Military secrecy

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secrecy is the precondition of surprise, always one of the most effective strokes in warfare. Great care is always taken by commanders to keep their intentions secret; great efforts are expended by security services, in preserving secrecy, and by intelligence services, in trying to pierce through it.

Mid-20th-century armed forces generated huge quantities of paper: the British war office used up more paper in a year, 25,000,000 tons, than the 22,000,000 tons allotted to the whole book publishing industry. Much of this paper bore no security grading, but what did, bore it on an established scale: restricted, confidential, secret, most secret (changed to top secret after Pearl Harbor, because some Americans thought ‘most’ meant ‘almost’ secret). Beyond top secret, a limited group of officers handled ULTRA top secret material, deriving from Bletchley Park; an overlapping (but not identical) group handled material, classified as BIGOT, which included details of NEPTUNE, the assault phase of the Normandy landings (see OVERLORD).

There were, moreover, secret services, such as MI5, MI6, and SOE, the mere existence of which was not supposed to be referred to in papers graded lower than secret or in unscrambled telephone conversations. Telephone scramblers, then in their infancy, were available to staff at senior headquarters. They provided no long-term security (see Forschungsstelle, for example) as all an interceptor had to do was to record them, and then play them over at varying speeds, until he hit one that was intelligible, but they were useful for making secret tactical arrangements.

Not only were extra severe precautions taken to keep ULTRA secret material hidden; matters that senior staff regarded as very secret indeed were sometimes (in defiance of a rule of Churchill's) not written down at all—to the confusion of historians, but to the advantage of maintaining secrecy and thus securing victory.

The Americans, coming from a much more open society than the British, were less affected by the passion for secrecy. The Germans were still more affected by it than the British. Hitler put out an order, of which a copy was on the wall in every office in Germany, civil or military, in which he reminded his subjects that nothing declared secret was ever to be discussed by those not entitled to know about it: it was a useful part of the arrangements for persecuting those of whom the Nazis disapproved.

The Germans also graded some documents ‘only for officers’, just as the British and Americans sometimes used the rubric ‘by hand of officer only’. Over-elaborate precautions were taken by the Americans in the limited distribution of MAGIC decrypts. In 1941 there was a rule that MAGIC messages were carried round Washington, DC, in a locked box by a US Marine officer, who had no key to it and no knowledge of its contents. He visited each of eight key-carriers (president, chiefs of army and navy staffs, and so on), satisfied himself that each was sitting at an empty desk, placed the box on it, retired to the back of room, and picked the box up again after it had been re-locked. Therefore none of the readers of the messages could make any notes about them, at least while he had them in front of him; and analysis of the contents was consequently inhibited. It was an instance of how an obsession with security can defeat its own ends. The rubric THIS DOCUMENT IS NOT TO BE TAKEN INTO FRONT-LINE TRENCHES was discontinued by the British War Office in June 1940; ‘not to be taken forward of Divisional headquarters’ remained in occasional use until 1942.

Debate continues about whether any secrets are still worth preserving. Few of those who conduct it are aware of all the issues involved. Questions of manners, tact, and discretion are mixed up with questions of national safety; there are various points of method, still perfectly usable, which it would be folly to reveal; while a myriad points of detail are only held back because governments cannot afford the time and money to have the old records securely winnowed.

Secret services, moreover, like to be able to offer to possible recruits the inducement that a person's connection with the service will never, ever, become known to anybody outside it, and indeed only to a restricted number of people within it; such assurances will be valueless if any chance enquirer is ever to be let loose among secret service papers.

M. R. D. Foot

secret adj. (of information or documents) given the security classification above unclassified and below top secret.
n. something that is kept or meant to be kept unknown or unseen by others: a state secret.