Pssst! Hey! The Washington Post wants to let you in on a little secret called Top Secret America.

Apparently, the government counter terrorism movement that emerged after 9-11 manages to be both hugely unwieldly and top secret. The hub of Top Secret America is around Washington D.C.:

Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in McLean, a line of cars idles every weekday morning as a new day in Top Secret America gets underway. The drivers wait patiently to turn left, then crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is not on any public map and not announced by any street sign…

…Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of parking spaces.

But Top Secret America encompasses more than just this area—Top Secret America is everywhere. The problem, according to the Washington Post, is that Top Secret America has grown so vast that no one knows just how much it costs or who’s in charge of what.

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.

The article charges that the inefficiencies—the redundancies—of Top Secret America kept multiple agencies from intercepting a Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as he boarded an Amsterdam flight bound for Detroit late last year with explosives in his underwear—even though Abdulmatallab’s father had contacted the U.S. embassy in Nigeria, fearing that his son had become a radical and was planning an attack.

America’s vast network of counter terrorist networks didn’t stop Abdulmutallab from setting off his underwear explosives—other passengers on the flight did.

Top Secret America, ladies and gentlemen. (SHHHHHH!)

Former Stranger news writer Cienna Madrid has been a writer in residence for Richard Hugo House, a local literary nonprofit. There, she taught fiction classes and wrote 4/5 of a book about a death-row...

11 replies on “Top Secret America”

  1. Oh, great. Now you’ve gone and blabbed about teh Top Secret all over the Interwebs, which means any of us who’ve read it are probably going to end up on some NSA/NIA/NCC/CIA/FBI/DoD watch list.

    OTOH, even if if they ARE watching, it appears they’re all too wrapped up in petty bureaucratic territorialism to ever share the info with each other…

  2. God only knows how many billions of dollars are being pissed away on this. And that’s the literal truth, because apparently the feds don’t know.

  3. It’s not that there are too many agencies or that they can’t coordinate, or any of that…there’s a protocol for how information is sent up. It has to be processed, verified, re-processed, re-verified, analysed, interpreted, and briefed before anyone can do anything actionable with it. we’re all so afraid of our own shadows within the intel community because one misstep or honest mistake can lead to a lifetime of jail, and/or unnecessary panic, and/or unnecessary death. No one can protect an entire country (let alone three, like we’re trying to do) effectively under those conditions. It’s great that we’re held accountable for our actions, but the majority of the populace and the media do not know, and could not fathom what we deal with every single day. War is ugly and violent, terrorism is cruel and indiscriminate. And we are all just struggling to keep it at bay, so the rest of the nation can go about their day in peace.

  4. I guess I’m not sure what the point of the article is.
    “The government does a lot of top secret shit” – Yeah, no shit and they’ve been doing a lot of top secret shit for decades.
    “The government spends huge piles of money on their top secret shit and intentionally hides the paper trail so nobody really knows how much money they’re spending” – No shit, they’ve been doing this for decades.
    “They’ve collected so much top secret shit that no one person can keep it all straight” – No shit, that’s why they’ve got 3,000 people working at this one site and thousands more around the world.
    “They’ve got a mini army protecting their top secret shit” – No shit, they’ve been doing this for decades. You don’t want other people getting their hands on your top secret shit.
    “Some of the shit they collect is really useful some of the shit they collect is worthless” – No shit, just like every intelligence agency in history.
    “This information helps them stop some fuckers from doing bad shit but doesn’t stop every fucker from doing bad shit” – No shit! Do you think they’re omnipotent and omniscient?

    So, in short, tell me something I don’t know. They’ve just reiterated the nature of intelligence work. Call me when they’ve got something useful to say.

  5. It’s even worse than they’re admitting.

    Back in the 80s, about 1/4 of the total federal budget was off the books.

    Now it’s bigger.

    They never publish those numbers, and a lot of what you think is farm aid, military aid, actual military, or assistance programs are actually spy ops.

    Fnarf will – incorrectly – say this isn’t true, because it’s not on wiki – but that’s the way it actually is.

  7. I’m sure all those blank checks written to off-the-books organizations operating without oversight is money well spent. Not because I think they’re actually doing useful intelligence work with that money, but because I’m superstitious and I heard that digging a big secret hole out in the desert and putting a billion dollars into it every couple days is a good way to ward off bad luck and the “evil eye.”

Comments are closed.