The Pentagon is having paroxysms over No Easy Day, by Matt Bissonnette (writing as Mark Owen), which hit bookstores earlier this week. “Let’s cut through it,” said George Little, the Pentagon press secretary. “Sensitive and classified information is contained in the book.” Little’s declaration should be coupled with a statement made last month by Lt. Col. James Gregory, in which he warned that if classified material was discovered in the book, the military would “defer to the Department of Justice” on the matter. Likewise, before the book’s release, Jeh Charles Johnson, General Counsel for the Department of Defense, put Bissonnette on notice in a letter, writing: “The Department is considering pursuing against you, and all those acting in concert with you, all remedies legally available to us in light of this situation.” Taken together, the statements suggest that the Pentagon is willing to go thermonuclear.
Bissonnette is therefore putting the secrecy apparatus of the United States to the test, and we will soon learn just how broken, politicized, and hypocritical the system really is. If the Justice Department refrains from airdropping lawyers onto the SEAL’s hometown, it will send a message that nondisclosure agreements are mere formalities. But if it does go after Bissonnette, it will signal that the only leaks actively pursued are those inconvenient to the White House. After all, if the Justice Department really cared about illegal revelations of the Osama bin Laden raid, half of the West Wing would be in chains today.
The Obama reelection campaign is all but built on the president having personally fast-roped from a Black Hawk, knife in his teeth, and taken point on the mission. The amount of material leaked is astounding. In the post-assassination glory-grab, we learned about stealth helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles, the role and capabilities of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office in mapping out the compound, the CIA agents on the ground (and now in prison)—even the name of the canine paratrooper present on the mission (Cairo). The New Yorker dutifully published the breathless, “official” account of the raid. (It wasn’t leaked by some guy in the mailroom.) And for a unit that isn’t even officially acknowledged, we now know an awful lot about SEAL Team Six.
But it’s good to see the White House taking operational security seriously. In the aftermath of Act of Valor and Zero Dark Thirty, maybe officials are just exhausted from facilitating VIP access to so many filmmakers. And therein lies the problem: By fostering a culture of “permissible leaks,” the administration has set an example for the whole of government. As the saying goes, the ship of state is the only ship that leaks from the top. And the line on what, exactly, is permissible has blurred to a soft haze.
Perusing No Easy Day, it’s hard to figure out what, exactly, we didn’t already know about operational matters. A casual glance at history says that this is an extraordinarily cautious recounting of events. It’s not like Bissonnette revealed the secret history of DEVGRU—something its founder did in the 1990s. Likewise, a mere six years after founding Delta Force, Col. Charles Beckwith wrote a book about it.
To see what real damage to national security looks like, Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: CIA Diary is a good place to start. For catastrophic revelations of sensitive material, The American Black Chamber, by Herbert Yardley stands as the worst-case scenario. Yardley was one of the most talented cryptographers in the world, founding the U.S. Cipher Bureau (precursor to the National Security Agency) in 1919. He was a genuine war hero, and among his greatest accomplishments was breaking Ja, the encryption method used by the Japanese. When he lost his job at the State Department, he wrote his book, and exposed the extent and sophistication of U.S. code-breaking operations. The book was so revealing, in fact, that one of its editors worried that they’d “all be charged with treason and shot at sunrise.” The Japanese government overhauled its cryptography program after publication of The American Black Chamber, and arguably strengthened its hand going into World War II.
When put in context, Bissonnette’s book is quite tame. Had he submitted the manuscript to the publication review boards at the Defense Department and CIA, it’s unclear what would have been the result. Anecdotal evidence and an internal investigation suggest that, at least at Langley, political considerations are as important as operational matters, and the book would have been shot dead. So if the system is broken, and the entire secrecy apparatus is politicized, why not gamble? If Obama administration is serious, Matt Bissonnette will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But it’s not serious, because going after Matt Bissonnette would mean going after an actual warrior who helped make possible the president’s signature achievement in foreign policy. Nothing would cause greater disruption of the political narrative in an election year.
So how might the Pentagon have better handled No Easy Day? They should have lied. The book was going to be released anyway. George Little should have said, “Yes, we vetted it for sources and methods, but didn’t touch the content. It’s one SEAL’s account, and he’s earned the right to say whatever he pleases, even if he got some details wrong. Next question.” It’s not like untruths are an alien concept to the Department of Defense. Internally, they could have even called it a “disinformation campaign” to make it nice and official. Instead, the Pentagon is threatening to go to war with Mark Bissonnette. Personally, I’m betting on the SEAL.
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D.B. Grady is the pseudonym of author David Brown. He is the co-author of The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army, and can be found at http://dbgrady.com or on Twitter at @dbgrady.
