Veteran journalist George Wilson writes in the July 10 National Journal about his experiences with press leaks of "national security secrets." Wilson explains that these “revelations" are not always what they appear to be. His column is available at http://www.cdi.org/PDFs/071006_Column.pdf and it is below.


MONDAY, JULY 10, 2006 5

CongressDailyAM

http://nationaljournal.com/pubs/congressdaily/

By George C. Wilson

It’s no secret to anybody who has covered the military
for any length of time that our leaders, including presidents,
reveal military secrets to help themselves politically.

This do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do philosophy is
practiced by both political parties.
At his very first presidential news conference on Feb.
29, 1964, Lyndon Johnson revealed to the world that the
United States, in deepest secrecy, had developed and
flight tested the A-11 spy plane, which could go 2,000
miles an hour and climb to 70,000 feet.

At the time, I was a reporter at Aviation Week and
Space Technology Magazine. Robert Hotz, the magazine’s
editor, knew about the A-11 but had withheld publishing
anything about the plane at the government’s
fervent request. White House Press Secretary Pierre
Salinger told me that Johnson broke the story of the A-
11 because the administration had learned that Aviation
Week was about to publish it. This was not true.
Other government officials told me Johnson felt the
political need to make headlines at his first presidential
news conference and wanted to combat charges by Republican
presidential challenger Barry Goldwater that
Johnson was soft on defense.

Five months later, on July 24, 1964, when the Johnson-
Goldwater campaign was heating up, Johnson revealed
another big military secret: the United States had developed
an even more capable spy plane than the A-11. It
was designated the SR-71. New York Times humorist
Russell Baker noted on Sept. 20, 1964: “President Johnson
has developed an odd habit. Whenever he comes
under political attack, he hits back with news bulletins
from the wonderful world of hardware.”

In 1967, when I was a military correspondent at The
Washington Post, I learned this top secret: the United
States had perfected a technology called MIRV — multiple
independently targetable re-entry vehicle — which
enabled one intercontinental ballistic missile to drop Hbombs
on several Soviet cities hundreds of miles apart
during a single flight. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
asked the Post not to run the story and told me his
research director, Harold Brown, would explain why.
Brown said the Soviets almost certainly knew we had
perfected the technique of packing several H-bombs
into the nose of one missile and sending them against a
single target, shotgun style. But they probably didn’t
know, he said, that we had advanced the MIRV technology
to the multi-city capability.

If the Post still felt compelled to
run a story on MIRV, Brown said it
would be in the national interest
to leave out the latest technical
advances. My editors decided that
MIRV had such huge implications
for arms control, missile defense
and offense that the public and Congress should know
about the technology.

My story ran on Jan. 29, 1967. It was short on secret
technical details and long on policy implications. Shortly
after publication, McNamara revealed many more of its
technical details in an interview with Life magazine.

In 1971, I was the only reporter cleared to attend the
secret federal court sessions on whether the Post
should be allowed to resume publication of the top-secret
Pentagon Papers. My role was not that of a reporter,
but to advise Post lawyers on the validity of
government claims that the Pentagon Papers contained
deep, dark secrets that would harm the country
if revealed.

The Post team showed the judges time after time that
what government prosecutors were claiming as deep secrets
had actually been in the public domain. The thinly
prepared government prosecutors fell back on one crucial
disclosure in the Papers to make its case that publishing
them would endanger American lives.

Tis key contention was the text of an intercept from
a North Vietnamese military communications station.
No less an expert than Adm. Noel Gayler, director of the
hush-hush National Security Agency, had sent a sealed
envelope to Appeals Court Judge David Bazelon contending
that publishing the intercept would tip off the
enemy to our eavesdropping on this valuable source
and lead to its shut-down.

What Gayler didn’t know, or didn’t bother to tell the
judge, was that the very same intercept had been
cleared by the Pentagon for publication in a public hearing
book issued by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Luckily, I had that hearing book with me during
the secret hearing in Bazelon’s chambers and showed it
to him, leaving government lawyers speechless.

The point here is that secrecy is in the eye of the beholder.
It is easy for government officials to forget about
their own behavior in handling secrets and sink into
demagoguery when others reveal uncomfortable truths
about issues the general public knows little about.
Presidents often try to shoot down the messengers,
as President Bush is now trying to do with the New York
Times. But with the Republican-controlled Congress
willingly becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the
Bush administration rather than fulfilling its constitutional
oversight obligations — to the point of refusing to
hold hearings on Bush’s questionable if not illegal practice
of eavesdropping on thousands
of telephone calls without obtaining
warrants — the Times and other publications
have by default become the
check on executive power that the
Founding Fathers had in mind.

We should be grateful for this thin,
red line of defense.
CongressDailyFORWARD OBSERVER

Leaky Logic
n “Forward Observer,” an insider’s look at
defense and military topics, appears every
other Monday in CongressDailyAM.
Special Correspondent George C. Wilson can
be reached at gwilson@nationaljournal.com.

Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information @ www.cdi.org/smrp
202 797-5271 in DC
301 840-8992 in MD
301 221-3897 cell
winslowwheeler@comcast.net