Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Oh My Goodness Gracious

Oh my Goodness Gracious!

Sanger’s book, Confront and Conceal is informative but it is like reading Clausewitz. It reads for long periods interspersed with nuggets of revelation.

These nuggets peel back the onion several layers and shine some light onto the worm scheme that is claimed to have set the Iranian nuclear program back several years. It is based on truth but cluttered with omission and amateurish attempts at deception and other forms of disinformation. In a sense it is like Shaffer’s book without all the redactions, where the author tries to use some slight of hand to keep from making what he knows are serious disclosures. I’m not surprised that the Administration was caught off guard. Sanger was seen by insiders as a “good guy” and was often invited into sensitive discussions to serve as a sort of fly on the wall of history. The current President is very much interested in insuring a favorable legacy of his term in office.

Anyway, there are no redactions in Sanger’s book, only heavy-handed attempts to misdirect, mute and cushion some of the revelations he knew would get his sources in trouble.

To explain this better let me give an example from my own distant past. On an operation in Vietnam a Special Forces Lieutenant, training a CIDG (Vietnamese Para Military Group) wanted to know the location of my ambush site so if the questionable individuals he was training decided to betray him, he’d know where to run. As we talked it was clear to me that my colleague was even more nervous than I was. Still there was no way on this God’s earth that I was going to give him the grid coordinates of where I was operating at night. So he suggested that we use a point of origin technique… that I would pass him the location if he got in trouble. Instead of an encrypted grid coordinate I would use instead a key word. He labeled several grid intersections on the map, which he called “Sports Car, ”Girly Name" and "Vacation Spot." When passing my grid he said, “Say from Porsche, (Or Corvette) go down two and a half grid squares and right three more.) This was how he avoided the cumbersome encryption system that was damn near impossible to use at night and substitute it for something that could be retained readily in mind. I couldn’t believe that this system was what his organization was routinely using. The deception was that instead of saying, “from Sports Car” I would use a different subset word in the clear with the idea that those listening were too dumb to figure out it was referring to the same point of origin.

This is the sort of workaround that writers use in trying to skirt around an obvious revelation of classified information and still get it included in their books. Obviously the trick works with book censors who know much less than the writer often does. Once the book is released and someone knowledgeable reads the context and its implications face the light of day, the insiders gnash their teeth, clasp their hands to their heads and say “OH my goodness gracious… the cat’s out of the bag! We have another FRACKIN leak!”