long ago. It was not a particularly well-kept secret, and frankly the rumors were more salacious than the truth. But still, it was one of those strange whispered things that was not referenced in polite company.

I had the opportunity to meet the Strom a few times when I worked on the Hill. He was unfailingly courteous, polite to a fault. I once introduced him to small group I was showing around the Senate side, and he was kind enough to spend a few seconds with each person, making them feel special. Then he motored off like the Energizer Bunny, inexorable in his appointed rounds.

Strom seemed to have no problems with his secret, and even his daughter politely waited until the distinguished member from South Carolina was interred to point out that she was his daughter. Sort of like what they say on the floor of the Congress, that they reserve the right to correct and expand their remarks in the Congressional Record , published where no one will read them the next day.

Politeness was the hallmark of Strom’s generation, even when they were race-baiting on the campaign trail. The whole thing was very Old School, since this is hardly a secret to African Americans. But misgenation was one of the secrets of the South, and the North for that matter. We are much more related that anyone lets on. Entwined, in fact.

But that is the nature of secrets. Anyhow, Trent got together with a Democrat from Oregon named Ron Wyden, who is the junior Senator to Patty Murray, the Senator in Sneakers. The bi-partisan duo have identified the key problem confronting us this Fall.

That’s right. Over-classification .

I have been waiting breathlessly for someone to bring this up. There are just too many secrets. The Senators claim that Congress and the American people lack the  information to protect the national security. That’s what we need. More information.

But they have a point. Thomas H. Kean was the chairman of the 9/11 Commission. He said that three-quarters of the classified material he reviewed for the commission should not have been classified in the first place.

So the secret is out. Theoretically, only some people in Government can declare things secret. I used to have a thing called Original Classification Authority. Oh, not me, exactly, since OCA is a big deal.

My Boss had OCA. He was a four-star officer, and the ability to manufacture secrets came with his job. That authority, in turn, was delegated through the chain of command down to us worker-bees. In practise, that meant that when our team of bright young people compiled the day’s intelligence summary from the thick sheaf of raw reports, we had to assign a level of secrecy to each paragraph. It was keyed to the level of the biggest secret contained in each one.

Often it was a judgment call, and the natural inclination was to just assign the highest classification to the paragraph that you had just seen. Of course, it was more complicated than that. We had two product lines, one was at the Special Intelligence level, which was read for the most part only by other Spooks. The second was just Secret, and had to be carefully parsed to ensure that the good stuff didn’t get in the report we shared with ordinary government people. It was sort of like running with scissors in kindergarden.

It turned out it the rivalry between the collection agencies was useful, since we found out later that the Walker Spy Ring had stolen the codes protecting the lower-ranking secrets and the Russians were reading our messages just as fast as we could transmit them.

I wondered at the time exactly who we were keeping the Secrets from, since we were giving them away to the prospective enemy for free.

But no matter. In time the Walkers were arrested, and after some heavy breathing, we went back to business as usual.

I can remember some of the proposed new code-words that were to comprise the new control system. It is a symptom of the vagaries of the aging brain that I can, since I cannot sometimes remember which dry-cleaning establishment has my shirts.

The system we use to classify information is another of those relics that pre-date the Cold War. There is Unclassified information, and then the first leap into the world of controlled data. For Official Use Only . That means the information isn’t classified, and you can carry it around, though, but only if you are doing so to conduct official activities in the comfort and privacy of your own home.

Which is to say that the information isn’t classified, but it can’t be released, either. The National Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office reports we did 14.2 million classification actions in 2003, double the number recorded in 1993.

Trent and Ron say the culture of classification can impair the information-sharing among intelligence agencies necessary to ensure sound policymaking. They could be right, though the classification of the information does not seem to have much impact on bad policy.

The good news is that the Senators think they can clear ” Washington ‘s fog of secrecy” by establishing an “independent board to review the standards and procedures for national security classification.”

Nothing will dispel the fog off the Potomac , if the last couple centuries are any indication. The Carter Administration tried to do the right thing about classification, but as with so many things, idealism proved hopelessly wrong in application.

Thirty years after that we are still doing business the way we were in 1948. The Senate says they want to bring common sense to bear on the national security classification system. They have introduced a Bill to establish a three-person board with two tasks. The first of which would be “to review and make recommendations on the standards and processes used to classify information for national security purposes;” and second, to “serve as a standing body to act on Congressional and certain executive branch requests to re-examine classification decisions.”

The latter is where there could be enormous fun. The board is too small to do anything meaningful, and with millions of individual decisions to review, it is certain to be only a means for the Congress to unilaterally reveal Secrets when there is a compelling need to embarrass the Administration.

Which is certainly good sport, and considering what we have given away over the years, probably couldn’t be much more compromising than the situation we have now. Nor could the investigation of Senator Richard Shelby for being the alleged source of leaked secrets have anything to do with this important initiative. It is purely coincidental that he and Trent are old pals.

The Senators primly conclude that there are “certainly important sources and pieces of information that must never be compromised.” But they say that millions of documents that weren’t born classified have inherited or adopted or married into a classification.

I had to laugh, thinking back to Strom and why Senator Lott isn’t the Majority Leader anymore.

And then I thought about the new classification that has arrived since the Global War on Terror began. “Sensitive but Unclassified Law Enforcement Information.”

I always wondered what the hell that meant. Or exactly what I was supposed to do with it.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra