Moran Company Confessions

Revealing CIA Secrets
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78590-006-8
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

The CIA has been anxious about people wanting to tell its stories. Indeed, its effectiveness as an intelligence service hinges to a large degree on its ability to protect sensitive information. As an oft-quoted CIA proverb neatly sums up: 'The secret of our success is the secret of our success.'The disclosure of sources and methods, information that has the potential to endanger lives and put the success of its operations at risk has always been regarded, understandably, as something to be avoided at all costs.How, then, is the CIA to acclimatise when this cherished rule is increasingly bypassed, with the memoirs of ex-CIA officers regularly reaching bestseller lists and being adapted for Hollywood? Using interviews, private correspondence and declassified files, award-winning author Christopher Moran examines how the CIA treads (and, some might say, oversteps) the fine line between justifiable censorship on the grounds of security, and petty, overbearing redaction for the sake of reputation.From stealing draft manuscripts to authorising its own programme of 'memoirs', Company Confessions details how the CIA grapples with the notion of secrecy when faced with the demands of an open and democratic America.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Moran, Christopher

Leseproben

Chapter 1 Herbert Yardley: Playing for High Stakes
I. A ‘Magnificent Book’
The truth never hurts. There is too much secrecy in the world. Governments are run by a small clique. They connive and scheme and when they get in trouble they ask the rest of us to settle their disputes by warfare. If a publisher in each country would do what Bobbs-Merrill are doing, a big step would be taken for international peace. Let the people know what is going on. Let them see how governments are conducted. Herbert Yardley, 4 March 1931.1 In December 1930, with the United States slipping deeper into the worst economic depression of the twentieth century, a former star high school quarterback, starved for money, and with a wife, mistress and young child to support, began writing a memoir of his time in government service. Billeted in a dingy, small second-floor apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, the man, in his early forties, was not an accomplished writer and utterly detested spending his days camped inside, tapping away at a rented typewriter. He later recalled: ‘I could do no more than stare into space. For days I pecked out a few lines and threw them into the fire … I wanted to weep for words’.2 Adding to his feelings of frustration and foreboding, Manhattan’s literary and journalistic heavy-hitters poured cold water on the project, telling him, ‘You might have a story; I doubt it.’3 Scrambling for a living, the man persevered and eventually the words started to flow. After seven weeks of hard graft, working through the night, the man (‘dead on my feet and hollow-eyed’) delivered his manuscript to George T. Bye, New York’s premier literary agent, whose list of clients included such personages as the future First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and the legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh.4 To the man’s astonishment, Bye considered it a ‘magnificent book’ – ‘ten times better than my most optimistic expectations’.5 Not long after, a deal was successfully brokered with Bobbs-Merrill, a publishing house from Indiana. George Shively, a senior editor at the publisher, believed that the book had all the hallmarks of a bestseller; indeed, he even predicted that it should ‘make the front page of every paper in the world’.6 The excitement, however, was tempered by anxiety, for publication would represent the biggest leak of classified information in US history. There was a real danger, suggested Shively, that everyone associated with the book would ‘be charged with treason and shot at sunrise’.7 The book in question was The American Black Chamber by Herbert Yardley, a colourful and controversial character who, in two decades, went from being a precocious small-town boy from the Midwest to head America’s first professional and permanent cryptography bureau, funded jointly by the State Department and the US Army. Published on 1 June 1931, the book detailed the inner workings of the ‘Cipher Bureau’, which Yardley led from its creation in 1917 until its dissolution in 1929.8 Among the secrets disclosed was the shocking revelation that Yardley’s codebreakers had intercepted and deciphered Japanese diplomatic traffic during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22, meaning that the US diplomatic delegation knew exactly how far they could push Japanese representatives on the critical issue of naval ratios. More broadly, the book revealed that the US had read the communications of some twenty-one countries, including friendly nations such as Great Britain, over the course of the bureau’s twelve-year existence. Generally praised by the press, it outraged the cryptanalytic community and ensured that its author would never work for the US government again, a sad demise for a man whose talents and experience would surely have benefited his country in the future cryptographic conflict against Japan during World War Two. In consolation, the book made Yardley a national celebrity, something he relished. When he was not on the radio or lecturing, he was socialising with actors and actresses, famous authors, even Nobel Prize winners and future presidential candidates.9 A far cry indeed from the cloistered world of a cryptographer. The story of The American Black Chamber, scarcely remembered today, is hugely significant in the context of US spy memoirs. First, it confirmed that knowledge of intelligence work was a profitable commodity and, by extension, established money as a key motivating factor as to why spies might be tempted to publish. Finding himself in hard times, in the midst of the Great Depression, Yardley exploited his secret knowledge out of financial necessity; although he did not make a fortune, the rewards were plain to see. Second, it showed that there was an enormous global market for recollections by former intelligence officers. The American Black Chamber was a bestseller not only in the United States, but overseas, especially in countries where the hidden hand of US espionage was felt. Third, Yardley’s pioneering book established many of the qualities of the spy memoir genre. It followed a quasi-historical narrative, arranging its material in a chronologically sequential order and anchoring the content behind a single, clear story. It included ‘revelations’. It gloried in technical detail, yet contained moments of high-drama and adventure. Fourth, it triggered a fevered discussion about whether the book had harmed national security, with critics arguing that the disclosures had prompted Japan to improve the security of its cryptosystems. Debates about the potential damage inflicted by spy books would be commonplace in the years to come. Finally, for all the positives of The American Black Chamber in establishing the embryonic form of the nascent spy memoir genre, it might also be said to have had a chilling effect on memoir production in the short term. For the rest of his life, Yardley became a ‘watched’ man and an outcast. The authorities impounded the manuscript of a further volume of reminiscences and scrupulously examined for classified information the trashy spy fiction stories he produced to make ends meet. In its hour of need after Pearl Harbor, the US government refused his services and then, suspecting him of harbouring pro-Axis sympathisers, watched his movements and staked out a restaurant he opened in Washington. Legislation was also passed, triggered by Yardley’s writings, to criminalise the unauthorised disclosure of cryptographic material. In short, he became a cautionary tale for any aspiring memoirist looking to follow suit.10 II. Codebreaker
I knew that I had one of the most dramatic stories in American history. Herbert Yardley, 14 June 1931.11 Being a pariah in intelligence circles was not the life that Yardley had imagined for himself when, in late 1912, at the age of twenty-four, fresh out of college, he became a code clerk and telegrapher in the State Department’s code room in Washington, DC. Yardley came to the nation’s capital burning with ambition. His formative years growing up in Middle America had given him the taste of success. He had been a high-achiever in the classroom, especially at mathematics, and was an outstanding sportsman. He earned good money on the side by playing poker in the smoke-filled saloons and dive bars in the small frontier town of Worthington, Indiana, and, to the envy of his male friends, was unerringly successful at chasing members of the opposite sex. At State, Yardley became fascinated with the magic and mystery of cryptography. In his spare time, he became interested in the construction of US diplomatic codes, and tried to solve them. The White House was horrified and amazed when, in less than two hours, he translated an encoded message from Colonel Edward House to President Woodrow Wilson. He then embarrassed the State Department by penetrating its system of secret communications. As a direct result of this cryptographic stunt, a new method of encoding State Department messages was introduced. Leveraging his unique talents, he charmed his way to an army commission and a pay rise to $1,000 a year.12 US entry into the war in April 1917 gave Yardley the perfect platform to use his cryptographic expertise. His apprenticeship complete, he was promptly made head of MI-8, the covert and deniable cryptologic branch of the newly created Military Intelligence Section in the Army War College Division. As the historian David Kahn has argued, although MI-8’s creation was a secret, ‘it marked one of the most significant steps in American intelligence’.13 For the first time in its history, the US had an official agency to break foreign codes. From humble beginnings, with just two civilian clerks on its books, it grew to an organisation of 151 men and women at its peak.14 After the armistice was signed in 1918, Yardley was given a Distinguished Service Medal and then used his considerable powers of persuasion to convince the army to extend the life of his unit into peacetime, with himself remaining as chief. He supported his case by proudly declaring that, in eighteen months, his staff had read nearly 11,000 messages of eight foreign governments.15 An unexceptional brownstone three-storey building just off Fifth Avenue in New York was selected as the organisation’s new home, renamed the ‘American Black Chamber’ after the secret...