Twenty-Five Years
For the first thirteen years of my life, I didn’t know much about my Mom. Oh, I knew she was from England, and devoted to her family here in America, and her family at “home”, especially her father and the Queen. As my eldest sister Terry says, Mom made England into a “fairyland” for us. Mom was the youngest in her family by far, “Babs” (for baby) to them and the rest of the world. Even when some of her siblings were estranged from each other, they all welcomed Babs and her family to their homes. To us, everyone smiled in England.
I heard some rumors from my sisters and Dad about what Mom did during World War II. But she really told me nothing about it. That is, until I was thirteen years-old, in the back seat of a 1963 Ford station wagon with Terry driving – Mom didn’t drive. We were in Kettering, heading south towards I-75 on the South Dixie Highway. It was one of those events I can detail, like a car wreck (we didn’t) or a tragedy. Mom turned to me and said, “It’s been twenty-five years since the end of the war. I’m now free to talk about ‘most’ of what I did.”
The Act
Mom was a spy for England’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the War. (There’s lots of essays about that, click here to see some.) She went into Nazi occupied territory over and over again. Mom helped organize resistance activities, delivered important messages, and sabotaged Nazi troop movements. Dad knew about it, because he knew the Americans she worked with, and I’m sure he got a better inkling from Mom. But generally, Mom didn’t talk about her work in World War II until 1970, twenty-five years after, when her oath of secrecy under the British Official Secrets Act finally expired.
Mom knew how to keep a secret. And she knew what her obligations were under the law, British Law, even decades after the War was over. She kept her secrets even from her family and friends, so much so that there was always a note of skepticism from our British cousins when we mentioned it later. After all, they, her direct family, didn’t know. (That is, except for her oldest brother, who was engaged in similar work. They ran into each other at a mission briefing). My grandparents thought that Mom was going to work at the “Old-Age Pension Office” during the War, though I suppose they too had some inkling. “Old-Age Pension” officials didn’t consistently go on weeks-long trips, completely out of contact from home.
Keep the Faith
Secrets, Government secrets, were important. The SOE was merged into British Intelligence (MI-6) after the war. The methods, tactics and some of the personnel that fought the War against the Nazis went onto fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Things they did during the War came back to help (or haunt) in the 1950’s and 60’s. So keeping secrets was important, not just to the past, but to the present and future operatives. Mom understood that only too well; of the ninety-six members of her SOE unit, she was one of only five to survive the War.
So I come from a family well aware of government secrets. And we learned the cost of those secrets, not just in terms of the government, but to individuals as well. The SOE sometimes sent agents with mis-information into the field, set up, unknown to them, to be captured. They would fight to retain their secrets, until the Nazi torture brutally wrung it out of them. And those hard kept secrets, given finally to the enemy, got the Nazis to believe things that weren’t true. It was all part of Duty to Country: sacrifice one to save hundreds.
Revelation
So when folks seem cavalier with our Government’s secrets, it makes me concerned. I understood when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the “Pentagon Papers”, showing that our Government consistently lied in the Vietnam War. No lives were at risk, it was “just” a history the Pentagon didn’t want Americans to know. But when folks that I generally agree talk about Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning as “heroes”, I disagree. How many lives were lost because of the secrets they revealed?
And when a former President of the United States proves to be careless with our secrets while in office, and even more dismissive of them after he is out of power, I shudder. When then-President Trump revealed shared secret Israeli information to Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov about Syria, it is said that an Israeli informant died in Damascus. How many lives are at risk with Top Secrets scattered around a dinner club in Palm Beach?
Yesterday it was revealed (by the Trump side) that a Federal Grand Jury has indicted Donald J Trump, the 45th President of the United States, on seven criminal counts. Some are violations of the Espionage Act, America’s version of the Official Secrets Act. As President, he accessed all of the United States’ “secrets”. When his Presidency ended, he chose to keep some of those secrets for himself. After years of negotiations, obfuscation, falsification and obstruction; the Justice Department was pushed to take him to Court.
Here we are, a former President learning the “hard way” how important secrets are. Mom would approve.
