By Bruce Grant
December 30, 2010
Courtesy Of "The Age"
The wholesale release of official communications by WikiLeaks has been revealing and entertaining, condemned and applauded by the usual suspects, but it hasn't yet touched the heart of the matter, which is the state's secret life.
Exposing what diplomats and their sources say to each other brings pleasure to some and grief to others, but so far it is merely evidence that the diplomatic community is lively and well informed. The secret state is another matter. Diplomacy has been described as a "conversation between strangers", recognising the diversity of states and the need to acknowledge the concerns and interests of others. The secret state regards strangers as adversaries, even enemies, and sets out to intimidate, suborn or subdue them with whatever means are at hand.
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Niccolo Machiavelli put the argument succinctly: "Where the very safety of the country depends upon the resolution to be taken, no consideration of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, nor of glory or shame, should be allowed to prevail . . . The only question should be, what course will save the life and liberty of the country?" Accordingly, he advised his prince "how not to be good".
We have progressed in some ways since the 16th century but are still captive to the fears and designs of states living in a lawless, anarchic world outside their borders.
The secret state keeps growing. World War II ends but the Cold War begins. The Cold War ends, then comes September 11, 2001, undetected by the intelligence agencies, who are nevertheless rewarded with more money, more personnel and more power.
The spy is never out of fashion. The world's second-oldest profession, like the first, persists in all civilisations, and therefore in art, history and entertainment. Practitioners know their societies are ambivalent about what they do, but there is a demand, which creates the supply. The reputation for seedy excitement keeps them in the public eye. Diplomacy is patient, intricate and devoted to compromise, which makes it boring.
Within its borders, the state monopolises lawmaking and law-enforcement. But in the world outside, no authority lays down the law. So the state believes itself to be obliged to take all necessary measures to protect itself. It abhors, and severely punishes, illegal, immoral and lethal activities undertaken by its citizens within its borders, but mounts such clandestine operations itself.
As international law becomes stronger, especially in the field of human rights, the flaw in the state's moral authority is increasingly exposed; its secret agents are seen as violators of both human decency and probably law. The secret state in Russia during the Cold War and in China now is well documented, but it is widespread among the world's 200 or so states.
It is difficult to imagine how former Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos and president Suharto of Indonesia, among others, could have accumulated so much private wealth and used the police and the military to destabilise their political opponents and stifle dissent without the active support of the intelligence agencies.
A spectacular example of intrusion into the private lives of political opponents was revealed in 2000 in Peru, when 2300 videotapes were released by a disgruntled head of state security showing the elite of Peruvian society, especially politicians, business leaders, editors and military chiefs, caught in extramarital affairs and financial graft, visiting brothels and taking drugs. The tapes were used to blackmail the subjects into supporting the former president, Alberto Fujimori, who later resigned and fled into exile in Japan.
Even in liberal democracies such as Australia, the secret state is protected by bipartisan rules of neither confirming nor denying its activities, or even its existence. Only an exceptionally strong civil society can stand against it. The United States, which is the current target of WikiLeaks, has as good a reputation as any in that respect, as shown by the support of the US Supreme Court for The New York Times in 1971 for printing the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the gap between what the US government was doing in Vietnam and what it told the American people.
American scholar and diplomat George Kennan, a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War, distinguished between intelligence and "clandestine operations" in foreign countries, the former being acceptable to him, the latter not. He wrote: "We easily become ourselves the sufferers from these methods of deception. For they inculcate in their authors, as well as their intended victims, unlimited cynicism, causing them to lose all realistic understanding of the relationship, in what they are doing, of ends and means."
He has a point. The US secret state has a fabled reputation and is seen by conspiracy theorists as the author of almost everything (including the September 11 terror attacks).
The late US senator Patrick Moynihan created a wave of consternation in intelligence circles by calling for an end to the culture of secrecy (and transferring the activities of the CIA to the State Department). As an anti-communist liberal and vice-chairman of the Senate select committee on intelligence, his argument was robustly American - secrecy overrated adversaries and protected inefficiency. Openness was an American comparative advantage; secrecy was for people who could not produce the goods and appreciate the importance of real information.
He, too, has a point. As anyone who has worked in government knows, the value of secrecy is overrated. A vast industry of fairly ordinary quality is given undue importance by being restricted in ever-decreasing circles to those few who are entitled to know.
The test of the value of WikiLeaks to global peace and civilisation is whether it will assist in reforming the state or merely make it more diligent in keeping its secrets.
Bruce Grant, author and former diplomat, was among a group of distinguished fellows of the Australian Institute of International Affairs appointed in 2010.
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