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Imagine a Society Without Secrets
The Intelligence Culture in the National Security Age

By SAUL LANDAU

...In the early 1990s, Aldrich Ames, a trusted Agency big shot with access to the family jewels, admitted (after being caught) that he had traded burning national secrets for cold cash.

How could the CIA have permitted such lax security, Congress naively wondered, as if greed and treachery only recently arose as characteristics of human behavior? They focused on how and why the CIA let Aldrich Ames go undetected for years while he conducted his lucrative transactions. But the larger and most obvious questions didn't arise from the hearings: Why should a republic possess so many vital secrets? If they were so vital, how did our government survive after the Soviets learned them? What's left to give away? And to whom?

We had suffered a similar shock in the 1980s. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger worried publicly that pre-Ames traitor spies inside US intelligence agencies had delivered to the Soviets most of our national security secrets. Add Ames's top-secret information to those documents pilfered throughout the 1980s and there could hardly have been many top secrets our former enemy didn't know.

However, possession of these secrets didn't seem to help the Soviets. Indeed, no sooner did they obtain our vital secrets than they collapsed....