American History Hit - America's Top Secrets: Manhattan Project to Drone Warfare

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Much of American history has been redacted. Since the World War 2, the number of secrets the US government has kept has grown exponentially. There are some things they think are too dangerous for the public to know. Matthew Connelly, author of the Declassification Engine, takes Don through America's top secrets of the 20th century.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Stuary Beckwith. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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It was December 7, 1941, the day that will live in infamy. On that fateful evening, Churchill was the one hosting a dinner of his own at his country estate in England. His guests were American ambassador John G. Wynett and Wall Street banker Averill Harriman. According to a document which would be classified as top secret for 50 years after Pearl Harbor, shortly before 9 p.m., still mourning in Honolulu, the butler announced the news of a Japanese attack on the American fleet in Hawaii, expecting his guests to be distraught upon hearing of the dreadful attack. The sunken ships, thousands of American casualties, Churchill is shocked to see both men embrace, race and dance around the room in delight. According to Churchill, Ambassador Weinen insisted the

attack was a marvelous thing. That same evening at the White House, Churchill also described being informed that an aid to an American general had failed to pass on deciphered Japanese messages before the attack, announcing that they were breaking off negotiations with the Americans. These revelations are just two examples of America's until recently redacted history, which the U.S. government has considered too dangerous to reveal to the public. It is an attitude and practice that has snowballed throughout the 20th century into present day as numbers of classified documents have multiplied exponentially, creating a cult of secrecy within the U.S. government.

Hi, everybody, it's Don Wildman. Welcome to American History Hit. Top secret, confidential, restricted, compartmented. These are a few of the categories of classification that dictate levels of access to official information produced by the government. It is real terminology, not just the stuff of political thrillers. And over our lifetimes, for decades prior, this element of public life has expanded exponentially. In the course of 80 years or so, the modern United States government has become mired in a swamp of its own secrecy, one that calls into question the usefulness of the secrecy, never mind any darker implications of how the federal government might be utilizing

all that information in ways the public will likely never understand or control. The declassification engine is a recent book that deals with this contemporary crisis. And its author joins us today. Matthew Connolly is a professor of international and global history at Columbia University and principal investigator at History Lab, a project that applies data science to the problem of preserving the public record and accelerating its release. Matthew Connolly, welcome to American History Hit. It's a privilege to have you, sir.

It's good to be with you, Don. Your book addresses a pressing issue, a unique dilemma of modern America. The United States was conceived, ideally, to be a transparently governed society, an open book for its citizenry. But today, instead, ours is a government of profound secrecy that, you suggest, contains within it a dark state. Not a deep state. There's a difference in those terms. That every year produces a new mountain of classified information that only adds to the mountain range already standing. We're locked in a perpetual process. More secrecy, less transparency.

That's the broad sketch of the problem, right? Yeah, that's right, Don. And, you know, if you actually read the Constitution, you won't find anything in there about how the president can keep secrets from the American public. So that's something that really has a history. And in fact, that history, as you say, it's about 80 years old. For most of American history, the United States was really an outlier. We didn't have systems for key. keeping secrets. We didn't have centralized intelligence agencies. We didn't have any surveillance apparatus. So all that's something that you have to explain. And for me, the story begins in the Second World War. You make a movie line reference early in the book. We can't handle the truth.

It's the futility of the government keeping up with its own production of classified information. Yeah, that's right. I'm thinking of that movie. I think probably everyone's seen by now, a few good men. It's the famous scene, right? Where that grizzled Marine colonel tells the innocent young attorney how it is that there are all kinds of secrets, right, that our government keeps from us just to keep us safe. And unfortunately, that attitude, it's all too prevalent. And you can find it, again, going back to the Second World War from the very outset, right? And that's why my book begins with Pearl Harbor, what I call the original secret. How is that? So why Pearl Harbor, what happened then? Obviously, I know what happened,

but why was that secret such a building block of what's to come? You know, if you only knew what it was that President Roosevelt was willing to tell the public, you would think, as he said, that this Japanese attack was a day of infamy, right? Because it was a surprise attack. It came out of nowhere. American diplomats were negotiating in good faith. But it's just not true. They knew an attack was coming. They knew it was coming for weeks beforehand. And not only that, but they welcomed it. In fact, Winston Churchill tells the story about how American diplomats literally danced. They got up on their feet and started dancing when they heard the news, how the Japanese had attacked the American fleet in the Pacific.

This is a long-held theory. Some people called a conspiracy theory, but you are actually specifying a document which you were able to find, which was redacted, that actually tells this story. It's from 1954, I believe I read, right? Yeah, that's right. It was a war story. So Churchill was visiting the White House. It was late into the evening after dinner, and the prime minister loved to drink and probably

was drinking too much. And it was then that he told this story. not only about American diplomats celebrating the Japanese attack, but also how it is that the man who at that point was the director of the CIA, Biddle Smith, how it is he'd failed to deliver a telegram that conveyed the news at the Japanese were breaking off negotiations. And so Churchill demanded to know how that had happened. And so Churchill, when you hear this story, and you would never have heard it unless more than half a century later they finally declassified this document, you know, you would think

that Churchill was a conspiracy theorist. But when I hear that term, I have to laugh because I think of myself as a conspiracy empiricist. Because the fact is, if we think of conspiracy in the literal sense, it's people covering up wrongdoing and trying to keep it secret long after the fact. And sadly, there are all too many examples of this that can be demonstrated with documents and proven with evidence. There's about a thousand rabbit holes to go down in this book. And that's really one of the pleasures of reading it.

I have to say, it's a great review of. of 20th century history that visits all of these different eras through the lens of the information age, the classification crisis you're talking about. But I want to stay with this for a brief moment because what you're talking about is so interesting. What it refers to is the fact that it wasn't necessarily a plot to get the Japanese to attack us and know that they were going to do it and play a game of that way. It was more like there were a lot of steps in the process of trapping them into a moment when they had to attack or that made the attack more likely, not least of which was embargoing their oil. All of this is provable through documents which are classified or declassified

over time. And we're really talking about a mechanism really indicated by the title of the book, the declassification engine. That's what we're really talking about the process of how these documents, how these secrets are handled or not handled by the government. Yeah. And that process whereby records are reviewed, typically decades after the fact, that whole process is breaking down. So I describe how, especially over the last 20 years, there's been almost a collapse in declassification. So the book describes how if we're to surmount this crisis, we're going to have to begin using technology. So I describe how I've been working with a team of data scientists and engineers at Columbia to develop machine learning algorithms to try to figure out what's missing, right? And the hope is, eventually, that in our government, they're going to begin to use this same

kind of technology to begin prioritizing the records that really do have to be kept secret and accelerating the release of everything else. But once you begin to recover that history, there's a lot you learn about the story of the United States that for too long has been covered up. There are plenty of them. The various conspiracies, right, the plots, the strange experiments and whatnot. They're also like much bigger themes that I think have too often been missed. because this secrecy, by definition, is so hard to explore.

Isn't it, though, a condition of the modern age? I mean, the information age that we're in. Everything before World War II doesn't have the computer involved. That is itself a device that sort of creates the problem, right? Yeah, most people in Washington would tell you that overclassification was already a known problem going back to the 1950s. But what's happened in the last 20 years is that it's been supercharged by the development of new information systems, new information technology. And so when they count, as they tried to,

up until five years ago, they were estimating how many new secrets were created every year. It got to the point by 2012 where it was almost 95 million times a year. That's three times every second. And in 2017, the government office that was producing these estimates gave up. They said they could no longer even count how many times officials were creating secrets. And that's one reason why it's now become clear. Most any expert, even Washington, would tell you the only way we're going to get a handle on this problem is by using technology to begin identifying those records that really have to be protected. Because it's not just about the stuff that we're not seeing, right? And the way it makes it harder for us to hold our government to account. It's also the fact that a lot of really dangerous information does get out. It's hacked or it's leaked in ways that put lives in danger. You cite a cost of $18.4 billion a year that it costs the government to manage secrets, to keep the secrets. You say if there was a Department of Secrets in the government, it would have a budget that is double the size of the Department of Congress and 50% larger than Treasury. Yeah, it would be double the size of the Department of Commerce.

It would be 50% bigger than the Department of Treasury. So this is a very sizable and growing part of our government. the part of our government that tries to keep information from us. Now, at the same time, that same estimate includes the amount of money that they spend on reviewing records and releasing them to the public. Then you know how much that comes to? It's barely half of 1%. About $100 million a year that they spend out of that $18.4 billion to decide what the rest of us

are allowed to know. And that, too, that number is one that is now five years old. For five years now, the government office that releases this kind of data has reported that they can no longer even estimate how much money the government is spending on secrecy. They can't even count how many special access programs have proliferated across the federal government. So we've arrived at a pivotal moment as a society. Was there a time before that all of these rules worked perfectly or did we even need them? Yeah, it's striking to me how when you go back before the Second World War, what you find is that for, 150 years, the United States would develop the capacity to gather intelligence, right, to conduct

espionage and surveillance and such. And it did have systems for keeping secrets. But this is something it only did in wartime. So the United States had quite small government overall. And the part of it that was about protecting national security was the smallest part of all. You have to look, for example, the size of the American military. The United States had a smaller army than Portugal. And it had, again, until the 1880s, there were no intelligence agencies of any kind. And when they were finally created, like the Office of Naval Intelligence, basically it was a library. They would collect published information from around the world. So it's not that the United States didn't have spies, it didn't have secrets, but this was

something that only happened in wartime. And as soon as these wars ended, whether it was a civil war or World War I, this apparatus was dismantled. Because the fact is, until the Second World War war, the American public just wouldn't put up with having a massive peacetime military establishment. Pearl Harbor really starts it, as you say, not only the deep wound of being surprise attacked and the loss of life, all of that tragedy, but it also sets into motion the building of an apparatus that begins to take over the process of classifying secrets and then declassifying them or not. It's really the original secret is the Pearl Harbor secret, both the conspiracy of making Pearl Harbor happen or not, but also how are we going to make sure this doesn't happen

again? And this sets off a process that only builds and builds through the coming generations, really. Yeah, the national security state, I argue, it was founded on false premises. So the idea was, this was a surprise attack, came out of a clear blue sky. And so henceforth, the United States developed this huge apparatus, now 18 different intelligence agencies that are all of them supposed to prevent any surprise attacks in the future. And similarly, the idea was that the United States at the same time had to make sure that if a warning came, that we had to be ready to respond instantaneously or even preempt any kind of attack.

And that's why ever since the development of nuclear weapons, the United States has the capacity now to deliver thousands of thermonuclear weapons, enough to blow up the planet many times over, again with the idea that we have to be able to respond or even preempt any such attack. But these kinds of systems, on the one hand, they don't actually work, right? I mean, we've been surprised again and again. If you look, for instance, at the 9-11 attack, and also at the same time, they create their own kinds of dangers, right? So some of the most closely held secrets are the numbers of times and the particular details of all the incidents in which the United States almost used nuclear weapons by accident, right? So there have been a whole

series of accidents, so-called, many of them resulting from the way that we configure our forces such that they can respond instantaneously. So these systems founded on false premises don't actually keep us safe. If anything, they actually make the world more dangerous. Not only is this apparatus, this whole system worth questioning for all the flaws or effectiveness that it has, but also it's created a whole, as I cited, you call it a dark state. I can't help but think that a great deal of the distrust that people feel towards the government. Of course, that's rooted in many different factors, not least of which is economic distress. But this new reality of the government holding so many secrets has to contribute to that feeling, that dynamic in our society today. Absolutely, Don.

I mean, when you go back to the 1950s and you review the records that were declassified about experimentation on human subjects, it's almost touching. These people who were basically lab rats, in government research projects, they would say that they had faith, right? They had faith in the scientists who were trying to help them and keep them safe. At the same time, these government scientists, again, were treating them like lab rats. And so what changes, right? I think part of the story, at least, is how it is that over time we gradually came to realize that this history conceals a lot of dark chapters. It's one reason why I call it the dark state. Some of the darkest chapters in American history are the things that happen in secrecy. And it, it's a reason why we're

It was the actual intent of scientists to use the classification system to cover up these experiments because they knew that if they were revealed, it would make them look like Nazis. And so, like, on the very day that the Nornburg tribunals were showing the incredible crimes of Nazi doctors like Mengala, it was that very day that one of the people in charge of radiation experiments on unwitting subjects, it was then that he said that they had to classify everything so that none of it could leak out. so that none of them could be convicted or tried. There's a difference, though, between dark state and deep state.

Explain that. Yeah, so when people use the term deep state, they typically mean that there are people, anonymous people, working inside the government in ways that countermand or undermine what it is the commander chief is trying to do. But what I find when you look at this history is that this love of secrecy, it goes all the way to the top. Presidents above all love this awesome power of deciding what the the American public is allowed to know. It's really the only kind of power in our system that's

almost completely unchecked. And in this way, Donald Trump wasn't actually wrong when he said that presidents are sovereign over secrecy. And so presidents, one after another, including Trump, come into office promising they're going to be more transparent and more accountable. And over and over again, we find they betray these promises or they fail to carry out the reforms that they promise when they're running for president. And so that's why I say, you know, if you really want to change this, you can't trust the executive branch, no matter who we end up electing as president. You can't trust any president to reform the system themselves. Instead, we really need courts in the Congress to begin stepping up and acting on their constitutional responsibilities on behalf of the American people.

It really goes side by side with the growth in power of the executive branch, of the presidency, doesn't it? Starting with Roosevelt, of course. Yeah, that's right. You know, Roosevelt, he, love secrecy. And I tell stories about how, for example, when there were wartime regulations that barred reporters from informing the public about troop movements, Roosevelt instantly realized that he could use this as a way of controlling news coverage about his own political campaigning. So there's an example, for instance, where Roosevelt was conducting a tour of American war industries and shipyards, and he ended up addressing a crowd of thousands of workers. And he told them that you all are now privy to a top secret. And you have to keep this to yourselves. So he was just laughing at the

fact that he was allowed to limit press coverage, in this case, censoring any report about the way he was trying to campaign and win re-election for Democratic congressmen. And reporters view, but there was nothing they could do about it. So this is a story again, you know, that shows from the beginning how secrecy could be so self-serving and presidents realized right away that they could use it to serve their own agendas. It's almost like an institutionalization of propaganda. You have loose lifts, sink ships. We all agree with that. We understand the need in wartime for careful control of information and keeping secrets, but it has blurred the lines. It has stepped over the line into everyday life so that it's just a fact of life that this is the way the government

works and it's kind of out of control. Yeah, well, we've all come of age in this era in which we take for granted that the government is going to keep secrets, right? I try to show how this is something that when you take the long view at American history, it wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to stay this way. But you're absolutely right. I think now most of us think that this is all but inevitable. But again, the only way we're going to change this is by standing up and insisting that our leaders be accountable. And one of the most important and foundational steps to make sure that happens is to, at the very least, make sure they keep a record. And so, So that's why for me, I end the book with what I call the ultimate secret, how it is increasingly

common now that officials are stealing or destroying public records in order to make it impossible for anyone to hold them account, even historians, even decades after the fact. We'll be back with more from Matthew Connolly after this short break. Hello, I'm James Rogers. And over on the history hit warfare podcast, I bring you cutting-edge military histories from around the world. Why was Sitting Bull such a remarkable leader? What was Napoleon's greatest ever battle?

How did the Cuban Missile Crisis almost turn the Cold War hot and who dropped the world's largest nuclear bomb on the Arctic? Through interviews with world-leading historians, policy experts, and the veterans who served, we find the answers to these questions and so much more. So come and join us on the history hit warfare podcast, where we're on the front lines of military history. You are historian, Matthew,

And so this book is steeped in history. It takes us through various eras of certainly the 20th century and shows how this whole reality was created. Let's talk about the Manhattan Project for a bit. I mean, here is an incredibly effective secret keeping organization from top to bottom that eventually does not keep its secrets. Eventually, everything gets known because they were completely infiltrated by various spies at Los Alamos. That's right. And it had the reputation as being the best kept secret. And that's why the Manhattan Project became the model for special access programs that

began to propagate all across the federal government. It was effective in keeping the secret from the American public. It was also effective in compartmentalizing this information within the U.S. government, such that, you know, for example, it was decided that the Navy didn't have to know about the Manhattan Project. Even Vice President Harry Truman didn't know anything about the atomic bomb until he finally succeeded Roosevelt. On the other hand, it was not effective in keeping this secret from our allies, from the Soviet Union, for example, who, as you say, thoroughly infiltrated the Manhattan Project.

But it wasn't really a secret from our enemies either, right? I mean, the Nazis knew the United States was building an atomic bomb. And one of the leading physicists in the Manhattan Project estimated that all these extraordinary efforts to keep this a top secret, the fact that, for example, hundreds of thousands of workers were made to work in remote locations without being able to disclose anything of what they were doing, it actually slowed down the development of these weapons. For him, it was about a year and a half. So just imagine what World War II would have been like if the United States had deployed atomic bombs in 1943. Just think how differently that war might have gone, especially in Europe, if the United States already had atomic bombs well before the Normandy landings.

I'm just going to play devil's advocate here. And honestly, I'm that kind of American where I'm sort of naturally inclined to trust the government, probably more than I should. But that's how I was raised, baby boomer and all that. Despite the fact that there's Vietnam and all the rest of the history in my lifetime, I still trust the government. And yet, here we are. So in 1947, the CIA has begun. Then along comes the NSA. And these institutions of government grow beyond belief. And they start to institutionalize this secrecy to a level that no one really saw coming. But I want to say, as the devil's advocate. Wasn't this necessary?

I mean, we're facing a conniving enemy with lots of infiltration into our world. We need to create systems of secrecy and classification just to operate in this new world. Yeah, it's absolutely true. I think it's clear when the United States is facing a deadly enemy and a very secret of one, too, in the Soviet Union, that, of course, the United States needed to be able to keep secrets, right? And I would not, at any point, claim that we need to know everything our government is doing all the time.

But what we do need to do is decide what information really does have to be protected. Because when you have a system in which everything is secret, well, then nothing is secret. And this is a well-known problem. You go back 70 years, people in the government, even a Pentagon study in 1956 included that because of overclassification, officials were becoming cynical. They were using classification to cover up all kinds of things that had nothing to do with national security. So this was leading to pervasive cynicism in which more and more people were becoming

contemptuous of the very idea that there was information that really had to be guarded closely. So I'll just take an example. You may have heard of the Office of Personal Management Hack. So this is the part of our government that keeps the records of people who have been investigated for background checks, people who get security clearances in our government. Those people have to be interviewed. They conduct clearance procedures where they look at their credit ratings. They sometimes even look at their psychiatric records. People have to disclose all kinds of information, and anything to do with substance abuse problems or gambling or money problems or whatnot. And all these records were kept by the Office of Personal Management.

None of them were classified, right? So none of them were deemed national security information. And it's one of the reasons why the Chinese were able to infiltrate this system and exfiltrate over 20 million of these files. So can you imagine information that was more important, more vital, that was more worthy of being protected, even at the highest level? So this is another example of how this system where we're trying to, to make everything secret, in the end, we don't end up protecting this stuff that really could get

people killed. And the system actually ends up enabling bad behavior. It's a power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely situation. The CIA, of course, famous in this regard. The ability to keep secrets to work under the radar in the public life creates all kinds of crazy programs. You have an entire chapter devoted to this where you call it weird science. LSD trials on their own personnel. The story of Frank Olson, terrifying. I didn't even know about that story. Yeah, and it's an example where I think most of us would agree that we need parts of our

government that can work against our adversaries. There are going to be times in which intelligence agencies need to lie, cheat and steal, right? I mean, we actually need them to be ruthless. But it's all the more important than that they be accountable. They have to be accountable to our elected leaders. And ultimately, they have to be accountable in the court of history. So a case like the one you mentioned, this long-running CIA program where they were dosing people with LSD trying to turn them into assassins. The CIA, once that began to leak out, they decided they were going to destroy all the records they could get their hands on.

So to me, that is one thing I find unforgivable, the inclination to not only cover up the evidence of crimes like this, but also to destroy every record. So nobody will ever know the full story of what happened. And unfortunately, it's not the only such instance. I think a lot of us know, for example, how Gina Haspel, who later became the CIA director, decided they were going to destroy videos of the torture, the interrogation of al-Qaeda detainees. Another example, less well-known, is how the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to destroy all the records of all their meetings, going back all the way to 1947. As soon as they knew in the early 1970s that it was possible that some of these records might eventually be declassified or leaked, they decided they were going to destroy every such record. And henceforth, they decided they would never again keep records of their meetings. So just imagine, we have the Department of Defense spending over $800 billion a year of taxpayer money, and the people at the very top, the Joint Chiefs of staff, won't even keep a record of their meetings. So what does that tell you about the attitude they have about their accountability to the American people? And their programs. Cats being used for surveillance. Who knew?

I mean, there's all too many examples like this. And I know a lot of your listeners come from the U.K. And there's some interesting stories, you know, not just about Churchill and Pearl Harbor. There are lots more about, for example, when the Army decided they were going to study the use of mine dogs, the use of dogs to determine whether they could detect mines, even when these mines were odorless and buried underground. So what happened, right? In the case of the UK, they got a very eminent scientist, had many years running experiments with animals. He conducted extremely rigorous studies to get to the part of the matter. What did the Americans do? It was a covert operation.

It was a clandestine experiment. They ended up hiring a psychic. This is a guy who believed in extra sensory perception, and his working theory was that dogs had ESP. So you could take examples like this to see how the U.S. really was special in this way. I mean, it's not as if you don't have secrecy and nonsense in the UK as well. But there are examples like this where with unlimited budgets and limitless secrecy, you can find all kinds of nonsense expensive and sometimes dangerous things happening under the cloak of secrecy.

It's all about accountability, isn't it? A very basic question here, buried in the middle of a very broad interview. How does something become secret and classified? What is the basic system of this? Yeah, so if you look at the executive orders, and this is really how it is that this whole system is meant to work, it's by order of the president. So practically every president, with one exception, has issued an executive order. And one of the things they do is they decide who it is allowed to create new secrets. And so these are the people who have what's called original classification. authority. There are only about a couple of thousand of these people. And these are the ones, many of them presidential appointees, who will say that this covert program, this new technology,

this is something we're going to classify as top secret or secret or confidential. But there are actually many, many more people. There are millions of people with security clearances. When they're working in these programs, when they're developing this technology, they're supposed to classify everything related to it at the same level. And so that's how, as much as presidents might want to limit the number of people who can create secrets, as much as they want to keep only the president's own secrets or the things that presidents care about classified at the highest level, what happens is you have so many other people who are able to create secrets, they end up doing it for their own reasons. And that's why this system just grows and grows until it grows out of control.

There are many examples throughout the 20th century of secrets being exposed illegally, or, you know, we look back on it and it seems almost legal. Famously, the Pentagon Papers really is the big story of the Vietnam War. That, of course, leads up to WikiLeaks. So how is history going to look back on these guys? Snowden, Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, exposing this system for what it is? Yeah, so I would draw distinctions here because I think in the case of Ellsberg, it was clear that he was privy to information that the American public really needed to know.

And so what he did, I think, was heroic because he knew he was at risk of prosecution and long-term imprisonment. And he did it anyway. And he did it because he felt that he had a duty to the American people. And he did so at great risk. The only reason he didn't end up in a federal penitentiary was because the Nixon administration went to such extraordinary, even criminal lengths, even like breaking into the office of the psychiatrist in an effort to embarrass him that the judge ended up throwing out these charges. Now, these other cases are different. Now, in the case of Julian Assange, a lot of what he ends up putting out of Wikileaks is information where he doesn't even know what's in it. He also, like in the case of cable

Gate, quarter of million diplomatic cables, he, for a time anyway, tried to protect that information because he knew that it included a lot of information about confidential informants, like dissidents, human rights activists who spoke to American diplomats and whose lives would be in danger if this information was released. But really because of sloppy tradecraft, all that information ended up going out. And a lot of those people had to run for their lives. Now, Stodin, I think, is another case again. It's true that if he had not leaked what he knew about the NSA, we never would have understood the full dimensions of NSA surveillance, including surveillance of American citizens. And so I think that was a very necessary debate. And later on, if you read books

like Bart Gellman, Dark Mirror, even some of the people who raged against Snowden would now admit that it was important that the American people have that information. And yet he's still exiled in Moscow. He is. And I think all of us would be better off if Snowden came home. Now, that's not to say that he shouldn't face legal consequences. Because after all, in the case of Ellsberg, for example, many people would say that if you want to engage in this kind of civil disobedience, you have to be willing to suffer the consequences. So I don't know what those consequences could be,

but I do think it's important that we have that hearing, right? And we have that conversation. In the case of Assange, I'm not very sympathetic with Julian Assange. I think it's curious, for example, when you look at Cablegate, what you find like I do, when you work with data scientists and you analyze what's in there, what you find is that nowhere, even in the top 10, do you find the American Embassy in Moscow? Now, that just can't be right, because we know that the American embassy in Moscow is massive in every other list, all the other data we have from other periods

of American history. This is one of the busiest embassies in the world. It would have been sending thousands of cables, but somehow they're very few of them in Cablegate. It's one of the reasons why I really wonder, right, about the provenance of some of those cables and how they came out. And another thing, though, I think it may be the most important thing of all, is that Assange is now under threat of prosecution for the Espionage Act. And one of the counts, and this came about during the Trump administration, is that the government would insist, he ought to be convicted for violating the espionage act merely for releasing classified information. Now, that's a little bit scary because when you think about it, whether or not you think Julian Assange is a good person or not, even whether you consider him to be a journalist or not, if that precedent is set, if they are able to put him in jail merely for making available classified information, then there are thousands of reporters all over the world who might also get locked up because the espionage act, the literal black letter of that law is so expansive that many of us, maybe even me and you, you know, could end up in jail if you took it to be literally. true. Just for having this conversation. Just sharing information it's supposed to be classified. It's a terrible law. And it would be a real tragedy, I think, and a dangerous one, if it ends up

setting precedents that could put all of us at risk. You refer to it all as a cult of secrecy in our government, born out of World War II, institutionalized in the Cold War, then increasingly mismanaged and neglected through the 70s. Still, it would seem to me a Luddite that this is a natural progression from the information age where you grow the ability for governments to produce. classified data, only for that to sort of work against itself. You get what you ask for situation. You also suggest that much of this secrecy is absolutely unnecessary, and this is the best kept secret of all, that many of the secrets don't need to be kept secret. Yeah, that's right. There's a famous CIA analyst at the CIA. They named a center for the study of intelligence

after this man, Sherman Kent. He had a history PhD, really a brilliant man. And he observed that there are many people in government who only ever read classified information. And so they, over time, would begin to lose sight of the fact that a lot of what they're reading, a lot of that information they were privy to is information that's already out in the public. A lot of the stuff that gets classified, estimates range from 50 to 95%. A lot of it is already in the public domain. But people who live in this secret world, who are part of this culture of secrecy, many of them don't even know it. And Sermon Kent, he called them innocents. He said there are all too many of these innocents at the Central Intelligence Agency. And so, yeah, I call it the best kept secret in Washington because a lot of the people who spend their life in this world, they're so deeply invested in it that they have come to believe it almost like a faith. And in fact, I call it not just a culture, but sometimes it can be like a cult.

And it actually resembles in many ways the practices that you find in cults. It has its indoctrination rituals. It has its secret passwords. It has its badges. There are levels of access and so on. It's almost a little like Scientology. And so in the same way, the people who become. part of this world and leave the rest of the world behind, sometimes they just lose all perspective

about how the world really works and how strange this small world really is. But again, I want to be clear, this is a really smart book. And it's taking a very sophisticated view of this situation. You are not claiming that this world of secrecy, spying, intelligence, all this doesn't need to exist. Of course it does in this world. What you're pointing out is the management of this classification declassification process is a broken system. Yeah, what I'm saying, Don, is yes, that's right. We need secrecy. There are things that are dangerous and need to be kept confidential.

International negotiations. I think most of us know even negotiating within our phone family, right? There are other examples, military technology where the U.S. is at the forefront of innovation. In some cases, the reason we're innovative is because we're so open. But in other cases, like, you know, stealth technology, for example, there's really a military advantage of keeping that information as long as we possibly can. But what I'm saying is we don't need 95 million secrets a year. We don't need 18 different intelligence agencies. We don't need a Pentagon that costs over $800 billion a year spends more money than the next eight to 10 countries

combined. So this system really has grown out of control for reasons that are really explicable. But to understand how this happened, you have to go back and study that history. And to know how it can change, you have to go back to our Constitution and understand the importance of balancing these powers and making sure the other branches the government can hold the executive in check. It's almost like the system becomes a trap, trapping even good people who are intending to do something good in the government, but because they're sort of caught up in this cult of secrecy as you're talking about, it ends up hamstringing them from doing the good they mean to do. Are you hopeful things will change, Matthew? Is there a fix in the works, a better system

leading to a more open society? Because it's a cultural problem, Don cultures can be very hard to change. So there is not going to be any silver bullet. I do think technology is essential. I think it's something we really need to begin investing in. But one thing I find gratifying is that in the last couple of months, I've been talking to staffers on different Senate committees. And it seems like there's real movement.

We had a hearing recently in the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, where for the first time in a long time, they actually brought in witnesses to start discussing how we could begin grappling with this problem. We need more hearings and we eventually are going to need law. The whole system of secrecy has almost no legal basis. There are only a handful of laws that are actually meant to regulate the way the executive branch creates secrets and keeps them.

So what we really need, it's something that Daniel Patrick Moynihan said back in the late 1990s, he's long considered the government's leading expert on secrecy. He led a high-level commission. And one of their conclusions was that there has to be a legal basis for the way in which the executive brands keep secrets from the rest of us, including from Congress. And until we have that law, it's going to continue to be impossible, really,

to hold government officials to account. Well, fortunately, the robots will fix everything, so we're okay. Matthew Connolly's book, The Declassification Machine, is a remarkable account of how our government created a now broken system of state secrets approaching a point of no return.

It is an alarming present-day crisis we should all seek to understand, and I recommend any listener here to start with this book. Thank you, Matthew, for coming on the podcast, Really appreciate it. Thank you, Don. I really enjoyed it.

Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.