Nat S. Finney understood government secrecy and its legitimate uses. A Washington correspondent for The Minneapolis Tribune and Look magazine in 1945, he was among the first reporters allowed into the laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., where the atomic bomb had been created. The following year he covered U.S. nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
After World War II, when the Truman administration sought to maintain and expand a regime of wartime-level government secrecy in peacetime, Finney brought the story to light. His reporting made it clear that under the new rules, secret information could mean whatever government officials wanted it to mean. He also got the bottom of the reasoning for the administration’s tightening the screws: hot or cold, war was war.
The coverage won Finney the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1948 — the same year, incidentally, that George Orwell finished the manuscript of 1984.
The Minneapolis Sunday Tribune published this story, part of his winning entry, on Oct. 19, 1947.
Move seeks to restore wartime gag
By NAT S. FINNEY
The Truman administration is about to put the ordinary affairs of federal civilian agencies under a security blanket modeled after wartime military security.
This was learned Saturday from Hamilton Robinson, Chairman of the Security Advisory Board of the State, War and Navy Department Coordinating Committee, after a directive imposing secrecy upon the operations of the Veterans Administration “leaked.”
The rules of secrecy have been drafted, but they are themselves marked “secret” until President Truman issues the White House directive that will make them binding in all departments.
When the White House directive is issued — if it is not blocked — the secrecy rules will be sent to all federal agencies. The rules as drafted are “minimum” secrecy rules. And by clear implication individual departments can make them stricter under the expected presidential directive, if they so desire.
The heart of the new secrecy rule, as disclosed by the Veterans Administration directive, involves so-called “confidential” information.
Confidential information is “information the unauthorized disclosure of which, although not endangering the national security, would be prejudicial to the interests or prestige of the nation, any governmental activity, or an individual; or would cause administrative embarrassment or difficulty.”
The Veterans Administration code of secrecy goes even farther to authorize classification of routine information as “restricted” information.
“Restricted information is information which should not be published or communicated to anyone except for official purposes,” the rule reads. Chairman Robinson made no bones about the fact that means any information any federal administrative official does not wish to give out, whatever his reasons may be.
Robinson supplied a concrete example of what the restricted information rule means. He had in his hands a copy of the State Department’s secrecy regulations, described by him as “severe as the wartime army and navy regulations.”
This document, printed by the Government Printing Office, had the words “for official use only” printed on its cover. Mr. Robinson was unable to hand the document to this reporter.
The Veterans Administration’s definition of the term information makes it mean whatever departmental officials want it to mean:
“The term information as used herein shall include all documents or other materials which convey information requiring provisions for safeguarding.”
The secrecy directive that has been drafted and secretly circulated to the heads of federal civil service agencies is based on the “sleeper” paragraph in President Truman’s executive order 9835 which was titled, “Prescribing procedures for the administration of an enemy loyalty program in the executive branch of the government.”
In the final part of the directive, under the heading “miscellaneous,” the directive reads:
“The security advisory board of the state-war-navy coordinating committee shall draft rules applicable to the handling and transmission of confidential documents and other documents and information which shall not be publicly disclosed, and upon approval by the President such rules shall constitute the minimum standard for the handling and transmission of such documents and information, and shall be applicable to all departments and agencies of the executive branch.”
Under this directive, which passed unnoticed at the time it was issued, the Security Advisory Board has worked for nearly eight months drafting and redrafting so-called security regulations for the civilian departments.
Meanwhile, the State Department, which has become increasingly mum about current affairs under Secretary George C. Marshall, put through its own regulations in anticipation of eventual issuance of government minimum regulations.
It is under these State Department regulations that the State Department has imposed close secrecy over details of Marshall Plan discussions, not only on its own officials, but upon Commerce, Agriculture and Treasury Department officials.
Although Chairman Robinson said without hesitation that the proposed secrecy rules have been submitted to all civil departments for comment, inquiries made at the departments themselves brought denials of any knowledge of what was afoot.
At the Commerce Department a request for a copy of the department’s secrecy rules Friday was readily granted, at first. But something happened while the inquiring reporter waited, and eventually the same information man who had readily agreed to hand over a copy of the rules denied knowledge of their existence.
Other departments either denied knowledge of the pending rules, or asked for time to look the matter up — and failed to get around it.
Chairman Robinson says, however, that the protests he expected from civil departments when the draft copy of minimum regulations was circulated didn’t amount to anywhere nearly as much as he anticipated.
The Veterans Administration regulations, which are said to be closely parallel to the minimum regulations that have been handed to President Truman for his approval, follow the army and navy pattern.
These rules disclose that they were adopted at a request from the Security Advisory Board: “Pursuant to the request of the Security Advisory Board, State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, the (Veterans Bureau) Administrator has designated the Assistant Administrator for Contact and Administrative Services as the (security) officer for the Veterans Administration,” the document reads.
An unusual point in the veterans administration rules, presumably also a part of the general regulations awaiting Mr. Truman’s okay, is that it muzzles employees on questions involved in pending legislation.
“Legislative information, particularly information pertaining to pending legislation, which is contained in the files of the office of assistant administrator for legislation, or elsewhere in the veterans administration, is held confidential,” the rule reads.
Chairman Robinson was frank to say that neither this nor other security rules would be effective if a member of Congress asked for the information. He’d get it. But if a newspaper reporter asked for it in preparing a story about Veterans Administration views on pending legislation he would be refused on grounds the information was “classified as confidential.”
Although the Veterans Administration has no functions involving high military matters, its rules provide for classifying information as “Top Secret,” a classification reserved in military practice for information that can be communicated only by cryptographic code and is intended only for the eyes of the highest brass.
Under the official definition, Top Secret information is information the security aspect of which is paramount, and the unauthorized disclosure of which would cause exceptionally grave damage to the nation.
Secret information under the VA classification system is “information the unauthorized disclosure of which would endanger national security, or cause serious injury to the interests or prestige of the nation or any governmental activity thereof.”
If the State Department security regulations are a guide — and Mr. Robinson did not disclaim this is the case — the regulations for secrecy are themselves to be secret.
Mr. Robinson placed considerable stress on the fact that the regulations in prospect are “only minimum” regulations. He indicated that the expected presidential directive will authorize heads of departments to go as far as they like in putting the lid on disclosure of information about public business to the public.
To Chairman Robinson the question of whether or not the Truman administration is right in rubber-stamping secrecy into executive department business hinges on who should say whether or not information ought to be published.
Mr. Robinson thought that public officials should decide what the public ought to be told, and what, for the public’s own good, it should not be told.
An information employee in the Department of Commerce had a different explanation.
“You know yourself,” he said, “that we’re just as much at war with Russia as we were at war with Germany in 1937. And everybody knows that we kept secret a lot of what we were doing back in those days.”
Source: “Nat S. Finney, Ex-Reporter, Won Pulitzer in Journalism,” The New York Times, Dec. 22, 1982.