“growing mountain of research”: Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1945; G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (Boston: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 261–64.

“Memex”: Bush, “As We May Think.”

“a broad dissemination”: Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1945), pp. 29, 143–57.

Price worried: Byron Price to Harry S. Truman, Aug. 24, 1945, White House Central Files, Official File, box 1507, HSTL.

His own work: Zachary, Endless Frontier, pp. 269–71.

“put into a potential . . . freedom not to publish”: “Remarks of Vannevar Bush,” April 16, 1948, in Availability of Information from Federal Departments and Agencies: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, 84th Cong., 1st Sess. (1956), p. 2159.

The eighty-one billion dollars: This is from 2017, and includes twenty-six billion for Pentagon “Operational Systems Development” (CRS, Government Expenditures on Defense Research and Development by the United States and Other OECD Countries: Fact Sheet, R45441 [2020], pp. 1, 4).

Some 1.3 million: National Counterintelligence and Security Center, Fiscal Year 2019 Annual Report on Security Clearance Determinations, April 2020, FAS.

But rather than making: The WikiLeaks and Snowden leaks have been the largest, when measured by volume of classified content, but leaks have also become more frequent (Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, State Secrets: How an Avalanche of Media Leaks Is Harming National Security, Senate Report no. 115, 1st Sess. [2017]).

Donald Trump railed: Annie Karni, “Meet the Guys Who Tape Trump’s Papers Back Together,” Politico, June 10, 2018.

In their official histories: For example, see Jennifer Wilcox, Revolutionary Secrets: Cryptology in the American Revolution (Fort Meade, Md.: NSA, 2012); “A Look Back … George Washington: America's First Military Intelligence Director,” CIA, June 20, 2008.

“secrecy and despatch”: Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, Federalist Papers, nos. 64 and 70. See also Daniel Hoffman, Governmental Secrecy and the Founding Fathers: A Study in Constitutional Controls (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1981), pp. 20–21, and Christopher Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), pp. 295–96, 303.

“an example to the world”: Hoffman, Governmental Secrecy, pp. 14, 24.

“friends of science . . . advances from persecution”: Clarence E. Carter, “The United States and Documentary Historical Publication,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 25, no. 1 (1938): pp. 3–4.

“intelligence becomes interesting”: George Washington, The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1938), p. 98. See also Andrew, Secret World, p. 309.

In 1791: William B. McAllister et al., Toward “Thorough, Accurate, and Reliable”: A History of the Foreign Relations of the United States Series (Washington D.C.: Department of State Office of the Historian, 2015), pp. 35–37; Alexander Hamilton, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 11, February 1792 – June 1792, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), pp. 211–12.

They developed a policy: McAllister, et al., Toward “Thorough, Accurate, and Reliable,” pp. 11–12.

They did not change: Ralph E. Weber, Masked Dispatches: Cryptograms and Cryptology in American History, 1775–1900 (Fort Meade, Md.: NSA, 2002), pp. 68–69.

In his spare time: David Kahn, The Code-Breakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 114–16.

an order of magnitude smaller: Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 154.

But even in the American West: Robert Wooster, The American Military Frontiers: The United States Army in the West, 1783–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), p. xiii.

“a popular Government”: James Madison to W. T. Barry, Aug. 4, 1822, LOC. Though Madison’s words are often cited to explain the freedom of information, he knew that information was not free. This quotation was just the beginning of a long letter arguing that universities must be supported, whatever the cost, since citizens needed “a knowledge of the Globe & its various inhabitants.” Education might also create a healthy appetite for learning history, “an inexhaustible fund” for useful instruction.

The public demand: When Jefferson proposed a public-school system for Virginia, he explained, “Those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people of large” (“79. A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, 18 June 1779,” Founders Online; original source, Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 2, 1777 – 18 June 1779, ed. Julian P. Boyd [Princeton: Princeton University Press 1950], pp. 526–35). See also Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: Norton, 1974), pp. 68–69; F. W. Grubb, “Growth of Literacy in Colonial America: Longitudinal Patterns, Economic Models, and the Direction of Future Research,” Social Science History, vol. 1 (Winter 1990): pp. 456–57.

“Where the press is free”: Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 154–55. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter” (Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, Jan. 16, 1787, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 5: Correspondence 1786–1789, ed. Paul Leicester Ford [New York: Putnam, 1904], pp. 252–53).

“By travelling”: Granger to James Jackson, March 23, 1802, in Walter Lowrie and Walter S. Franklin, eds., American State Papers, vol. VII, Post Office Department (March 4, 1789, to March 2, 1833) (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1834), p. 27. See also United States Postal Service Office of the Historian, “African American Postal Workers in the 19th Century.” On barring Black people from carrying the mail, see John C. Calhoun, The Works of John C. Calhoun, vol. 2 (New York: Appleton and Co., 1853–54), p. 110; Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 223.

Jefferson therefore signed: John, Spreading the News, pp. 162–65; Jack Lynch. “Every Man Able to Read: Literacy in Early America,” Colonial Williamsburg Journal, Winter 2011.

But in the nineteenth century: John, Spreading the News, pp. 257–71.

Henry “Box” Brown: Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America (New York: Penguin, 2016), pp. 141–42.

“arms themselves”: For a discussion of literacy, see Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 7–19.

When American ideals: John, Spreading the News, pp. 167–68, 278–79.

Federalists saw: Balogh, Government Out of Sight, p. 223; Jeremy Bentham, chapter 2 of his "Essay on Political Tactics," in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 2. (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843).

When Andrew Jackson: Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: Norton, 2020), pp. 124–25.

The Choctaws well understood: Ibid., pp. 125–26.

“Our cause is your own”: Walter H. Conser, “John Ross and the Cherokee Resistance Campaign, 1833–1838,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 44, no. 2 (1978): p. 200. On Samuel Worcester, see Angela Pulley, “Cherokee Phoenix,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, July 17, 2020.

But Jackson just ignored: Tiya Miles, “‘Circular Reasoning’: Recentering Cherokee Women in the Antiremoval Campaigns,” American Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 2 (2009): p. 222.

Archived records have been: Steve Inskeep, Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab (New York: Penguin, 2015), pp. 100–101. On property interests and the early-American political order more generally, the classic work is Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913), which gave rise to decades of heated debate. More recently, historians of economics have found support for his main argument—i.e., that votes on the Constitution aligned with the pecuniary interests of delegates. (Robert A. McGuire, To Form a More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003].) On presidential withholding of information, see Abraham D. Sofaer, “Executive Power and the Control of Information: Practice Under the Framers,” Duke Law Journal, vol. 1977, no.1 (1977): pp. 8–45.

“secrets of a mischievous”: Thomas Jefferson, “Memoranda of Consultations with the President,” March 11–April 9, 1792, Founders Online.

“They are welcome”: James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, vol. 3 (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860): pp. 606–7.

Cities like New York: Saunt, Unworthy Republic, pp. 187–96.

“opening to them”: On Polk and his predecessor’s defense of secrecy while seizing land from Native Americans and Mexicans, see Mark J. Rozell, Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy, and Accountability (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), pp. 34–37; James Knox Polk, “Inaugural Address,” Washington, D.C., March 4, 1845, Avalon Project.

“monuments of the past”: McAllister et al., Toward “Thorough, Accurate, and Reliable,” p. 14.

By 1850: Carrol Davidson Wright, U.S. Bureau of Labor, History and Growth of the United States Census (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1900), pp. 39–50, 312.

The importance of public: James Gregory Bradsher, “An Administrative History of the Disposal of Federal Records, 1789–1949,” Provenance: Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists, vol. 3, no. 2 (1985): 1.

“develop the talents”: Frances Smith Foster, “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture,” American Literary History, vol. 17 (Winter 2005): p. 730.

“however unimportant”: Frank Wells, Garrard Winston, and Henry Beers, “Historical Development of the Records Disposal Policy of the Federal Government Prior to 1934,” American Archivist, vol. 7, no. 3 (July 1, 1944): p. 183.

In 1882, a young scholar: Michael G. Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1986; 2017 ed.), p. 127.

Instead of a powerful: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 53–54.

The passage: Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Penguin, 2019), pp. 8-9.

When the minister: McAllister, et al., Toward “Thorough, Accurate, and Reliable,” pp. 17–19.

But Congress directed: Fred G. Ainsworth and Joseph W. Kirkley, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 135, General Index and Additions and Corrections, ed. John S. Moodey, (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1901), pp. V–VI. The page estimate includes the navy records, which were published separately. Lincoln’s own papers, eventually deposited in the Library of Congress, are also voluminous, including some twenty thousand documents.

Moreover, the Union’s: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper, 1988), pp. 148–49, 154.

Other governments: Data from “The Correlates of War Project,” Correlates of War.

Several European states: Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Faith Hillis, Utopia's Discontents: Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s–1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

In 1873: Nicola Kay Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 100.

All the while: Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), p. 39.

Absent any anxiety: Michael E. Bigelow, “A Short History of Army Intelligence,” Army Intelligence Resources, 2012, p. 10, FAS.

As for diplomacy: Thomas G. Otte, The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of British Foreign Policy, 1865–1914 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 7–12; Robert Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1975, 1986), pp. 28–30. No matter how well qualified, Black diplomats were only ever appointed to a handful of consular posts, such as Liberia and Haiti (Allison Blakely, “Blacks in the Diplomatic and Consular Services,” in African Americans in U.S. Foreign Policy: From the Era of Frederick Douglass to the Age of Obama, ed. Linda Heywood et al. [Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015], pp. 14–15.)

One frustrated office-seeker: Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President (New York: Doubleday, 2011), pp. 231–32.

With the advent: Desmond King, Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the US Federal Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 45–49.

Women filled: Cindy Sondik Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 5.

Relative to the size: International Monetary Fund, “Public Finances in Modern History,” based on Paolo Mauro et al., “A Modern History of Fiscal Prudence and Profligacy,” 2013, IMF Working Paper no. 12/XXX.

The exception: An Act to Provide for Taking the Tenth and Subsequent Censuses, S195, 45th Cong., 3rd Sess. (March 3, 1879); Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 121–23.

“There ought to be”: David Greenberg, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (New York: Norton, 2016), p. 80.

But in 1916: Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 81, 92–96; Anderson, American Census, p. 129.

“Open covenants of peace”: President Wilson's Message to Congress, Jan. 8, 1918, RG 46, Records of the United States Senate, USNA.

He failed to follow through: Sadao Asada, “Between the Old Diplomacy and the New, 1918–1922: The Washington System and the Origins of Japanese-American Rapprochement,” Diplomatic History, vol. 30, no. 2 (2006): 223-224.

“has upset many”: Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (Nov. 10, 1919).

Arrested for speaking: Edmund A. Kersten, A. Philip Randolph: A Life in the Vanguard (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), pp. 19–20. See also Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

One exception: Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 60–62.

He managed to: FBI, “SIS. History”, pt. 1 (2004), pp. 5–6; James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2022), p. 69. It was not until the 1990s that the Bureau finally began to overcome its crippling lack of diversity (Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI: A History [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007], pp. 213–17).

“Gentlemen do not”: David Kahn, The Reader of Gentlemen's Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. IX, 101, and see also Herbert O. Yardley, The American Black Chamber (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1931), pp. 369–70.

Under the Communications: Bigelow, Short History, p. 10; Jeffreys-Jones, FBI: A History, p. 87.

At this point: Robert D. W. Connor, “The National Archives: Objectives and Practices,” Bulletin of the American Library Association, vol. 30 (1936): p. 592; Jessie Kratz, “Survey of Federal Archives,” Pieces of History, Oct. 6, 2014; “Transfer of War Department Records to the National Archives, 1937–39,” R.D.W. Connor Papers, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter Connor Papers), folder 866.

The United States still lacked: Rodney A. Ross, “The National Archives: The Formative Years, 1934-1949,” Prologue, vol. 16, no. 2 (1984): p. 38.

A new era: “Transfer of War Department Records.”

“We have a right”: Leech to Cass Canfield, Nov. 16, 1938, reproduced in "Transfer of War Department Records.”

Connor won: “Lunch with the President, 1935,” Connor Papers, folder 862.

“When my term”: “Conference with the President, 1940,” Connor Papers, folder 897.

“They care nothing”: W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 128–34.

“fleeing from”: R.D.W. Connor, “The Rehabilitation of a Rural Commonwealth,” American Historical Review, vol. 36, no. 1 (1930): p. 54.

Of the eighty-nine: Ross, “National Archives,” pp. 35–37.

While Connor: Ibid., p. 37.

“The chief reason”: Bradsher, “Administrative History,” p. 13.

Roosevelt’s own papers: FDR was worried about Republican investigations of his presidency. Connor was happy to support his plan, since it gave him face time with the president: “The words ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt Library’ were an Open Sesame to his office whenever I wanted to see him” (“Dedication of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, 1941,” Connor Papers, folder 908).

“silences, erasures”: Bergis Jules, “Confronting Our Failure of Care Around the Legacies of Marginalized People in the Archives,” Medium, Nov. 11, 2016.

“Guardians of the Secrets”: Annual Report of the Archivist of the United States (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1934), p. 7.

Roosevelt could see: “Statutes at Large: 75th Congress Session 3, Chapter 2: An Act to Prohibit the Making of Photographs, Sketches, or Maps of Vital Military and Naval Defensive Installations and Equipment, and for Other Purposes,” LOC; Weiner, Enemies, pp. 80–82.

In 1940: Exec. Order 8381, “Defining Certain Vital Military and Naval Installations and Equipment,” March 22, 1940, FAS; Ernst Posner, “The Role of Records in German Administration,” in Archives and the Public Interest: Selected Essays by Ernst Posner, ed. Ken Munden (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1967), p. 87; Rodney Ross, “Ernst Posner: The Bridge Between the Old World and the New,” American Archivist, vol. 44 (Fall 1981): pp. 306–7.

When America entered: James Worsham, “Our Story: How the National Archives Evolved over 75 Years of Change and Challenges,” Prologue, vol. 41, no. 2 (Summer 2009).

State Department historians: Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 301–4.

And the War and Navy: Milton Gustafson, “Travels of the Charters of Freedom,” Prologue, vol. 34, no. 4 (Winter 2002).

“weeding out”: Bradsher, “ Administrative History,” p. 13.

He expected that: Bradsher, “Administrative History,” p. 9.

“in the capacity”: “Remarks at the Dedication of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York,” June 30, 1941, American Presidency Project.

Those who could be depended on: Novick, That Noble Dream, pp. 305–9, quoting William Langer and S. Everett Gleason, and see also John F. Doherty to Kenneth P. O’Donnell, July 5, 1963, White House Central Subject Files, box 632, JFKL; Arthur Schlesinger to Boyd Shafer, Dec. 23, 1961, Papers of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., White House Files, box WH 12, JFKL.

On the other hand: Alex Poole, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow Archives: Race, Space, and History in the Mid-Twentieth-Century American South,” American Archivist, vol. 77, no. 1 (2014): p. 45. Whereas well-connected professors tapped friends to become OSS analysts and cultural attachés, John Hope Franklin was turned away when he volunteered to become a clerk in the U.S. Navy, notwithstanding his Harvard Ph.D. (John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007], p. 105.)

That is how the War Department: Alan M. Kraut and Richard Breitman, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 126–45.

When surveyed: Steven White, World War II and American Racial Politics: Public Opinion, the Presidency, and Civil Rights Advocacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 42-44; Survey 32: Attitudes of and Toward Negroes, March 1943, The American Soldier in World War 2, https://americansoldierww2.org.

Black servicemen: Thomas A. Guglielmo, Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America's World War II Military (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 246.

“because of race”: Cornelius L. Bynum, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), pp. 171–74.

“If you put all”: Guglielmo, Divisions, p. 251.

But Truman only took: Bates, Pullman Porters, pp. 147–48; Kersten, A. Philip Randolph, pp. 79–83; “The Transformation of the Racial Views of Harry Truman,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, vol. 26 (Winter 1999-2000): p. 30.

What turned out: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 73.

Within this dark state: The security-clearance process has evolved over the years, and in some cases administrative appeals are possible. But courts have provided little or no recourse. See David C. Mayer, “Reviewing National Security Clearance Decisions: The Clash Between Title VII and Bivens Claims,” Cornell Law Review, vol. 85, no. 3 (2000), pp. 786–821; Louis Fisher, “Judicial Interpretations of Egan,” Law Library of Congress, Nov. 13, 2009, FAS.

Even some kinds: On the large number of lesbian and gay people who worked in Washington before 1945, but were subsequently denied security clearances, see David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 43–46, and Kirchick, Secret City, chapters four and five.

In the years: An arrest record—even without conviction—can lead to such a denial, which has a disproportionate impact on over-policed communities. See Paul R. Wassenaar, “Title VII—Racial Discrimination in Employment—Employers Use of Record of Arrests Not Leading to Conviction,” Wayne Law Review, vol. 17, no. 1 (1971): p. 233. The government does not track security-clearance denials by race, but for a revealing study showing a clear correlation, see GAO, Managing DOE: Further Review Needed of Suspensions of Security Clearances for Minority Employees, GAO/RCED-95-15 (1994). The perception that Black people could not obtain security clearances gave senior officials an excuse not even to try appointing them. See, for instance, Michael Krenn, Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945–69 (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 97–100.

“Every bureaucracy”: Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1948), p. 233.

In fact, many: “Even as the transparency laws of the 1960s and 1970s placed increasingly onerous demands on the domestic policy process,” David Pozen writes, “they grew increasingly detached from the state’s most violent and least visible components. While the National Labor Relations Board continually runs into the strictures of FOIA, [the Federal Advisory Committee Act, the Government in the Sunshine Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act], the National Security Agency runs riot.” (David E. Pozen, “Transparency's Ideological Drift,” Yale Law Journal, vol. 128 [2018]: pp. 100–65.) One reason is that this blanket of secrecy has also served to protect the interests of a host of corporate contractors, think tanks, and management consulting firms.

“Our present security”: Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, Secrecy: Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Larry Combest, Senate doc. no. 105-2 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1997), pp. A48-A49.

“overclassification has”: Committee on Classified Information, Report to the Secretary of Defense by the Committee on Classified Information (Washington, D.C., 1956), p. 7.

By 1961: Arthur M. Schlesinger, memorandum for McGeorge Bundy, March 20, 1961, Papers of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., White House Files, box WH-12, JFKL.

A series of high-level reviews: Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, Secrecy: Report of the Commission, p. 2.

What we do know: PIDB, Transforming the Security Classification System (Washington, D.C., 2012), p. 17.

Altogether, the United States spent: ISOO, 2012 Report to the President (Washington, D.C., 2013); ISOO, 2017 Report to the President (Washington, D.C., 1998).

“coping with information overload”: Barton Gellman and Greg Miller, “‘Black Budget’ Summary Details U.S. Spy Network’s Successes, Failures and Objectives,” Washington Post, Aug. 29, 2013.

The government estimates: PIDB, Transforming the Security, p. 17.

But at the largest: NARA, Office of the Inspector General, Audit of Processing of Textual Records, OIG Audit Report No. 13–14, 2013, p. 13. The most recent audit, from 2018, does not specify either the volume of backlogged records or the number of archivists who must process them, but notes that, “with staffing increases unlikely,” they may need to work more than seven times faster to reduce the backlog (NARA, Office of the Inspector General, Audit of Research Services' Analog Processing, 18-AUD-11 [2018], p. 9).

Notwithstanding the exponential growth: Compare the data in ISOO, Report to the President, of 1997 with that of 2016: $150 million in 1997 ($229 million adjusted for inflation), $107 million in 2016, and 204 million pages declassified in 1997 versus forty-four million in 2016.

The State Department is experimenting: Joseph Risi et al., “Predicting History,” Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 3, no. 9 (June 3, 2019), p. 906.

Conversely, there are: Marc Ambinder and D. B. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry (Hoboken: Wiley, 2013), pp. 190–92.

1. Pearl Harbor: The Original Secret

“surprise offensive” . . . “make it very certain”: Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address to Congress Requesting a Declaration of War,” Dec. 8, 1941.

Altogether, “national security”: Winslow Wheeler, “America's $1 Trillion National Security Budget,” Project on Government Oversight, March 13, 2014.

Until then: Adam J. Berinsky, In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 46.

Best-selling books: James Ledbetter, Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 21-25.

“full record”: Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat,” address, Dec. 9, 1941, American Presidency Project.

“ruse and cunning”: Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor: The Coming of the War Between the United States and Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 5.

“final judgment”: Gleason and Langer, The Undeclared War, 1940–1941 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1953), p. xvi. See also Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 305.

The experiment involved: This is U.S. DDO, of which the publisher, Gale, gave permission for us to analyze as part of this project.

We came across this account: Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Memorandum of Conversation, June 26, 1954, U.S. DDO; unredacted version, doc. no. CK2349066468.

“Get me the president”: This account is from ibid., and also from John Martin, Downing Street: The War Years (London: Trafalgar Square Publishing, 1992), pp. 66–67.

Because the army chief of staff: Lori S. Tagg, “Intelligence, Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor,” U.S. Army, Jan. 4, 2017; Pearl Harbor Attack: Hearings Before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, pt. 39, 79th Cong., 1st Sess. (1946), pp. 139, 228–29 (hereafter Pearl Harbor Attack with part and page number).

The State Department maintained: Memorandum of Conversation, June 26, 1954, U.S. DDO, redacted version, doc. no. CK2349309531.

“which reasonably could be expected”: Exec. Order 12356, 47 Fed. Reg. 14874, April 6, 1982.

“old and tired”: Lovett to Eisenhower, Jan. 24, 1952, U.S. DDO; unredacted version, doc. no. CK2349082002; John Charmley, Churchill, the End of Glory: A Political Biography (San Diego: Harcourt, 1993), p. 578.

“paper cities of Japan”: Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 109.

“had long burned”: David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 623. But, contrary to Reynolds’s account, Churchill did leave in that, for the Americans, the Japanese attack represented “a vast simplification of their problems and their duty” (Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3, The Grand Alliance [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950], p. 602.

It was only: Pearl Harbor Attack, pt. 39, pp. 226–29.

At a time: Reynolds, In Command of History, pp. 264-267.

Just ten days earlier: Peter Hennessy, The Secret State (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 56–57.

Forward deployment also brought: Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 98–106.

“avoid any action”: Hennessy, The Secret State, pp. 54–55.

“cause widespread”: Memorandum of Restricted Meeting of Chiefs of Staff, Dec. 7, 1953, U.S. DDO; unredacted version, doc. no. CK2349558075; redacted version, doc. no. CK2349230668.

After the State Department lost: Henry C. Clausen and Bruce Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgment (New York: Crown, 1992), pp. 45–46; David Kahn, The Code-Breakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 29.

“back door” theory: Charles Callan Tansill’s Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933–1941 (Chicago: Regnery, 1952) is the best-known version of this argument, but the great Charles A. Beard’s account is the most scholarly: President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948). This line of argument was almost single-handedly revived by the historian Marc Trachtenberg in The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chap. four.

“said that he would”: Marc Trachtenberg, “Roundtable 5-4 on ‘Democracy, Deception, and Entry into War,’” ISFF Roundtable 5, no. 4 (May 17, 2013), who cites W.M. 84 (41), Aug. 19, 1941, CAB 65/19, “Most Secret” typewritten attachment, frames 208–210.

U.S. forces escorting: Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 285–92.

In April 1941: Daniel Ford, Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers, 1941-1942 (Durham, NH: Warbird Books, 2016), pp. 35-38, 42-50.

Without U.S. oil: Edwin T. Layton with Roger Pineau and John Costello, “And I Was There”: Pearl Harbor and Midway—Breaking the Secrets (New York: Morrow, 1985), p. 130.

“There will never”: Sidney L. Pash, The Currents of War: A New History of American-Japanese Relations, 1899–1941 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), p. 174.

But Ickes does not: Trachtenberg, “Dan Reiter and America’s Road to War in 1941,” in “Roundtable 5-4 on ‘Democracy, Deception, and Entry into War,’” which also links to the original documents.

So Roosevelt’s options: This is Trachtenberg’s argument in Craft of International History, pp. 92–96.

Instead of intervening: Grew, Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years, 1904-1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), vol. 2, p. 1347.

“would simply drive”: Patrick J. Hearden, Roosevelt Confronts Hitler: America’s Entry into World War II (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987), p. 211. See also John M. Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Urgency 1938–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 377.

The announcement: Eri Hotta, Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy (New York: Vintage, 2013), pp. 143-44.

Its policy up to this point: David J. Lu, Agony of Choice, Matsuoka Yosuke and the Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), pp. 12-13.

The agreement was supposed: Jeremy A. Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), pp. 28-45.

At once: Trachtenberg, Craft of International History, p.125.

“hat-in-hand”: Grew, Turbulent Era, vol. 2, pp. 1302-4.

“has long been committed”: “Memorandum by the Secretary of State,” September 3, 1941, in “Japan 1931–1941,” FRUS, vol. 2, (1943) pp. 588-92.

“conclusively and wholeheartedly”: Grew Memorandum, September 6, 1941, in “Japan 1931–1941,” FRUS, vol. 2, (1943) pp. 604, 608.

“accept the American terms”: Grew, Turbulent Era, vol. 2, pp. 1321-33, 1359, and see also Trachtenberg, Craft of International History, pp. 104-5.

“no matter what”: Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor, pp. 252-53. See also pp. 259-60, where Feis answers the question of whether there was “some hidden wish to punish Japan” with another question: “Who is to know?” Gleason and Langer, for their part, quote the German ambassador as the authoritative source on Konoe’s actual intent—even though Konoe refused throughout this episode to keep Berlin informed. They also refer to “Japanese records which became available after the war” without actually citing any such records, Undeclared War, 707.

“surrendering to the United States”: Hotta, Japan 1941, pp. 170-171, 188-89.

Konoe kept trying: Hotta, Japan 1941, p. 179.

Interestingly: Paul W. Schroader, The Axis Alliance and Japanese-American Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), pp. 62-68.

“unbearable”: Hotta, Japan 1941, pp. 201-2.

Tōjō therefore pushed: Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt, pp. 306–7.

“comprehensive Pacific settlement”: “Memorandum of Conversation” and “Outline of Proposed Basis for Agreement,” November 26, 1941, in “Japan 1931–1941,” FRUS, vol. 2, (1943) pp. 764-70.

“maximum demands”: Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War, p. 898.

“The question was”: Langer and Gleason admit the wording was “infelicitous,” but describe it as expressing Stimson’s concern that the political situation did not permit the administration to parry the blow even though they saw it coming (Undeclared War, pp. 886, 898).

The words “without”: That’s why FDR and his closest advisers were “not too tense” upon receiving the reports from Pearl Harbor. Hitler was the main enemy, the United States would inevitably have to join the war, and “Japan had given us an opportunity,” as one of the president’s advisers recalled (Trachtenberg, Craft of International History, p. 129). As Roosevelt himself later said, “If the Japanese had not attacked the United States, he doubted very much if it would have been possible to send any American forces to Europe” (Roosevelt-Stalin Meeting, Nov. 29, 1943, in FRUS, 1943, vol. 3, doc. no. 365).

Roosevelt’s most influential critics: Larry J. Frank, “The United States Navy v. the ‘Chicago Tribune,” Historian, vol. 42, no. 2 (1980): pp. 291–92.

“I am now painfully”: Yellen, The Greater East Asia, p. 45.

The keynote: Even four years after Pearl Harbor, and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed, a poll showed that 23 percent of Americans wanted to keep on dropping atomic bombs on Japan before Tokyo had a chance to surrender (John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War [New York: Pantheon, 1993], pp. 36–37, 54–55, 98-110).

For that very reason: Both Marshall and the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold Stark, urged Roosevelt to avoid war, advising, “The most essential thing now is to gain time,” both for America to rearm and to give them the ability to focus on the main threat: Nazi Germany (Stark to Roosevelt, Nov. 5, 1941, Pearl Harbor Attack, pt. 16, pp. 2222–23).

“is not true”: Thomas Schelling, foreword to Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), p. vii.

These communications would have shown: Layton, “And I Was There,” pp. 115–17, 138–45.

“hostile action”: Pearl Harbor Attack, pt. 39, p. 79.

It was locked: Ibid., pp. 228-229.

When the Chicago Tribune: David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet (New York: Scribner, 1996), pp. 604–5.

The army operated: Pearl Harbor Attack, pt. 39, p. 65.

Even after Japanese: The commander at Clark wanted to raid Formosa, but MacArthur only communicated with him through an intermediary for several hours after word came about Pearl Harbor, slowing the response (Arthur Herman, Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior, [New York: Random House, 2016], pp. 495–506).

As in August 2001: “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” excerpt from the President's Daily Brief, Dec. 4, 1998, FAS.

Brian Hochman, The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2022), pp. 85-86.

Thus, the same month: Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 41–42; James F. Schnabel, History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, vol. 1, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy, 1945–1947 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chairman of the JCS, 1996), pp. 66–67.

Thomas A. Bailey: Novick, That Noble Dream, pp. 290-2, 305–9. As Novick points out, Bailey later qualified this claim. He did not mean that “people ought in all cases or even most cases to be deceived,” only confirming his contention that presidents should deceive the public at least some of the time (The American Pageant Revisited: Recollections of a Stanford Historian [Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1982], p. 167).

“without provocation”: George Bush, “In Defense of Saudi Arabia,” speech, Aug. 8, 1990, in The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions, eds. Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf (New York: Times Books, 1991), p. 197.

“no opinion”: “The Glaspie Transcript: Saddam Meets the U.S. Ambassador (July 25, 1990),” in Gulf War Reader, p. 130. See also Elaine Sciolino, “Envoy’s Testimony on Iraq Is Assailed,” New York Times, July 13, 1991. On green light, see Roger Simon, “Was the U.S. Signal Red or Green on Kuwait?,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 22, 1992. Ross Perot said that the Bush administration was guarding records of its instructions to Glaspie “like the secrets of the atomic bomb” (Jeffrey Smith, “State Department Cable Traffic on Iraq-Kuwait Tensions, July 1990,” Washington Post, Oct. 21, 1992). As John M. Schuessler argues, Pearl Harbor was an illustrative example of how presidents have used false pretenses to start or expand wars the American people would not otherwise support (John M. Schuessler, “The Deception Dividend: FDR's Undeclared War,” International Security, vol. 34, no. 4. [Spring 2010]: pp. 158–64).

“Infamy”: Representative DeFazio, speaking on H. Res. 27, Jan. 10, 1991, 102nd Cong., 1st Sess., Congressional Record, vol. 137, pt. 1, p. 549.

And all this: Consider, for instance, how the U.S. intelligence community warned the public of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which helped the president prepare sanctions, rally an alliance, and win a decisive advantage in the information war (Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger, “Accurate U.S. Intelligence Did Not Stop Putin, But It Gave Biden Big Advantages,” New York Times, Feb. 22, 2022).

2. The Bomb: Born Secret

But starting with: To be sure, the government can find ways to threaten journalists with prosecution for publishing classified information even without using the Atomic Energy Act. As shown in the James Risen case, they can compel journalists to testify and threaten prison time if they do not give up their sources.

In 1998: Kyl-Lott Amendments to the Strom Thurmond National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999, Public Law 105-261, U.S. Statutes at Large 112 (1998).

In the first eight years: William Burr, “How Many and Where Were the Nukes?,” ZNet, Aug. 21, 2006. Bible of 1,286 pages cost $4.9 million in 1996, so $3,810 per page; for the DOE program, $3,313 per page in 2006 (according to the Burr article) is $4,236 in 2020.

In the case: NSC, Function of the Special Committee of NSC on Atomic Energy to Advise the President on Use of Atomic Weapons, 1952, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349320976; White House, Procedures to Be Followed in the Event the President Is Called Upon to Decide Whether or Not Atomic Weapons Should Be Used, 1951, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349137214; General Advisory Committee to the AEC, Working Memorandum: Distinction Between the Atomic Bomb and the Super-Bomb, 1949, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349218994.

Documents related to unidentified flying objects: Hannah Wallach, “Textual Analysis of Government Declassification Patterns,” University of Massachusetts, 2013.

In an exception: Project 1794 Final Development Summary Report, 06/1956, and Program Planning Report, Project 1794 Extension Program, 04/1957, RG 342: Records of U.S. Air Force Commands, Activities, and Organizations, Entry UD-UP 138, Research and Development Project Files, USNA.

Scientists believed: A. J. Goodpaster, Memorandum of Conference with the President, Feb. 13, 1959, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349092480.

It will also reveal: See Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, “Staff Memoranda: Atomic Veterans,” Sept. 8, 1994; “Recommendations for Remedies Pertaining to Experiments and Exposures During the Period 1944–1974,” Sept. 22, 1995, OSTI.

In Hollywood movies: The best evidence that has emerged of a close encounter, a navy video of a UFO, was released after just thirteen years, more evidence that the government does not closely guard information about the possibility of extraterrestrial visitations—just the opposite (Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean, “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” New York Times, Dec. 16, 2017).

“ultimate weapon”: For a typical example, see Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (New York: Times Books, 2004), p. 6. For the pervasiveness of this perception, see John E. Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 81–82.

This story begins: Barton J. Bernstein, “The Uneasy Alliance: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Atomic Bomb, 1940-1945,” Western Political Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 2 (1976): p. 205.

It started with: Bruce Cameron Reed, The Manhattan Project: The Story of the Century (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2020), p. 91.

But to actually produce: Ibid., pp. 6–7.

Over the next few years: Manhattan District History, bk. 8, Los Alamos Project, vol. 1: General (Washington, D.C.: DOE, 1947).

But it was dwarfed: Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 22, 27, 297; Reed, Manhattan Project, pp. 164–65, 168, 210–18.

“absolute secrecy”: Manhattan District History, bk. 1, General, vol. 14: Intelligence and Security, (Washington, D.C.: DOE, 1945), app. A-1, FAS.

That was the main concern: Alex Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), pp. 54–56.

Bush and George Marshall: Martin J. Sherwin, “The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War: U.S. Atomic-Energy Policy and Diplomacy, 1941–45,” American Historical Review, vol. 78 (Oct. 1973): pp. 946–48.

But while the war: Bernstein, “Uneasy Alliance,” pp. 206, 210; Barton J. Bernstein, “Roosevelt, Truman, and the Atomic Bomb, 1941–1945: A Reinterpretation,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 1 (1975): p. 25.

“all other nations”: Robert S. Norris, Racing for the Bomb (Hanover, N.H.: Steerforth Press, 2003), pp. 253–54.

Groves developed: Manhattan District History, General, vol. 14, p. 343.

In the three years: Ibid., p. 34.

The most senior: Alex Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb: Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, 1939–2008,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2010, pp. 65–66.

Black women: Robert Bauman, “Jim Crow in the Tri-Cities, 1943-1950,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 96, no. 3 (2005): pp. 124–31.

“careful checks”: Brown, Plutopia, 27.

“Confidential”: Exec. Order 10501, 3 C.F.R., pp. 979–86 (1953). Strangely, “Nation” was only capitalized in the definition of “Top Secret” information, but not for “Confidential” information.

“Compartmentalization of knowledge”: Robert S. Norris, “Unprecedented Security Measures,” in The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians, ed. Cynthia Kelly (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007), p. 235.

They pointed out: Richard Feynman, interview by Charles Weiner, American Institute of Physics, March 5, 1966.

“It was rare”: Lt. Col. John Lansdale, Jr., “As If They Were Walking in the Woods,” in Manhattan Project, ed. Kelly, p. 242. See also Alex Wellerstein, “What Did Bohr Do at Los Alamos?,” Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog, May 11, 2015.

Other scientists, like Richard Feynman: Lawrence Badash, J. O. Hirschfelder, and H. P. Broida, Reminiscences of Los Alamos 1943–1945 (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1980), pp. 115–16.

Feynman knew: Ibid., pp. 117–19.

The same system: Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy (Darby, Pa.: Diane Publishing Company, 1997), p. 106.

Soviet agents: Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (New York: Henry Holt, 2013), p. 161.

As further proof: Wellerstein, Restricted Data, pp. 66–70.

Groves handled: Arvin Quist, Security Classification of Information, vol. 1 (Oak Ridge, Tenn.: Oak Ridge National Laboratories, 1989), p. 105; Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb,” pp. 18, 134–36.

“Publicity day”: Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb,” p. 159.

With the creation: Wellerstein, Restricted Data, pp. 64, 130, 144, 152, 157.

It has been argued: Ibid, 153-8.

“special access program”: SAPs were only formally named and recognized as part of the government’s information security system in 1972. For a good primer, see Tim McMillan and Tyler Rogoway, “Special Access Programs and the Pentagon's Ecosystem of Secrecy,” Drive, July 22, 2019.

Groves finally got around: Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb,” pp. 198, 207–8.

When a shortage of plutonium: Chuck Hansen, Eleanor Hansen, and Larry Hatfield, The Swords of Armageddon (Sunnyvale, Calif.: Chukelea Publications, 2007), pp. V116–17.

Groves therefore realized: Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb,” pp. 195–205; Quist, Security Classification, p. 105.

The most sensitive information: DOE, Report of Committee on Declassification, 1945.

Decades later: David Pozen, “Deep Secrecy,” Stanford Law Review, vol. 62, no. 2 (2010): p. 257.

“This revelation”: Winston Churchill, “Statement by the Prime Minister,” Aug. 6, 1945, in Manhattan District History, bk. 1, General, vol. 4, chap. 8.

“hunch”: Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb,” p. 224.

The theoretical possibility: Even Groves admitted that the most important secret of the Manhattan Project was simply “the fact that the thing went off” (Testimony of Gen. L. R. Groves, in House Committee on Military Affairs, Atomic Energy: Hearings on H.R. 4280, An Act for the Development and Control of Atomic Energy, Oct. 9 and 18, 79th Congress, lst Sess., [1945]).

“utterly bizarre”: David E. Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, vol. 2, The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 16.

The published report: Henry Smyth, “The Work on the Atomic Bomb,” in Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb Under the Auspices of the United States Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), p. 208.

But many of the specifics: John Coster-Mullen, Atomic Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man (self-published, 2016), p. 27.

But even when you put: Ibid., p. 39.

But however clever: Alice L. Buck, A History of the Atomic Energy Commission (Washington, D.C.: DOE, 1983); “Summary of Declassified Nuclear Stockpile Information,” DOE OpenNet. On Truman not being briefed, see David Alan Rosenberg, “U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, 1945–1950,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 38, no. 5 (1982): p. 27.

“hollow threat”: Coster-Mullen, Atomic Bombs, p. 382.

Many of the planes: Harry R. Borowski, A Hollow Threat: Strategic Air Power and Containment Before Korea (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 103-105. See also Harry R. Borowski, “Air Force Atomic Capability from V-J Day to the Berlin Blockade—Potential or Real?," Military Affairs, vol. 44, no. 3 (1980): pp. 105–10.

When Curtis LeMay: Walton S. Moody, Building a Strategic Air Force, Air Force History and Museums Program (1995), p. 125.

In a simulated night attack: Borowski, “Air Force Atomic Capability,” pp. 105–10.

At any given time: Moody, Building a Strategic Air Force, pp. 125, 168.

The AEC had custody: Hansen, Hansen, and Hatfield, Swords of Armageddon, pp. 146–49.

After your first strike: Ibid., p. 150.

After all, Roswell: Ibid., pp. 147–49.

Compounding the government’s concern: Col. Richard L. Weaver and 1st Lt. James McAndrew, The Roswell Report: Fact and Fiction in the New Mexico Desert (Washington, D.C.: USAF, 1995), pp. 3–4; William J. Broad, “Wreckage in the Desert Was Odd but Not Alien,” New York Times, Sept. 18, 1994.

“I’m glad”: Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb,” p. 289.

With the help: On Seborer, see Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, “On the Trail of a Fourth Soviet Spy at Los Alamos,” Studies in Intelligence, vol. 63, no. 3 (Sept. 2019), pp. 1-4.

But it was later confirmed: David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 107–8.

All three did it: Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy (New York: Diane Publishing Company, 1997), pp. 89–90.

“of the very atomic”: Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb,” pp. 322–23.

Top-secret intelligence estimate: CIA, “Special Estimate: Soviet Capabilities for a Surprise Attack on the Continental U.S. Before July 1952,” SE-10, 1951, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349034249.

President John F. Kennedy warned: Press Conference, March 21, 1963, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1964), p. 280. The top-secret briefing he was given considered Swedish, German, and Egyptian nukes to be plausible (Peter R. Lavoy, “Predicting Nuclear Proliferation: A Declassified Documentary Record,” Strategic Insights, vol. 3, no. 1 [Jan. 2004]: pp. 1–2).

In 1964: W. J. Frank, Summary Report of the Nth Country Experiment (Livermore, Calif.: Livermore Radiation Laboratory, 1967), pp. 40-43.

After newspapers reported: Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb,” pp. 394–99.

“This is no bluff”: Ibid., pp. 385–86. The leading theory for the lost uranium from Apollo is that it was purloined by Mossad and helped jump-start Israel’s stockpile.

The hard part: Ibid., p. 108; Michael Levi, On Nuclear Terrorism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 40–41.

In 1986 the DOE: David Samuels, “Atomic John,” New Yorker, Dec. 7, 2008.

There was no compelling: Peter Galison et al., “What We Have Learned About Limiting Knowledge in a Democracy,” Social Research, vol. 77 (2010): p. 1034. For illustrations of Iraqi centrifuges, see CIA Waffles on Alleged Nuclear Centrifuge, Cryptome, July 2, 2003.

But the process: William Burr, “How Many and Where Were the Nukes?,” ZNET, Aug. 21, 2006.

There are also: Matthew M. Aid, ed., “Declassification in Reverse: The U.S. Intelligence Community's Secret Historical Document Reclassification Program,” National Security Archive, Feb. 26, 2006.

Even in 1954: Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb,” pp. 18, 210–11.

Document number 43: DOD, “Rolling Thunder: List of Unauthorized Targets Recommended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” 1968, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349119281.

Richard Nixon would later: Jeffrey P. Kimball, The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon-Era Strategy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), pp. 30–31, 214–18.

A more typical document: “Attachment: Description of Atomic Devices and Component Parts,” n.d., U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349508376.

The most sensitive document: JCS, Study on National Security Factors in a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, 1966, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349562865.

The next document: White House, “Disarmament Study: Task Forces Study of Inspection and Control Methods,” Reports by the Task Force, vol. 2, 1955, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349309553.

The third and final document: Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Study of U.S. and NATO Nuclear Weapons Arrangements, 1961, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349601635.

Here again: Peter Stein and Peter Feaver, Assuring Control of Nuclear Weapons: The Evolution of Permissive Action Links (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987), p. 32.

But government officials: In 2009, the director of National Intelligence replaced the “need to know” with the “responsibility to provide” principle, intended to push the intelligence community to more openly share intelligence information with other parts of the government. This could have been a fundamental reform. But insiders believe it is largely ignored within the intelligence community, and perhaps unknown in the rest of the government.

3. Code Making and Code Breaking: The Secret of Secrets

Get at the heart of the matter: This experiment was done with the Declassified Documents Online database.

So, when: “Critique of Battle for Hill 1243,” Dec. 27, 1951, USNA, RG457, Records of the National Security Agency, P/Entry 5, General Records, “Query on Security Matter,” USNA.

When NASA began sending: The procedures can be found here: “Review of S2 Staff Study on Missiles, Satellites, and Special Projects,” Dec. 26, 1961, RG457, Records of the National Security Agency, P/Entry 5, General Records, “Relationships on COMSEC R&D,” USNA.

Cryptologists would not share: “Minutes of the Sixth Meeting of the National Intelligence Authority,” Aug. 21, 1946, FRUS, 1945–1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, p. 397; A. C. Peterson to Ennis, “Intelligence Liaison,” Nov. 20, 1947, DNSA, doc. no. HN00237.

Amazingly, it appears: Hoover told Truman who was suspected of being a spy, but did not tell him how intercepted Soviet communications proved their guilt (J. Edgar Hoover to Harry Hawkins Vaughan, Nov. 8, 1945, in Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939–1957, eds. Robert Lewis Benson and Michael Warner [Washington, D.C.: NSA and CIA, 1996], p. 69).

But the person in charge: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 70–72.

In 1951: Disclosure of Classified Information, 18 U.S.C. § 798 (Oct. 31, 1951 & Supp. 1996). See also Stephen Budiansky, Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union (New York: Knopf, 2016), p. 160.

Those who try: Lauren Harper, “90-Year-Old Cryptanalytic Efforts Must Stay Secret, Says NSA," Unredacted, June 20, 2016.

In 2016: The CIA, not to be outdone, allowed someone to steal thirty-four terabytes’ worth of computer viruses, malware, and zero-day exploits. They did not even realize it had happened until WikiLeaks started sharing the data. An internal report concluded that U.S. government hackers “prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems.” (Ellen Nakashima and Shane Harris, “Elite CIA Unit That Developed Hacking Tools Failed to Secure Its Own Systems, Allowing Massive Leak, an Internal Report Found,” Washington Post, June 16, 2020; WikiLeaks Task Force to CIA Director, “WikiLeaks Task Force Final Report,” Oct. 17, 2017.)

“cocked weapon”: David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” International Security, vol. 7, no. 4 (Spring 1983): p. 19.

“wargasm”: Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 120.

This strategy: David Alan Rosenberg, “‘A Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours’: Documents on American Plans for Nuclear War with the Soviet Union, 1954–1955,” International Security, vol. 6, no. 3 (Winter 1981–82), pp. 25, 31.

Air-force planners: Some air-force planners were inspired by the way Britain policed its colonies from the air, and proposed that coercive air power could be imposed on the USSR as an alternative to outright nuclear destruction (George R. Gagnon, Air Control: Strategy for a Smaller United States Air Force [Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.: Air University Press, 1993], pp. 17–18).

Leading figures: “Project Solarium: Summary of Basic Concepts of Task Forces,” July 30, 1953, NSC Meeting Files, No. 157, Tab D, NSC Records, USNA; “Summaries Prepared by the NSC Staff of Project Solarium Presentations and Written Reports,” July 22, 1953, FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 2, pp. 430–31.

“duty to future generations”: Eisenhower to Dulles, Sept. 8, 1953, FRUS, 1952–54, vol. 2, p. 461.

He made clear: Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Statement to Senior Military Officers,” June 19, 1954, James Hagerty Diary, James Hagerty Papers, box 1, DDEL.

But unless Moscow: Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself–While the Rest of Us Die (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), pp. 52–53.

“rougher road”: Marc Trachtenberg, “A ‘Wasting Asset’: American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949–1954,” International Security, vol. 13, no. 3 (Winter 1988–89), pp. 10, 42.

SAC sent a B-47 bomber: Harold R. Austin, “A Daytime Overlight of the Soviet Union,” in Early Cold War Overflight: Symposium Proceedings, vol. 1, eds. R. Cargill Hall and Clayton D. Laurie (Washington, D.C.: National Reconnaissance Office, 2003), pp. 213–19.

By 1956: James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (New York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 35–36, citing R. Cargill Hall, “The Truth About Overflights,” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, vol. 9, no. 3 (Spring 1997): pp. 24–39.

In a further humiliation: Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, “U-2 Operations in the Soviet Bloc and Middle East, 1956–1968,” in The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974 (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1998), pp. 102-108, FAS.

They had far fewer: Stephen J. Zaloga, The Kremlin's Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall of Russia's Strategic Nuclear Forces, 1945-2000 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2002), p. 24.

Until the Soviets: NSA Scientific Advisory Board, National Security Agency Historical Study (Fort Meade, 2010), pp. 10–11.

The KL-7: David G. Boak, “A History of U.S. Communications Security (the David Boak Lectures),” vols. 1 and 2 (Fort Meade, Md., 1973), pp. 36–37; NSA Center for Cryptologic History, AFSAM-7, in Cryptologic Almanac 50th Anniversary Series (Fort Meade, Md., 2003); NSA, “TEMPEST: A Signal Problem,” pp. 26–27; NSA, Plain Text Radiation Study of TSEC/KL-7 (AFSAM 7), UKUSA-344 (1955).

The NSA worked: Ed Fitzgerald, History of U.S. Communications Security, Post–World War II (Fort Meade, Md.: NSA, 2011), pp. 8–9, 90–91; Boak, “History of U.S Communications Security,” pp. 45–46.

But anyone they sent: NSA, Study of the Security Division, 1955, RG457, P/Entry 14, Security Policy, box 1, USNA; United States Communications Intelligence Board Special Committee to Study Communications Intelligence Personnel Security Standards and Practice, Study of COMINT Personnel Security Standards and Practices (Washington, D.C., 1955), DNSA, HN00942.

Number of NSA personnel: Thomas R. Johnson, “The Move, or How NSA Came to Fort Meade,” Cryptologic History, NSA doc. no. 3928654, pp. 93–95.

The new NSA headquarters: NSA, Study of NSA Physical Security Program, 1963, RG457, P/Entry 14, Security Policy, box 1, USNA.

At night: Ralph J. Canine to Commander of the Marine Corps, “Marine Guard Detachment for the National Security Agency at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland,” July 28, 1955, RG457, P/Entry 14, Security Policy, box 1, USNA.

The marines: NSA, Study of NSA Physical Security Program.

And every day: James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), p. 118.

The new NSA building: Colin B. Burke, “It Wasn’t All Magic: The Early Struggle to Automate Cryptanalysis, 1930s–1960s,” United States Cryptologic History, special ser., vol. 6 (2002), p. 277.

They produced: Bamford, Puzzle Palace, p. 65.

It added up: AFSA to Commanding Officer, Military District of Washington, June 19, 1952, RG457.3, Records of the National Security Agency, P/Entry 5, General Records, container 2, USNA.

“a major riot”: NSA, Study of NSA Physical Security Program.

“a continual conflict”: Ibid.

Soviet Embassy staff: Carroll E. Williams, “Meade Work at Bid Stage,” Baltimore Sun, March 14, 1954.

No polygraph exams: “The Role of Employer Practices in the Federal Industrial Personnel Security Program: A Field Study,” Stanford Law Review, vol. 8, no. 2 (1956): pp. 240–41.

The national unemployment rate: “Booming Construction Industry Spurs Sharp Private Employment Rise,” Washington Post and Times Herald, May 22, 1955.

This location: “Building Planning Service,” May 17–19, 1953, NSA doc. no. 3978858.

“When the battery dies”: Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA’s Spytechs from Communism to Al-Qaeda (New York: Plume, 2009), p. 188.

Luckily for the Soviets: Albert Glinsky, Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), pp. 259–60.

New kind of wireless surveillance system: George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1950–1963 (New York: Pantheon, 1967), pp. 154–56.

Theremin realized: Glinsky, Theremin, pp. 260–61.

Center for juvenile delinquents: “Man Is Held for Posing as Doctor,” Washington Post and Times Herald, Aug. 30, 1957.

Once on staff: Eve Edstrom, “Counselor Suspended in Striking of Boy, 15,” Washington Post and Times Herald, Nov. 8, 1957.

But KGB operatives: Alfred Hubest, “Audiosurveillance,” Studies in Intelligence, vol. 4, no. 3 (Summer 1960): pp. 43–45; John P. Callahan, “Immigrants Fade in Building Field,” New York Times, Oct. 13, 1957.

“It is now virtually”: Hubest, “Audiosurveillance,” 40–41.

Simply dropping: Wallace and Melton, Spycraft, p. 173.

NSA was under such pressure: House Committee on Un-American Activities, Security Practices in the National Security Agency (Defection of Bernon F. Mitchell and William H. Martin), 87th Cong., 2d Sess. (1962), 6, P/Entry 5, General Records, container 5, USNA.

“For Official Use Only”: John J. Beiser to director of the National Security Agency, “Classifications of Investigations Conducted by the Army,” Oct. 20th, 1958, RG457, P/Entry 5, General Records, container 4, USNA.

Each of these rooms: NSA, “TEMPEST,” p. 28.

Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: Display ad 81, no title, Washington Post and Times Herald, March 21, 1954.

For the NSA’s own move: “Ghosts,” Washington Post and Times Herald, March 26, 1954.

It did fire: “ODM Fires Questionable Loyalty Risk,” Austin Statesman, March 23, 1954.

But the plan itself: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “Operations Building ‘A’—No. 401 and ‘B’—No. 450, First Floor Plans,” RG457, P/Entry-14, Security Policy, box 1, USNA.

As an enterprising journalist: Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, p. 124.

“Elements of NSA”: “Interim Movement, 31 January 1955–24 June 1955,” NSA doc. no. 3987308.

It took months: J. C. Bennett to DD/PROD, “Exceptions to NSA Regulation 121-7 Granted to NSA Elements at the Interim Site, Ft. Meade,” Nov. 2, 1955, RG457, P/Entry 14, “Security Policy,” box 1, USNA.

Finally, the Soviet Division: Thomas R. Johnson, “The Move,” p. 97.

“sense of false security”: Leslie H. Wyman, “Designation of Areas,” April 6, 1953, RG457, Records of the National Security Agency, P/Entry 14, Security Policy, box 1, “Physical Security,” USNA.

Even at the new headquarters: NSA, Study of NSA Physical Security Program.

“If they are of”: Ibid.

A 1963 report found: Ibid.

Security staff periodically: Ibid.

As the same 1963: Ibid.

“Their integrity”: Ibid.

Military personnel were exempt: Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, pp. 123–24.

Twenty years earlier: Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), pp. 180–81.

When the CIA constructed: DDA to Agency/Office Division Directors, “Request for Thoughts on Reducing Bureaucracy,” April 1, 1987, CIA-RDP91-00058R000200400010-4.

Period of rapid growth: Steven Aftergood, “Proposed NSA Headquarters Expansion Under Review,” March 15, 2017, FAS.

In 1957: David Easter, “Soviet Bloc and Western Bugging of Opponents' Diplomatic Premises during the Early Cold War,” Intelligence and National Security, vol. 31, no. 1 (2016): p. 34.

Between 1953 and 1957: Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 375.

In the 1980s: Philip Shenon, “U.S. Drops Its Case Against a Marine in Embassy Spying,” New York Times, June 13, 1987.

From the North Koreans: NSA, Cryptographic Damage Assessment: USS Pueblo, AGER-2, Jan. 23–Dec. 23 (1968), sect. V, 1969, pp. 1–2.

“For more than seventeen”: Laura J. Heath, “An Analysis of the Systemic Security Weaknesses of the U.S. Navy Fleet Broadcasting System, 1967–1974, as Exploited by CWO John Walker,” master’s thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005, pp. 72–73, FAS; Bamford, Body of Secrets, pp. 276–77, 307–11.

In addition to giving: Heath, “Analysis of the Systemic Security Weaknesses,” p. 29; Pete Early, Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 109.

“In its push”: Scott Wilson, “NSA's Quest for Diversity Called Risky,” Baltimore Sun, July 6, 1997.

“on full alert”: Bamford, Puzzle Palace, pp. 133–50. See also David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 145–46.

Smashed their Great Seal: NSA, “TEMPEST,” p. 26.

“They always had”: “Report Prepared in the Department of State: Estimate of Damage to U.S. Foreign Policy Interests (from Net of Listening Devices in U.S. Embassy Moscow),” Oct. 2, 1969, FRUS, 1964–68, vol. 14, Soviet Union, no. 47.

Instead, between the embassy bugs: It was also recently revealed that in the 1970s and early 1980s the Soviets read the keystrokes from several IBM Selectric typewriters in the Moscow embassy (Sharon A. Maneki, NSA Center for Cryptologic History, Learning from the Enemy: The GUNMAN Project (2018).

4. The Military-Industrial Complex: The Dirty Secret of Civil-Military Relations

“do something”: Peter Stein and Peter Feaver, Assuring Control of Nuclear Weapon:. The Evolution of Permissive Action Links (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987), p. 32.

The military resisted: Ibid., pp. 36–39; McGeorge Bundy, Memorandum of a Conversation, Oct. 4, 1961, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349499904.

But in the 1970s: Bruce G. Blair, “Keeping Presidents in the Nuclear Dark: The SIOP Option that Wasn't,” Defense Monitor, vol. 33, no. 2 (2004): p. 2. On Minuteman procedures, see also Bernard C. Nalty, U.S. Air Force Ballistic Missile Programs, 1964–1966, USAF Historical Division, 1967, p. 11, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349654796.

“I am shocked”: Blair, “Keeping Presidents,” p. 2.

Consider what happened: Phil Stanford, “Who Pushes the Button?,” Parade magazine, March 28, 1976; Ron Rosenbaum, How the End Begins: The Road to Nuclear World War III (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 61; First Use of Nuclear Weapons: Preserving Responsible Control: Hearings before the Subcommittee on International Security and Scientific Affairs of the Committee on International Relations, 94th Cong., 2nd Sess. (1976), pp. 227–28.

“defective mental attitude”: First Use of Nuclear Weapons, p. 228.

“Then we’d tell”: “JCS Meeting,” Memorandum for the Record, Sept. 13, 1971, National Security Archive.

“could lose two”: Ibid.

“was not the end”: “Command and Control Briefing Presented to DEPSECDEF,” Memorandum for the Record, Sept. 3, 1971, National Security Archive.

Moorer went so far: Seymour Hersh, “Radford Says He Had Instructions to Pilfer Papers,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 1974; James Rosen, “Nixon and the Chiefs,” Atlantic, April 2002.

He remained chairman: John W. Finney, “Rockwell Names Pentagon Guests,” New York Times, March 18, 1976; Bernard Weinraub, “2 Officers Protest Plan to Strengthen Civilians in Pentagon,” New York Times, Feb. 6, 1978; Adam Bernstein, “Adm. Thomas Moorer Dies,” Washington Post, Feb. 7, 2004.

It was not until 1977: Bruce G. Blair and Gary D. Brewer, “The Terrorist Threat to World Nuclear Programs,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 21, no. 3 (Sept. 1977): pp. 386–89. Blair's experience as a Minuteman launch-control officer so scarred him that he decided to devote the rest of his life to disarmament (Sam Roberts, “Bruce Blair, Crusader for Nuclear Arms Control, Dies at 72,” New York Times, July 24, 2020).

“dirty little secret”: Andrew J. Bacevich, “Discord Still: Clinton and the Military,” Washington Post, Jan. 3, 1999.

But in the 1940s: Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 354–61.

For example, in 1949: Mark Perry, Four Stars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), pp. 11–19.

“open rebellion”: Barry M. Blechman et al., The American Military in the 21st Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), p. 14.

“Revolt of the Admirals”: Huntington, Soldier and State, pp. 353–54.

The outbreak of the Korean War: Arthur Herman, Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior (New York: Random House, 2016), pp. 705–10.

How close MacArthur came: James E. Alexander, “Who's In Charge Here?,” Naval History, vol. 11, no. 48 (1997): p. 48.

The planes buzzing: A veteran of this engagement recently noted the falsity of the ship’s log—and the existence of other corroborating accounts of the engagement—in a post to the National Archives Web site (Lawson Winslow, “Seeking to Correct the Deck Log of the USS John A Bole,” HistoryHub, Oct. 5, 2020). But the secrecy of the mission makes it unclear whether anyone in the White House even knew about it. The official army history describes Truman as hastily making the announcement out of concern that the news of MacArthur’s relief would leak. (Billy C. Mossman, United States Army in the Korean War: Ebb and Flow, November 1950–July 1951 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1988), pp. 364–65.

“new and heretofore”: M. B. Ridgway, “A Code of Loyalty,” New York Times, May 2, 1973.

A secret came to light: Carol M. Petillo, “Douglas MacArthur and Manuel Quezon: A Note on an Imperial Bond,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 48, no. 1 (1979): pp. 108–15.

Nine years later: Herman, Douglas MacArthur, p. 831.

Another popular general: Andrew J. Bacevich, “The Paradox of Professionalism: Eisenhower, Ridgway, and the Challenge to Civilian Control, 1953–1955,” Journal of Military History, vol. 61 (1997): p. 307-8.

He expanded the nuclear arsenal: As Eisenhower told his NSC, “In a future nuclear war the chief task of the U.S. ground forces would be to preserve order in the United States. God only knew what the Navy would be doing in a nuclear attack.” (Memorandum of Discussion at the 277th Meeting of the National Security Council, Feb. 27, 1956, FRUS, 1955–57, National Security Policy, vol. 19, p. 208.)

Army generals: Bacevich, “Paradox of Professionalism,” pp. 315–19, 331.

“What would happen”: S. Everett Gleason, “Discussion at the 229th Meeting of the National Security Council, Tuesday, December 21st, 1954,” Dec. 22, 1954, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349094730.

“I’d have to explain”: Harold Austin, “A B-47 Overflight of Russia—1954,” Daedalus Flyer, Spring 1995; also quoted in Robert S. Hopkins, “An Expanded Understanding of Eisenhower, American Policy and Overflights,” Intelligence and National Security, vol. 11 (April 1996): p. 335.

“the exact manner”: David Alan Rosenberg and W. B. Moore, “‘Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours’: Documents on American Plans for Nuclear War with the Soviet Union, 1954–55,” International Security, vol. 6, no. 3 (Winter 1981–82): p. 25

LeMay had shown: Warren Kozak, LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2009), pp. 216–27.

Now he would not: The navy’s dogged resistance to letting SAC develop a coordinated war plan was also a factor; see “Memorandum of Conference With President Eisenhower,” Aug. 11, 1960, FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 3, p. 444.

Share of the defense budget rose: Kevin N. Lewis, “The U.S. Air Force Budget and Posture Over Time,” R-3807-AF (Santa Monica: RAND, 1990), pp. 12–14.

To fight back: Richard Aliano, American Defense Policy from Eisenhower to Kennedy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), pp. 135–36.

“bomber gap”: Memorandum of Discussion of the 172nd Meeting of the NSC, Nov. 24, 1953, NSC Series, box 6, AWF, DDEL.

“You could read”: Memorandum of Discussion of the 223rd Meeting of the NSC, Nov. 9, 1954, NSC Series, box 6, AWF, DDEL.

By the mid-1950s: Huntington, Soldier and State, p. 366. See also James Fallows, National Defense (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 65, for more conservative estimates, and also figures for 1969 and 1979.

Unlike Truman: Glenn Fowler, “R. T. Ross, Ex-Congressman,” New York Times, Oct. 3, 1981; Michael S. Mayer, The Eisenhower Years (New York: Facts on File, 2010), p. 485.

A lot of corruption: William M. Freeman, “Bradley Takes Over Tomorrow as Head of Bulova Research in $10,000,000 Plant,” New York Times, Aug. 16, 1953; Huntington, Soldier and State, pp. 361–66; William Turner, “The Right Wing’s Biggest Spender: Patrick J. Frawley,” Washington Post, Aug. 30, 1970.

Eisenhower sought the help: John L. Sprague, Sprague Electric: An Electronics Giant’s Rise, Fall, and Life after Death (North Charleston, S.C.: CreateSpace, 2015), pp. 32, 76–77; Joint Committee on Defense Production, Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age (The “Gaither Report” of 1957), 94th Cong., 2nd Sess. (1976), pp. 35–37.

“I’m going to knock”: Interview with Robert Sprague, “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: A Bigger Bang for the Buck,” WGBH, March 5, 1986.

If Sprague was untroubled: Memorandum of a Conversation, Jan. 3, 1958, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349061388.

Eisenhower declined: Interview with Robert Sprague, March 5, 1986; David Linsdey Snead, “Eisenhower and the Gaither Report: The Influence of a Committee of Experts on National Security Policy in the Late 1950s,” Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1997, pp. 218–19.

“This experience”: Memorandum of a Conversation, Dec. 26, 1957, vol. 19, FRUS, 1955–57, National Security Policy, no. 174.

Thomas Power: Melvin G. Deaile, “The SAC Mentality: The Origins of Organizational Culture in Strategic Air Command, 1946–1962,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007, p. 259.

“Look. At the end”: Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 246.

“I used to worry”: Scott Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 150.

“to keep it out”: Bruce G. Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1993), pp. 48–49.

“TYPICAL First”: Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 112.

“disturbing evidence”: Evan Thomas, Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), p. 250, citing Ann Whitman diary, July 31, 1958, and DDE to Neil McElroy, July 31, 1958, both in AWF, DDEL. For more about the program, see Steve Blank, “Balloon Wars,” part 16 of his “Secret History of Silicon Valley.”

“would take the man”: Editorial Notes and Memorandum for the Record, July 29, 1958, FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 10, pp. 178–81. See Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954–1974 (Washington, D.C.: CIA, 1992), p. 103.

“carried the danger”: Editorial Note, FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 10, p. 155.

After all: CIA, Situation Estimate for Project Chalice: Fiscal Years 1961 and 1962, 1960, CIA-RDP33-02415A000100380014-3.

If the USSR: Memorandum for the Record, Feb. 12, 1959, FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 10, p. 155. On Eisenhower’s ambivalence regarding overflights, see Hopkins, “An Expanded Understanding,” pp. 332–34.

“cocked weapon”: David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” International Security, vol. 7, no. 4 (1983): p. 19.

In 1957: Interview with Robert Sprague.

But the next year: The civilian leadership of the Pentagon asked how the Soviets would react if, all of a sudden, many squadrons of American nuclear bombers began to approach their territory at nearly supersonic speed. The generals drafted what they thought was a good answer: “For ten years we have been conducting exercises of similar nature and the only time we have ever had a Soviet reaction was when our airplanes inadvertently penetrated the Soviet early warning net.” But the air-force chief of staff, General Thomas White, worried—with good reason—that this admission might cause alarm. He wanted to conceal the fact that SAC bombers had overflown the USSR. It was only at the insistence of the army that this was disclosed. Ironically, a promise not to repeat the “inadvertent” penetration helped secure for the SAC commander a new and expanded power. (Sagan, Limits of Safety, pp. 165–69.)

“Minimum Interval Takeoffs”: Deaile, “SAC Mentality,” pp. 261–62.

Hitting the runway: DOD, “Narrative Summaries of Accidents Involving U.S. Nuclear Weapons 1950–1980,” 1980.

Secrecy was not an option: “‘Dead’ A-Bomb Hits U.S. Town,” Universal-International News, 1955, in AIRBOYD, B-47 Drops Atomic Bomb on Mars Bluff (1958), YouTube video.

But in other cases: “Sidi Slimane Air Incident Involving Plane Loaded with Nuclear Weapon,” Jan. 31, 1958, DNSA, NH00859; Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York: Penguin, 2013), p. 184.

Near Goldsboro, North Carolina: Schlosser, Command and Control, pp. 450–52; Parker F. Jones, “Goldsboro Revisited: Account of Hydrogen Bomb Near-Disaster over North Carolina—Declassified Document,” Guardian, Sept. 20, 2013.

The true gravity: The following account of the Thule incident is based on Sagan, Limits of Safety, chap. 4.

“enormously complex”: Paul Bracken, “Delegation of Nuclear Command Authority,” in Managing Nuclear Operations, eds. Ashton B. Carter et al. (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1987), pp. 352–53.

Such a thing: Sagan, The Limits of Safety, p. 189.

Why would a pilot: Ibid., p. 254.

In a similar incident in 1962: Richard Hall, comment on “B-47 Losses,” May 7, 2016, B-47 Stratojet Historical Website.

It was General Power: Gen. Horace M. Wade, interview by Hugh M. Ahmann, United States Air Force Oral History Program, Oct. 10–12, 1978, Air Force Historical Research Agency, pp. 306–7.

How great was the danger: Sagan, Limits of Safety, p. 176.

But Sagan also found: Ibid., pp. 192–98.

In his last battle: John Prados, The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Intelligence Analysis & Russian Military Strength (New York: Dial, 1982), pp. 41–50.

Power even went public: Aliano, American Defense Policy, p. 136.

“legalized insubordination”: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1958(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1959), p. 122.

“the potential”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Military-Industrial Complex Speech,” 1960, Public Papers of the Presidents, DDEL, Avalon Project, Yale Law School.

After his election: Kozak, LeMay, p. 335; Schlosser, Command and Control, pp. 429–32.

“We thought we could”: Kozak, LeMay, p. 335.

But early on: Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 224.

“why are we hitting”: Carl Kaysen, interview by Vicki Daitch, Nov. 21, 2002, Oral History Program, transcript p. 18, JFKL. Emphasis added.

Kennedy was amazed: Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 52–57, 107–11.

“It was very unpleasant”: Carl Kaysen, interview with Marc Trachtenberg and David Rosenberg, Aug. 3, 1988, courtesy of Marc Trachtenberg.

His doubts about the competence: H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York: Harper, 1997), pp. 15–17.

The Joint Chiefs came back: Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of Defense, memorandum, “Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba,” March 13, 1962, National Security Archive. In fairness, after the United States discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba, the president’s own brother asked “whether there is some other way we can get involved in this, through Guantanamo Bay or something . . .whether there's some ship that . . . you know, sink the Maine again or something” (“Off the Record Meeting on Cuba,” Oct. 16, 1962, FRUS, accessed via FOIArchive).

“This is almost”: Recording of conversation between JFK and JCS, Oct. 19, 1962, President’s Office Files, Presidential Recordings Collection, tape 31.2, JFKL, in Jerry Goldman and Giel Stein, “The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962,” Wyzant.

“maximum readiness posture”: Scott Sagan, “Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management,” International Security, vol. 9, no. 4 (1985): p. 109.

Taylor approved the plan: Martin J. Sherwin Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Vintage, 2020), pp. 369–71. Michael E. Weaver, professor at the Air Command and Staff College, argues that there was nothing unusual about Power’s decision to transmit the order in the clear. But there was nothing normal about this situation. (“The Relationship Between Diplomacy and Military Force: An Example from the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Diplomatic History, vol. 38, no. 1 [2014]: p. 162.)

McNamara worried: Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), p. 562.

“We thought”: “Recollections of Vadim Orlov (USSR Submarine B-59), ‘We Will Sink Them All, but We Will Not Disgrace Our Navy,’” in Alexander Mozgovoi, The Cuban Samba of the Quartet of Foxtrots: Soviet Submarines in the Caribbean Crisis of 1962 (Moscow: Military Parade, 2002). Trans. Svetlana Savranskaya for the National Security Archive.

“could get out of control”: Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, trans. Strobe Talbott (New York: Bantam, 1971), p. 552.

“Anderson was absolutely”: John F. Kennedy and Robert S. McNamara, “Meeting on Defense Contracts,” Nov. 8, 1963, digitized audio recording, tape 120/A56, JFKL.

“definitely pink”: Morris K. Udall, “The Dismissal of Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker: A Special Report,” 1961, Special Collections, University of Arizona Libraries; Eric Pace, “Gen. Edwin Walker, 83, Is Dead; Promoted Rightist Causes in 60’s,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 1993.

“demand . . . immediately establish”: Military Cold War Education and Speech Review Policies: Hearings Before the Special Preparedness Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services, pt. 3, 87th Cong., 2nd Sess. (1962), p. 1384. The extent of radical right influence in the military is difficult to assess, but for a nuanced treatment see Lori L. Bogle, The Pentagon’s Battle for the American Mind: The Early Cold War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), p. 147.

Walker was offered: Bogle, Pentagon’s Battle, pp. 146–53; D. J. Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), pp. 8–9.

Pentagon-run: DOD, Politico-Military Game Olympiad I-62: Draft (Decade After) (1962), U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349262484, pp. 214–20. Kennedy went to his summer home in Hyannisport to make it easier for the film’s director, John Frankenheimer, to shoot a riot scene outside the White House (Patrick Kiger, “The Movie That JFK Wanted Made, but Didn't Live to See,” Boundary Stones: WETA’s Local History Blog, May 13, 2013).

“watch the generals”: Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military Research Agency (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), p. 138, and see also Benjamin Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 22.

“reconquest”: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Mariner Books, 2002), p. 315.

Mutual contempt: Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997); McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, pp. 143–54, 303–12.

It culminated: Scott D. Sagan and Jeremi Suri, “The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969,” International Security, vol. 27, no. 4 (2003): pp. 150–83; Ellsberg, Doomsday Machine, pp. 309–12.

Advised nuking North Vietnam: DOD, SIGMA II-65 (U), 26 July 1955-5 August 1955: Final Report (1965), F-23-24, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349260286.

In 1968: LeMay claimed to see no difference between killing with a nuke and killing with a rusty knife (“LeMay Favors Nuclear Arms in Viet If Needed to Win,” Lewiston Daily Sun, Oct. 4, 1968).

Many still claim: Memorandum of Discussion at the 333rd Meeting of the National Security Council, Aug. 1, 1957, U.S. DDO, unredacted version, doc. no. CK2349535825; redacted version, doc. no. CK2349102765; Memorandum on the Substance of Discussion at the Department of State-Joint Chiefs of Staff Meeting, Nov. 21, 1958, FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 8, Berlin Crisis, pp. 772–76; USCINCEUR to JCS, Dec. 8, 1958, RG 218, box 140, CCS 092 (4-20-50), sect. 8, USNA; Bromley Smith, Memorandum of Conference with the President, Jan. 13, 1964, U.S. DDO; unredacted version, doc. no. CK2349037513; redacted version, doc. no. CK2349243649; Maxwell Taylor to General LeMay, General Wheeler, Admiral McDonald, General Shoup, “Chinese Nuclear Development,” Nov. 18, 1963, RG 218, Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Chairman's Files (Maxwell D. Taylor), box 1, CM-1963, USNA. See also Curtis LeMay to Secretary of Defense, “Study of Chinese Communist Vulnerability,” April 29, 1963, RG 59, Records of Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, Office of the Country Director for the Republic of China, Top Secret Files Relating to the Republic of China, 1954–65, box 4, 1963, USNA.

When polled: Frank Newport, “Americans Continue to Express Highest Confidence in Military,” Gallup, June 17, 2016.

When Americans are surveyed: Frank Newport, “Memorial Day Finds Americans Very Positive About Military,” Gallup, May 25, 2018.

When, as in the case: Donald P. Casler, “Credible to Whom? The Organizational Politics of Credibility in International Relations,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2022, pp. 78, 155.

They can retire: In 2008, IRS data indicated that there were 2,435 former Pentagon officials—“generals, admirals, senior executives, program managers, contracting officers”—working for some fifty-two different defense contractors (GAO, Defense Contracting: Post-Government Employment of Former DOD Officials Needs Greater Transparency [2008], Executive Summary, GAO-08-485).

Colin Powell, for instance: Richard H. Kohn, “Out of Control: The Crisis in Civil-Military Relations,” National Interest, no. 35, Spring 1994, pp. 9–15. See also John Lehman in: Colin Powell et al., “An Exchange on Civil-Military Relations,” National Interest, no. 36, Summer 1994, pp. 23–25.

In a White House meeting: Josh Gerstein, “Clinton, Powell Talked Gays in Military,” Politico, October 10, 2014.

As for Powell: Christopher Marquis, “Powell’s Wealth Now Over $28 Million,” New York Times, Jan. 18, 2001.

Nevertheless, a steady stream: Kohn, “Out of Control,” p. 3.

Even Donald Rumsfeld: Donald Rumsfeld, “DOD Acquisition and Logistics Excellence Week Kickoff—Bureaucracy to Battlefield,” speech presented at the Pentagon, Sept. 10, 2001.

Rumsfeld, like Aspin: Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011), pp. 296–97.

“We failed the audit”: Dave Lindorff, “Exclusive: The Pentagon's Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed,” Nation, Nov. 27, 2018.

The growing resistance: Peter Feaver, “Civil-Military Relations,” Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 2 (1999): pp. 59–60; Peter Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 59–60.

Managed to lose the “biscuit”: Hugh Shelton, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (New York: St. Martin’s, 2010), pp. 392–94.

Such a scenario: David Hoffman, “Cold-War Doctrines Refuse to Die,” Washington Post, March 15, 1998.

Powell, for instance: Robert Parry and Norman Solomon, “Behind Colin Powell’s Legend—My Lai,” Consortium, 1996.

In his second memoir: Colin Powell, It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership (New York: Harper, 2012), p. 109; Adam Sneed, “Powell Says He Doesn’t Have Any of His State Emails,” Politico, March 3, 2015.

He apparently encouraged: David Smith, “Colin Powell Told Clinton He Bypassed Official Servers to Email Foreign Leaders,” Guardian, Sept. 8, 2016.

In 2010: Bruce G. Blair, “Why Our Nuclear Weapons Can Be Hacked,” New York Times, March 14, 2017.

In the summer of 2013: Robert Burns, “U.S. Air Force Flunked Defense of Nuclear Missile Silo Against Simulated Attack,” Consortium of Defense Analysts, May 23, 2014.

The next year: Helene Cooper, “Air Force Fires 9 Officers in Scandal over Cheating on Proficiency Tests,” New York Times, March 27, 2014.

Journalists found: Mark Thompson, “Are You Smarter than a Nuclear Launch Officer?,” Time, Feb. 13, 2014.

Another captain: Kristen Davis, “AF: Missileer Who Ran ‘Violent Street Gang’ Gets 25 Years,” Air Force Times, Feb. 2, 2015.

In 2016: Robert Burns, “Five Added to Drug Probe at Air Force Nuclear Base,” Military.com, June 16, 2016.

“suspect” women: Mark Thompson, “Is This Any Way for a Nuclear-Armed U.S. Air Force General to Behave?,” Time, Dec. 19, 2013.

Preventing public scrutiny: DOD, Reducing the Backlog in Legally Required Historical Declassification Obligations of the Department of Defense (2021). The report released in October 2021, after Congress made it a legal requirement. But since Congress had set March 2021 as the deadline, the Pentagon backdated the report to March.

The military would never: Frank Newport, “The Military's Positive Image and the Defense Budget,” Gallup, April 1, 2019.

“How can I”: Rosenbaum, How the End Begins, p. 31.

In 2017: “General Heading Strategic Command Says Illegal Nuclear Launch Order Can Be Refused,” NBC News, Nov. 18, 2017. Hyten was later promoted to become the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Even if a president: Dave Merrill, Nafeesa Syeed, and Brittany Harris, “To Launch a Nuclear Strike, President Trump Would Take These Steps,” Bloomberg, Jan. 20, 2017.

5. Surveillance: Other People’s Secrets

In 1991: Ali Caron, “Margaret ‘Daisy’ Suckley,” FDR Library & Museum.

It is certainly: Gary Ginsberg, First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (and Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents (New York: Twelve, 2021), p. 189.

Roosevelt’s friend kept his secrets: Geoffrey C. Ward, ed., Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. xix; Ginsberg, First Friends, pp. 183–84, 190.

“honorable espionage”: Matthew L. Jones, “The Spy Who Pwned Me,” Limn, Feb. 2017.

“you need the haystack”: J.D. Tuccille, “Why Spy on Everybody? Because ‘You Need the Haystack To Find the Needle,’ Says NSA Chief,” Reason, July 19, 2013.

Twenty people in the NSA: Rebecca J. Richards, “Review of U.S. Person Privacy Protections in the Production and Dissemination of Serialized Intelligence Reports Derived from Signals Intelligence Acquired Pursuant to Title I and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” NSA Civil Liberties and Privacy Office, 2017, pp. 7–8.

Officials with: Under new rules, issued in the last days of the Obama administration, any one of seventeen different intelligence agencies can now access NSA databases of intercepted communications (Charlie Savage, “N.S.A. Gets More Latitude to Share Intercepted Communications,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 2017).

“dramatic, entertaining”: David Easter, “Code Words, Euphemisms and What They Can Tell Us About Cold War Anglo-American Communications Intelligence,” Intelligence and National Security, vol. 27 (2012): p. 880.

During the Cold War: James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), p. 283.

No matter how: There is no public information about the number of secret informants run by the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, or more than a dozen other intelligence agencies. But the number of DEA informants is almost double the number of people in the DEA’s own workforce, and it does not include the number of spies the DEA has recruited abroad. Altogether, these informants were paid some $237 million between 2010 and 2015. (DOJ Office of the Inspector General, Audit of Drug Enforcement Administration's Management and Oversight of its Confidential Source Program, Audit Report 16-33 [Washington, D.C., 2016]).

“The special nature”: “National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 9 Revised,” Dec. 29, 1952, FRUS, 1950–1955, The Intelligence Community; “National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 9,” March 10, 1950, FRUS, 1945–1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, no. 435. See also Bamford, Puzzle Palace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1982), pp. 45–47.

“sensitive compartmented”: CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, Critique of the Codeword Compartment in the CIA (Washington, D.C., 1977), pp. 16–17, CIA-RDP83B00823R000900180001-6.

The oath not only committed them: NSA, “Oath for National Security Agency Employees,” A40436.

“perpetual silence”: “Security of AFSA COMINT Communications—AFSA Manual Changes,” Jan. 28, 1952, NSA.

“so help me God”: “Indoctrination for Navy Visitors,” May 20, 1955, RG457, Records of the National Security Agency, P/Entry 14, Security Policy, box 1, “Sec-5,” USNA.

The entire government agency: Bruce Berkowitz, The National Reconnaissance Office at 50 Years: A Brief History (Chantilly, Va.: Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance, 2011), p. 38.

Two years later: Memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence, “BYEMAN Security Compromises,” NRO, October 30, 1973.

Until then: “Security Requirements of the NRO,” March 28, 1974, NRO.

“special offices”: Berkowitz, National Reconnaissance Office, p. 38.

It is a memo: Papers of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Moynihan Papers), pt. II, box 280, folder 4.

Until 1999: Chief, Special Intelligence Staff, "Classification of talent and keyhole Information,” Jan. 16, 1964, CIA-RDP67R00587A000100140024-5.

Some of the code: For an inventory, see “Snowden Revelations,” Lawfare, March 25, 2019.

“The texts were placed”: David Easter, “Code Words,” p. 880.

“few would have the temerity”: CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, Critique of the Codeword Department, p. 18.

Disproportionate number of prosecutions: This includes Ellsberg himself (the Pentagon Papers referenced communications intelligence methods); Samuel Loring Morison, satellite reconnaissance; Shamai Leibowitz, transcripts from wiretapped embassy communications; Thomas Drake, NSA electronic surveillance methods; Edward Snowden, NSA electronic surveillance; Joshua Schulte, CIA hacking tools; Reality Winner, NSA intelligence on Russian hacking. For the authoritative list as of 2012, see Charlie Savage, “Nine Leak-Related Cases,” New York Times, June 20, 2012. Since then, there have been ten more: including Snowden, Schulte, and Winner as well as Donald John Sachtleben, David Petraeus, James Cartwright, James Wolfe, Henry Kyle Frese, Daniel Everette Hale, and Terry Albury.

Conversely, even in: George Ellard, “NSA Inspector General's Letter to Senator Charles Grassley,” 2013, release no. PA-023-18.

Even the best-informed: See, e.g., Jason Healey, “The U.S. Government and Zero-Day Vulnerabilities,” Journal of International Affairs, Nov. 2016, pp. 1–20. For good recent analyses of cyberweapons, see David E. Sanger, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age (New York: Crown, 2018); Nicole Perlroth, They Tell Me This Is How the World Ends: The Cyber-Weapons Arms Race (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021).

“Top Secret Dinar”: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology During the Cold War, 1945–1989, bk. II, Centralization Wins, 1960–1972 (Washington, D.C.: NSA, 1995), p. 473. See also Easter, “Code Words,” p. 885.

By 1972: Jeffrey T. Richelson, “Out of the Black: The Disclosure and Declassification of the National Reconnaissance Office,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, vol. 11, no. 1 (1998): pp. 4–5.

Moreover, it was thought: Ibid.; Memorandum for the Record, “USIB Meeting on Release of ‘Fact Of,’” NRO, July 12, 1974. On SIGINT and satellites more generally, see David B. Bradburn et al., The SIGINT Satellite Story, NRO, 1994.

“cryptographic naivete”: Communications Intelligence Board Special Committee to Study Communications Intelligence Personnel Security Standards, and Practice, A Study of COMINT Personnel Security Standards and Practices, 1955, HN00942, DSNA.

The same principle: “Questionable NPIC Projects,” May 8, 1973, doc ID 1451843, NSA. See also Jeffrey T. Richelson, “U.S. Reconnaissance Satellites: Domestic Targets,” in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 229 (2007).

“Could lead to”: “Security Requirements of the NRO.”

The abnormally secret: The National Reconnaissance Office at 50, pp. 24–27; Richelson, “Out of the Black,” pp. 16–17.

NRO had almost never: The Ford administration’s response to the Church Committee did, however, create new oversight mechanisms that required the NRO to report any illegal activity. See Memorandum for Mr. Robert D. Murphy, Chairman, Intelligence Oversight Board, NRO, July 13, 1976.

“efficient and streamlined”: “Security Requirements of the NRO.”

“The best engineering”: Dennis Fitzgerald, “Commentary on the ‘Decline of the National Reconnaissance Office’—The NRO Leadership Replies,” Studies in Intelligence, vol. 46, no. 2 (2002): p. 48.

Internal study from the early 1990s: Matthew M. Aid, “The Times of Troubles: The US National Security Agency in the Twenty-First Century,” Intelligence and National Security, vol. 15, no. 3 (2000): p. 7.

“The intelligence analyst”: CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, Critique of the Codeword Compartment, p. 25.

“I just had”: Robert E. Newton, “The Capture of the USS Pueblo and Its Effect on SIGINT Operations,” in United States Cryptologic History, Center for Cryptologic History, 1992, p. 68; NSA, Cryptologic Damage Assessment: USS Pueblo, vol. 1, sect. IV, 1968.

“The list”: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Critique of the Codeword Compartment, p. 25.

And since the NSA prefers: Stephen Budiansky, Code Warriors” NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union (New York: Knopf, 2016), p. 285.

“There was no filter”: Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), pp. 4–5. See also

Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration (New York: Norton, 2009), pp. 71–73.

J. Edgar Hoover: Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 35, 44–45.

In 1939: William R. Rogers, “The Case for Wire Tapping,” Yale Law Journal, vol. 63 (1954), pp. 792–93; Weiner, Enemies, pp. 76–77.

“We knew it was illegal”: Steve Usdin, “We've Just Learned the Origins of Illegal Surveillance in the United States Go Back to the 1930s,” History News Network, Oct. 18, 2015.

“the utmost degree”: Weiner, Enemies, pp. 23, 80.

“engaged in espionage”: Rogers, “The Case for Wire Tapping,” pp. 794–97.

“it is almost bound”: Weiner, Enemies, pp. 86–88.

Illegal surveillance unleashed: Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System (New York: Knopf, 1980), pp. 23–24. This dynamic has been so frequently observed that it resembles a natural law, at least as far as U.S. surveillance is concerned. See, for instance, Richard A. Clarke et al., The NSA Report: Liberty and Security in a Changing World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 15, which approvingly quotes the finding of the Church Committee “that there is a natural [emphasis added] ‘tendency of intelligence activities to expand beyond their initial scope’ and to ‘generate ever-increasing demands for new data.’”

“Crime is contagious”: Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 485 (June 4, 1928).

Black “messiah”: FBI, “COINTEL Black Extremist,” pt. 1 of 23.

Worried about the support: Beverly Gage, “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals,” New York Times, Nov. 11, 2014.

The president stayed up: Weiner, Enemies, p. 254-55.

Johnson also insisted: Budiansky, Code Warriors, p. 249.

As attorney general: David J. Garrow, “The FBI and Martin Luther King,” Atlantic, July/Aug. 2002.

“Bobby Kennedy”: Henry Kissinger, telephone conversation with Richard Nixon, June 1, 1973, National Security Archive.

Outside the Beltway: Hochman, The Listeners, pp. 181-94.

In 1968: Ibid., pp. 195-196

Conservative jurists: Alexander Charns, Cloak and Gavel: FBI Wiretaps, Bugs, Informers, and the Supreme Court (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 87; “Georgia's Supreme Court Upholds Antitrespass Act,” New York Times, Jan. 1, 1964.

Of course, the FBI: Hochman, The Listeners, pp. 199-200.

Between 1965 and 1975: David E. Kaplan, “A Snooper’s Guide,” Bill of Rights Journal, vol. 17 (Dec. 1984): pp. 9–10.

The best summary: “About the Department of Defense Senior Intelligence Oversight Official,” DOD.

“This is an area”: “Evolution of Operation Chaos—Domestic Unrest in 1968,” excerpt of CIA Paper 055/69, attached to Peter Rodman to Larry Eagleburger, “Restless Youth,” June 10, 1975.

The Agency covered up: Henry Kissinger, “Colby Report,” Dec. 25, 1974, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349537645. Kissinger repeated CIA Director Colby’s claim that there was no CIA surveillance of serving members of Congress when he informed President Ford. But when, for instance, the name of Congresswoman Bella Abzug appeared in the mailing list of an organization under Agency surveillance, the CIA shared that information with the FBI. (Emma Best, “The Interagency CACTUS Program Served as the Conduit Between CIA’s Operation CHAOS and FBI’s COINTELPRO,” Muckrock, Dec. 11, 2017.)

Targeted U.S. senators: Thomas R. Johnson, “Retrenchment and Reform, 1972–1980,” in American Cryptology During the Cold War, 1945–1989, bk. III (Washington D.C.: NSA, 1995), p. 85. See also Matthew M. Aid and William Burr, “Secret Cold War Documents Reveal NSA Spied on Senators,” Foreign Policy, Sept. 25, 2013.

The NSA took care: Aid and Burr, “Secret Cold War Documents.”

“disreputable if not”: Matthew M. Aid and William Burr, “‘Disreputable If Not Outright Illegal’: The National Security Agency Versus Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Art Buchwald, Frank Church, et al.,” National Security Archive, Sept. 25, 2013.

In fact, Justice Department: DOJ, Report on Inquiry into CIA Related Electronic Surveillance Activities, 1976, p. 171-72. Also in James Bamford, “The NSA and Me,” Intercept, Oct. 2, 2014.

“Once evidence is”: The White House legal opinion has never been made public. Even the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein, was unable to obtain a copy. But it is quoted in a 2007 Justice Department memorandum authorizing the NSA overseas collection program (Kenneth L. Weinstein to the Attorney General, “Proposed Amendment to Department of Defense Procedures to Permit the National Security Agency to Conduct Analysis of Communications Metadata Associated with Persons in the United States,” Nov. 20, 2007, https://www.aclu.org).

If the NSA “incidentally”: Exec. Order No. 12333, 46 Fed. Reg. 59941, Dec. 4, 1981; Cyrus Farivasr, “Meet John Tye: The Kinder, Gentler, and By-the-Book Whistleblower,” Arstechnica, Aug. 20, 2014.

The Star Chamber allowed: Daniel L. Vande Zande, “Coercive Power and the Demise of the Star Chamber,” American Journal of Legal History, vol. 50 (2008): pp. 326–27, which takes issue with Bamford’s analogy (James Bamford, “Washington Bends the Rules,” New York Times, Aug. 22, 2002).

“modified an order”: William French Smith to the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, April 22, 1981, FAS (emphasis added). For overall statistics on FISA applications and approvals, see “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court Orders 1979–2017,” Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“It is self evident”: FISC, Memorandum Opinion, May 17, 2002, FAS.

It would be even more: Louis A. Chiarella and Michael A. Newton, “‘So Judge, How Do I Get That FISA Warrant?’: The Policy and Procedure for Conducting Electronic Surveillance,” Army Lawyer, no. 10 (Oct. 1997), pp. 25–36, FAS.

FBI headquarters in 2000: M. E. Bowman to William Delahunt, Aug. 7, 2002, FAS; William Delahunt to Robert Mueller III, June 14, 2002, FAS.

One of the main purposes: FISC, Memorandum Opinion, May 17, 2002.

The FBI responded: Patrick G. Eddington, “Does the FBI Spy on FOIA Requesters?,” Cato Institute, March 18, 2021.

The FBI already had: “PATRIOT Act,” Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Body of case law: Patrick Thibodeau, “Carnivore Controversy Aired Before Congress,” Computerworld, Sept. 7, 2000.

“sophisticated attack”: DOD Defense Science Board, Protecting the Homeland: Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Defensive Information Operations, Summer 2000 Study, vol. II (Washington, D.C., 2001). For an excellent introduction, see Matthew Jones, “Great Exploitations: Data Mining, Legal Modernization, and the NSA,” lecture, University of California, Berkeley, Feb. 15, 2015.

One year later: “PATRIOT Act.”

More than doubling: “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court Orders 1979–2017.”

Example of legal sophistry: Andrew E. Nieland, “National Security Letters and the Amended Patriot Act,” Cornell Law Review, vol. 92, no. 6 (2007): pp. 1211–14.

In such a scenario: Dan Eggen, “FBI Found to Misuse Security Letters,” Washington Post, March 14, 2008.

“because an unknown amount”: DOJ Office of the Inspector General, A Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Use of National Security Letters (Washington, D.C., 2007), p. xvii.

Audits of these requests: DOJ Office of the Inspector General, A Review of the FBI’s Use of National Security Letters: Assessment of Corrective Actions and Examination of NSL Usage in 2006 (Washington D.C., 2008), pp. 4, 78–89, FAS.

This rancor focused: James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” New York Times, Dec. 16, 2005. See also Elizabeth Bazan, The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: An Overview of Selected Issues, CRS, RL34279 (2008), FAS.

The NSA had obtained: “FISC Order Approving the Government's Request for Authorization to Collect Bulk Telephony Metadata Under Section 501 of FISA, BR 06-05,” May 24, 2006, FAS.

It was also collecting: Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman, “NSA Collected US Email Records in Bulk for More Than Two Years Under Obama,” Guardian, June 27, 2013.

“daily violations”: “FISC Order Approving the Government’s Request to Continue Collecting Bulk Telephony Metadata Subject in Accordance with Order on December 8, 2008, BR 08-13,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, March 2, 2009.

“deeply troubled”: “FISC Order Regarding Further Compliance Incidents, BR 09-13,” ODNI, Sept. 25, 2009.

“The Government can”: United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400, 3–4 (Jan. 23, 2012).

“in this age”: Halkin v. Helms, 598 F.2d 1, D.C. Cir. (1978). I am grateful to my colleague Matthew L. Jones for pointing out this basic contradiction in how the government presents different mosaic dangers.

More than two hundred and thirty thousand: ODNI, Annual Statistical Transparency Report: Regarding the Use of National Security Authorities, Calendar Year 2021 (2022).

According to its own rules: Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler, “MetaPhone: The NSA Three-Hop,” Web Policy, Dec. 9, 2013. The NSA proved unable even to honor the limits the FISA Court had placed on this program, even after the agency was repeatedly caught, and repeatedly warned. In thousands of instances, it conducted “overly broad” searches, improperly surveilled people it was not supposed to spy on, and retained data it was not entitled to possess (John Solomon, “Newly Declassified Memos Detail Extent of Improper Obama-Era NSA Spying,” The Hill, July 25, 2017).

Gaining traction: Gabriel R. Schlabach, “Privacy in the Cloud: The Mosaic Theory and the Stored Communications Act,” Stanford Law Review, vol. 67 (March 2015): pp. 680–86.

The CIA could not: ODNI, Statistical Transparency Report: Regarding Use of National Security Authorities, Calendar Year 2017 (2018).

A record of the numbers: Huiqi Zhang and Ram Dantu, “Discovery of Social Groups Using Call Detail Records,” in On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2008 Workshops, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5333 (2008), p. 489.

There are many, many ways: Vincent Blondel, Adeline Decuyper, and Gautier Krings, “A Survey of Results on Mobile Phone Datasets Analysis,” EPJ Data Science, vol. 4, no. 10 (2015): pp. 39–41.

The appeal of CDRs: Greene, “The Intel Community’s Annual Report Raises . . .,” Just Security, 2018; ODNI, Statistical Transparency Report . . . 2017, pp. 34–35.

Congress did allow: Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, Report on the Government’s Use of the Call Detail Records Program Under the USA Freedom Act (2020).

But the intelligence community: Andrew Crocker and Cindy Cohn, “Don’t Worry, the Government Still Has Plenty of Surveillance Power If Section 215 Sunsets,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, May 31, 2015.

Perhaps most striking: Arthur H. Michel, Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), 44-50.

“Data Integration and Visualization System”: Asha Rangappa, “Don’t Fall for the Hype: How the FBI’s Use of Section 702 Surveillance Data Really Works,” Just Security, Nov. 29, 2017.

“Records may contain”: “Notice of a New System of Records,” CPCLO Order No. 012-2012, 77 Fed. Reg. 40631 (July 10, 2012)..

“geospatial tools”: Robert S. Mueller, III, “Statement Before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs,” FBI, Sept. 13, 2011; FBI, “New Database Search Tool Will Aid Bureau Investigations.”

It was subsequently discovered: Rangappa, “Don’t Fall for the Hype.”

“technical irregularities”: David Ruiz, “The NSA Continues to Blame Technology for Breaking the Law,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sept. 5, 2018.

Agents could have accessed NSA data: “Notice of a New System of Records.”

“The rapid change”: Jimmy Carter, “The President's News Conference,” Jan. 17, 1979, in American Presidency Project.

When we analyzed: Matthew Connelly, Raymond Hicks, Robert Jervis & Arthur Spirling, "New Evidence and New Methods for Analyzing the Iranian Revolution as an Intelligence Failure," Intelligence and National Security, vol. 36, no. 6 (2021): pp. 781-806.

To that end: Yuanjun Gao, Jack Goetz, Matthew Connelly, and Rahul Mazumder, "Mining Events with Declassified Diplomatic Documents," Annals of Applied Statistics, vol. 14, no. 4 (December 2020): pp. 1699-1723.

This radically inductive method: For an account of this experiment see history-lab.org/declassificationengine/man-versus-machine.

“Asmara” and “Amberley”: “Prime Minister Whitlam’s Interpretation of ALP Party Platform of 1971,” March 9, 1973, CFPF.

“any Arab”: Joe Stork and Rene Theberge, “‘Any Arab or Others of a Suspicious Nature . . .,’” MERIP Reports, no. 14, 1973, pp. 3–6, 13.

Six months after 9/11: Andrew H. Card to Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies, “Action to Safeguard Information Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction and Other Sensitive Documents Related to Homeland Security,” March 19, 2002, FAS.

One striking fact: GAO, Intelligence Agencies: Personnel Practices at NSA, CIA, NSA, and DIA Compared with Those of Other Agencies, GAO/NSIAD-96-6 (1996), pp. 23–28, FAS; Scott Wilson, “NSA's Quest for Diversity Called Risky,” Baltimore Sun, July 6, 1997.

In 2019: DOJ Office of the Inspector General, Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, 20-012 (2019).

“. . . that capability”: James Bamford, “They Know Much More Than You Think,” New York Review, (Aug. 2013).

6. Weird Science: Secrets That Are Stranger than Fiction

“continued protection”: Exec. Order 11652, 37 Fed. Reg. 5209, March 8, 1972.

After the end: Steven Aftergood, “CIA Declassifies Documents from World War I,” April 20, 2011, FAS.

“When historical information”: “CIA Declassifies Oldest Documents in U.S. Government Collection,” CIA.

Recipes for making invisible ink: “Secret Writing,” undated, CIA.

For Steven Aftergood: Toby Harnden, “Invisible Ink Used During First World War Among Declassified CIA Files,” Telegraph, April 20, 2011.

The Jasons: Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), p. 87.

The cryptonym: David Kahn, The Code-Breakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 79.

“If ever legends”: Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), p. 562. Gates originally made a slightly different version of this claim in 1999, “Dinner Remarks of Former DCI Robert Gates,” Nov. 19, 1999, CIA.

“pursuit of the magic weapon”: James Fallows, National Defense (New York: Random House, 1985), p. 35. Fallows titles this chapter “The Magicians.”

“Any sufficiently advanced”: Arthur C. Clarke, “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination,” in Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 30–39.

The Royal Navy: Katherine Epstein, Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 15–16, 39–40.

Leo Szilard: Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 224, 504–8.

The committee: Alex Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb: Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, 1939–2008,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2010, chap. 6. On secrecy among scientists, see David B. Resnik, “Openness Versus Secrecy in Scientific Research,” Episteme, vol. 2, no. 3 (2006): pp. 135–47.

After the Manhattan Project: Jacobsen, Pentagon’s Brain, pp. 245–46.

Covert work continues: Pete J. Westwick, “Secret Science: A Classified Community in the National Laboratories,” Minerva, vol. 38 (2000): pp. 363–91.

Civilian spinoffs: John Collett, “The History of Electronics: From Vacuum Tubes to Transistors,” in Science in the Twentieth Century, eds. John Krige and Dominique Pestre (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 269–72.

The most important innovation: For a nuanced discussion of the complex and distributed origins of the Internet, see Roy Rosenzweig, “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet,” American Historical Review, vol. 103 (Dec. 1998): pp. 1530–52. On the culture of openness, see also Michael Hauben, “Behind the Net: The Untold History of the ARPANET and Computer Science,” in Michael Hauben and Rhonda Hauben, Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997), chap. 7.

“Secrecy,” he concluded: Robert W. Seidel, “Secret Scientific Communities: Classification and Scientific Communication in the DOE and DoD,” in Proceedings of the 1998 Conference on the History and Heritage of Science Information Systems, eds. Mary Ellen Bowden, Trudi Bellardo Hahn, and Robert V. Williams (Medford, N.J.: Information Today, 1999), pp. 56–58.

Leo Szilard estimated: George E. Conklin, “Acquisition Systems Protection Planning,” master’s thesis, Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kans., 1994, p. 110, Moynihan Papers, pt. II, box 280, folder 4.

U.S. government devotes: This is clearly the case from 1980 to 2017. But starting in fiscal year 2017, the government began to claim that R&D did not include a lot of D—i.e., the costs of testing, evaluation, and late-stage development. Since these are mainly Pentagon programs, it artificially minimized the relative cost of military R&D, and made it harder to calculate. (“Historical Trends in Federal R&D,” American Association for the Advancement of Science.)

This is proportionally: CRS, Government Expenditures on Defense Research and Development by the United States and Other OECD Countries: Fact Sheet, R45441 (2020), pp. 1–4. All this is based on the new, narrower definition of R&D. Under the previous definition, the United States accounted for 88 percent of military R&D among OECD countries.

“an improvement”: Jack DeMent, “Method of Dispersing Materials in Water,” U.S. Patent 2,637,536, filed Oct. 30, 1947, and issued May 5, 1953.

“capable of reducing”: White House, Staff Notes no. 370, May 19, 1958, U.S. DDO; unredacted, doc. no. CK2349318759; redacted, doc. no. CK2349165310.

Army radar: Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack: Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, rep. no. 79-244, 1946, pp. 66, 242–43.

Aldrich Ames: John Deutch, “Statement of the Director of Central Intelligence on the Clandestine Services and the Damage Caused by Aldrich Ames,” Dec. 7, 1995, Moynihan Papers, pt. II, box 286.

The CIA admitted: The extent of the damage was difficult to estimate, since Pentagon officials “were often reluctant to state that this reporting had any significant impact” (Deutch, “Statement of the Director”; see also “Statement of Frederick P. Hitz, Inspector General, CIA,” Nov. 9, 1995, Moynihan Papers, pt. II, box 286).

“transparent campaign”: U.S. Navy, “War Gaming of Single Integrated Operational Plan,” June 2, 1961, NH00321, DNSA.

“The money contest”: U.S. Navy, “Atomic Strike Forces,” April 12, 1961, NH00314, p. 3, DNSA.

“maidens of extreme”: Ed Mack Miller, “The Gutting of the Valkyrie,” Air Force Magazine, Jan. 1, 1960.

Grand total of two planes: Marcelle Size Knack, “Post World War II Bombers, 1945–1973,” in Encyclopedia of U.S. Air Force Aircraft and Missile Systems, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: USAF, 1988), pp. 571–73.

The B-1: Stephen Walker, “B-1B Bombers Can No Longer Fly at Low-Level and Their Annual Flight Hours Have Been Restricted,” Drive, Feb. 14, 2020.

The B-2 stealth bomber: Scott Amey, “B-21 Comes with a Stealth Final Price Tag,” April 7, 2016, Project on Government Oversight.

Large-scale RAND study: Joseph G. Bolten et al., Sources of Weapon System Cost Growth: Analysis of 35 Major Defense Acquisition Programs (Santa Monica: RAND, 2008), p. 41.

While the Pentagon: Scot Paltrow and Kelly Carr, “Special Report: How the Pentagon’s Payroll Quagmire Traps America’s Soldiers,” Reuters, July 9, 2013.

Out of total military spending: NATO Public Diplomacy Division, “Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries (2010–2017),” communiqué no. Pr/CP(2018)016, March 15, 2018, p. 3.

Doubles the appropriations required: Arvin Quist, Security Classification of Information, vol. 1 (Oak Ridge, Tenn.: Oak Ridge National Laboratories, 1989), p. 152, FAS.

Extreme cost of magic weapons: RAND researchers found that, along with errors in the original budget estimates, changing requirements for new weapons, such as improved performance or new capabilities, was a major contributor to the increasing cost of weapons during development (Bolten et al., Sources of Weapon System Cost Growth, pp. 31–32).

“General, I have fought”: Matthew Connelly, et al., “‘General, I Have Fought Just as Many Nuclear Wars as You Have’: Forecasts, Future Scenarios, and the Politics of Armageddon,” The American Historical Review, vol. 117, no. 5, 2012, pp. 1431–60.

Even in a blood-and-guts: Jacobsen, Pentagon’s Brain, pp. 203–9.

Isidor Rabi revealed: Memorandum for the Record, Oct. 29, 1957, U.S. DDO; redacted, doc. no. CK2349443239; unredacted, doc. no. CK2349423695.

Andrew Marshall masterminded: Raymond L. Garthoff, “Polyakov's Run,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, vol. 56, no. 7 (Sept./Oct. 2000): pp. 37–40; David Wise, Cassidy's Run: The Secret Spy War over Nerve Gas (New York: Random House, 2001), 42-47; Steven Block, “The Growing Threat of Biological Weapons,” American Scientist, vol. 89, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 2001): p. 5.

When Reagan announced: Thomas Mahnken, Technology and the American Way of War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 124–25, 151.

The army finally decided: GAO, Ballistic Missile Defense: Records Indicate Deception Program Did Not Affect 1984 Test Results, GAO/NSIAD-94-219 (Washington, D.C., 1994), p. 25.

In press conferences: The GAO report is oddly titled. It shows how the program to deceive the Soviets had been discontinued before the test, making the concealment of the rigging to Congress even more difficult to defend. (GAO, Ballistic Missile Defense, pp. 26–30.)

“You’re always trying”: Tim Weiner, “Lies and Rigged ‘Star Wars’ Test Fooled the Kremlin, and Congress,” New York Times, Aug. 18, 1993.

“air power is”: United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (March 9, 1953).

More than 840 times: Todd Garvey and Edward C. Liu, “The State Secrets Privilege: Preventing the Disclosure of Sensitive National Security Information During Civil Litigation,” CRS, R41741 (2011), p. 2.

The 1948 accident report: “Petition for a Writ of Error Coram Nobis to Remedy Fraud upon This Court,” United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (March 9, 1953).

The widows had been forced: A federal judge declined to reopen the case in 2004 (Herring v. United States, 2004 WL 2040272 [September 10, 2004]). He ruled that the plaintiffs had not met the strenuous test for deliberate fraud. He credited the standard catch-all claim that the air force might have had a legitimate concern that the accident report would contribute to a “mosaic” revealing genuinely sensitive information. More interestingly, he pointed out that the Soviets had reverse-engineered the B-29, and had the same problem with engines catching fire. But it should therefore have been no secret to Moscow that they needed to fix the problem: it was already a matter of public record in 1949. The real secret, itself a threat to national security, was that the air force had still failed to make their own planes airworthy (B. K. Thorne, “‘Bugs’ in B-29’s Date to War Tests,” New York Times, Nov. 19, 1949).

In the 1980s: Deutch, “Statement of the Director,” and “Statement of Frederick P. Hitz.” This kind of disinformation was also fed to the public. Pentagon publications like Soviet Military Power warned about how the USSR would soon deploy high-energy lasers on the battlefield and launch their own space shuttles (Kyle Mizokami, “What Ever Happened to the Russia's (sic) Cold War Super Weapons?," National Interest, Nov. 3, 2019).

Truly villainous behavior: Committee on Energy and Commerce, American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens, H.R. Rep. 65-0190 (1986), pp. 2, 9–11, 14–15.

“sinister doctrines”: Dana Adams Schmidt, “Germans on Trial in ‘Science’ Crimes,” New York Times, Dec. 10, 1946.

In April 1947: Jeffrey E. Stephenson and Arthur O. Anderson, “Ethical and Legal Dilemmas in Biodefense Research,” in Textbook of Military Medicine: Medical Aspects of Biological Warfare (Houston: Borden Institute, 2007), pp. 565–67. On Nuremberg, see “Nuremberg Code,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“might have adverse”: O. G. Haywood to Dr. Fidler, “Medical Experiments on Humans,” April 17, 1947, DOE.

But when defending: See chap. 8 in this book.

“a little of the Buchenwald touch”: Keith Schneider, “1950 Note Warns About Radiation Test,” New York Times, Dec. 28, 1993.

The AEC and the Pentagon: Michael R. Lehman, “Nuisance to Nemesis: Nuclear Fallout and Intelligence as Secrets, Problems, and Limitations on the Arms Race, 1940–1964,” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016, p. 10.

Officials also worried: Janet Farrell Brodie, “Radiation Secrecy and Censorship After Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Journal of Social History, vol. 48 (Summer 2015): pp. 842–64.

In 1953–54: Schneider, “1950 Note Warns About Radiation Test.”

“to avoid any”: Stuart Auerbach and Thomas O'Toole, “Pentagon Has Contract to Test Radiation Effect on Humans: Cancer Patients Used in Radiation Testing,” Washington Post and Times Herald, Oct. 8, 1971.

“nuclear calibration devices”: Committee on Energy and Commerce, American Nuclear Guinea Pigs, pp. 1, 11–12, 15–16.

Having first irradiated: Alfred H. Hausrath et al., Operations Research Office, Troop Performance on a Training Maneuver Involving the Use of Atomic Weapons, ORO-T-170 (1952), pp. 8–10.

The army petitioned: See, e.g., Defense Nuclear Agency, Exercise Desert Rock IV, April 11–June 1952, ADA078565, 1952, p. 14; Joseph Trevithick, “During the 1950s, the Pentagon Played War Games with Troops and Nukes,” Medium, April 20, 2015.

“might hurt other people”: United States v. Reynolds; Barton C. Hacker, Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing, 1947–1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 187.

Two to three thousand: DOE Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1995).

They included paratroopers: Operations Research Office, Troop Performance on a Training Maneuver, pp. 20–21, 48.

“Nothing to get panicky about”: Ibid., pp. 20, 24, 31, 33.

Decades later: D. Bross and N. S. Bross, “Do Atomic Veterans Have Excess Cancer? New Results Correcting for the Healthy Soldier Bias,” American Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 126, no. 6 (Dec. 1987), pp. 1042-43.

Scientists deliberately released: John M. Findlay and Bruce W. Hevly, Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West (Seattle: Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, 2011), p. 57; DOD, Report on Search for Human Radiation Experiment Records, 1944–1994 (Washington, D.C., 1997), pp. 51–54.

The level in Walla Walla: Technical Steering Panel of the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project, “The Green Run,” fact sheet no. 12, March 1992, p. 3.

Even the 1949 incident: DOD, Report on Search, p. 54.

“Not all the residents”: Findlay and Hevly, Atomic Frontier Days, p. 301.

Irving Langmuir: James Rodger Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 151–54, 170–71. The scientist who actually achieved the breakthrough with silver iodide, Bernard Vonnegut, thought Langmuir was “playing with fire,” because it could have unpredictable effects thousands of miles away.

During the Vietnam War: Ibid., pp. 179–81.

Covert and “experimental”: James G. Lewis, “James G. Lewis on Smokey Bear in Vietnam,” Environmental History, vol. 11 (2006): p. 598.

“experiments” and “tests”: William A. Buckingham, Jr., Operation Ranch Hand: The Air Force and Herbicides in Southeast Asia, 1961-1971 (Washington, D.C.: USAF, 1982), pp. 33, 43–44, 200.

But for the five years: National Academy of Sciences Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides, Veterans and Agent Orange: Update 2014 (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2016), pp. 1–18. The health impact of Agent Orange exposure remains controversial. See Anh D. Ngo et al., “Association Between Agent Orange and Birth Defects: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” International Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 35 (Oct. 2006): pp. 1220–30; Arnold Schecter and John D. Constable, “Commentary: Agent Orange and Birth Defects in Vietnam,” International Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 35 (Oct. 2006): pp. 1230–32.

Continued to be shrouded: On the secrecy of the test program, doubts about safety, and calls for greater openness, see Lehman, “Nuisance to Nemesis,” pp. 81–83; Hacker, Elements of Controversy, pp. 140–58; Thomas Kunkle and Byron Ristvet, Castle Bravo: Fifty Years of Legend and Lore, DTRIAC SR-12-001 (2013).

From August to September 1958: Defense Nuclear Agency, Operation Argus 1958, DNA 6039F (Washington, D.C., 1992), pp. 1–23.

The effect turned: Charles N. Vittitoe, Did High Altitude EMP Cause the Hawaiian Streetlight Incident?, System Design and Assessment Notes 31 (Albuquerque: Sandia National Laboratories, 1989), p. 22.

The first radiation testing: Buckingham, Operation Ranch Hand, p. 200.

“poorly-instrumented”: Defense Atomic Support Agency, Project Officer’s Interim Report: Starfish Prime (1962); Fleming, Fixing the Sky, p. 210.

As for Starfish Prime: Daniel G. DuPont, “Nuclear Explosions in Orbit,” Scientific American, vol. 290, no. 6 (June 2004): pp. 100–102; Robert Ecoffet, “Overview of In-Orbit Radiation Induced Spacecraft Anomalies,” IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, vol. 60 (June 2013): p. 1798.

“Far more progress”: Quist, Security Classification of Information, p. 150.

“Some of the work”: “Need for a Secrecy Commission,” Moynihan Papers, pt. II, box 280, folder 10.

“remarkable scientific achievement”: Memorandum, “Views on Trained Use of Cats,” Sept. 1983, National Security Archive.

“A lot of money”: John Ranelagh, Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 208. See also Jeffrey T. Richelson, Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001), p. 147.

“energy and imagination”: Memorandum, “Views on Trained Use of Cats.”

Solly Zuckerman: Robert G. W. Kirk, “In Dogs We Trust? Intersubjectivity, Response-able Relations, and the Making of Mine Detector Dogs,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 50, no.1 (2014): pp. 12–18.

J. B. Rhine: Kirk, “In Dogs We Trust,” pp. 22–30; Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (New York: Little, Brown, 2017), pp. 42–44; J. G. Pratt, “Research on Animal Orientation, with Emphasis on the Phenomenon of Homing in Pigeons,” DTIC-AD-24-294 (1954).

Rhine was a paragon: Jacobsen, Phenomena, pp. 61–64.

The CIA’s Project MKUltra: These experiments were to be conducted with “the surreptitious oral application of drugs on unwilling subjects for speech inducement purposes.” On the lack of controls, see John Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), p. 61.

Harold Blauer: Barrett v. United States, 660 F. Supp. 1291 (S.D.N.Y. 1987). According to the Agency’s inspector general, “Dosage levels were set not by research on toxicity, but by guess” (Torsten Passie, “MDA, MDMA, and Other ‘Mescaline-Like’ Substances in the US Military's Search for a Truth Drug [1940s to 1960s],” Drug Testing and Analysis, vol. 10, no. 1 [Jan. 2018], p. 76.)

“some unwitting testing”: Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification: Joint Hearing Before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, 95th Cong., 1st Sess., Aug, 3, 1997, p. 7. The experiment that killed Blauer was conducted by the Army Chemical Corps, but, as John Marks has shown, the CIA organized, supplied, and funded mind-control research even when it was carried out by the services (Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” pp. 67–68).

CIA also experimented: Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” pp. 77–80.

Gottlieb was likely: Ibid., pp. 57, 86.

“professionally unethical”: Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, bk. I, S. Rep. 94-755 (1976), p. 390.

Gottlieb’s deputy: Olson’s distraught wife and children could not bring themselves to believe he had committed suicide. It took the CIA more than two decades to admit that Olson had been the subject of another government experiment, Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” pp.77–86. Marks suggests it was indeed a suicide, but the official CIA account strains credulity. See Sheffield Edwards, “Suicide of Frank Olsen [sic],” Memorandum for the Record, Nov. 28, 1953, in CIA Documents Concerning the Death of Frank Olson, National Security Archive.

“The most efficient accident”: “A Study of Assassination,” Jan. 5, 1954, CIA.

“were ready when called”: Nicholas M. Horrock, “C.I.A. Documents Tell of 1954 Project to Create Involuntary Assassins,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 1978.

Most of the MKUltra records: Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” pp. 57, 197. Since the main period of MKUltra was 1953–64, the cost equivalent is adjusted for inflation since 1958.

“to determine whether”: Edwin C. May to Office of Research Development, “Annotated Bibliography, Document Set from 1972 to Date,” June 16, 1995, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200170016-2l. The money was distributed between 1972 and 1988, so this is adjusted for inflation since 1980.

Even escape artists: Jacobsen, Phenomena, pp. 145–46.

“no scientific warrant”: John A. Swets and Robert A. Bjork, “Enhancing Human Performance: An Evaluation of ‘New Age’ Techniques Considered by the Army,” Psychological Science, vol. 1, no. 2 (March 1990): pp. 85, 92.

In 1995: American Institutes for Research, “A Proposal to Review the Remote Viewing Research Program,” May 25, 1995, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100080003-7.

“In no case”: American Institutes for Research, “An Evaluation of the Remote Viewing Program: Research and Operational Applications,” draft report, 1995, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5, pp. E1–E4.

“In order to best inform”: CIA Office of Medical Services, “OSM Guidelines on Medical and Psychological Support to Detainee Renditions, Interrogations, and Detentions,” Dec. 2004, p. 20, CIA.

“was like an experiment”: Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), p. 156.

Waterboarding, “diapering”: Mark Mazzetti, “Behind Clash Between C.I.A. and Congress, a Secret Report on Interrogations,” New York Times, March 7, 2014. See also Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program: Findings and Conclusions (2012), pp. 8–13.

Experiments depended on deception: As the main sponsor of MKUltra, Richard Helms, argued to CIA Director Allen Dulles, there was no point in trying to test mind-control methods unless they used unwitting subjects (Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” p. 87).

Two concepts are fundamentally opposed: Peter Galison, “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 31 (2004): pp. 240–43.

This was already clear: Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Secrecy (1970), p. 11, FAS. See also Quist, Security Classification of Information, pp. 142–49. In recent years, a growing number of government research contracts prohibit collaboration with non-American scientists, and restrict the publication of the results. Export controls in electronics and biotechnology can discourage researchers from pursuing international collaboration even if the government is not paying for it. (Dirk Libaers, “Industry Relationships of DoD-funded Academics and Institutional Changes in the US University System,” Journal of Technology Transfer, vol. 34 [2009], pp. 484-486.) On the earlier history of government efforts to restrict the free flow of scientific knowledge, see Harold Relyea, Silencing Science: National Security Controls and Scientific Communication (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing, 1994).

This history tarnished the reputation: DOE Advisory Committee, Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

Change by the 1970s: Debra D. Durocher, “Radiation Redux,” American Journalism Review, vol. 16, no. 2 (1994): p. 34.

This did not change: Linda Turbyville, “Hazel O'Leary,” interview, Omni, vol. 17, no. 5 (April 1995).

7. Following the Money: Trade Secrets

“The chief business”: Ellen Terrell, “When a Quote Is Not (Exactly) a Quote: The Business of America Is Business Edition,” Jan. 17, 2019, LOC.

Coolidge’s successors: The classic text is William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1959), pp. 145–47, where he identifies the foreign-policy elite as leaders of corporate America, and cites the pages of Fortune magazine as explicitly calling for expanded foreign trade and investment as essential for the U.S. economic system.

Price list for each ambassadorship: Johannes Fedderke and Dennis Jett, “What Price the Court of St. James? Political Influences on Ambassadorial Postings of the United States of America,” Governance, vol. 30 (July 2017): pp. 486, 506.

“US national security”: Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, 2nd. ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), p. 485.

Weapons production: Louis Uchitelle, “The U.S. Still Leans on the Military-Industrial Complex,” New York Times, Sept. 22, 2017.

During periods of growth: Doug Berenson, Chris Higgins, and Jim Tinsley, “The U.S. Defense Industry in a New Era,” War on the Rocks, Jan. 13, 2021.

10 percent of manufacturing: Loren Thompson, “Defense Industry Profits Are Not Impressive,” Forbes, July 24, 2013.

Arms manufacturers: Louis Uchitelle, “Arms Makers: Rather Fight than Switch,” New York Times, Sept. 20, 1992.

These periods saw consolidation: Berenson, Higgins, and Tinsley, “U.S. Defense Industry.”

The government often classifies: Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 62–64.

Important exceptions: The economist Seymour Melman was one of the main proponents of the argument that the defense sector had a preponderant role in the American economy. But the inefficiency of Pentagon contractors (and contracting) undermined Melman’s claim. I well remember that, when I took his “War Economy” class at Columbia in 1989, he would not revise his thesis even as defense spending shrank as a share of overall output and dynamic new industries emerged. See, e.g., Seymour Melman, “Economic Consequences of the Arms Race: The Second-Rate Economy,” American Economic Review, vol. 78, no. 2 (1988): pp. 55–59.

The government does not typically share: This prohibition against using signals or communications intelligence to help private businesses has been an explicit part of training those who work with SIGINT and COMINT. Some have argued otherwise, but the best evidence they offer is that the United States has “contemplated” industrial espionage on behalf of U.S. firms in future scenario exercises (Glenn Greenwald, “The U.S. Government’s Secret Plans to Spy for American Corporations,” The Intercept, Sept. 5, 2014).

Generally been bad for business: Claire Miller, “Revelations of N.S.A. Spying Cost U.S. Tech Companies,” New York Times, March 21, 2014; Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn, “Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How U.S. Surveillance Still Subverts U.S. Competitiveness,” Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, June 9, 2015.

“successfully completed our assignment”: Refinitiv, “Q2 2021 Fluor Corp Earnings Call,” Aug. 6, 2021; Isabel Debre, “Contractors Who Powered US War in Afghanistan Stuck in Dubai,” Military Times, Aug. 9, 2021.

Building an Afghan military: William D. Hartung, “Profits of War: Corporate Beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 Pentagon Spending Surge,” Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Sept. 13, 2021.

Went to non-U.S. firms: Sandra Halperin, “The Political Economy of Anglo-American War: The Case of Iraq,” International Politics, vol. 48, nos. 2–3 (March/May 2011): p. 213.

Lyndon Johnson: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 251.

Coolidge himself: Dennis R. Shaughnessy, “‘The Business of America Is Business!,’” Social Enterprise Institute, Feb. 2, 2017. Coolidge never said that the government should only care about the private sector. But the phrase resonated at least in part because Coolidge himself was so pro-business, cutting taxes, opposing regulation, and using troops to back American business interests in Central America and the Caribbean.

“thorough, accurate”: Joshua Botts, “‘A Burden for the Department’?: To the 1991 FRUS Statute,” DOS Office of the Historian, Feb. 6, 2012.

But FRUS now totals: See ISOO annual reports, which provide annual figures for pages that have been declassified (“ISOO Annual Report Archive, Calendar Years 1979 Through 2019,” NARA).

New and better methodology: Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), pp. 47–49.

Topic modeling: For an accessible introduction by the pioneer of topic modeling, see David Blei, “Probabilistic Topic Models,” Communications of the ACM, vol. 55 no. 4 (April 2012): pp. 77–84.

“Please guard”: Ambassador in the United Kingdom to the Secretary of State, June 25, 1947, FRUS, accessed via FOIArchive.

Not even classified: Gaston to Koo, October 23, 1947, FRUS; Memorandum of Conversation by the Assistant Chief of the Division of European Affairs, March 28, 1941, FRUS, accessed via FOIArchive.

One way to find: David Allen et al., “Topic Modeling Official Secrecy,” paper presented at Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Bloomberg Headquarters, N.Y., Aug. 2014.

UFCO owned 42 percent: Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (Cambridge, Mass.: David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 2005), pp. 70–74; Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 165.

Recounted the true story: Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Avon Books, 1970).

“With the bloodthirsty”: Pablo Neruda, “United Fruit Co.,” in Canto General (1950), accessed via Brown University Library.

Historical research: Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, p. 76.

Many Guatemalan farmers: Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, pp. 149–51, 164–65.

Usually downplayed: Ibid., pp. 143–47, 231–32.

Less than a year earlier: Mary Ann Heiss, “The United States, Great Britain, and the Creation of the Iranian Oil Consortium, 1953–1954,” International History Review, vol. 16 (1994): pp. 515–16.

One of the top documents: Memorandum for the Record, New York, Nov. 20, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, Guatemala, no. 71.

Decades later: Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, p. 376. One or more oil companies did indeed comply with the CIA request. See Telegram from the Central Intelligence Agency to Operation PBSUCCESS Headquarters in Florida, June 15, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, Guatemala, no. 187.

In fact, when more documents: See, e.g., Memorandum of Conversation, Washington, Sept. 15, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, Guatemala, no. 52. This document also references a memorandum in which King “explained that we were in need of the best business brains of the country for planning purposes and possibly subsequent action against Guatemala in the economic field; that we wished to explore all possible covert means of embarrassing the present Government by economic pressures.”

“cut off our oil”: Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, p. 322.

In June 1954: Ibid.

A week later: Chief of Station, Guatemala, to Lincoln, “Guatemala Government Interest in Local Gasoline Supply,” June 11, 1954, CIA.

Dulles was even more intent: Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London: Verso Books, 2002), pp. 47–48; Kiama Mutahi, “The United States, the Congo, and the Mineral Crisis of 1960–64: A Triple Entente of Economic Interest,” master’s thesis, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

Others on the list: Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 149, 164.

Case of the Saharan oil fields: 406th Meeting of the NSC, May 13, 1959, FRUS, 1958–60, vol. 13, pp. 729–30.

Decades-long career: Message from William Pawley to President Nixon, March 25, 1959, FRUS, 1969–1976, vol. E-10, 1969–1972, Documents on American Republics, p. 584.

One discovers: Memorandum of Conference with the President, May 7, 1960, DDE Diaries, Staff Notes, May 1960 (2), box 32, AWF, DDEL; redacted, U.S. DDO, doc. no. CK2349426420; unredacted, doc. no. CK2349193456.

Pawley could be said: On Pawley’s business career, see Anthony R. Carrozza, William D. Pawley: The Extraordinary Life of the Adventurer, Entrepreneur, and Diplomat Who Cofounded the Flying Tigers (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012), pts. 1–2.

“war is a racket” and “a high class muscle man”: Hans Schmidt, Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), pp. 223–31.

But to Pawley: Max Holland, “Private Sources of U.S. Foreign Policy: William Pawley and the 1954 Coup d’Etat in Guatemala,” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 7, no. 4 (2005): p. 42.

Truman decorated Pawley: Cheryl L. Miller, “Belvoir: A Colonial Revival Landmark in the Piedmont,” prepared for the Garden Club of Virginia, 2014, p. 65.

Pawley took an office: Holland, “Private Sources of U.S. Foreign Policy,” pp. 52–53, 57.

Despite Pawley’s angry protestations: Ibid., p. 58.

Source told the CIA: Telegram from the CIA Station in Guatemala to Operation PBSUCCESS Headquarters in Florida, June 23, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, Guatemala, no. 225.

“Bomb repeat Bomb”: Telegram from the CIA Chief of Station in Guatemala to the Central Intelligence Agency, June 19, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, Guatemala, no. 208.

The insurgents’ invasion stalled: This account of what happened on June 22 is based on Max Holland’s excellent study, “Private Sources of U.S. Foreign Policy,” pp. 58–62.

Holland, Dulles, and Pawley went: Max Holland notes that Pawley’s account is corroborated by Eisenhower’s own memoir as well as CIA documents from the time (Ibid., p. 60).

Pawley told the Nicaraguan ambassador: Ibid., pp. 57, 61.

That same evening: Telegram from the Central Intelligence Agency to Operation PBSUCCESS Headquarters in Florida, June 22, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, Guatemala, no. 219; Telegram from CIA to Operation PBSUCCESS Headquarters, June 24, 1954, Ibid., no. 233.

In the end: Telegram from the CIA Station in Guatemala to Operation PBSUCCESS Headquarters in Florida, June 27, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, Guatemala, no. 244; Telegram from Operation PBSUCCESS Headquarters in Florida to the Mission Broadcasting Station, June 28, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, Guatemala, no. 247; Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, pp. 338–52.

His name is missing: For a rare exception, see Holland, “Private Sources of U.S. Foreign Policy,” pp. 52, 57–63.

The defeat of the Guatemalan Revolution: “Letter from President Eisenhower to General James H. Doolittle,” July 26, 1954, FRUS, 1950–1955, The Intelligence Community, no. 185.

“There are no rules”: James Doolittle et al., Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA Special Study Group (1954).

“no better plan . . . must be prepared”: A. J. Goodpaster, Memorandum of Conference with the President, March 17, 1960, U.S. DDO; redacted, doc. no. CK2349317538; unredacted, doc. no. CK2349098650.

Bay of Pigs: Max Holland, “A Luce Connection: Senator Keating, William Pawley, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 1, no. 3 (Fall 1999): pp. 163–65.

Team of economists studied: Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and Suresh Naidu, “Coups, Corporations, and Classified Information,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 126 (2011): 1380–81.

United Fruit’s stock rose: Ibid., p. 1398.

Bedell Smith went on: “Elected to United Fruit Directorate,” New York Times, April 21, 1955.

So one can easily: Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu, “Coups, Corporations,” p. 1379, citing Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 7.

“nothing more”: Agee, Inside the Company, 575.

“serious foreign policy implications”: Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 19.

“on balance”: Editorial Note, FRUS, 1952–1954, Guatemala, no. 196.

Justice Department filed suit: Marcelo Bucheli, “Chronology,” United Fruit Historical Society, 2001.

Obvious quid pro quo: Heiss, “United States, Great Britain,” pp. 515–16.

“prompt, adequate…nothing but words”: Oliver Murphey, “A Bond That Will Permanently Endure: The Eisenhower Administration, the Bolivian Revolution and Latin American Leftist Nationalism,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2017, chap. 6.

“change one iota”: Murphey, “Bond That Will Permanently Endure,” p. 213.

“grown no bananas”: Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, pp. 3–4.

So, rather than: On this point, see also Cullather, Secret History, p. 19.

Fifty such operations: David Robarge, “The CIA and the Covert Cold War,” presentation in Columbia University course “Cold War Power: Culture as a Weapon,” New York, April 10, 2018). Robarge has not published this data, but for an analysis by an independent scholar, see John. G. Breen, “Covert Action and Unintended Consequences,” InterAgency Journal, vol. 8, no. 3 (2017): pp. 106–22.

Favorite partners: Connelly, Diplomatic Revolution, p. 165.

Explicitly political interventions: Robarge, “CIA and the Covert Cold War.”

“promote or protect”: Ibid.

Few cables involving Russia: On Assange’s Russian ties, see Zack Beauchamp, “The WikiLeaks-Russia Connection Started Way Before the 2016 Election,” Vox, Jan. 6, 2017.

Collection includes the metadata: For an introduction, see the "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), Record Group 59: General Records of the Department of State Central Foreign Policy File, 1973 – 1979", NARA.

37 percent: The total excludes records that are administrative in nature, or that relate to consular services like visas and passports. The economics and business categories also include military sales and assistance.

“a foreign policy”: Jimmy Carter, “Human Rights and Foreign Policy,” speech presented at Notre Dame University, South Bend, Ind., June 1977.

Nevertheless, exporters argued: Bradley Graham, “Trade Reorganization Urged,” Washington Post, May 30, 1979; N. David Palmeter and Thomas Leonard Kossl, “Restructuring Executive Branch Trade Responsibilities: A Half-Step Forward,” Law and Policy in International Business, vol. 12 (1980): pp. 636–37.

“jobs, jobs, jobs”: Charley Reese, “Who's Better Off After the Persian Gulf War? Not the U.S. Public,” Orlando Sentinel, Jan. 19, 1992.

First, we need: What follows is drawn from a paper I co-authored with Ray Hicks. For a summary, see Raymond Hicks and Matthew Connelly, “Underfunding the State Department Could Hurt U.S. Exports—and U.S. Companies,” Washington Post, Feb. 14, 2018.

Hard-core capitalists: Andrew K. Rose, “The Foreign Service and Foreign Trade: Embassies as Export Promotion,” World Economy, vol. 30, no. 1 (Jan. 2007): 23; Daniel Lederman, Marcelo Olarreaga, and Lucy Payton, Export Promotion Agencies: What Works and What Doesn't, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4044, 2006, p. 16.

Trans-Pacific Partnership: Patrice McDermott and Emily Manna, “Secrecy, Democracy and the TPP: Trade Transparency Is What the Public Wants—And Needs,” The Hill, Sept. 12, 2016.

When they are surveyed: Bianca DiJulio, Mira Norton, and Mollyann Brodie, “Americans’ Views on the U.S. Role in Global Health,” Kaiser Family Foundation, Jan. 20, 2016.

$39.2 billion: George Ingram, “What Every American Should Know about US Foreign Aid,” Brookings Institution, Oct. 15, 2019.

In fact, historically: Marian L. Lawson and Emily M. Morgenstern, Foreign Aid: An Introduction to U.S. Programs and Policy, CRS, R40213 (2019), FAS.

8. Spin: The Flipside of Secrecy

In June 1942: “Handbook of the Records Declassification Division,” Office of the National Archives, Feb. 1975, Brownell Papers, box 184, DDEL; Arvin Quist, Security Classification of Information, vol. 1 (Oak Ridge, Tenn.: Oak Ridge National Laboratories, 2002), pp. 45–48, FAS.

That same month: W. H. Lawrence, “An 8,754 Mile Tour: Munitions Output Put at 94% of His Goals After Swing to West,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 1942.

“You know”: Betty Winfield, FDR and the News Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 181.

The Tribune claimed: Larry J. Frank, “The United States Navy v. the Chicago Tribune,” Historian, vol. 42, no. 2 (1980): pp. 286–87, 295–96, 302.

But Roosevelt also: James Gregory Bradsher, “‘Fake News’ 1942: President Roosevelt and the Chicago Tribune,” Text Message, NARA, Feb. 1, 2018.

He resorted to public shaming: Richard W. Steele, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Foreign Policy Critics,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 94, no. 1 (1979): p. 29; Winfield, FDR and the News Media, pp. 68, 178.

The exception of nuclear secrets: Alex Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), pp. 145–57.

“secrecy at the source”: This was the original formulation of George Creel, who came up with the idea from the hard experience of trying to enforce press censorship during World War I (Commission on Government Security, Report of the Commission on Government Security [Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1957], p. 153).

“serious administrative embarrassment”: Steelman to Irving Ives, Oct. 28, 1947, White House Official Files, box 1507, HSTL.

“some assistant secretary”: Earl Richert, “Truman’s Words Come Back to Haunt Him,” Washington Daily News, Oct. 8, 1951; “Memorandum for the NSC Representative on Internal Security,” Dec. 29, 1950, White House President’s Secretary, box 182, HSTL. For Finney’s original scoop, which also won a Pulitzer, see “U.S. Censorship Plan Revealed,” Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, Oct. 19, 1947.

“prestige of the nation”: “Prescribed Regulation Establishing Minimum Standards,” Dec. 28, 1950, White House Official Files, box 2070, HSTL.

“a dangerous instrument”: “Editors Assail Truman Curb on Civil News,” New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 30, 1951.

Proved self-defeating: Richard Hollander, “Under Capricious Classification Security Can Be Overdone,” Washington Daily News, Sept. 27, 1951; U.S. Office of Censorship, Code of Wartime Practices for the American Press (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1942).

“ridiculed”: “Memorandum for Mr. Short,” January 23, 1951, White House Official Files, box 2070, HSTL.

But Truman went on: Harry S. Truman, “The President's News Conference," address presented in Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C., Oct. 4, 1951, HSTL.

“The administration’s approach”: James Reston, “Suspicion of News Tinkering Overcasts Edict on Secrecy: Approach of the Administration to Public Information Likened to a Press Agent's Suppressions of Convenience,” New York Times, Oct. 3, 1951.

“might prove embarrassing”: “O.P.S. Bans ‘Embarrassing’ News, Truman Quickly Rescinds Order,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 1951.

Federal Trade Commission: George M. Elsey to Irving Perlmeter, Nov. 23, 1951, Elsey Papers, box 89, HSTL.

The administration also claimed: Vaughan to Watson, Aug. 25, 1950, White House Official Files, box 1889, HSTL.

Security professionals in the FBI: Murphy and Spingarn, Memorandum for Truman, May 16, 1950, White House Official Files, box 1888, HSTL.

Judged to be sexually “deviant”: David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 114. That is not to say no one tried. The Soviets attempted to blackmail Joseph Alsop, a highly influential columnist, after setting up a “honey trap” when he visited Moscow. But Alsop promptly informed the CIA, and benefited from an unspoken policy that protected well-connected people as long as they stayed in the closet. It likely helped that Alsop was a staunch anticommunist (Greg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington [New York: Knopf, 2014], p. 205-208).

Overriding priority: Athan Theoharris, “The Soviet Espionage Threat,” in Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counter-Intelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), p. 332.

“important only from”: Summary of 96th Meeting of the NSC, July 12, 1951, White House President’s Secretary, box 188, HSTL.

In his very first: Dwight Eisenhower, “1953 State of the Union Address,” Feb. 2, 1953, DDEL.

In a press conference: White House Press Conference, June 17, 1953, Hagarty Papers, box 69, DDEL.

“dangerous policy”: Brownell, “Free Flow of Information from the Government,” Nov. 6, 1953, Brownell Papers, box 154, DDEL.

“the proposed order”: Minutes of Cabinet Meeting, Oct. 30, 1953, White House Office of the Staff Secretary, Cabinet Minutes, box 1, DDEL.

Eisenhower believed: Discussion of the 172nd and 197th Meetings of the NSC, Nov. 23, 1953, and May 14, 1954, NSC Series, box 5, AWF, DDEL. Eisenhower also encouraged his postmaster general to deliberately “lose” mail that contained what was considered communist propaganda, even suggesting the Post Office be provided a secret budget to do so.

He was sure Moscow: Minutes of Cabinet Meeting, Oct. 30, 1953.

Defense contractors reported: Morgan to Archibald, Nov. 9, 1956, Gerald D. Morgan Papers, box 22, DDEL.

When archivists: Handbook of the Records Declassification Division, Feb. 1975.

As for reducing: “Report to the Secretary of Defense by the Committee on Classified Information,” Nov. 8, 1956, Gerald D. Morgan Papers, box 22, DDEL.

In just ten years: Rick Neustadt to Stu Eizenstadt, ca. July 1977, White House Staff Offices, Domestic Policy Staff, Richard Neustadt Files, box 29, “Declassification Project,” JCPL.

“continuous staff supervision”: “Department of Defense Reply to Questionnaire of Government Information Subcommittee,” Sept. 30, 1955, Gerald D. Morgan Papers, box 23, DDEL.

Truman’s 1951 order: Exec. Order 10290, 16 Fed. Reg. 9795, 1951; Exec. Order 10501, 18 Fed. Reg. 7049, 1953; Executive Order 10964, 26 Fed. Reg. 8932, 1961. Steven Aftergood has conveniently assembled all the executive orders relevant to state secrecy in one place: “Selected Executive Orders on National Security,” FAS.

Kennedy left Eisenhower’s order: Mansfield to Kennedy, June 14, 1962, White House Central Subject Files, box 632, JFKL.

“a time bomb”: Bill Moyers to Lee White, Dec. 15, 1965, and Wilfred H. Rommel to LBJ, June 29, 1966, both in White House Central Files, LE/FE 14-1, box 44, LBJL.

“the fucking thing”: Frederick A. O. Schwartz, Democracy in the Dark: The Seduction of Government Secrecy (New York: New Press, 2015), p. 198; Mary Graham, Presidents’ Secrets: The Use and Abuse of Hidden Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 128–30. On LBJ’s strategy, see Wilfred H. Rommel to LBJ, June 29, 1966.

“We’ve got the best”: Lyndon Johnson and Cyrus Vance, Recording of a Conversation, June 24, 1965, Secret White House Tapes, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.

“the Generals and the Admirals”: Harry S. Truman, Strictly Personal and Confidential: The Letters Harry Truman Never Mailed (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), pp. 26–28; Arthur Krock, “Truman’s Press Views Mystify the Capital,” New York Times, Oct. 7, 1951.

Richard Nixon: William Rehnquist, “Department of Justice Submission Relating to Tightening Protection of Classified Documents,” Aug. 5, 1971, RG59, Executive Secretariat Briefing Books, 1958–1976, lot 73D324, Advisory Panels, 2-1969 to Lin, USNA.

But the group: Report of the Justice Department Working Group, June 24, 1971, RG59, Executive Secretariat Briefing Books, 1958–1976, President Nixon's Letter, “Council on Classification Policy,” USNA.

Nixon tried to devise: Transcript of July 24, 1971, Meeting, in Statement of Information: Hearings Before the Committee of the Judiciary, bk. VII, pt. 1, White House Surveillance Activities and Campaign Activities, 93rd Cong., 2nd. Sess. (1974), pp. 874–75.

“lift the veil”: Richard Halloran, “President Orders Limit on Labeling of Data as Secret,” New York Times, March 9, 1972.

The order reduced: Exec. Order No. 11652, 37 Fed. Reg. 5209, 1972.

“shall be held”: Exec. Order 10290, 1951; Exec. Order No. 11652, 1972.

“We have reversed”: Department of State Appropriations Authorization, Fiscal Year 1973, Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1972, p. 528.

It seemed like sunlight: Nixon knew that, contrary to hagiographic accounts like Robert Kennedy’s just-published Thirteen Days, JFK had been ready to withdraw American missiles in Turkey publicly to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1970, when Nixon learned that the Soviets were building a submarine base in Cuba, he told Kissinger to look into whether the United States could deploy missiles or build its own submarine base on the Black Sea, “anything which will give us some trading stock.” As Philip Nash notes, “Nixon had a fine sense of history” (Philip Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957–1963 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997], p. 172).

Just to make certain: Tom Latimer to General Haig, Oct. 8, 1971, folder 000076-011-0525, PQHV. Sure enough, as Cuban Missile Crisis documents were released during the 1970s, they showed that Kennedy was more willing to consider concessions to Khrushchev than had been acknowledged, though Nixon was out of office by this point (Barton J. Bernstein, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Trading the Jupiters in Turkey?,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 95, no. 1 [1980]: pp. 97–125).

Nixon was actually “weaponizing”: “A Conversation with the President about Foreign Policy,” July 1, 1970, American Presidency Project.

“group of clowns”: Transcript of July 24, 1971, Meeting, p. 877.

In the aftermath: David Greenberg, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (New York: Norton, 2016), p. 402; Gerald R. Ford, “Remarks upon Taking the Oath of Office as President,” Aug. 9, 1974, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, Mich.

“cover up dishonesty”: Gerald R. Ford, “Mr. Ford's Early Views on Executive Privilege,” New York Times, Nov. 4, 1973.

“open up”: Meet the Press, July 11, 1976, White House Staff Offices, Domestic Policy Staff, Richard Neustadt Files, box 28, “Declassification—Jimmy Carter Statements,” JCPL.

These promises seemed: Jimmy Carter, Robert Scheer, “The Playboy Interview with Jimmy Carter: A Candid Conversation with the Democratic Candidate for the Presidency,” Playboy, Nov. 1, 1976.

“I was shocked”: Q&A With State Department Employees, Feb. 29, 1977, White House Staff Offices, Domestic Policy Staff, Richard Neustadt Files, box 28, “Declassification—Jimmy Carter Statements,” JCPL.

Just one “compartment”: Memorandum for Robert Gates and Richard Neustadt, Presidential Review Memorandum (PRM)/NSC 29, “A Comprehensive Review of the Classification System,” June 28, 1977, White House Staff Offices, Domestic Policy Staff, Richard Neustadt Files, box 28, “Declassification Project,” JCPL.

“Does [the] President”: Dan O’Neill to Rick Neustadt, June 29, 1977, White House Staff Offices, Domestic Policy Staff, Richard Neustadt Files, box 29, “Declassification Project,” JCPL.

“time-consuming”: Michael Hornblow, “Draft PRM on Classification,” April 15, 1977, White House Staff Offices, Domestic Policy Staff, Richard Neustadt Files, box 28, “Declassification Project,” JCPL.

One such reform: Exec. Order No. 12065, 43 Fed. Reg. 28949, June 29, 1978, FAS.

Carter insisted: “Statement by the President,” June 29, 1978, White House Staff Offices, Domestic Policy Staff, Richard Neustadt Files, box 29, “Declassification—ISOO-GSA Relationship,” JCPL.

“the American people”: Jimmy Carter, “Human Rights and Foreign Policy,” speech presented in Notre Dame University, South Bend, Ind., June 1977.

Critics argued: Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships & Double Standards,” Commentary, Nov. 1979.

Some close Middle Eastern: Amnesty International, Annual Report 1978 (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1978), pp. 253–55, 264–65.

Saudi Arabia: Roy Reed, “Saudis Provoke Outcry in Britain By Flogging 2 Who Brewed Beer,” New York Times, June 15, 1978.

“People don’t give”: Recording of Conversation Between Rumsfeld and Nixon, 1971, “Rumsfeld and Nixon: Caught on Tape,” Frontline, Oct. 26, 2004, PBS.

Less risky in Latin America: “Telecon with FM Rabasa and Kissinger at 12:50 P.M.,” March 13, 1974, Kissinger telecons, FOIArchive, doc. ID 0000C499.

All in all: ISOO, Annual Report to the President: 1980–1981 (Washington, D.C., 1981), p. 12.

Another key element: Questions from Senator Huddleston and Senator Leahy, ca. February 1972, White House Staff, Peter Rusthoven Papers, box 3, “Executive Order on Classification,” RRPL.

“rare” and “exceptional”: David J. Anderson to Richard K. Willard, February 22, 1982, White House Staff, Edwin Meese Papers, box 24, “Executive Order on Classification,” RRPL.

Government lawyers used: Edward P. Boland to William P. Clark, March 9, 1982, White House Staff, Edwin Meese Papers, box 24, “Executive Order on Classification,” RRPL.

Carter did create: David Aaron and Stu Eizenstat to the President, Aug. 17, 1977, White House Staff Offices, Domestic Policy Staff, Richard Neustadt Files, box 29, “Declassification Project,” JCPL.

But no one wanted: Richard M. Neustadt, “Points for Classification Meeting,” July 25, 1977, White House Staff Offices, Domestic Policy Staff, Richard Neustadt Files, box 28, JCPL.

50 percent more: ISOO, Annual Report to the President: Fiscal Year 1979 (Washington, D.C., 1980), p. 41.

They blamed: Ibid., p. 16.

New designation: “royal”: Pete Earley, “He Keeps Deepest Secrets,” Washington Post, Dec. 14, 1983.

Reagan campaigned: Douglas Kneeland, “Reagan Assails Carter over Disclosure of Secret Plane,” New York Times, Sept. 5, 1980.

“to reduce costly”: Republican National Convention, “Republican Party Platform of 1980,” Detroit, July 15, 1980.

Their primary concern: William P. Clark to Edwin III, ca. Nov. 1981, White House Staff, Edwin Meese Papers, box 24, “Executive Order on Classification,” RRPL.

So they crafted: Exec. Order 12356, 47 Fed. Reg. 14874, April 6, 1982.

But Reagan knew: Robert Parry, “News Media Opposes Reagan's Secrecy Plan,” Associated Press, March 11, 1982.

“way too much classification”: George Lardner Jr., “CIA Doublespeak Cloaks Proposals for Homespy and Datahide,” Washington Post, Nov. 13, 1981

“To minimize criticism”: William P. Clark to Edwin Meese III, n.d. [ca. Feb. 1982], White House Staff, Edwin Meese, Papers box 24, RRPL.

White House source told Moynihan: The source was the deputy chief of staff, John Podesta (Memcon, March 3, 1998, Moynihan Papers, pt. II, box 39).

“a citizen-centered”: “Gore Declares National Monuments in Pacific Northwest; Bush Touts Government Reform,” CNN, June 9, 2000.

“drill through”: George W. Bush, “Getting Results from Government,” speech, Philadelphia, Pa., June 9, 2000.

Instead, Bush gave: Graham, Presidents’ Secrets, pp. 163–65.

Cited 9/11 as the reason: Mary Graham, “The Information Wars: Terrorism Has Become a Pretext for a New Culture of Secrecy,” Atlantic, Sept. 2002.

Barack Obama: Exec. Order No. 13526, 75 Fed. Reg. 707, Jan. 5, 2010.

“If there is significant”: Exec. Order 13526, 75 Fed. Reg. 707, Jan. 5, 2010, FAS.

Exact same language: Exec. Order 12958, 60 Fed. Reg. 19825, April 20, 1995, FAS.

In Carter’s: Exec. Order 12065, 43 Fed. Reg. 28949, June 29, 1978, FAS.

In all three cases: See “ISOO Annual Report Archive, Calendar Years 1979 Through 2019,” NARA.

Obama really outdid: ISOO, 2012 Annual Report to the President (Washington, D.C., 2013), p. 8.

At the same time: Tom Engelhardt, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), p. 31.

Journalists reported: Committee to Protect Journalists, “The Obama Administration and the Press: Leak Investigations and Surveillance in Post-9/11 America,” Oct. 10, 2013.

No better example: On the president’s approval, see Cora Currier, “The Kill Chain: The Lethal Bureaucracy Behind Obama’s Drone War,” The Intercept, Oct. 15, 2015. On the CIA/Pentagon rivalry, see Gordon Lubold and Shane Harris, “Trump Broadens CIA Powers, Allows Deadly Drone Strikes,” Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2017.

Agency quashed FOIA appeals: Memorandum Opinion, American Civil Liberties Union et al. v. Department of Justice, Civil Action No. 10-0436 (RMC).

“pleaks”: Englehardt, Shadow Government, pp. 120–26; Lena Groeger and Cora Currier, “Stacking Up the Administration’s Drone Claims,” ProPublica, April 28, 2015.

Obama finally acknowledged: Ta-Nehisi Coates, “‘Better Is Good’: Obama on Reparations, Civil Rights, and the Art of the Possible,” Atlantic, Dec. 21, 2016.

Between 64 and 116: Karen DeYoung, “White House Releases Its Count of Civilian Deaths in Counterterrorism Operations under Obama,” Washington Post, July 1, 2016.

474 in total: Coates, “‘Better Is Good’”; Micah Zenko, “Do Not Believe the U.S. Government’s Official Numbers on Drone Strike Civilian Casualties,” Foreign Policy, July 5, 2016.

In a subsequent investigation: “What to Know About the Civilian Casualty Files,” New York Times, Dec. 18, 2021.

Bush-Obama-era program: Lubold and Harris, “Trump Broadens CIA Powers.”

He began his presidency: Ian Shapira, “Trump Delays Full Release of Some JFK Assassination Files Until 2021, Bowing to National Security Concerns,” Washington Post, April 26, 2018.

In actual practice: Ashley Parker et al., “‘He Never Stopped Ripping Things Up’: Inside Trump’s Relentless Document Destruction Habits,” Washington Post, Feb. 5, 2022; Tom Porter, “Trump Warned John Bolton of ‘Legal Consequences’ If He Publishes His Tell-All Memoir, Claiming That All Conversations with Him Are Classified,” Business Insider, June 16, 2020.

Even Ronald Reagan: David E. Pozen, “The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 127 (Dec. 2003): p. 550.

“a recommitment”: Joseph R. Biden, Jr., “Memorandum on Revitalizing America’s Foreign Policy and National Security Workforce, Institutions, and Partnerships,” Feb. 4, 2021, FAS.

Backlog of FOIA requests: GAO, “Freedom of Information Act: Selected Agencies Adapted to the COVID-19 Pandemic but Face Ongoing Challenges and Backlogs,” GAO-22-105040, 2022, pp. 23–24.

But the Biden administration: C. J. Ciaramella, “FOIA Advocates Say Biden Administration Is Ignoring Transparency Issues,” Reason, Feb. 4, 2022.

“The volume”: Avril Haines to Sen. Ron Wyden and Jerry Moran, Jan. 5, 2022, https://www.wyden.senate.gov.

“The great secret”: Pozen, “Leaky Leviathan,” p. 635.

The cost of this system: Ibid., p. 516.

“excessive concern”: Schwartz, Democracy in the Dark, p. 4.

“recognizes that it”: Exec. Order 12356, 47 Fed. Reg. 14874, April 2, 1982, FAS.

Pentagon spent $159,010: For 1955 figures, see “Department of Defense Reply to Questionnaire,” Sept. 30, 1955; Mordecai Lee, “When Congress Tried to Cut Pentagon Public Relations: A Lesson from History,” Public Relations Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (2000): pp. 131–54.

By 2016: GAO, Public Relations Spending: Reported Data on Related Federal Activities, GAO-16-877R (2016), p. 11.

“safes, locks”: “Department of Defense Reply to Questionnaire,” Sept. 30, 1955.

When Congress mandated: ISOO, Classification Related Costs for FY 1995 (Washington, D.C., 1996), p. 2, FAS.

In 2017: ISOO, 2017 Report to the President, (Washington, D.C., 2018), p. 4.

“Every gun”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Chance for Peace,” speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, D.C., April 16, 1953.

9. There Is No There There: The Best Kept Secret

Imagine you have: U.S. Office of Personnel Management, “Questionnaire for National Security Questions,” Dec. 2020, 5 CFR pts. 731, 732, 736.

“It is imperative”: Ibid.

Reviewers have broad discretion: DOJ, “Judicial Review of Claims of Discrimination in Security Clearance Determinations,” 1997.

Even seemingly objective criteria: Tepring Piquado et al., “Assessing the Potential for Racial Bias in the Security Clearance Process,” 2021, RAND Corporation; “Title VII—Racial Discrimination in Employment—Employers Use of Record of Arrests Not Leading to Conviction,” Wayne Law Review, vol. 17, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1971): p. 233.

“unquestionable loyalty”: “Personnel Security Investigative Standards and Procedures Governing Eligibility for Access to Sensitive Compartmented Information and Other Controlled Access Program Information,” ICPG 701.1, 2008, p. 2.

George W. Bush: David Priess, The President's Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America's Presidents from Kennedy to Obama (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016), p. 259.

“most tightly guarded”: Aki Peritz, “Think U.S. Intel Is in Decline? These Declassified Memos May Change Your Mind,” Washington Post, Feb. 19, 2016.

“I’m sure that”: Priess, President's Book of Secrets, p. 261.

“The CIA tells”: Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), p. 350.

“slick magazines”: Harry S. Truman, “The President's News Conference," address, Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C., Oct. 4, 1951, HSTL.

William Langer: Sherman Kent, Miscellaneous Studies: Military Secrets in an Open Society: The Yale Report, MS-10 (1973), CIA-RDP86M00886R002100140005-2; Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (New York: Morrow, 1987), pp. 457–61.

Who was chosen: Kent, Miscellaneous Studies, p. 6.

Ten weeks later: CIA, Estimates of Capabilities of the United States Forces In-Being (1951), CIA-RDP79R00971A000300020002-0.

Kent judged: CIA, Ibid., p. 368; Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, 1945–2010,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 66, no. 4 (July 2010): pp. 77–83.

When asked: Harry S. Truman, “President's News Conference,” Oct. 4, 1951.

The president was wrong: Steven T. Usdin, Bureau of Spies: The Secret Connections Between Espionage and Journalism in Washington (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2018), pp. 280, 289.

Ultimate sources: Kent, Miscellaneous Studies, pp. 19, 30–32. When he wrote about this twenty years later, Kent pulled his punches, because friends in the Pentagon “didn’t like the earlier drafts” (Kent to Editor of Studies in Intelligence, April 11, 1973, attached to Miscellaneous Studies).

All copies: Winks, Cloak and Gown, p. 460.

An intelligence agency: As of 1997, the CIA’s own library subscribed to seventeen hundred serials, held 150,000 books, and stored millions of documents. “I think a lot of people have a deep misconception of what we do” at the CIA, one of the librarians explained. “We do research for people. We look for information for people. We don't all wear trench coats with large hats pulled over our heads. That is a very small part of what we are.” (Susan L. Wright, “50 Years of Silent Service: Inside the CIA Library,” Information Outlook, Feb. 1997.)

America’s oldest intelligence agency: Ludwell Lee Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence, October 1950–February 1953 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1992), pp. 131–36.

“a peculiar kind”: AEC, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board and Texts of Principal Documents and Letters (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 467.

This kind of psychology: Matthew Connelly et al., “‘General, I Have Fought Just As Many Nuclear Wars As You Have’: Forecasts, Future Scenarios, and the Politics of Armageddon,” American Historical Review, vol. 117, no. 5 (Dec. 2012): 1438-39.

“The thing that rather”: David E. Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, vol. 2, The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 376.

“The Official Secrets Act”: Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, “Jobs for the Boys,” Yes Minister, BBC Two, April 7, 1980.

“fanatically defended”: Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 1948), p. 233.

“With great excitement”: Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 9.

“next morning’s newspapers”: Ibid., p. 11.

CIA seemed completely uninterested: Ibid., p. 10.

It is also possible: John Deutch, “Statement of the Director of Central Intelligence on the Clandestine Services and the Damage Caused by Aldrich Ames,” Dec. 7, 1995, Moynihan Papers, pt. II, box 286. See also chap. 6 of this book.

“Iran is not”: Gary Sick, All Fall Down: America's Tragic Encounter with Iran (New York: Random House, 1986), pp. 92–93.

“is expected to remain”: James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 258.

Some obvious reasons: Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails, p. 23.

Perhaps it was no: Ibid., p. 22.

“Diplomatic telegrams”: Edward G. Shirley, “Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?,” Atlantic, Feb. 1998.

Psychologists have confirmed: Mark Travers et al., “The Secrecy Heuristic: Inferring Quality from Secrecy in Foreign Policy Contexts,” Political Psychology, vol. 35, no. 1 (2014): pp. 101, 105–8.

In a follow-up study: Tore Pedersen and Pia Therese Jansen, “Seduced by Secrecy—Perplexed by Complexity: Effects of Secret vs Open-Source on Intelligence Credibility and Analytic Confidence,” Intelligence and National Security, vol. 34, no. 6 (June 2019): p. 890.

“innocents”: Kent, Miscellaneous Studies, p. 19.

“the first refuge”: House Committee on Government Operations, Availability of Information from Federal Departments and Agencies: The First Five Years and Progress of Study, August 1959–July 1960, H.R. Rep. No. 86-2084, 1960, p. 36.

“In such a context”: Ritchie P. Lowry, “Toward a Sociology of Secrecy and Security Systems,” Social Problems, vol. 19 (1972): p. 440.

“. . . the Government”: Affidavit of Max Frankel, New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971).

No radical muckraker: Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2019), pp. 167–70.

Frankel’s high-level access: Archconservative Senator Jesse Helms believed much the same thing: he and other members of Congress frequently found “national security” used to cover up information “which would be potentially politically embarrassing to officials in the Executive Branch or which would make known an illegal or indefensible policy” (Helms to Moynihan, July 15, 1996, Moynihan Papers, pt. II, box 284).

Pentagon Papers case: Ellsberg later revealed that he was also planning to release even more documents related to U.S. nuclear-war planning, but was thwarted when the documents were accidentally destroyed (Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner [New York: Bloomsbury, 2017], pp. 5–10).

Purpose of the leak: David Pozen, “The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 127 (2013): pp. 529–30. This has been true for a long time. See, e.g., “Report to the Secretary of Defense by the Committee on Classified Information,” Nov. 8, 1956, Morgan Papers, Box 22, Security Order—Executive Order of November 3, 1953—Classification of Information #1, DDEL.

These officials: Spies and moles, on the other hand, happily deal in bulk. Aldrich Ames gave the Soviets fifteen to twenty feet of classified documents during just one assignment. Unlike most reporters, analysts can pore through seemingly arcane information for useful tidbits, and combine it with information they already have from other sources. (Deutch, “Statement of the Director,” Dec. 7, 1995.)

“Cablegate”: Julian Assange, Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography, ePub ed. (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2011), pp. 189–93.

Ironically, the State Department: On the effort to track the distribution list of the Pentagon Papers, see Egil Krogh and David Young to John Ehrlichman, Aug. 3, 1971, reprinted in “Memos Showing Concern Over Leaks,” New York Times, July 19, 1974. On the implementation of the data-index recommendation, see Memorandum for the President from Interagency Classification Review Committee, ca. March 1973, and “Interagency Classification Review Committee Progress Report,” March 31, 1973, both in Documents of the National Security Council: Fourth Supplement (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1987).

Also ironically: David Langbart et al., “Appraisal of Records Covered by N1-59-07-3-P,” June 4, 2007, on file with author.

Assange himself apparently meant: Assange blamed a Guardian editor, David Leigh, for publishing the password. But Leigh said that he was told the password was temporary, and he could not know that Assange inexplicably used the same password for other copies of the database, which Assange encouraged other Web sites to mirror. Moreover, one of Assange’s associates had already been sharing unredacted cables with the pro-Putin government of Belarus. (Jerome Taylor, “Guardian Journalist Accused of Recklessly Disclosing Password,” Independent, Sept. 2, 2011; “Wikileaks, Belarus and Israel Shamir,” Index on Censorship, Feb. 5, 2011.)

The leak revealed: Mark MacKinnon, “Leaked Cables Spark Witch-Hunt for Chinese ‘Rats,’” Globe and Mail, Sept. 14, 2011.

“We’ll continue saying”: Stephen A. Seche, “General Petraeus’ Meeting with Saleh on Security Assistance, AQAP Strikes,” Jan. 4 2010; Scott Shane and Andrew W. Lehren, “Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy,” New York Times, Nov. 28, 2010.

Already been reported: Thom Shanker and Mark Landler, “U.S. Aids Yemeni Raids on Al Qaeda, Officials Say,” New York Times, Dec. 18, 2009.

One compilation: Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors (New York: Ballantine, 1988).

“Some war”: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 42–43. On the number of employees, see William Webster, “FBI Proposals to Amend the Freedom of Information Act,” June 19, 1979, Moynihan Papers, pt. II, box 1698.

“convince the public”: “Oswald, Lee, Murder by Ruby,” Nov. 24 1973, John F. Kennedy Assassination Records, box 4, USNA.

“The public must”: Nicholas Katzenbach to Bill Moyers, Nov. 25, 1963, FBI, https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=62268###relPageId=29&tab=page.

Did Katzenbach and Hoover: Select Committee on Assassinations, Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations, H.R. Rep. No. 95-1828, 1979, pp. 195–96. They only admitted destroying the note years later, when others came forward.

U.S. special forces: Brian Adam Jones, “The Majority of American Combat Fatalities Since 2015 Have Been US Special Ops,” Business Insider, May 26, 2017; Kyle Rempfer, “SOCOM: Bulk of War Casualties May Be Operators but SOF Readiness Is at All-Time High,” Military Times, July 26, 2019.

Contrast this record: Remarks by Richard Stolz, May 31, 1988, CIA-RDP90G01353R002000070002-5; “The Stars on the Wall,” April 30, 2013, CIA; Angus MacLean Theurmer to Deputy Director for Management and Services, “Memorial Stars in the Lobby,” April 30, 1974, CIA-RDP87-01130R000200160011-0.

“We in intelligence”: Proposed Remarks by William H. Webster, May 31, 1988, CIA-RDP90G01353R002000070002-5.

“Those of us here”: Remarks by Stolz, May 31, 1988.

Senior CIA leaders equate: Theurmer to Deputy Director, April 30, 1974; “Stars on the Wall.”

“essence of the CIA”: Paul D. Shinkman, “CIA Adds Names to Memorial Wall,” U.S. News & World Report, May 24, 2016.

Decision to build it: Director of Personnel to Director of Central Intelligence, “Memorial Plaque,” Oct. 5, 1973, CIA-RDP87-01130R000200160016-5.

That was the year: On Watergate, see Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pp. 327–29. For the dossier itself, see Howard J. Osborn to Executive Secretary of CIA Management Committee, “Family Jewels,” May 16, 1973; Shinkman, “CIA Adds Names.”

Extremely safe career choice: Ian Shapira, “A CIA Suicide Sparks Hard Questions About the Agency's Memorial Wall,” Washington Post, May 21, 2019. To be sure, some who died in accidents or during medical procedures were overseas doing dangerous work. See, e.g., “Remembering CIA's African American Heroes,” CIA, July 10, 2014.

“gives us psychological problems”: Donnalley provided some good reasons, such as the risk of losing a valued intelligence source. But Nixon’s declassification order specifically exempted intelligence sources or methods, or anything that would endanger a specific individual. It is all the more striking, then, that Donnalley repeatedly emphasized how merely reviewing records for declassification “involves a considerable amount of trauma as a result of our previous history” (Gail F. Donnalley, “Declassification in an Open Society,” Studies in Intelligence, vol.18, no. 3 [1974]: pp. 11–18).

What form this trauma took: For an insightful sociological analysis, see Fred M. Kaiser, “Secrecy, Intelligence, and Community: The U.S. Intelligence Community,” in Secrecy, a Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Stanton K. Tefft (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1980), pp. 273–96.

“We would have more”: Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Secrecy (1970), p. 8, FAS.

George Kennan judged: Kennan to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, March 25, 1997, Moynihan Papers, pt. II, box 3014.

Howard Baker: James Q. Wilson, in relating this fact, wrote that he had had exactly the same experience while serving on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board—everything was revealed within days by the Washington Post or some other media outlet (Wilson to Moynihan, Oct. 25, 1996, Moynihan Papers, pt. II, box 284).

Reagan’s secretary of state: Shultz, Memorandum of Conversation, Jan. 5, 1996, Moynihan Papers, pt. II, box 280.

“very narrow number”: Jack Goldsmith, Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency After 9/11 (New York: Norton, 2012), p. 68. “The very adjective ‘covert’ is a misnomer,” Arthur Schlesinger observed. “Covert action is often easy to detect . . .” (Arthur Schlesinger, “A Democrat Looks at Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 66, no. 2 [1987]: p. 270.) The same is also true of “covert operatives.” It is now illegal to deliberately reveal their identity. But back in 1975, the Chicago Tribune published a guide to unmasking CIA spies operating under diplomatic cover. They all worked in the same part of the embassy, stuck together when they went out, were listed as “Foreign Service Reserve” in the State Department’s Foreign Service List, and had conspicuous gaps in their published biographies. The Agency would replace one officer with another ostensibly with the exact same cover title, same apartment, and even the same car. (John Marks, “How to Unmask CIA Spies Hidden in our Embassies,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 19, 1975.) See also Jonathan Haslam, “How to Explain the KGB's Amazing Success Identifying CIA Agents in the Field?,” Salon, Sept. 25, 2015.

“The United States Government”: Donald Rumsfeld, “U.S. Government Incapable of Keeping a Secret,” Nov. 2, 2005, FAS.

CIA withholds 82 percent: The Information Security Oversight Office no longer provides this comparative breakdown of automatic declassification rates by department and agency. For the most recent data, see ISOO, 2014 Report to the President (Washington, D.C., 2015).

After he was “read in”: Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails, pp. 7–9.

“great stuff!”: David A. Hatch, Presidential Transition 2001: NSA Briefs a New Administration, 4045841 (2004), p. 17, NSA.

“information overload”: Barton Gellman and Greg Miller, “‘Black Budget’ Summary Details U.S. Spy Network’s Successes, Failures and Objectives,” Washington Post, Aug. 29, 2013. For a good introduction to the challenge information overload presents to intelligence agencies, see Robert Mandel, Global Data Shock: Strategic Ambiguity, Deception, and Surprise in an Age of Information Overload (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).

“Conspiring against”: CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, Critique of the Codeword Compartment in the CIA (Washington, D.C., 1977), CIA-RDP83B00823R000900180001-6.

“uneven guidance”: ODNI Community Technology Governance, Intelligence Community Classification Guidance: Findings and Recommendations Report (2008), p. iv, FAS.

In 1996: Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, “Possible Recommendations and Background Materials,” June 28, 1996, Moynihan Papers, box 292.

There are even cases: For these and many more excellent examples, see “Redactions: The Declassified File,” National Security Archive, April 22, 2019.

Academics have run: Samuel-Azran et al., “Jewish-Israeli Attitudes Towards the Iranian Football Team During the 2014 World Cup Tournament,” Media, War & Conflict, vol. 9, no. 3 (2016): pp. 258–59; Jamie Boydstun, Jeralynn S. Cossman, and Denise Krause, “Oral Health Interventions in Appalachian States,” Journal of Appalachian Studies, vol. 24, no. 1 (2018): pp. 74–76.

At a conference: “FOIA@ 50 Conference Day 2," video, YouTube, posted by Columbia Journalism School, June 3, 2016. Miriam Nisbet, founding director of the National Archives Office of Government Information Services, eventually agreed it would be a “fascinating study.” None of the panelists could explain why it had never been done.

Of the 30,490 e-mail chains: Note that the oft-cited figure of thirty thousand Clinton e-mails is actually the number of e-mail threads, many of which contain multiple messages. For more on this analysis, see Matthew Connelly and Rohan Shaw, “Here's What Data Science Tells Us About Hillary Clinton's Emails,” Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2016.

“why the State Department”: Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo, “Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton's Use of Email,” New York Times, July 23, 2015.

“extremely careless”: “Statement by FBI Director James B. Comey on the Investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton's Use of a Personal E-Mail System,” July 5, 2016, FBI.

“gross negligence”: DOJ Office of the Inspector General, A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election, Oversight and Review Division no. 18-04 (2018), pp. 29–34.

When he was later found: Kevin Schmidt and Thomas Kimbrell, “Records Show How Former FBI Director James Comey Misled the DOJ Inspector General About His Personal Email Use,” Cause of Action Institute, Dec. 7, 2018.

“random”: Abbe David Lowell, “The Broken System of Classifying Government Documents,” New York Times, Feb. 29, 2016.

“practically everything”: Affidavit of Max Frankel, New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971).

We devised our own experiment: For a fuller description than is given in the text, see Renato Rocha Souza et al., “Using Artificial Intelligence to Identify State Secrets,” draft, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.00356.pdf.

Resulting from technical problems: “Central Foreign Policy File (CFPF), 1973–1979,”

NARA.

“a subject which is”: Philip P. Alston to Richard Holbrooke, “Information on Indian Ocean; Information on 1977 Meat,” Dec. 1, 1977.

Lebanese Christian leaders: “South Lebanon Situation—Phalange View,” July 6, 1977, CFPF.

Japanese government’s sensitivity: “USG Safeguards Review at Tokai Mura,” Sept. 7, 1977, CFPF.

President of Cyprus: “Rumored Kidnapping of President Kyprianou’s Son,” Dec. 15, 1977, CFPF.

Almost certainly overclassified: “Earth Station,” April 23, 1977, CFPF.

Category has different names: Peter Galison, “Secrecy in Three Acts,” Social Research, vol. 77 (Fall 2010): p. 966.

Unlike “top-secret”: Daniel J, Metcalfe, “The Nature of Government Secrecy,” Government Information Quarterly, vol. 26 (2009): p. 308.

10. Deleting the Archive: The Ultimate Secret

The documents are displayed: Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler and Catherine Nicholson, “The Declaration of Independence and the Hand of Time,” Prologue, Fall 2016.

“to penetrate”: John Acton, Lectures on Modern History (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 10.

“Power tends”: John Acton, Historical Essays & Studies (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. 504.

To see fully: Terry Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts,” Archival Science, vol. 1, no. 1 (March 2001), p. 8, citing Jacques Le Goff.

When power shifts: Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, “Twice Plundered or ‘Twice Saved’? Identifying Russia's ‘Trophy’ Archives and the Loot of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 15, no. 2 (Fall 2001): pp. 192–93; Grimsted, “‘Trophy’ Archives and Non-Restitution: Russia’s Cultural ‘Cold War’ with the European Community,” Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 45, no. 3 (1998): 6.

“The Archivists’ career”: Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Archivaria, vol. 43 (Spring 1997): 23.

But, however selfless: Historians have long understood archives as institutions of state power, typically citing the French theorist Jacques Derrida. But they rarely delve deeper into the rich intellectual history produced by archivists themselves. For an excellent introduction, see Cook, “What is Past is Prologue,” 17-58.

When the U.S. government: Ibid., p. 26.

“The struggle of man”: Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Penguin, 1980), p. 3.

In 1890, abolitionists: Amy Chazkel, “History Out of the Ashes: Remembering Brazilian Slavery After Rui Barbosa’s Burning of the Documents,” in From the Ashes of History: Loss and Recovery of Archives and Libraries in Modern Latin America, eds. Carlos Aguirre and Javier Villa-Flores (Raleigh, N.C.: Editorial A Contracorriente, 2015), pp. 70–72.

Conversely, archives: See, for example, Elidor Mëhilli, “Documents as Weapons: The Uses of a Dictatorship’s Archives,” Contemporary European History, vol. 28, no. 1 (2019): pp. 88–89.

In India: Ashis Nandy, “History's Forgotten Doubles,” History and Theory. vol. 34, no. 2 (1995): p. 60.

“That place was like”: Manuela Adreoni and Ernesto Londoño, “Loss of Indigenous Works in Brazil Museum Fire Felt ‘like a New Genocide,’” New York Times, Sept. 13, 2018.

Firefighters arrived: “The 1973 Fire, National Personnel Records Center,” NARA.

We will never know: Ibid.; Walter W. Stender and Evans Walker, “The National Personnel Records Center Fire: A Study in Disaster,” American Archivist, vol. 37, no. 4 (Oct. 1974): 521–22.

The State Department had already: “Administrative History of the Department of State,” vol. 1, chap. 13, Administrative Histories, State, box 4, LBJL; “Airgram Distribution Analysis,” March 15, 1967, RG59, CFPF, 1967–1969, Administration CR to CR4, box 47, USNA.

This particular record: Jakarta Embassy to Secretary of State, “Ford-Sukarno Meeting,” Dec. 6, 1975, National Security Archive.

“That will leak”: Mark Hertsgaard, “The Secret Life of Henry Kissinger: Minutes of a 1975 Meeting with Lawrence Eagleburger,” Nation, Oct. 29, 1990.

Other notable gaps: Bruce P. Montgomery, “‘Source Material’—Sequestered from the Court of History: The Kissinger Transcripts,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 34 (2004): p. 870.

“culture of destruction”: Tim Weiner, “CIA Destroyed Files on 1953 Iran Coup,” New York Times, May 29, 1997. See also “Opening Up CIA History,” New York Times, May 30, 1997.

“Since the program”: “1973: Richard Helms and Sid Gottlieb Ordered All Records Re: Mind-Control Projects Destroyed,” Alliance for Human Research Protection, Jan. 18, 2015.

“innocuous information”: Halkin v. Helms, 598 F.2d 1 (D.C. Cir. 1978).

If documents are destroyed: David A. Wallace, “Preserving the U.S. Government's White House Electronic Mail: Archival Challenges and Policy Implications,” paper, Sixth DELOS Workshop: Preserving Digital Information, Lisbon, June 19, 1998, p. 2.

Nevertheless, on the last: Ibid., pp. 3–6; Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President, 810 F. Supp. 335 (D.D.C. 1993).

Dedicated National Archives staff: Wallace, “Preserving Electronic Mail,” pp. 11–13.

By the year 2000: The figures for declassification costs were included in the annual reports of the Information Security Oversight Office, which are available here: “ISOO Annual Report Archive, Calendar Years 1979 through 2019,” NARA. After 2012, the declassification costs of the intelligence community were also included, complicating comparisons over time. But in 2017—the last year ISOO tried to estimate these costs—the total for the entire government was $103 million.

Agency established a “factory”: Carla Anne Robbin, “Psst, Want to Hear Some CIA Secrets?,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 1998.

CIA factory shut down: ISOO, 2012 Annual Report to the President (Washington, D.C., 2013), p. 26.

The overall budget: These figures, for the NARA operating budget, are published online each year for NARA’s “Performance Budget.”

Lockheed Martin: GAO, “Electronic Records Archive: National Archives Needs to Strengthen Its Capacity to Use Earned Value Techniques to Manage and Oversee Development,” GAO-11-86 (2011), p. 22.

National Archives now cannot: Minutes of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, June 17–18, 2019, and March 2–3, 2020, both at https://history.state.gov/about/hac.

Year after year: “NARA Challenges Regarding Staffing and Responsibilities,” Dec. 20, 2019, on file with the author.

In 2013: See NARA, Office of the Inspector General, Audit of the Electronic Records Archives System’s Ability to Preserve Records, audit report no. 13-03, 2013, pp. 24–25.

Management continues to use: NARA, Office of the Inspector General, Audit of NARA’s Legacy Systems, 18-AUD-06 (2018), pp. 7–8.

Nevertheless, all federal: Jeffery Zeints to David Ferriero, Aug. 24, 2012; NARA, FY 2020 Congressional Justification (2019), p. 3.

Supposed to be more efficient: Michael Moss, in Moss and Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, Is Digital Different?: How Information Creation, Capture, Preservation and Discovery Are Being Transformed (London: Facet Publishing, 2015), pp. 6–7.

In 2007: David Langbart et al., “Appraisal of Records Covered by N1-59-07-3-P,” June 4, 2007, on file with author.

Solon Buck: James Gregory Bradsher, “An Administrative History of the Disposal of Federal Records, 1789–1949,” Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists, vol. 3, no. 2 (Jan. 1985): p. 13.

In December 1940: Peter M. Rutkoff, William B. Scott, and Marc Bloch, “Letters to America: The Correspondence of Marc Bloch, 1940–41,” French Historical Studies, vol. 12, no. 2 (1981): p. 278.

Fewer than 15 percent: The data is available at “Wars/International Relations: Diplomatic Records,” NARA.

One from 1975: Emma North-Best, “State Department Cable Shows Exposure of Lockheed Bribes Threatened NATO’s Stability,” MuckRock, Nov. 7, 2018. The subject of the scandal, Prince Bernhard, happened to be a founding member of the Bilderberg Group. Like many such bribes, it was apparently given with the full knowledge of the CIA and the Pentagon.

“thorough, accurate”: William B. McAllister et al., Toward Thorough, Accurate, and Reliable: A History of the Foreign Relations of the United States Series (Washington, D.C.: DOS Office of the Historian, 2015), p. 2.

Other statistics: Compare “Status of the Foreign Relations of the United States Series,” available here (https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/status-of-the-series) with the archived versions of the same web page available through the Wayback Machine.

In 2021: See “Unauthorized Disposition of Federal Records,” NARA.

Colin Powell: Adam Sneed, “Powell Says He Doesn't Have Any of His State emails,” Politico, March 8, 2015.

Some twenty-two million: “Millions of Bush Administration E-Mails Recovered,” CNN, Dec. 14, 2009.

“the real issues”: Hillary Clinton, What Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), p. 309.

“never been used”: DOJ Office of the Inspector General, A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election, no. 18-04 (2018), pp. 36, 257.

“the situation”: Personal communication, on file with author.

“involvement on major decisions”: “Request for Records Disposition Authority: Records Schedule Number DAA-0059-2019-0002,” Dec. 7, 2018, DOS. The request was subsequently withdrawn, and taken down from government Web sites. It is not clear what the department will propose in its place.

“health, safety”: The Department of the Interior and the National Archives had already decided they should delete files on endangered species, offshore-drilling inspections, and the safety of drinking water. They even claimed that papers from a case in which the department mismanaged Native American land and assets—resulting in a multibillion-dollar settlement—would be of no interest to researchers. (Megan Black, “Appetite for Destruction? Making Sense of the Interior Department’s Request to Destroy Files,” Cambridge Core Blog, Nov. 5, 2018.)

The last inspector-general report: “At the current pace NARA may never get through the processing backlog if no changes are made to the presidential libraries processing program” (NARA Office of the Inspector General, Audit of Processing of Textual Records, report no. 13-14 [2013], pp. 12–16).

After Obama left: “NARA Challenges Regarding Staffing and Responsibilities,” Dec. 20, 2019.

Years ago: Personal communication with the author.

The IRS: Michael Wyland, “IRS Lois Lerner Emails Impossible to Find or Save,” Nonprofit Quarterly, June 25, 2015.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General, ICE Needs to Improve Its Oversight of Segregation Use in Detention Facilities, OIG-22-01 (Washington, D.C., 2021), pp. 5–7.

Gina Haspel: Glenn Kessler, “CIA Director Nominee Haspel and the Destruction of Interrogation Tapes: Contradictions and Questions,” Washington Post, May 11, 2018.

“I don’t think”: Karoun Demirjan and Shane Harris, “Gina Haspel, Trump’s Pick to Lead CIA, Pledges She Won’t Restart Interrogation Program,” Washington Post, May 9, 2018.

Thanks to Haspel’s decision: Matthew Connelly, “State Secrecy, Archival Negligence, and the End of History As We Know It,” Knight First Amendment Institute, Sept. 13, 2018.

“historical monuments”: Laila Hussein Moustafa, “Cultural Heritage and Preservation: Lessons from World War II and the Contemporary Conflict in the Middle East,” American Archivist, vol. 79 (Fall/Winter 2016): p. 325.

April 9, 2003: Robert Fisk, “Americans Defend Two Untouchable Ministries from the Hordes of Looters,” Independent, April 14, 2003.

Baath Party: Mary-Jane Deeb, Michael Albin, and Alan Haley, Report on the National Library and the House of Manuscripts, October 27–November 3, 2003, LOC and DOS Mission to Baghdad, 2003.

“Stuff happens”: Nabil Al-Tikriti, “‘Stuff Happens’: A Brief Overview of the 2003 Destruction of Iraqi Manuscript Collections, Archives, and Libraries,” Library Trends, vol. 55 (Winter 2007): p. 743.

“boggles the mind”: William A. Mayer, “Session 1 Panel—2014 CRL Leviathan Forum: Conference on Leviathan: Libraries and Government Information in the Age of Big Data,” YouTube video, April 24, 2014.

“monitoring role”: This initiative was not publicly confirmed until I published an op-ed in The New York Times warning about the pitfalls, as well as the problems with the ICE and State Department records schedules, prompting an angry rebuttal from the archivist of the United States, David Ferriero (Matthew Connelly, “Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE,” New York Times, Feb. 4, 2020; David S. Ferriero, “The National Archives Responds,” New York Times, Feb. 7, 2020).

“The owl”: Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, preface, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. Allen W. Wood and H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 23.

In our experiment: Joseph Risi et al., “Predicting History,” Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 3 (Sept. 2019): pp. 906–12.

Inspiring stories: Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).

NASA seems to have: Zoë Jackson, “Archiving the Final Frontier: Preserving Space History for the Future,” Perspectives on History, vol. 56, no. 5 (May 1, 2018).

Conclusion: The End of History as We Know It

The biggest worry: Abbe David Lowell, “The Broken System of Classifying Government Documents,” New York Times, Feb. 29, 2016.

White House had specifically: “Presidential Memorandum - Implementation of the Executive Order, ‘Classified National Security Information,’” December 29, 2009.

“The government must”: PIDB, Setting Priorities: An Essential Step in Transforming Declassification (2014), p. 4.

“The heritage of the past”: Jessie Kratz, “The National Archives’ Larger-Than-Life Statues,” NARA, Pieces of History, May 22, 2018.

Guardianship: Ibid.

“redaction integrity”: Personal communication with the author.

Fifty-eight pages long: ISOO, 2017 Report to the President (Washington, D.C., 2018).

“many of the same”: ISOO, 2018 Report to the President (Washington, D.C., 2019). As this book goes to bed, the PIDB is showing signs of life, with a flurry of appointments and public meetings. But the ISOO is still not reporting any data on declassification.

“reflect how agencies”: Ibid.

“We’re ringing”: Steven Aftergood, “Modernization of Secrecy System Is Stalled,” Aug. 21, 2019, FAS.

They included a large facility: James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 139-143.

Long before, large-scale shelters: Erica X. Eisen, “Blackness and the Bomb,” Boston Review, June 29, 2021.

At the CIA, not one woman: Walter Pincus, “CIA and the ‘Glass Ceiling’ Secret,” Washington Post, Sept. 9, 1994.

“cultural imperative”: Glass Ceiling Study Summary (1992), CIA.

1991 Pentagon study: Theodore R. Sarbin, Homosexuality and Personnel Security (Defense Personnel Security Research and Education Center, 1991), p. 30.

When new leaders: Director's Diversity in Leadership Study (2015), Homeland Security Digital Library.

The same troubling legacy: National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, State of Black Promotions at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (2018).

Historians are still surveying: For an excellent introduction, see Paul A. Kramer, “Shades of Sovereignty: Racialized Power, the United States and the World,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 3rd edition, eds. Frank Costigliola and Michael Hogan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 245-270.

Even well-studied topics: Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Amy J. Rutenberg, Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2019).

“brown people”: Gary R. Hess, Vietnam and the United States: Origins and Legacy of a War (Boston: Twayne, 1990), p. 29.

“the one and a half billion” and “a constant worry”: NSC Meetings, May 28 and Aug. 18, 1959, NSC Series, AWF, DDEL.

“strong men”: Ebere Nwaubani, The United States and Decolonization in West Africa, 1950–1960 (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2001), p. 50.

For John F. Kennedy: Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1992 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), p. 232.

“There are 3 billion”: Remarks to American and Korean Servicemen at Camp Stanley, Nov. 1966, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1966), bk. II, p. 1287.

You can see the difference: Cameron Averill, Ye Seul Byeon, and Matthew Connelly, “What Can Computational Methods Reveal about Diplomatic History and the Future of the Historical Profession?” Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations annual conference, June 17, 2022.

Even the 1970s: Niall Ferguson, The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), introduction.

And might not: For a sterling example of how a determined historian can pursue every avenue to uncover more recent and extremely relevant history, see Mary Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). This study required dozens of requests to the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, which produced a trove of previously denied documents on U.S.-Russian meetings in the 1990s. But such a strategy would be fruitless now. In the most recent report, for 2020, ISCAP reported having received only forty-five new requests. This is far fewer than were recorded in previous years, likely because most people have given up. Of these, they resolved exactly two, leaving a backlog of 1,313 appeals. (ISOO, 2020 Report to the President [Washington, D.C., 2021].)

“proceeded upon”: Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley (Project Gutenberg, 2003), p. 20..

A profound change: Tim Hitchcock, “Confronting the Digital: Or How Academic History Writing Lost the Plot,” Cultural and Social History, vol. 10, no. 1 (2013): pp. 14–18. Studies have shown that, though digital sources are more likely to be consulted, scholars are less likely to cite them, instead preferring to footnote a manuscript source for the very same information (Donghee Sinn and Nicholas Soares, “Historians’ Use of Digital Archival Collections: The Web, Historical Scholarship, and Archival Research,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, vol. 65, no. 9 [2014]: pp. 1794–1809).

Scholars are actually becoming: Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” American Historical Review, vol. 121 (2016): pp. 377–402.

How the algorithms actually work: Hitchcock, “Confronting the Digital,” p. 13. One of the most common problems is that optical-character-recognition software cannot clearly “see” many of the words in the original books and documents. They are garbled or missing.

Too many scholars: The reductio ad absurdum of this way of working is the increasingly common practice of citing the results of keyword searches as if they can sustain some claim about the content of archives or trends in scholarship. For a fuller discussion of the pitfalls of this practice, and the possibility of more rigorous analysis, see Cameron Averill, Ye Seul Byeon, and Matthew Connelly, “History Versus the Archive: What Do Historians Write About When They Write About the History of American Foreign Relations?,” seminar, Data for Good, Nov. 11, 2020.

the most revolutionary advance: As Anthony Grafton, then president of the American Historical Association, has observed, “The Future Is Here: Pioneers Discuss the Future of Digital Humanities,” presentation, 126th annual meeting of the AHA, Chicago, Ill., Jan. 6, 2012.

Realization of Ranke’s dream: The data for all the experiments described in this book are available both at History-lab.org and through an Application Programming Interface (see History-lab.org).