Happy New Year and a note to my readers

Late in November, I started sending out Bill’s Black Box of Government Secrets newsletter and thought that this would be a good time to wish my readers Happy New Year and to explain.

I’m buried in secrets, government secrets, and they come across my desk in documents and leaks every day. Plus, I’ve been collecting codenames for over 20 years, first writing the book Code Names in 2005, when books were important. I now have over 10,000 more – new ones and old ones discovered. To me, it’s a decoder ring to understanding what the national security organism is up to, and by extension what they’re not telling us.

I’ve always felt an obligation to put the government’s secrets out there in public, from when I first started revealing where all U.S. nuclear weapons were deployed around the world in 1981. The Reagan administration wasn’t happy with that and threatened to take legal action because they claimed that I had harmed national security. I remember speaking to a well known Washington statesman at the time who told me that the security of American nuclear weapons couldn’t rely on their being secret; it relied on the physical security surrounding them and the policies justifying their existence and hence their locations.

Alexander Haig and company were eventually forced to relent, but I learned some important lessons: information was powerful and though a nugget was important, putting it ALL together was where the real value was. Coincident with the deployment revelations, I also started working on the five-volume Nuclear Weapons Databook series and Nuclear Battlefields, which attempted to do just that. I still remember the government flurry when the first volume of the Databook came out, the Department of Energy writing us a letter that said it was not “in the national interest” to publish the book. I remember then Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger condemning Nuclear Battlefields on TV. I learned another important lesson: it’s always what they say.

Early nuclear revelations (and there were more) were followed by revelations relating to future weapons, war plans, WMD, Iraq, Afghanistan, information warfare, continuity of government intelligence collection – I could go on – but suffice it to say that I learned that the basis for almost all of the secrecy wasn’t to keep things from the Russians or the Chinese. It was to push the American people out of the debate, away from national security, and place them in a state of constant fear. That’s what motivated me to write Code Names, and Top Secret America. The devil is in the details.

When I first revealed where the nukes were, I lost my job. Then I lost more jobs. I lost publishers. I lost my seat at the table. The doors in Washington closed, so I turned to journalism. I was able to persevere because the quality of my information was so good. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times all hired me, but they also treated me like I was radioactive, tolerating me as long as I didn’t go too far. Not going too far sadly also means mostly needing to dumb everything down to get past the Journalism 1.0 editors and publishers. The effect in the case of national security reporting is that the one-off article fails to convey the enormity of the system, and the problem.

I currently write for Newsweek, but I still have new secrets and revelations that can’t find a place there, hence the reason for Substack. Think of what I’m doing here as a scouting expedition and a political gambit. In this venture into Journalism 2.0, I’m not going to feel obligated to dumb it all down, not going to be afraid of getting in the weeds, not going to quote people just to have quotes, not going to worry too much about being “off” the news, not going to feel like I need to be relevant, not going to even understand everything (or pretend that I do). If I don’t know something, I’ll tell you.

I’m still starting out and experimenting with different modes. My sense is that there are a vast number of people out there who are interested in the worlds of spying and killing and who are interested in secrets. I’m not a conspiracy fan, though I recognize that conspiracies are born out of official secrecy. I’m also not a believer that the government is evil, other than the traditional American evil as enshrined in the Constitution when it warns of too much power being lodged in too few hands. I mostly believe that the bureaucracy – the system – is about itself. I believe that there is a fair share of people in the national security community who are lazy, oblivious, sloppy, and just plain dumb. As there are in most systems.

My hope here is not just to inform a curious public but also to inspire other journalists and researchers to look more deeply. I’m happy to answer your questions and I welcome your comments. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work – no one is interested in financially supporting my quest to discover government secrets just for the sake of it. I’m noodling around with a Code Names II as well; it won’t see the light of day without your support.