President Trump has pledged his administration will get to the bottom of alleged leaks of information coming out of the government and put stop to this practice. He is not the first president to stake out this position, particularly when it puts him in a bad light. Not only presidents but cabinet officers, senior government officials, Generals, and Admirals, also have made the promise to “get to the bottom of this” and send someone to prison. Much of this is bombast to placate the public.
Many leaks from the government are planned, well-thought out, desirable, and often serve an official purpose. An official can leak something and if the public outcry is against it, the official’s identity, reputation, sanity, and job are not at stake. Masters of the convenient leak are found in the executive branch of government and the Congress. Supporting all these officials are thousands of workers from attorneys to file clerks who may also leak information for various reasons. Leaks have occurred since the Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to form a more perfect union.
In 1953, I was a young airman in the USAF and assigned as the senior clerk in the Sabotage & Espionage Branch, Counterintelligence Division, HQ, USAF Office of Special Investigations, (OSI). There were six officers serving under the Branch Chief, a Lt. Col. We had two civilian secretaries. We all shared a rectangular office with four desks lined up on one side and five on the other side. Conversations among the officers were open affairs.
These were the days when hardly a week went by that muckraking columnist Drew Pearson didn’t publish something that someone in the government fed him. Whether it was true, accurate or fair, did not matter to Pearson.
One day a particularly inaccurate and offensive Drew Pearson column dealing with Air Force business appeared in print and the matter came to the attention of OSI. Senior Air Force officials were furious and characterized the story as a mixture of bad information, half truths, and blatant inaccuracies. Three officials in the Air Force were suspected of being the source who leaked to Pearson.
A plan was hatched by the officers in the S&E Branch. It called for putting together a classified report to be circulated to the three suspects with minor variations in each suspect’s copy. The fabricated report would be close to reality and the type of story Pearson would jump at. Based upon what Pearson published it would be highly possible to identify the source based on the variation revealed.
The plan was worked and re-worked and ready to be put in play. Appropriate officials in the hierarchy of OSI and the Pentagon were briefed. Then the word came down from on high. Scuttle the operation. No one wanted to learn the identity of the leaker.
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