Keeping secrets

Finally – that's a foolish word, I should say 'for the time being' – the atrocious heat, which will be back, has vanished along this north-eastern seaboard and the weathermen gurgled for a day or two over the return of normal, daily, high temperatures around 80, but delicious days because they're fanned by the most precious of Canadian imports, the north-west wind, which blows across thousands of miles of dry land, shoves all the clammy air out to sea and leaves us with brilliant, shining days.

This is all very fine except for those of us who are subject to the invisible particles of pollen that arise from various exotic grasses, mostly Indian grass and ragweed. This, they say, is one of the worst ragweed seasons in years. So, if at the moment you're hearing a slightly scratchy throat and nasal delivery, at least we're not on television and you're not seeing weepy eyes.

Last Monday, the White House put out a statement which would have made me weep anyway. Rather, it wasn't the White House, but one sentence in the dispatch of a reporter who was covering the White House which this week was situated in Santa Barbara, California, where the president was doing what his Democratic opponents wish he would do every day, now and for evermore, riding horse and chopping wood and wishing us all the best with a big grin and a wide wave.

The White House's permanent fall guy, known as the official White House spokesman, is Mr Larry Speakes and this week Mr Speakes announced that the United States, quote, 'is prepared to take whatever action is necessary,' unquote, to counter any new terrorism that Mr Gaddafi may have in mind. Mr Speakes didn't say there was any evidence – and of course he wouldn't tell us if there was – of new Libyan plans to start up terrorist attacks. He simply said that Colonel Gaddafi has not forsaken his desire to create terrorist activities.

Now comes the sentence in a newspaperwoman's report on this press briefing that makes me wince and weep for the stupidity or unintended mischief of my fellow reporters. This is it: 'Speakes did not deny published reports that the United States is preparing contingency plans to deal with any Libya-sponsored terrorism.'

That's a real 'When did you stop beating your wife?' sentence. Of course, he didn't deny that. Whatever early plans there may be, I'm sure he wouldn't deny that the United States has contingency plans for a Soviet nuclear attack across the Baring Strait or for an advance of those half-million Russian troops across the Chinese border, or for an attack on the United States' Guantanamo naval base by Fidel Castro. Or, for that matter, for one night worker in the underground Omaha missile headquarters going off his head.

Every nation, big and small, every foreign office and state department has contingency plans for the most remote possibilities and it's quite right that the press never sees them. They're bound to be hair-raising because many of them are dealing with extremely improbably hair-raising possibilities. You don't suppose, do you, that Mrs Thatcher or Mr Reagan or even Mr David Lange, in New Zealand, doesn't have contingency plans for the dropping by somebody of a nuclear bomb? I'm quite sure that every president and prime minister on earth has prepared an underground shelter stocked with the yoghurt or shepherd's pie or whatever the great man or woman can't get along without.

One of the more absurd legacies of the heyday of the investigative reporter is the discovery by wide-eyed young reporters that nations have this something called contingency plans. Only very rarely does a head of government blab one out in public and then pandemonium breaks loose. I remember being present at a White House press conference just before Christmas in 1950. It was, in fact, a British reporter who guilelessly, or perhaps not so guilelessly, asked President Truman if there was any thought of using the atomic, as it was then called, the atomic bomb in the Korean war. Truman wished later, on his way downstairs, he'd said, 'Certainly not!' What he said was that, 'Well, of course, any country at war always keeps in mind the possibility of using every weapon in its arsenal.' Bang! The man filed his report to London, 'Truman does not rule out atomic bomb in Korea'.

It came out on the ticker while the House of Commons was having one of its night-time debates. MPs scurried into the corridors, the debate was suspended. A hoarse House of Commons demanded of Prime Minister Atlee what he was going to do about it. Mr Atlee, the most level-headed prime minister of modern times, of course had no knowledge of, or feel for, the mood of the White House Press conference or the level-headedness of Mr Truman's reply.

The blaring headlines in London were enough. By morning, people were reading, 'Atomic Bomb in Korea?' (question mark). Mr Atlee was probably more alarmed than at any time in his political life. He announced to a wave of cheers that he would fly to Washington at once, which he did. President Truman wondered what all the fuss was about, but at least one biographer has practically credited Mr Atlee with saving the world from the first use of a nuclear bomb since the devastation of Nagasaki.

Well, now we have another – to be cold blooded about it – very interesting 'revelation', as the papers say, which I'm afraid may already have been reported as evidence of the once bloodthirsty intentions of President Carter. That's right, not the famous swashbuckler, the notorious warmonger President Reagan, but the earnest, peace-loving President Carter. This latest disclosure is not, I'm happy to say, the deduction or the wife-beating question of some dumb reporter, it's an article in the United States' Armed Services Journal, which is about as official, as unlike a muckraker's pay-dirt, as you can imagine.

You know that the United States does not have an official secrets act. Cabinet proceedings, secret memos of the highest members of the government are not sacrosanct now, let alone for 30 years. Any retired cabinet officer can write his memoirs and tell all as soon as he's out of the White House. We know, to the extreme of stupefaction, practically everything that was ever said or decided in the White House of President Nixon without benefit of the tapes and, thanks to the sacked director of the budget, Mr Stockman, all kinds of juicy secret conversations in the White House of Ronald Reagan.

I have always applauded the American refusal to have an official secrets act – well, it was never a refusal, it was never contemplated. If it had been, there'd have been a rebellion for, as you must know, every American government is hounded by, or pretends to be proud of, the clause in the first amendment to the constitution which guarantees the freedom of the press – a freedom which, at all times, is interpreted by somebody as a right to know everything.

It was, by the way, a fact of American life which I remember kept the late, sterling Democrat, Dag Hammarskjold, wringing his hands and shaking his head. He once told me that the one famous sentence of an American president which had caused more harm and confusion than any other was President Woodrow Wilson's bold, brave promise that in the diplomatic conduct between nations, henceforth, we should have open agreements, openly arrived at. Open agreements, yes, said Hammarskjold, but the road to them, the delicacy of all the discussions, the disagreements, the flaring tempers, the temporary stalling of any consensus, must be kept secret if any good agreement at all is to be reached.

So he amended Wilson's dictum to 'open agreements, secretly arrived at'. Alas, in the past 30 years or so, the media, pursuing what they honestly take to be their secret mission, have, I do believe, torpedoed more agreements than malign statesmen ever did in the course of the old, secret history.

Well, back to the new revelation of the United States' Armed Services Journal. President Carter's army chief of staff has disclosed that in August 1980 when Mr Carter was wringing his hands, as he'd been doing for a year or more, over what to do about the American hostages held in Iran – and it was, by the way, at the first clip of the 1980 presidential campaign – President Carter had undeniable evidence that the Soviet Union had massed 350,000 troops, 3700 tanks and over 300 fighter bombers on the northern border of Iran and could, if it chose, overrun the country and take over the oilfields of the Persian Gulf, which is the nightmare that has haunted every Western statesman in the past 20 years.

General David Jones admits that America could not possibly resist such an invasion, couldn't get anything like an American force of airborne troops in there in time or perhaps in any time. In other words, if the Soviets had moved, there could not have been any effective American response with conventional arms. So Mr Carter and General Jones and, I presume, the National Security Council sat down and discussed the possibility of the only effective American response – namely, the use of tactical nuclear weapons. So, nothing happened, but I hope no headline writer is about to ply his dubious trade with a big black banner, 'Carter Wanted Nuclear Missiles in Iran'.

I end with the most pathetic news item of the week. Rudolph Hess, the last of Hitler's intimates who was tried at Nuremberg as a war criminal and found guilty, has been for 40 years in Spandau prison and for many years its only inmate. He's in his nineties, very old and very ill and year after year, the British, American and French authorities, the original so-called occupying powers, with the Russians, have wanted to set him free and let him go home to his son. The Russians have never budged from saying that to do so would be a sign of condoning the Nazi war crimes.

And how does he spend his time, this sad, sick old sinner? He is fed and watches, over and over, reruns of 'Dynasty' and 'Dallas'. If he were an American citizen, he could sue the powers under that clause of the American constitution that forbids cruel and unusual punishment.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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