Although proponents of secret science like to focus on examples in which it has benefited society, insiders from the very beginning of the Cold War worried that the best minds would not be drawn to work that they could not even talk about. Secrecy protected those involved from embarrassment or criminal prosecution, but it also made it much harder to vet experimental protocols, validate the results, or replicate them in follow-up research.
One research manager at a Department of Energy weapons lab would later admit, “Far more progress is actually evidenced in the unclassified fields of research than the classified ones.” The physicist Robert McCrory, whose own lab received millions in funding in partnership with Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos National Laboratories, was even more blunt: “Some of the work is so poor that if it were declassified, it would be laughed off the face of the Earth.”
We can only guess what, specifically, McCrory had in mind when he said this. There are all too many possibilities. Collectively, they lend credence to the oft-stated concern that secret programs became a refuge for second- and third-rate minds. The wizards of Langley, for instance, considered it a “remarkable scientific achievement” when they managed to prove that cats could be “trained to move short distances.” According to a CIA veteran, Victor Marchetti, this achievement was part of a program to determine whether cats could be turned into surveillance devices:
A lot of money was spent. They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that. Finally they’re ready. They took it out to a park and pointed it at a park bench and said, “Listen to those two guys. Don’t listen to anything else—not the birds, no dog or cat—just those two guys!” They put him out of the van, and a taxi comes and runs him over. There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead!
The CIA nevertheless commended the “energy and imagination” of the team, and considered them potential “models for scientific pioneers.”
Secrecy protected those involved from embarrassment or criminal prosecution, but it also made it much harder to vet experimental protocols.
It could be argued that a sprawling research program purposely designed to push the envelope will, over several decades, inevitably produce some strange and low-quality research. But in some cases it is possible to make a side-by-side comparison of US government research with research commissioned by another country that had fewer resources but the same goal.
For instance, during World War II, American and British forces both used dogs to detect mines. It was delicate, dangerous work, and the dogs sometimes proved unreliable. Both governments therefore mounted research projects in the early 1950s to evaluate and improve dogs’ ability to locate mines.
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The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets by Matthew Connelly has been shortlisted for the 2023 Cundill History Prize.
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The British just wanted “the facts” and sought out a “trained scientist.” They selected Solly Zuckerman, an anatomist expert in animal behavior. He designed the experiment to eliminate the possibility that human handlers were unconsciously influencing the dogs’ performance.
This required systematically isolating the specific biochemical and physiological factors that might explain success or failure, since either could prove important when mines were odorless. Zuckerman had a strong personal motivation—he had seen the devastating impact of blast injuries when he conducted wartime physiological research with the survivors. His larger agenda was to develop more rigorous experimental methods in animal research. Zuckerman found no solid evidence that dogs could be relied on to detect buried mines.
The U.S. Army, on the other hand, hired a “parapsychologist” named J. B. Rhine. It is not clear why—all the army records were later destroyed. Though his training was in botany, Rhine had become famous for his experiments—never replicated— in extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis. For Rhine, the study was an opportunity to prove that ESP really existed; he had already gathered a collection of amazing stories of animal ESP. Rhine once again convinced him
