Epic Battles Over Secrecy Will Be Ignored by Uninterested Public

It’s always the apocalypse, for a while, until it’s meaningless.

In 1977 a former CIA analyst named Frank Snepp published an unauthorized book on the American response to the collapse of South Vietnam. Snepp depicted a CIA that ran for the exits, abandoning local allies and secret documents in a panicked race for home. Horrified at the agency’s depiction as a graceless, amoral bureaucracy, the CIA lashed out like a graceless, amoral bureaucracy: it successfully sued to take every penny Snepp had made from the book, eventually winning a Supreme Court decision that would impose the agency’s pre-publication review process on everything the former analyst might ever write about the world of intelligence agencies.

Then the grand crusade wound down, and Snepp ended up producing local TV news and living in Los Angeles, almost the very definition of an anticlimax. The CIA somehow survived the unauthorized revelations, and at last word was still in business. Frank Snepp had to be crushed, punished, and suppressed right up until the moment he could be more or less dropped as old, though officially silenced, news. “My own reward,” Snepp has written, “was a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1980 that left me impoverished and gagged for life, unable to write even limericks about the CIA without official approval.” If you asked a thousand randomly chosen Americans how the CIA treated its Vietnamese partners during the fall of Saigon, how many would have an answer?

Or take the case of Spycatcher, a memoir by former MI5 operative Peter Wright. The British government Snepped the hell out of Wright before the 1987 publication of his book, dragging him through two and a half years of legal challenges before the British Law Lords proved themselves somewhat less ridiculous than the United States Supreme Court. Wright’s obituary in the New York Times nicely captured the dilemma that an overwrought Margaret Thatcher imposed on her government:

Her Government argued at home that Mr. Wright’s tales were essentially just that. At the same time her Cabinet Secretary had to tell a skeptical Australian court that they were essentially correct and should be suppressed as a threat to Britain’s national security.

That’s the whole eternal dynamic, right there, the self-destroying story that governments usually tell about insiders who reveal their stories to the rest of the world: don’t believe a word he said, and that son-of-a-bitch revealed all our secrets. Again, MI5 somehow survived.

More recently, a long series of whistleblowers tried to inform the American public about the activities of the National Security Agency. One, William Binney, warned that the United States was becoming a “turnkey totalitarian state”: not one yet, but with all the right tools in place to make it happen. Other NSA veterans—Thomas Drake, Russell Tice—tried to make the same argument in public, with a similar absence of results.

Elsewhere, longtime officers of the U.S. military spent the late-Bush and early-Obama years arguing vociferously against the “long war” that the country had drifted into, pointing out the dangerous shallowness of a counterinsurgency doctrine that looked at the British imperialism and saw a useful recipe. Gian Gentile was very much noticed in the military, and not noticed much at all in the rest of the country.

The reality is that counterhegemonic narratives barely sprout in the soil of contemporary civil society, a creature thoroughly subordinated to the workings of government. As much as officials panic over whistleblowers and critics, they’re nearly the only people who take much notice. State power is the world. We just live in it.