Angus Mackenzie recounts in his new book the US intelligence agencies' and supporters' gradual erosion of Firt Amendment rights since the passage of the National Security Act of 1947. Secrets: The CIA's War At Home Angus Mackenzie University of California Press Berkeley, 1997. 241 pp. $27.50 ISBN 0-520-20020-9 "Secrets" decribes the origination of the Freedom of Information Act and other legislation to make government secrets available, the battles to get the laws passed and to defend them against subsequent attacks by proponents of secrecy who invoke the National Security Act. Mackenzie sets out the ways the intelligence industry, helped by the Department of Justice and the courts, manipulates the media, other governmental agencies and the citizenry by force and by seduction, with special attention to how it coopts its ostensible opponents like the ACLU and investigative journalists. He documents the undisclosed arrangments between the CIA and the media to favor journalism at the public's expense in legislation and in working relations. He carefully traces the long-running campaign to limit governmental employees from revealing what they know through various non-disclosure and lifetime secrecy agreements, sometimes breached by ex-agency heads who reveal secrets to boost careers. The book amply documents the ongoing struggle, now 50 years underway, to open the archives of domestic spying, new attempts to limit public access to governmental information, and moves to invade privacy. Here are the book's closing paragraphs: By the 1990s, reflecting the general conservative shift in Congress, many House members were actively welcoming a secrecy oath. Consideration of the oath, less comprehensive than the standard contract, first came up in the House Select Committee on Intelligence during a discussion of the fiscal year (FY) 1992 Intelligence Authorization Act. That led to a House rule requiring the intelligence committee members and staff to sign the oath. Interest in broadening the use of the oath did not stop there, especially for committee member Porter J. Goss of Florida. Goss's ties to the CIA dated from 1962 and his ten year stint as a clandestine service officer at the Agency. He and his fellow enthusiast, Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, offered amendments to the FY 1993 and 1994 authorization acts that would require secrecy oaths from every member of the House. The amendments did not prosper, but when the 104th Congress convened on January 4, 1995, backers of the oath changed tactics. This time the oath requirement for every House member was included in the packet of rules from the House Conference of the Majority. It became a new rule without debate. In the mid-1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick sounded the alarm about government censorship. Although a member of the Reagan administration's inner foreign policy circle, Kirkpatrick had a personal encounter with government censors over her refusal to sign the lifetime secrecy contract. Upon returning to her political science chair at Georgetown University from her post as U.S. United Nations ambassador, Kirkpatrick reexamined John Stuart Mill's classic essay On Liberty and delivered a lecture on censorship. "Societies are not made stronger by the process of repression that accompanies censorship," she warned. "Censorship requires an assumption of infallibility, and that seems to Mill invariably negative. Repression of an opinion is thus bad for the censor, who inevitably acts from a conviction of his own infallibility," she told her students, "and bad for the opinion itself, which can neither be corrected nor held with conviction equal to the strength of an opinion submitted to challenge." As the twentieth century draws to a close, the 1947 National Security Act has become the Pandora's box that Ambassador Kirkpatrick and Congressman Hoffman had feared. Placing a legal barrier between foreign intelligence operations and domestic politics in the National Security Act has proved ineffectual. In the decades that followed 1947, the CIA not only became increasingly involved in domestic politics but abridged First Amendment guarantees of free speech and free press in a conspiracy to keep this intrusion from the American people. The intelligence and military secrecy of the 1940s had broadened in the 1960s to covering up the suppression of domestic dissent. The 1980s registered a further, more fundamental change, as the suppression of unpopular opinions was supplemented by systematic and institutionalized peacetime censorship for the first time in U.S. history. The repressive machinery developed by the CIA has spread secrecy like oil on water. The U.S. government has always danced with the devil of secrecy during wartime. By attaching the word "war" to the economic and ideological race for world supremacy between the Soviet Union and the United States, a string of administrations continued this dance uninterrupted for fifty years. The cold war provided the foreign threat to justify the pervasive Washington belief that secrecy should have the greatest possible latitude and openness should be restricted as much as possible -- constitutional liberties be damned. With the collapse of the Soviet Union as a world power in 1990, even the pseudo-war rationale evaporated. But the partisans of secrecy have not been willing to accept the usual terms of peacetime. They have made clear their intentions to preserve and extend the wartime system. They will find a rationalization: if not the threat of the Soviet Union, then the goal of economic hegemony. Thus the U.S. government now needs to keep secrets to give an advantage to American corporate interests. Yet it is entrepreneurs who have been making the most use of FOIA -- not journalists, not lawyers. As of 1994, the great preponderance of all FOIA requests have been for business purposes. As the framers of the Constitution understood, the free exchange of ideas is good for commerce, but this idea has been widely forgotten in the years since the passage of the 1947 National Security Act. Only recently in the history of the world's oldest republic has secrecy functioned principally to keep the American people in the dark about the nefarious activities of their government. The United States is no longer the nation its citizens once thought: a place, unlike most others in the world, free from censorship and thought police, where people can say what they want, when they want to, about their government. Almost a decade after the end of the cold war, espionage is not the issue, if it ever really was. The issue is freedom, as it was for the Minute Men at Compo Hill. The issue is principle, as it was for Ernest Fitzgerald, who never signed a secrecy contract but retained his Pentagon job because he made his stand for the First Amendment resonate in Congress. Until the citizens of this land aggressively defend their First Amendment rights of free speech, there is little hope that the march to censorship will be reversed. The survival of the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights is at stake.