Storm over Secrecy Acts

In Canada and Britain, the lid is tighter than in the U.S.

The competing needs for government secrecy and the public right to know have long posed a dilemma for Western democracies. In the U.S., the most recent example is the case of Frank Snepp, the former CIA agent who was ordered by a federal judge last June to turn over to the Government any "ill-gotten gains" (at least $60,000 so far) from Decent Interval, his book charging the CIA with botching the evacuation of Saigon. The Government argued that Snepp jeopardized future intelligence operations by violating his secrecy oath; Snepp's defenders saw a discouraging precedent for future "whistle blowers."

No matter how worrisome the Snepp case may be to U.S. public servants who break promises to keep secrets, they do not have to contend with anything like the Official Secrets Act in Canada or Britain, where it is a crime to disclose any government document without permission. These laws are currently under fire in both countries, as a result of three cases.

The most bizarre one concerns Alexander Peter Treu, 56, a German-born Canadian and former Luftwaffe pilot who heads Canalatin Consultants, a Montreal electronics firm. In the late 1960's and early '70's, he worked on the design of communications and surveillance systems that were built for NATO by a larger Canadian firm. In 1974 Mounties raided Treu's home and carted away 500 Ibs. of documents. In 1976, after a long investigation, he was charged under the Official Secrets Act with holding on to classified documents without official authorization and failing to take "reasonable care" of them.

Just what Treu did wrong was not spelled out in the charge. Treu himself is not allowed to say; if he does, he will go to jail. He is likely to be imprisoned anyway because he has been found guilty. On what evidence? No one is allowed to explain that either. His year-long trial at Montreal's Palais de Justice, which concluded last April, was conducted in secret. All that has been revealed is his sentence: two years in jail.

During his trial, Treu gave several interviews suggesting that he was the victim of bureaucratic bungling, which may have let his security clearance lapse without his knowledge. Indeed, NATO was still awarding contracts to him during his trial. Now free on $10,000 bail pending an appeal, Treu has been silenced by a court order, and officials hint only that the case is not insubstantial.

While Treu was being secretly tried this spring, the Canadian government used the Official Secrets Act for the first time against a newspaper, prosecuting the Toronto Sun for disclosing a top-secret Mountie report on Soviet espionage. Critics complain that the Sun, a persistent right-wing gadfly to the Trudeau government, is being charged not with spilling secrets but with revealing government ineptness at dealing with Soviet spies.

The English case involves three small, militantly leftist magazines held in contempt for printing the name of an Intelligence Officer. Called Colonel B in court, the officer had testified against two left-wing journalists charged under the British O.S.A. with receiving unauthorized information. Four members of Parliament later deliberately uttered his real name in a nationally broadcast debate. Radio commentators, fearing prosecution, were careful not to repeat the name. The magazines were hand-slapped with small fines (less than $1,000 each), and much of the press ridiculed the whole farce.

The Colonel B affair underlines the curious history of the Official Secrets Act, which dates from 1896 in Britain and 1939 in Canada. Although, as one former British Attorney General put it, The Act can make it a crime "to report the number of cups of tea consumed per week in a government department," in fact there have been few prosecutions. That is explained partly by intimidation, partly by government restraint and partly by the British and Canadian press's deference to the need for government secrecy.

Lately, segments of press and Parliament in both countries have been less docile and more inclined to see The Act as a cover-up tool. Says Canadian M.P. Gerald Baldwin: "What was conceived of as a weapon of defense against enemies without has become an offensive weapon for governments and bureaucrats to deal with embarrassments within."

Britain's Labor government last month released a White Paper proposing a streamlined Official Secrets Act. But civil libertarians fear that under the reforms, official prosecutions will go up, not down. "The new act," says a Civil Liberties Advocate, "will convert an inaccurate blunderbuss into a highly accurate rifle."

Because of the First Amendment and ambiguous espionage laws, the U.S. press is not nearly so hamstrung by Government secrecy as its British and Canadian counterparts, who could not get away with printing something like the Pentagon papers. As for American public servants who disclose Government information, they can land in jail only if the information harms the national defense (though just what material should be classified secret remains hotly debated). To plug less serious leaks, the U.S. has tried to use other tools. Example: Snepp was not charged with disclosing classified information but with violating his secrecy oath, which the CIA, State, Treasury, Defense and other agencies all have in varying forms.

Unlike the U.S., neither Canada nor the U.K. has any kind of Freedom of Information Act. But in Canada, the government has promised to propose Freedom-Of-Information Legislation in the fall, and demand for similar legislation is building in Britain. Still, the chance for any real loosening is perhaps illustrated by what happened a few years ago to an internal Canadian government study on ways to increase public access: the Bureaucrats who ordered up the report promptly stamped it CONFIDENTIAL.

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