Operational Reality

The secret of success is secrecy. -- Wyndham Lewis



"...as soon as the knowledge of the cipher is widespread, the code will change again. Evidence shows it is already changing." -- T. Allen Greenfield



WaPo: In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration. "I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.



Peter Galison "The classified universe, as it is sometimes called, is certainly not smaller, and very probably much larger than the unclassified one. The U.S. added a net 250 million classified pages in 2003. By comparison, the entire system of Harvard libraries—over a hundred of them—added about 220,000 volumes (about sixty million pages, a number not far from the acquisition rate at other comparably massive universal depositories such as the Library of Congress, the British Museum, or the New York Public Library). Contemplate these numbers: about five times as many pages are being added to the classified universe than are being brought to the storehouses of human learning including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories on the planet.

Epistemology asks how knowledge can be uncovered and secured. Anti-epistemology asks how knowledge can be covered and obscured. Classification, the anti-epistemology par excellence, is the art of nontransmission."



"When you’re dealing with these things everyday, I very often ask: Why is this classified? Overclassification is, I agree, something that very properly ought to be addressed in a serious way." -- Donald Rumsfield



Robert Anderson: I was a demolitions technician with the Air Force who was reassigned to work with the CIA’s Air America operation in Laos. We turned in our military IDs cards and uniforms and were issued a State Department ID card and dressed in blue jeans. We were told if captured we were to ask for diplomatic immunity, if alive. We carried out military missions on a daily basis all across the countries of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam.

We also knew that if killed or captured that we would probably not be searched for and our families back home in the U.S. would be told we had been killed in an auto accident of some kind back in Thailand and our bodies not recovered.

In Laos the program I was attached to carried out a systematic assassination of people who were identified as not loyal to U.S. goals. It was called the Phoenix program and eliminated an estimated 60,000 people across Indochina. We did an amazing amount of damage to the civilian infrastructure of the country, and still lost the war. I saw one team of mercenaries I was training show us a bag of ears of dead civilians they had killed. This was how they verified their kills for us. The Green Berets that day were telling them to just take photos of the dead, leave the ears."



"The name of the game is 'Find Your Adversary'. Your adversary's game plan is to convince you that he does not exist." - William S. Burroughs

How to Master Secret Work --