Washington Decoded

The Politics (and Profits) of Information: The 9/11 Commission

See also: “The Making of a Washington Expert ”

Print

 

By Max Holland

 

    The commission that investigated the events of 9/11 has been highly praised and sharply criticized, but one aspect of its task has virtually escaped notice: its responsibility to leave behind a complete, lasting, and easily accessible public record of its investigation. For all the good work that the panel did, some of its decisions have eroded the public’s right and ability to understand what happened on September 11, 2001.

    Raising this issue may seem a quibble, given that the 9/11 Report is one of the best-selling government documents of all time. But history shows that reports of comparable magnitude, and the first reaction to these reports, have been inexorably colored by exigencies of the day. Time has a way of changing initial public opinion. Indeed, one media flap (like the still-unresolved questions about the Pentagon’s ABLE DANGER data-mining program), can destroy a commission’s carefully cultivated reputation in a matter of days. Consequently, the true measure of such investigations is not just their final reports or recommendations. These panels are ultimately judged on the totality of information they bring into the public realm; what they make knowable, in other words.

    Traditionally, this deeper purpose has meant that final reports of important commissions have been supplemented by publication of the public and private hearings, staff reports and the actual documents used to compile the findings. Take a look at the shelf space occupied by some major probes since 1945: these include the 1946 congressional inquiry into the Pearl Harbor attack (40 volumes); the 1964 Warren Commission investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination (27); and the 1975-76 Church Committee investigation of the intelligence agencies (15).

    By contrast, the 9/11 Commission climaxed in the publication of a single, 567-page volume—without an index. The relative poverty of this effort at the culmination of a twenty-month, $14 million investigation reflects a downward trend in the government’s obligation to disseminate information to the public. This policy began in the 1980s, when, for ideological reasons, the Reagan administration reduced the number and availability of government publications. The worrisome tendency has accelerated with the advent of the Internet.

    Much of this story concerns the US Government Printing Office (GPO), whose lineage as the principal agent for delivering public information goes back to 1860. “Keeping America Informed” is the GPO’s motto, and over the years its imprimatur has acquired symbolic and legal significance. The sober look of a GPO volume conveys weight and authenticity. The symbolism is embedded in the law as well. The US Code still states that “all [federal] printing . . . shall be done at the Government Printing Office.”

    The 9/11 Commission’s first departure from customary practice was its decision not to use the GPO. On May 19, 2004, the commission announced that W.W. Norton, a private New York publisher, would publish the “authorized edition” of its final report. According to the commission’s press release, Norton was selected based on the criteria “affordability, accuracy, availability, and longevity.” There was no mention of a role for the GPO, which had long done a sterling job by these standards.

The Making of a Washington Expert

See also: “The Politics (and Profits) of Information: The 9/11 Commission”

Print

By Max Holland

   

    Designating W.W. Norton as the publisher of the 9/11 Report was not the only plum handed out during Philip Zelikow’s tenure as director of the 9/11 Commission. Zelikow engaged in some blatant cronyism when he arranged for a colleague from the University of Virginia, Tim Naftali, to write a history of US counterterrorism policy from the Johnson to the Clinton administrations.

    The commission’s prime directive was to investigate the 9/11 attacks, of course, but a historical account of counterterrorism policy is the kind of ancillary study that comparable commissions have published. As part of its final report, the Church Committee, which investigated activities of US intelligence agencies, included an invaluable 106-page study of the CIA that was based upon access to classified internal histories.

    But like other aspects of the commission’s work, the Naftali study was not published as part of the commission’s output; it was not even deemed fit for posting on the Internet. Why was it commissioned in  the first place? Naftali, a Canadian citizen at the time, could not review classified materials. His study would have to depend entirely on open sources, meaning that at best it would represent a marginal addition to public knowledge. Naftali was not even a noted expert on the subject.

    Naftali’s unfamiliarity with the topic probably contributed to what happened next: he belatedly turned in a work that was way too long. Indeed, because of its tone and perspective it was quickly deemed unusable, according to sources on the commission. Since there was no time left to edit it, the commissioners would not even agree to have it posted on-line as a monograph.

    There’s an interesting coda to this story, too. Months before the commission closed its doors, in August 2004, some staff members found it odd that Naftali was engaged in research that clearly seemed tangential to his assignment. Sure enough, once the commissioners decided to “pass” on Naftali’s history and gave him permission to use the study any way he liked, he took his manuscript—which had cost US taxpayers at least $15,000—and nine months later published Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism.

    Naftali advertises the book as having been written partly “at the request of the 9/11 Commission,” and markets himself as “the official historian” of the commission, as this description from the CI Centre website reveals. The commissioners reportedly have gagged over this self-aggrandizement, brazen even by Washington standards. They are nonplussed that someone should have secured work from the commission through a personal favor, produced work of no usefulness to the commission, yet managed to exploit the opportunity for his own professional and financial gain.

     Postscript: One of the reviewers who noticed that Naftali’s history of counterterrorism was slap-dash, and bordering on laughable, was Hayden B. Peake, who reviews books for Studies in Intelligence. Writing in the March 2006 of Studies, Peake noted Naftali’s “curious interpretation of intelligence history.” Peake’s review can be read in full here.

In the fall of 2006, Naftali became the director of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library.

This article first appeared in The Washington Spectator, 1 November 2005
© 2005 by Max Holland

The New McCarthyism

Print

By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

 

    For nearly sixty years, Alger Hiss’s defenders have mounted one campaign after another to discredit the mountain of evidence that proves he spied for the Soviet Union.

    First, they tried to smear Hiss’s main accuser, Whittaker Chambers, as a fantasist, liar, and spurned homosexual. When that fell short, Hiss and his defenders invented any number of Baroque theories to rebut hard evidence, including “forgery by typewriter” to explain away portions of classified documents that had been typed on a Hiss-owned machine. Finally, they argued that the case against Hiss was a nefarious conspiracy, a Salem witch trial for the 1940s, orchestrated by such congenital anti-communists as Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover who had only one goal in mind: the destruction of New Deal liberalism, so as to pave the way for the cold war abroad and domestic repression at home.

    The end of the cold war brought new primary sources into play, and Hiss’s defenders—being true believers—raced to exploit these opportunities initially, thinking they could only redound to Hiss’s benefit. In 1992, John Lowenthal, Hiss’s long-time lawyer and a film-maker, prevailed upon Dmitri Volkogonov, a respected Russian general, military historian, and adviser to Russian President Yeltsin on archival policy, to help establish Hiss’s innocence once and for all on humanitarian grounds. In late October Volkogonov did issue a statement, asserting that Hiss was not registered in KGB documents as a recruited agent.[1] Lowenthal promptly claimed this was tantamount to exoneration for his long-suffering client. But within a matter of weeks, Volkogonov felt compelled to issue a retraction. The general volunteered that his inquiry had not encompassed the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Soviet Ministry of Defense, and it was the GRU, not KGB, that ran Hiss.[2]

    The next, unexpected twist in the case came from U.S. archives. In 1995, the NSA released one of its most closely-held secrets: the VENONA intercepts, the name given to coded messages between the Soviet Union and KGB officers stationed in the United States who ran Moscow’s network of spies.[3] Only a fraction of these messages were intercepted and deciphered by what is now known as the National Security Agency (NSA). Yet the VENONA intercepts were sufficient in number and substance to make it clear that Washington had not acted rashly or without reason in internal security investigations, but in response to positive evidence of a vast espionage effort orchestrated from Moscow. And one VENONA intercept, in particular, set Hiss’s shrinking band of defenders back on their heels.

    Number 1822, dated 30 March 1945, was a partially decoded message from the KGB’s Washington station to Moscow headquarters. The cable referred to a well-placed American agent, code-named ALES (pronounced A’-lis), who had been spying for Moscow continuously since 1935. The details conveyed in the message matched, in every particular, known or knowable facts about Hiss. Most importantly, the message noted that ALES, identified as a GRU agent, had been at the recently concluded Yalta conference and had returned to the United States via Moscow.[4] It turned out that only four State Department officials had gone from Yalta to Moscow for further consultations before coming home. One of them was Alger Hiss.

    This new, seemingly damning, revelation brought to mind the old adage: be careful what you wish for. In response, some students of the case, including Victor Navasky, then editorial director of The Nation, depicted VENONA as a sinister U.S. government project “to enlarge post-cold war intelligence gathering capability at the expense of civil liberty,” while the prominent radical lawyer William Kunstler insisted that the messages were forgeries.[5] When that insinuation did not fly, Hiss defenders retreated to their familiar tactics of re-imagining the evidence. In 2000, John Lowenthal abandoned the fiction that the intercepts had been forged and took them seriously—so seriously, in fact, that he now claimed VENONA 1822 actually exonerated Hiss. When read the right way, Lowenthal contended, the message proved Hiss could not be ALES.[6] In short order, Lowenthal’s outré analysis was so thoroughly demolished by two scholars that no one (including Hiss defenders, as we shall see) takes it seriously any more.[7]

    There matters stood, more or less, until a day-long conference at New York University on April 5 to inaugurate the university’s new Center for the United States and the Cold War. “Alger Hiss and History” was the featured topic, on the grounds that the Hiss trial was a “major moment in post-World War II American that reinforced Cold War ideology and accelerated America’s late-1940s turn to the right.”[8] Putting aside this tendentious framing, the dominant event of the conference was the presentation of a joint research paper by Kai Bird, a contributing editor for The Nation, and Svetlana Chervonnaya, a Moscow-based Russian historian.[9]The two arrived at the conference claiming to have dramatic new evidence and answers.[10]

The JFK Files: Cuba, Kennedy, and the Cold War

Print

By Max Holland

 

    Just when you thought you deserved a respite, here comes the thirtieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. More than 450 books and tens of thousands of articles have been published, and numerous documentaries and feature films produced, about November 22, 1963. Yet this anniversary will yield a bumper crop of offerings in every medium.

    The persistent disbelief attached to the Warren Report, the ceaseless re-examinations, have to be grounded in unfinished business, some yearning that goes well beyond narrow questions such as whether all pertinent government documents have been released. In a letter to The New York Times, William Manchester skillfully identified this unrequited need last year. The author of The Death of a President wrote:

There is an aesthetic principle here. . . . If you put the murdered president of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the president’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something.

A conspiracy, of course, would do the job nicely.

    If great events demand great causes, as Manchester argues, thirst for a conspiracy will never be slaked. As he stands, Oswald is unequal to the task of assassinating a president who, fairly or not, is sometimes rated higher than Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. But perhaps this anniversary ought to be an occasion to re-examine that imbalance, if possible, adjust the scales, and make the assassination coherent. In addition to marking thirty years, this November is the first major anniversary since the geopolitical rules changed and exaggerated passions and fears abated. Its more than possible that our understanding of the assassination, like so much else, has been obscured by cold war exigencies. New documentary evidence, not only about the assassination but also about Kennedy’s Cuba policy, has been released, and principal officials are talking, some after a long silence.

    In his first Weekly published after the assassination, I.F. Stone wrote a passionate and piercing column on the fallen president entitled “We All Had a Finger on That Trigger”:

Let us ask ourselves honest questions. How many Americans have not assumed--with approval--that the CIA was probably trying to find a way to assassinate Castro? How many would not applaud if the CIA succeeded? . . . Have we not become conditioned to the notion that we should have a secret agency of government--the CIA--with secret funds, to wield the dagger beneath the cloak against leaders we dislike? Even some of our best young liberal intellectuals can see nothing wrong in this picture except that the “operational” functions of [the] CIA should be kept separate from its intelligence evaluations! . . Where the right to kill is so universally accepted, we should not be surprised if our young president was slain.

    Drawing a rhetorical, unproven connection between the cold war mindset and Oswald’s stunning act was vintage Izzy Stone. With virtually every American still in shock, it took a journalistic dissenter to hold up the assassination against a backdrop of political violence contributed to by the United States. In retrospect, I.F. Stone was closer to understanding the context of the assassination than almost anyone at the time.

    The full story is a bipartisan one. The Eisenhower administration was hardly shy about subverting unsympathetic Third World regimes, and uncounted soldiers and civilians died during CIA-backed shadow wars and coups in the 1950s. But ostensibly adverse trends apparent in 1959 raised a new question: If thousands of deaths were acceptable, why not the murder of particular persons? It might be a less costly way to nip unfriendly regimes in the bud or oust a pro-Western but repressive ruler who might engender a Communist takeover. “Executive action,” the assassination of actual or potential leaders deemed inimical, was added to the CIA’s bag of covert tactics. In fragmented and frequently violent Third World polities, executive action appeared quite feasible, the rewards worthwhile, the risks tolerable.