A 'Stuntman!' Discusses His Death-Defying Feats

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The 'Top Secret America' Created After September 11

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

This week, we'll be doing several programs related to the 10th anniversary of

9/11. In response to the attacks, the government created a top secret world of

agencies and private contractors to collect and analyze intelligence. It's

become so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it

costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly

how many agencies do the same work.

The system put in place to keep the U.S. safe is so massive, its effectiveness

is impossible to determine. These are some of the conclusions Dana Priest and

William Arkin reached in their Washington Post series "Top Secret America."

They've just expanded the series into a book called "Top Secret America: The

Rise of a New American Security State."

Dana Priest is my guest. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her investigation

into the CIA's secret prisons. In 2008, she won another Pulitzer for her

investigation into conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Dana Priest, welcome to FRESH AIR. Would you just describe the scope of this

world that you describe as top secret America?

Ms. DANA PRIEST (Co-author, "Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American

Security State"): Well, physically, which is what we could see about this

world, since it is top secret, it is really a large community that's spread out

throughout the Washington area, but also in different parts of the country.

It's so big and includes so many buildings, that it is many, many times the

size of the Pentagon, if you were to put it together.

And inside top secret America, there are about 2,000 companies that work on top

secret projects and programs for government. And there are another 1,200

organizations, give or take, that work on top secret programs in intelligence

and counterterrorism. And that was the world that we sought to describe, the

world that great up in response to 9/11, when the government said: We're facing

an enemy we don't understand. We don't have the tools to deal with it. Here's

billions, literally, $40, then another $40 billion, and a blank check after

that, for anybody with a good idea to go and pursue it.

GROSS: I would want the vastness of these new intelligence and Homeland

Security outfits and the amount of money being given to them to make me feel

secure. But reading your book, a lot of that made me feel insecure, because

you're saying that there's so much redundancy and such a huge volume of

information and reports being generated by all these new agencies and private

contractors, and it's impossible to synthesize it and really keep up with it.

Ms. PRIEST: Well, that's so true. Not only does the government find itself

unable to get its arms around itself, this top secret America behemoth, it

doesn't know what's inside, it doesn't really know what works, what doesn't

work, and nobody still, 10 years later, is really in charge of those questions.

And at the bottom line, nobody still is in charge of counterterrorism.

So what you have are, you know, good-hearted people and companies and employees

that are doing what they think they can get paid for and what they - what might

help. But so much of it is reinventing the wheel that another organization has

already reinvented five times.

That's particularly true within the military, which is the largest government

agency in this world, much larger than the CIA or the National Security Agency.

So you find, within the military, large units that decided on their own that

they wanted to be - get in the fight, so to speak. They wanted to do

counterterrorism, and they were often ill-equipped to do that.

GROSS: How has this happened? How has our need to protect ourselves ended up in

this, like, vast network of agencies and private contractors that aren't

necessarily communicating, that are duplicating each other and that are

publishing all these reports that nobody can read, how did that happen?

Ms. PRIEST: It happened first because everyone was so worried there was going

to be another attack, that Congress and the White House really did say, you

know, anything it takes, here's the money, go do it. And then they didn't

follow up.

And then when they got better at understanding the threat and what it was and

what it wasn't, they never reassessed what was in the process of growing up.

And then you have, you know, the other leg of the stool is Congress. You know,

because this is all classified, you and I can't look at it. We can't debate it

like we could the nuclear Seawolf submarine the Defense Department was going to

build and say: Look, do we really need another one or another dozen? We can't

see that. We can't see anything about this.

So Congress plays this role that's critical and unique. Congress needs to do

that. But the intelligence committees are so understaffed and overwhelmed by

the largeness of the task.

There are literally only one handful of staffers who have any expertise in the

National Reconnaissance Office, which is the office that manages, develops spy

satellites and happens to spend tens of billions of dollars a year to do that -

critical function. Those handful of staffers, half of them are very

inexperienced because there's a relatively high turnover. That's your

oversight.

Then the next leg of the stool is the secrecy. You and I cannot pressure

government to do better. The interest groups that weigh in on every other

subject in our government cannot weigh in in any public manner.

So you get this cabal of people who have clearances, and they weigh in. And

that cabal unfortunately includes a profit motive, because there are so many

companies whose livelihood depends on a continued flow of money to them,

because the government in the beginning did rely on contractors to do so much

of the work, because Congress and the White House didn't want it to appear as

if they were growing government while they were asking government to do much

more in the beginning. So they brought in private contractors.

GROSS: While you were listening to Congress debate the debt ceiling and what

programs we should cut or cut back to help balance the budget, were you

thinking about all the money we're spending on top secret America? For example,

you write that after 9/11, the Bush administration and Congress gave security-

related agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending. And

you say this top secret world has grown so large, no one even knows how much

money it costs.

Ms. PRIEST: Of course I was, and even before the deficit became the center of

such attention. It was something that gnawed at me and actually was one of the

motivations for doing this sort of work, which wasn't easy, was watching social

programs - programs overseas that are meant to deal with terrorism in a

different way, not in a military way - be killed because of funding, or be

underappreciated because they couldn't show results on paper quickly, while

there was so much waste in this area.

And, I mean, I'm quoting a general in there who's also so frustrated. He says:

These buildings are like palaces. And they really are. The director of national

intelligence, which was a position created in 2003 to try to put somebody on

top of all this, to govern it, an experiment which has largely failed, by the

way, that - his office now is 500,000 square feet, the size of five Wal-Mart

stores stacked on top of each other. It's enormous.

GROSS: So this building is - houses the director of national intelligence. I

feel like I am in absolutely no position to judge whether the building needs

that kind of space, and - do you feel like you're in a position to say this is

really too big? I mean...

Ms. PRIEST: I - well, I would say that the people I talk to who have worked

with the director's office say that the size of the office symbolizes top

secret America in that it has become so big that it fails on its weight,

because people within the organization don't know what each other is doing. And

there are so many people, that it's hard to keep adequate oversight over what

they're doing.

But in addition to that, this particular office - which, again, was created

after 9/11 to manage the entire 16 intelligence agencies, according to people

in those agencies, is not a great benefit, has not made operations better, has

not made it more likely that those 16 agencies will find the people they're

looking for and stop the next attack.

GROSS: My guest is Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Dana Priest,

co-author of the new book "Top Secret America."

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Dana Priest. She and William Arkin have expanded their

Washington Post series, "Top Secret America," into a new book investigating the

vast and expensive terrorism industrial complex that has been created since

9/11.

Now, getting back to America's deficit and the crisis of spending and cutting

that we're in now, you say, you know, that when the government started

contracting, like, sending a lot of the intelligence and Homeland Security work

to private contractors, the idea was to make it seem to the public that

government was not growing. You write: They wanted the public to believe that

government was not growing during this vast period of expansion of the early

2000s. Contractors would be counted as part of an agency's workforce, and

besides, by turning to the private sector, the government could avoid the rigid

federal civil service rules that made the hiring process slow.

So it looked like government wasn't expanding, but the money that we were

spending paying private contractors was expanding enormously. And in fact, the

private contractors that we've been paying, most of them - or at least many of

them - make more than their counterparts in government, their counterparts in

the CIA or Homeland Security. Why is that?

Ms. PRIEST: Well, the simplest answer is the government will pay it. So the

market will bear it. They are willing to pay these companies this much money to

get the bodies. And because there are a limited number of companies that do the

work that, for instance, the CIA wants done, they're valuable to them.

Now, it's created this unintended adverse consequence, which is it also drew

from the agencies. It sucked away the very experienced people that those

agencies needed to keep. And it did it because it could attract them with such

high salaries and relatively less stressful work than when you're working in

government.

So it also - in addition to costing more - it bled the government of some of

its best people, and then it sold those people back to them for two and three

times as much money. So in recent years, the CIA, for example, tried to do

something about that, because they just saw people flooding out of the agency -

and not just senior people who could also collect their pension and retirement,

but young people who got enough experience to get a clearance - which takes

quite a bit of investigation on the part of the government. They would see them

leave before they really had much of a career, but then again be sold right

back to the same agency for much more money.

So it created this dynamic of brain drain, and the agency put on a prohibition

that anybody who left before 20 years - which is their retirement period -

could not work for the agency for a year.

Well, that sounds onerous, but actually what companies did - because they knew

these employees were so valuable - is they would hire them. They would have

them sit in the office doing basically nothing for a year, paying them these

very high salaries - you and I paying them their high salaries - so that when a

year was up, they could go work at the agency.

So it didn't really affect the larger companies that do this work. And by the

way, some of those large companies like Booz Allen Hamilton now are - they

really are an arm of the intelligence world.

Booz Allen, for example - which has a very good reputation within the community

- its work is almost exclusively government contracting in the intelligence

world now. So it's like a shadow agency, if you will.

GROSS: You know, just in terms of the expansion of this top secret world, there

are so many employees in the infrastructure of clearing people for their top

secret status. I mean, that's an industry in and of itself now.

Ms. PRIEST: It's an industry in and of itself that is contracted out.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. PRIEST: So even - so the government is now paying contractors to do the

security clearances for other contractors.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. PRIEST: I mean, the contractors, in the beginning, were supposed to just be

supplemental to the federal employees. But they - and, in fact, there are

regulations that say they cannot take on what's called inherently governmental

functions, because you don't want somebody to have a money motive, in addition

to a public service motive.

But now they are everywhere, everywhere, and some agencies 0 like the satellite

agency, the NRO - could really not exist, could not do what they need to do

without them. That wall that's so famous, the marble - the white marble wall at

the CIA, where the officers who have died in the line of duty have stars,

anonymous stars, 22 of those stars have been put up there since 9/11 for

officers who have died in the line of duty. Eight of those 22 are actually

contractors who were involved with, for the most part, covert action on the

part of the United States working with the agency. So that gives you some sense

of how ingrained contractors are to the intelligence world today.

GROSS: You know, one of the things I was thinking about reading book, is about

how the Homeland Security and intelligence business has expanded so enormously

at the same time that cities and towns are cutting back police and fire

departments because they don't have the money to support them. So we have this

huge federal infrastructure, but the local infrastructure in so many places is

falling apart. And they're the first responders.

Ms. PRIEST: Right. And so what you have now is you have DHS agreeing to give

states and local authorities - because they are now on this big campaign, I

should say, to get local police to be their front line against terrorism. They

will give local communities money for intelligence fusion cells and for

counterterrorism analysis and work. And those local communities are so

desperate for money that even though they don't really think they have an issue

with terrorism, they take the money, agree to do - agree to use their force to

do some of this work, which some of them don't really think needs to be done,

just so that they can get extra equipment and use it for regular crime-

fighting.

I went to Memphis, Tennessee, and spent a good - a fair amount of time there

with the Memphis Police Department, who's very gung-ho and very inventive in

the sort of information they're collecting on people that they think are

potentially criminals. And a lot of that equipment is given to them or funded

by DHS terrorism money. And, by the way, some of the intelligence equipment is

equipment it developed for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that has migrated

back to the law enforcement community here.

And I'm talking about biometric equipment that can take thumbprints at traffic

stops or take a picture of someone's iris, even, from a distance without them

knowing, some of the cameras that are now used to automatically pull up a

license plate information in a car when the police are just driving around, and

a lot of the cameras that are posted in high-crime areas throughout the - in

the case Memphis, but other communities that record people's actions. But there

are many others, as well.

GROSS: What are your concerns about that?

Ms. PRIEST: The concerns are privacy concerns, because it is being melded up

with commercially available information on individuals that, prior to this

separate boom in IT and just technology, the police needed a warrant to

understand, you know, all the places that you lived or what your various phone

numbers were. They needed to get some kind of higher permission to do that.

Well, now they can buy commercially available data about you and me, like you

and I can, or like the Washington Post can when we do that in order to do our

work as reporters. Law enforcement can do that now, also.

So you have this marriage of high-tech technology that can really probe

somebody's background, plus the surveillance equipment and biometric

information. And now they're also creating the DHS and FBI databases in which

people who are suspected of acting suspiciously - which is a pretty low bar. It

doesn't mean - it's nothing close to probable cause that is required to open an

investigation by a police department. It's much less than that.

We have seen dozens of cases throughout the country, the ACLU has collected

them on their website - but we've done some collecting ourselves - in which

local police departments and sheriffs departments, wanting to join the

counterterrorism fight, have totally misunderstood what they should be doing in

that regard and have collected information on anti-war activists and

protestors, on, you know, people who are protesting environmental issues.

They've collected information on Tea Party activists, just the whole gamut of

legal demonstrators and activists on various causes, and they've put it under

the name of counterterrorism.

GROSS: Dana Priest will be back in the second half of the show. Her new book is

called "Top Secret America." Tonight, she reports on top secret America in an

edition of the PBS series "Frontline."

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Pulitzer prize-winning,

Washington Post reporter Dana Priest. Priest and William Arkin have written a

new book called "Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security

State." It's about the massive terrorism industrial complex that was created in

response to 9/11 that Priest says operates in the dark without sufficient

oversight.

Your new book expands on the series that you wrote for the Washington Post on

top secret America. But there's a new chapter you write about, about JSOC,

which stands for the Joint Special Operations Command. And you describe this as

sitting at the center of the secret universe as the dark matter that shapes the

world in ways that are usually not detectable. What do you mean?

Ms. PRIEST: Well, JSCO is the secret clandestine military command that actually

does more work on counterterrorism against al-Qaida and its supporters that the

CIA does, and in the last 10 years has managed to pull off a level of obscurity

that the CIA hasn't even managed.

It is used by the president, reports directly to the president and to the

secretary of defense. And really, until now, we have had - for those of us who

were, you know, looking at this - we've had sporadic reporting here and there

about actions that were undertaken by JSOC. But this chapter is trying to put

together its history since 9/11, when it was completely revamped into a man-

hunting, lethal-action arm of the military. And to say - and to look at what

it's allowed to do and how it does it and how effective it has been...

GROSS: Well, it was a JSOC SEAL team that killed bin Laden. So...

Ms. PRIEST: Right.

GROSS: ...and is really effective.

Ms. PRIEST: Yes. I mean, as a killing machine, it is highly effective. It is -

you know, no one competes with them, not - certainly not the CIA's

paramilitary. It is a professionalized killing force, and that's what it's been

used for. And, in fact, president Obama has really increased the use of JSOC.

They operate in very small groups of people so they can keep a low profile.

They also operate unmanned drones that are there for surveillance to collect

information about their targets, but also lethal drone strikes. They have their

own interrogation facilities that they alone control. And they have actually

captured and killed a lot more al-Qaida than the CIA have.

And they've been revamped to by General Stanley McChrystal, who really took

them from being a hostage rescue unit that did - definitely did some major work

right after 9/11, into what I call - what we call the secret army of the United

States, because they're a self-sustaining unit that has everything they could

possibly want, from their own satellites to their own intelligence unit and

their own - some reconnaissance planes and aircraft and that sort of thing.

They do - they also have a kill list. And that I guess is one of the more

controversial elements of both JSOC and the CIA, is that they can put people on

that list - individuals, single individuals on that list, and they can then

hunt them down and kill them. Some people call that assassination, which is

banned in the United States. Other people call that targeted killing. That's

what the U.S. government calls it.

GROSS: You describe JSOC as being the president's personal weapon against

terrorists, and that both President Bush and Obama have used it that way. What

are the implications of that?

Ms. PRIEST: Well, again, because it's all shrouded in secrecy, and in this case

a level of secrecy that is beyond all others. It's hard for the public to know,

not only what they're doing, but whether that - those actions are effective, or

whether they're counterproductive.

In the chapter I quote Stanley McChrystal, General McChrystal, who was the

commander of JSOC and really revamped it in - starting in 2003, is saying some

of our actions were counterproductive. That's because whatever they do, and if

they make mistakes, there is always a cleanup operation afterwards. There is

always people in a village who hate what has been done, and especially if there

is mistakes and civilians are killed. And that has happened repeatedly. The

blowback for such secret operations, first of all, is no longer secret. People

know what people have been killed. And they began to understand that it was the

military or some kind of unit - because they must have worn clothes that were

similar enough - that it caused, some would argue, it caused more grief than a

benefit. And that is one of the downsides to being able to give the authority

to one person or to a small group of people to use such a lethal weapon without

the rest of the world knowing.

In JSOC's case, they have the authority, under the way the government lawyers

interpret what they do, to do more killing in this way than the CIA does

without informing Congress. Under Bush they did not inform Congress, much at

all, about JSOC's actions. President Obama has taken a slightly different tact.

He believes that they should brief Congress, even though he agrees with the

Bush administration's legal interpretation of what they're doing, but that it

makes political sense to brief some of the conventional leaders about what JSOC

is doing.

The CIA has more oversight of its activities than JSOC does. That's the bottom

line. JSOC's oversight comes from its own chain of command. The CIA's oversight

comes, not only from its own chain of command, but also from Congress.

GROSS: After bin Laden was killed, I felt like well, I can understand secrecy

surrounding an operation like that. I mean that's such a...

Ms. PRIEST: Well, absolutely.

GROSS: Yeah.

Ms. PRIEST: Absolutely. We're not arguing that secrecy is unnecessary, not at

all. However, the secrecy has gotten out of control and every body in

government has made that point, going back 20 years. Nine-eleven came along,

and not only were more things put into the ceiver(ph) box but they were more

highly classified, making it more difficult for, not only the public to

understand it, but for other people within government. So it became an

impediment to better government functioning, as well. And now it's simply out

of control. And most people I interviewed would agree with that.

And they would also agree that the government can no longer maintain its

secrets. The WikiLeaks is one product of that, but there are many other

examples of this sort of thinking of classified information that are contained

in the conclusion. But simply stated, the technology that the government uses

in its computer systems is easily penetrated and is being penetrated by people

who have no authorization to get that information. So it realizes that its

ability to control this vast amount of information it's created that's

classified, is very weak at the moment. And many people advocate it - just

start over again, and say what is it that we really need to keep secret?

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Washington Post Pulitzer prize-

winning reporter Dana Priest. Her new book is called "Top Secret America: The

Rise of the New American Security State."

Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Pulitzer prize-winning Washington

Post reporter, Dana Priest. We're talking about her new book "Top Secret

America," which is about how top secret private contractors and government

agencies have just expanded incredibly since 9/11.

Let's give some kind of physical reality to the top secret America that you're

describing. There's all kinds of new complexes that have grown up or that are

being built in the wake of 9/11. You say that the capital of this alternative

America is actually the Baltimore area, which surprised me. What's going on in

Baltimore?

Ms. PRIEST: Right. South of Baltimore, near the Baltimore Airport, is Fort

Meade, the home of the National Security Agency, which is an agency that

probably grew the most after 9/11. And it's the worldwide eavesdropping agency.

I backed into this discovery, because I was invited to go to a... You know, one

of the hazards, one of the difficulties of reporting this book, is how do you

get inside? So I was looking for places where I could go and get inside and do

something that was being done that relates the to top secret America, and the

Defense Intelligence Agency let me come into a class in which they were

teaching people how to program these cipher locks. And they were teaching them

how to maintain classified meeting space.

So they let me come in and watch what they were doing. And when I drove over

there, I noticed that the whole area where this classroom was situated, the

office was situated, had this eerie feel to it. I mean, I had to bring my

editor out to show her, to say, am I crazy?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. PRIEST: But the buildings looked different. They were, sort of, paler or

plainer than - lots of them had the same time of tinted glass. They had no

signs that identified what was inside, but only numbers that identify them. And

a lot of long stay hotels, for what I later learned, were contractors that

would come in. Well, this led to a big exploration of this area. Bill Arkin, up

in Vermont, where he did a lot of his work, would explore using his addresses

and his incredible research tools to map the area. And then I would get in the

car and drive around with my computer on the armrest, talking to Bill on the

phone, and the both of us trying to figure out where I should go next to find

these industrial - it looked like a business park, but they are business parks

for these corporations and agencies. And then I found a realtor who understood

the dynamics of the area, and he took me around and showed me even more.

And what it turned out to be was a part of the alternative geography that's

mirrored in other areas of the country, which is you have a large agency like

the NSA, which is the hub, and then around it grows up all the contractors who

need to be near it to do their work, and then also hundreds of other government

agencies that supply bits and pieces and personnel for this and that, that they

also need. And so you get a cluster effect. And that's how we discovered this

cluster and then went about discovering the other clusters. But what we

discovered about this cluster is that when you start counting these things, as

we did, that this is the densest.

GROSS: What's an example of something that you found in one of these secret

communities, these secret hubs, that you found especially interesting?

Ms. PRIEST: Well, the 10 richest counties in the United States, according to

the Census Bureau, seven of them are hubs of top secret America. That tells me

that we are not just talking about a concentration of top secret work in a

concentration of top secret corporate business, but the ripple effect of that

is that the people who live and work in those communities are, by far, more

well off, economically, than their counterparts elsewhere. And so there you see

the distortion, if you will, of top secret America's economic power. The

schools are better. The income is higher. The standard of living is much

different.

GROSS: So I'm wondering, when you hear politicians say government can't create

jobs...

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: ...what does it make you think? Because you've seen all these jobs,

high-paying jobs, that have basically - they're with private contractors, but

they've been created to fulfill government needs. And you've also seen

government agencies, in top secret America, expand.

Ms. PRIEST: Oh, and what I've just said about those wealthy communities is the

best example of that. I mean, this is a jobs program, as well - which is not -

which is a very important political point, because jobs programs are really

hard to cut back on, politically, for government, for politicians, because

people's livelihoods are at stake.

I mean, part of the reason this whole thing exists, is because our political

leaders have not yet had an honest dialogue with the public about terrorism -

about how many al-Qaida - about how much the al-Qaida network has been

decimated, about what its strengths are that remain. It's much easier just to

keep adding more onto this, so that if something were to happen, you know,

nobody can be blamed. The cost, the political cost of cutting this, publicly,

is that if something happens then political leaders are going to accuse whoever

did the cutting of risking our future and risking our safety. So it's just much

easier to maintain this belief that we are nearly under attack every day, than

it is to speak openly and honestly and disclose much more about what we know

about al-Qaida’s strength right now.

And if you do that - and I have had that conversation with many people, and

there is really - I mean, while there is still great concern about al-Qaida,

al-Qaida is largely a decimated network now and there are several hundreds

left. There are new affiliates that have sprung up that are very worrisome, but

al-Qaida is nothing like it was before. And that's been a success of some of

these organizations like the FBI, like JSOC, like the CIA - not the larger top

secret America that we describe in the book.

GROSS: So that’s interesting. So you'd think some of the greatest victories in

trying to attack terrorism have come from the already existing part of top

secret America, not from this huge new infrastructure that's grown up?

Ms. PRIEST: You can definitely pick out half a dozen organizations that have

been highly effective in capturing and killing al-Qaida, and in producing the

intelligence, more importantly, that it took to do that and creating the weapon

systems that it also took to do that job. But they are a minority. They are a

corner of this larger top secret America beast that we write about.

GROSS: Top secret America, as you describe it, has grown so much. But the more

people trying to keep it secret, the more likely the secret it is to get out.

So is the secrecy getting harder and harder to preserve as the secret

organizations, and contractors and government agencies expands and expands, and

as the Internet keeps gathering more and more information? I mean you point out

in your book that there are a whole lot of, like, top secret documents, even

before WikiLeaks, that have been on the Internet.

Ms. PRIEST: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. This is one of the oddities about this,

is that as secrecy grew and more became classified, the harder it was to keep

that information from leaking out one way or the other. And one of the

revelations in the book is a counterintelligence review of the WikiLeaks leaks.

And government discovered that many of its agencies don't understand how to

keep their networks safe, don't understand where their networks are leaking.

Those that do, haven't patched them up because they either don't have the money

or the personnel that know how to do it. And what's more, is that they believe

this problem is only going to get worse as, as you say, the Internet gets

stronger and people figure out other ways to penetrate the government’s

systems.

Part of this is a generational thing. The leaders are older. They don't

understand as much as they need to about how their own IT systems work. And

it's like plugging your finger in the dyke to try to patch it up here and

there. This problem will only get bigger, which is another reason why it is

time to re-look the entire classification system. Classification system was

written 50 years ago when technology was completely different. But yet, things

are classified today, under top secret, which means that exposing them would

cause grave harm to the national security. And when you look at the things that

have been exposed and written about that are top secret, they have not caused

grave harm to the national security. So really, the whole system needs to be

reviewed. It's been reviewed many times. Someone needs to take...

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Ms. PRIEST: ...someone needs to act on it for the sake of keeping those things

secret that need to be secret.

GROSS: Dana Priest, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.

Ms. PRIEST: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.

GROSS: Dana Priest is the co-author of the new book "Top Secret America: The

Rise of the New American Security State." You can read an excerpt on our

website, freshair.npr.org.

Priest reports on top secret America in tonight's edition of the PBS series

"Frontline."

Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews Amy Waldman’s new novel "The Submission,"

about the controversy over the design of a 9/11 memorial after the jury that

picks the designer finds out he's Muslim.

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Could 'Submission' Be America's September 11 Novel?

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TERRY GROSS, host:

Of all the subjects a first-time novelist might attempt, America in the wake of

September 11th would seem like a really unwise choice. It's too ambitious, too

fraught, just too much. Fortunately, says book critic Maureen Corrigan, Amy

Waldman didn't get that memo. Waldman served as co-chief of the South Asia

bureau of The New York Times, and her short fiction has been published in The

Atlantic. Her debut novel about September 11th is called "The Submission," and

Maureen calls it a triumph.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: "The Submission" is a gorgeously written novel of ideas about

America in the wake of September 11th. It tackles subjects like identity

politics, undocumented immigrants and the stress fractures of democracy. Maybe

the most audacious question that's posed by Amy Waldman's debut novel, however,

is the implicit one that lingers long after a reader finishes it: Namely, could

it be that a decade after the attacks, America finally has the 9/11 novel - one

that does justice, artistically and historically, to the aftershocks of that

day?

Of course, there have been other serious fiction contenders that have ruminated

on September 11th: among them, Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland," Deborah

Eisenberg's short story collection, "Twilight of the Superheroes," Don

DeLillo's "Falling Man," and Ken Kalfus' dark tour de force, "A Disorder

Peculiar to the Country." But "The Submission" distinguishes itself by its

panoramic scope and, also, by the ease with which it pulls off the literary

magic trick of being at once, poetic and polemical.

Arguments about America are hashed out relentlessly on the pages of this novel,

and yet, Waldman never stints on character development, plot or the pleasures

of her inventive language. Ever the English teacher, I even found myself making

lists of all the startling verbs and metaphors Waldman comes up with. For

instance, describing a tough woman laughing, meanly, at another's expense

Waldman writes: Her laugh burst forth, breaking up her face like jackhammered

cement. This is an assured, ambitious novel that appeals to both a reader's

senses and intelligence.

The central situation here will sound more contrived in my summary than it is

in Waldman's execution. Here goes: Two years after the attacks, a jury of

artists, academics and one non-credentialed civilian - a 9/11 widow - has been

convened to sift through some 5,000 blind design entries for a memorial at the

site of ground zero. In the opening chapter, a winner is chosen, and then, the

dumbfounded jury learns that their pick is a Muslim-American architect named

Mohammed Khan. The chief champion of Khan's design was the 9/11 widow, Claire

Burwell.

Waldman succinctly characterizes Claire's grief for her late husband this way:

It had been two years. He appeared in her dreams but vanished on waking, and

she spoke of him in qualities - positive, ebullient, smart, principled - that

had no texture. Claire initially loves the design for a rectangular walled

garden as a memorial - especially, the fact that it would be composed of both

life-affirming greenery, as well as steel trees made out of salvaged scraps

from the World Trade Center. But, as soon as Khan's name is leaked to the

public, controversy rages about the identity of the architect and his garden

design. It seems Islamic to some critics. In fact, Lou Sarge, a Rush Limbaugh-

like radio personality, charges that the garden is Mohammed Khan's sly strategy

to construct an Islamic martyr's paradise on ground zero. Claire finds herself

pressured to rethink her support for the garden. At a raucous public hearing in

New York, one bereaved father poignantly states his objections. We, who have

carried the weight of loss, are now being asked to carry the weight of proving

America's tolerance.

Khan himself is an aloof guy who doesn't play well to the media: He's outraged

that, as an American, he should even be called upon to justify his patriotism.

As more and more voices pile into the national debate, the arguments become

more complicated. A scholar opines that the World Trade Center Towers,

themselves, contained Islamic architectural features. another 9/11 widow speaks

out to ask if there will even be a place for her husband's name on whatever

memorial will be built, given that he was one of the many undocumented

immigrants who worked at the Towers, cleaning bathrooms and hallways.

"The Submission" is sure to generate a lot of discussion in book clubs across

the land about the promises of democracy. In so doing, Waldman's novel itself

serves as a powerful memorial to 9/11 and the struggles of America in its

aftermath.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She

reviewed "The Submission" by Amy Waldman. You can read an excerpt on our

website, freshair.npr.org, where you can download Podcasts of our show.

I'm Terry Gross.

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