The Year of the "Leaker"
Tuesday, 31 December 2013 09:31
By Robert Parry, Consortium News | Op-Ed
(Photo: Mike Herbst / Flickr)
People who condemn the leaks of classified documents by Pvt. Bradley
(now Chelsea) Manning and National Security Agency contractor Edward
Snowden typically cite the supposed harm done to U.S. diplomacy and
say lives have been put at risk. Manning/Snowden defenders counter by
noting how government secrecy has been used to conceal government
excesses and to stifle meaningful debate.
But there is another factor in this discussion: Secrecy often has
empowered U.S. government propagandists to manipulate the people and to
trick them into policies that, in turn, have cost lives, inflicted
damage to national security and created hatred toward America that its
enemies can then exploit. In other words, secrecy is the enabler of
deception which has undercut precisely those interests that the
Manning/Snowden critics say they want to protect (diplomacy and innocent
life).
While one could take note of the secrecy and lies that cleared the
paths into the disastrous wars in Vietnam and Iraq, let’s look at a less
known case that I faced in 1988 as a correspondent at Newsweek:
At the time, the Reagan administration – having suffered political
damage from the Iran-Contra scandal – was trying to get its proxy war
against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government back on track.
President Ronald Reagan’s skilled propagandists seized on what they
claimed was Sandinista repression of Nicaragua’s Catholic Church and
its Cardinal Obando y Bravo. All right-thinking Americans, especially
Catholics, were incited to outrage over affronts to religious freedom.
Because of this Sandinista behavior, the White House put political
pressure on Congress to send more money and weapons to the Contra rebels
who were killing thousands of Nicaraguans in towns near Honduras and
Costa Rica.
But there was another side of the story that was hidden behind a veil
of U.S. government secrecy. For years, the CIA and the White House had
been funneling money through the Catholic Church into Nicaragua to
destabilize the government. In effect, the Reagan administration had an
inside-outside game going, Cardinal Obando and a group of right-wing
Catholic priests were spreading around money to subvert Nicaragua from
the inside while the Contra rebels were inflicting bloody havoc from the
outside.
Whenever the Sandinista government would take steps against the
U.S.-financed subversion, Reagan’s team would cite those actions as more
justification to fund the Contra war. However, to make the propaganda
work on the American people and Congress, the propaganda campaign
required hiding the fact that the Reagan administration was using
Cardinal Obando and his church infrastructure as a financial conduit.
In my reporting on the Contra war and Reagan’s obsession about
Nicaragua, I had uncovered this secret. Ultimately I had more than a
dozen sources inside the Contra movement or close to U.S. intelligence
confirming these operations, which I was told carried an annual budget
of about $10 million. I also discovered that the CIA’s support for
Obando and his Catholic hierarchy went through a maze of cut-outs in
Europe, apparently to give Obando deniability.
But one well-placed Nicaraguan exile said he had spoken with Obando
about the money and the Cardinal had expressed fear that his past
receipt of CIA funding would come out. The CIA funding for Nicaragua’s
Catholic Church had originally been unearthed in 1985 by the
congressional intelligence oversight committees, which insisted that the
money be cut off to avoid compromising Obando.
However, White House aide Oliver North simply had his off-the-books
Contra-support operation pick up where the CIA had left off. In fall
1985, North earmarked $100,000 of his privately raised money to go to
Obando for his anti-Sandinista activities.
But what to do with this information? On one hand, I worried that
exposure of this clandestine operation could put Obando and those
right-wing priests in greater danger. On the other hand, my job – as I
saw it – was to arm the American people with relevant facts so they
could make knowledgeable judgments and avoid being manipulated by
government propaganda, especially on a matter as important as war or
peace.
Balance Tipped
For me, the balance of this question was tipped when the Reagan
administration began disseminating propaganda citing the Sandinistas’
supposedly unprovoked clampdown on Obando’s operation as a reason for
reauthorizing Contra funding. If I didn’t put forward this reporting, I
would, in effect, be collaborating in a deception of the American people
and contributing to a violation of international law, support for what
any objective observer would call Contra terrorism.
So, I presented the information to my bureau chief, Evan Thomas. To my surprise, Thomas was eager to go forward. Newsweek
editors then contacted the Central America correspondent Joseph
Contreras, who outlined our questions to Obando’s aides and prepared a
list of questions to present to the Cardinal personally. When Contreras
went to Obando’s home in a posh suburb of Managua, the Cardinal
literally evaded the issue.
As Contreras later recounted in a cable back to the United States, he
was approaching the front gate when it suddenly swung open and the
Cardinal, sitting in the front seat of his burgundy Toyota Land Cruiser,
blew past. As Contreras made eye contact and waved the letter, Obando’s
driver gunned the engine. Contreras jumped into his car and hastily
followed. Contreras guessed correctly that Obando had turned left at one
intersection and headed north toward Managua.
Contreras caught up to the Cardinal’s vehicle at the first
stop-light. The driver apparently spotted the reporter and, when the
light changed, sped away, veering from lane to lane. The Land Cruiser
again disappeared from view, but at the next intersection, Contreras
turned right and spotted the car pulled over, with its occupants
presumably hoping that Contreras had turned left. Quickly, the
Cardinal’s vehicle pulled onto the road and sped back toward Obando’s
house. Contreras gave up the chase, fearing that any further pursuit
might appear to be harassment.
Several days later, having regained his composure, the Cardinal
finally met with Contreras and denied receiving any CIA money. But
Contreras told me that Obando’s denial was unconvincing. Newsweek
then drafted a version of the story, making it appear as if we weren’t
sure of the facts about Obando and the money. When I saw a readback of
the article, I went into Thomas’s office and said that if Newsweek
didn’t trust my reporting, we shouldn’t run the story at all. He said
that wasn’t the case; it was just that the senior editors felt more
comfortable with a vaguely worded story.
We ended up in hot water with the Reagan administration and
right-wing media attack groups anyway. Accuracy in Media lambasted me,
in particular, for going with such a sensitive story without being sure
of the facts (which, of course, I was). Thomas was summoned to the State
Department where Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams heaped
more criticism on me though not denying the facts of our story.
I was later told that the Reagan administration was shocked that an
American reporter would disclose such a sensitive operation. In other
words, Reagan’s propagandists assumed they could simply get away with
manipulating the American people without the background facts coming
out. The attacks also worsened my relations with senior Newsweek
executives.
But the disclosure of the Obando operation had none of the feared
repercussions inside Nicaragua. The Sandinistas did nothing to punish
Obando, who gradually evolved more into a figure of reconciliation than
confrontation. Indeed, the Newsweek story may have helped facilitate an
eventual political settlement in Nicaragua.
Lessons Learned
In general, the lessons that I have learned from several decades of
dealing with these kinds of stories is that you should be careful to
minimize risks to specific individuals whenever possible. But the
real-life dangers cut both ways. Secrecy can be the handmaiden of
deception – and that can get lots of innocent people killed.
To this day, former senior Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg berates
himself for not leaking the Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War
earlier, when the revelations of government lying might have saved the
lives of countless Americans and Vietnamese.
Journalists also bear a profound responsibility to the people who —
in the United States – represent the sovereign power of a democratic
Republic. The United States is not a monarchy or a dictatorship where
government secrets are the possession of a king or the dictator.
The information rightly belongs to “We the People” and government
officials should take seriously their stewardship of these facts. They
should restrict access only when absolutely necessary, not when just
convenient for their careers or expedient for manufacturing consent
behind some desired policy.
In the real world, however, government officials can be expected to
tilt the secrecy-disclosure balance in ways that make their lives
easier. There is always some rationalization to wield the secrecy stamp,
always some possibly negative consequence that can be dreamt up if the
truth comes out.
Yes, there is a chance that al-Qaeda terrorists will take greater
care in their communications if they hear about U.S. intercept
capabilities, but the evidence is that they were already doing that, as
the long hunt for Osama bin Laden showed. It’s also true that the
deceptions that led the U.S. military into the Iraq invasion have helped
al-Qaeda expand its influence across the Middle East by inflaming animosity toward the United States.
There can be little doubt, too, that the NSA’s collection of
“metadata” and other information vacuumed up about hundreds of millions
of innocent people has gotten seriously out of whack – a judgment shared
by President Barack Obama’s special advisory panel on surveillance
policies and by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of that
paragon of the imperial presidency George W. Bush.
NSA leaker Snowden is clearly correct when he says this system of
pervasive spying represents “turnkey tyranny,” ready to be abused by
some future imperial president to silence his political opponents
through blackmail and other means.
So, when the government’s internal checks and balances fail – for
reasons of political expedience or bureaucratic inertia – the pressure
builds within the government for some idealistic citizen with access to
the secrets to challenge national security overreach by releasing some
of the information, often in a messy and chaotic way.
Then, of course, the government and its apologists will decry the
damage done to national security and to foreign policy. But that is a
complaint that would carry more weight if government officials were not
so eager to clutch so many “secrets” close to their chests and
deem other Americans unfit to know the facts.
At a time when many senior officials have used secrecy to cover up
their crimes – for example, torture carried out by President George W.
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and scores of their subordinates – and
when these government criminals have escaped all manner of
accountability, is it any wonder that a few people of conscience would
step forward and risk their careers and even their liberty to let the
American public in on the secrets?
It becomes an existential question for this democratic Republic: why
should patriots like Pvt. Manning face a 35-year prison term – and why
should Edward Snowden have to seek asylum in Russia to avoid harsh
prosecution at home – when U.S. government officials are free to flout
the nation’s laws and then flaunt their authority over the nation’s
secrets?
