Loose Lips’: U.S. Capabilities Vital to War on Terror Being Jeopardized by Dangerous Disclosures

(Washington, D.C.): Today’s Washington Post features a front page news article disclosing the existence of what it ominously calls a “shadow government” — a cadre of as many as 200 senior officials said to be working outside of the Nation’s capital in two secret locations. This is a most regrettable revelation as it will almost certainly lead to the compromise of one of the most sensitive and, arguably, one of them most important federal activities since September 11th: Ensuring the continuity of accountable and representative government in the face of terrorists’ manifest ambitions to “decapitate” our country by destroying its leadership.

While the Post exercised a modicum of restraint by acceding to Bush Administration demands not to identify the two locations, it is predictable that, by calling attention to the existence of such facilities, the paper has effectively challenged every other reporter on the planet to be the one to get credit for disclosing their precise whereabouts. One of the authors of the initial article, Barton Gellman, gave further, tantalizing hints in an interview on National Public Radio this morning: Both facilities are on the East Coast; one is in the military chain of command; one has been routinely updated, the other has obsolescent equipment dating from the Cold War days. Ready, set, go!

A few years back, in a fit of the “Cold War’s over” irresponsibility, congressional leaders saw fit to reveal the existence of a secret bunker at the Greenbrier Hotel complex, created covertly in the 1950s for the purpose of evacuating and surviving the legislative branch in the event of emergency. It can only be hoped — probably vainly — that some other such facility has been prepared in the meantime. If so, there is a chance that our constitutional form of government could continue to function at some level, even under the extremely difficult circumstances imposed by a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) attack on Washington.

More likely, no such preparation has been made, in light of the high costs associated with replicating compromised facilities and the extreme contempt for Continuity of Government (COG) activities expressed by people like former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State/White House Chief of Staff James Baker during the Bush 41 era and the Clinton national security team.

In World War II, those with knowledge of the movements of convoys were warned that “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” Today, in what some have called World War IV (III having been the Cold War), indiscreet comments about the existence and functioning of COG operations, personnel and sites invites their compromise. At best, that will mean relocation with all of the attendant expense and disruptions; at worst, it will mean the destruction of these vital “nodes” and with them, perhaps, the government we will then need more than ever.

Similar indiscretion has recently taken another casualty in the U.S. capabilities to wage the war on terrorism as effectively as possible: False, but widely repeated, claims by unnamed sources in the Defense Department that the recently established Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) was planning to use disinformation to manipulate foreign media and governments. These unsubstantiated charges were repeated and amplified by the New York Times and other media to the point that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld felt the OSI had been so badly “crippled” that he had no choice but to shut it down.

Even though the Office of Strategic Influence was not going to engage in disinformation, the fact is that keeping such vital activities as strategic influence and continuity of government as far removed as possible from the enemies’ eyes is not only necessary to maximize the effectiveness of such operations. It is usually essential to their ability to operate at all. Joseph Persico op.ed. article published in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal makes the case for secrecy in such matters. His injunction “Shhhhh!” should be followed scrupulously lest we be obliged to fight the war on terror disarmed of needed capabilities and more vulnerable to our enemies than we can afford to be.

A scene takes place in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” in which a subordinate, Menas, sidles up to the Roman general, Pompey, and says he could easily cut the throats of Pompey’s rivals, including Marc Antony, thus leaving Pompey in power. Pompey responds that Menas should have just done it. “And not have spoke on’t! In me ’tis villany; in thee’t had been good service.”

This situation seems to reflect the fate of the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Influence. Good idea, chaps, if you’d just kept your mouths shut. But once it became public knowledge that part of the office’s function was, allegedly, to sow deliberate misinformation to confound our adversaries, President Bush and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, backed off as if someone had handed them a dead rat. The falsehood is the weapon of nasty guys. Remember Hitler and his “Big Lie”?

The apparently swift rise and fall of the OSI may have given strategic lying a bad name. The real test is who is being lied to, about what, and, in history’s timeline, when.

Those now iconographic scenes of Allied troops successfully storming the Normandy beaches were underpinned by a lie of Paul Bunyanesque proportions. That American scrapper, Gen. George S. Patton, much to his chagrin was given command of a phony force which was supposedly preparing to invade occupied France across the Dover Straits, the narrowest neck of the English Channel as part of a deception plan labelled “Fortitude.” A theatrical set designer was fabricating thousands of rubber planes, tanks and artillery and inflating them near the Straits to reinforce the deception for spying eyes and aerial photographers.

It worked. Just one week before D-Day, Adolf Hitler confided to the Japanese ambassador to Germany, Hiroshi Oshima, that while the Allies might make diversionary feints in Norway, Brittany, and Normandy, the Allies actually “will come with the establishment of an all-out second front in the area of the straits of Dover.”

Oshima thereupon did what diplomats do. He cabled Hitler’s words back to the Japanese foreign office. The United States was cracking the Japanese code; and thus, the Allies learned that Hitler’s major force would not be awaiting them at Normandy, but, mistakenly, at the Dover Straits.

In the extremis of war, even lying to actual or potential allies has its own integrity. When, in 1940-41, his country stood alone and vulnerable, Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s keenest objective was to draw the United States into the war against Germany. Indeed, he charged British intelligence with advancing that end.

Consequently, British spooks provided President Franklin Roosevelt with a purloined map showing how the Germans intended to divide South America into five Nazi vassal states; showed him a stolen document revealing a German plot to overthrow a pro-American regime in Bolivia; and even provided proof that the Germans already had 5,000 troops in Brazil poised to threaten the Panama Canal. FDR cited this intelligence in his speeches and fireside chats.

It was all a tissue of lies fabricated by the British. But Roosevelt was not about to scrutinize to death intelligence that would help him lead American public opinion along the course he wanted, war against Germany.

When Roosevelt was planning to invade North Africa in 1942, key to his strategy was to minimize French resistance to the seizure of these African colonies before the Germans could grab them. A key weapon? The baldfaced lie. Roosevelt had his secret emissary to the French, Robert Murphy, inflate the number of Americans in the U.S. invasion fleet by 400%, a disincentive for the French to put up much of a fight.

That’s the upside of disinformation employed against friend or foe. The dread downside is the “blowback” in which deceptions planted among one’s enemies — and expected to go no further — come back to haunt the planter. Unwitting allies may believe the lie and act on it to our detriment. Newspapers report the falsehood to unintended readers in the wrong countries. Our own government agencies, not in on the scam, act on erroneous information. All of this has happened, at one time or another, to U.S. disinformation efforts.

Even this newspaper was a blowback victim in the 1980s when it innocently reported a story based on Reagan administration disinformation concocted to show that Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi faced serious internal opposition. Likewise, the Pentagon’s inflated body counts and unfounded optimism during the Vietnam War, when subsequently exposed, served only to damage the military’s credibility. The blowback is the gas attack in which the wind wafts the poison back onto the sender.

But let’s be frank. Even though the Office of Strategic Influence has been strangled in its cradle, the function of deceiving our adversaries will live on in one form or another, practiced in one place or another, just as deception has gone on ever since the serpent misled Eve and the Greeks left the Trojans a gift horse. The point is, as Pompey said, “Don’t tell me, just do it.”

Mr. Persico is the author, most recently, of “Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage” (Random House, 2001).