President Barack Obama has made some laudable gestures towards reform and transparency, but he has proved unwilling to make meaningful changes in the oversight, accountability, and prerogatives of the secret agencies he commands. Despite his promise of a government “committed to operating with an unprecedented level of openness,” he exhibits reluctance to investigate or expose the potential crimes of the nation’s secret warriors. If history can guide us in predicting the consequences of this timidity, his unwillingness to fulfill his pledge of transparency will feed conspiracy theories about the federal government, and undermine the trust that he needs to accomplish his most ambitious reforms.

At the beginning of his administration, the new president proclaimed that he would reverse the policies of the Bush White House and throw off the cloak of secrecy that had hidden government actions from the public.  On his first day in office, he issued new memos and orders that made it easier for Americans to find out what their public officials are doing behind closed doors. “Starting today, every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known,” he declared.

Even more important, he named an outsider – former congressman and White House chief of staff Leon Panetta – to head the Central Intelligence Agency, despite some strong pressure from supporters of the intelligence community to name an old agency hand.  And soon after taking office, the president released the “torture memos” -- government documents describing the brutal interrogation methods used on the CIA’s prisoners.

But Obama also signaled that there were some dark corners where the light would never shine.  He reversed his initial position on disclosing the photographs of the torture of detainees, insisting that these photos could provoke attacks on U.S. servicemen and women. Then his administration refused to release the FBI’s interview with former vice president Dick Cheney during the Valerie Plame leak investigation, a move that stunned supporters of government openness.  Obama’s Justice Department has also supported the Bush position in three lawsuits by invoking the “state secrets” privilege, in which the government insists that a suit cannot proceed because it might endanger national security.  This position outraged civil liberties groups.  Most tellingly, Obama decided to keep some of the CIA’s most powerful officials – men who had overseen the infamous rendition and torture programs – in important government posts. Recently he threatened to veto a bill that would expand congressional oversight of the CIA.

Obama’s advisers undoubtedly know that previous attempts to challenge the most powerful parts of the secret government have turned out badly for the reformers.  In 1977, after the revelations of Watergate and the House and Senate investigations of the intelligence community (the so-called Pike and Church committees), President Jimmy Carter appointed a principled military man to shake up the CIA, Admiral Stansfield Turner, who proclaimed that he would resign rather than carry out an illegal or unconstitutional order from the president.  Turner truly believed in the necessity of open government: in fact, he argued, secret agents make better decisions when they’re forced to explain their reasons to democratically elected overseers. When CIA employees stumbled across memos on one of the agency’s most notorious programs, the MKULTRA drug-testing operation, Turner immediately disclosed them to Congress.  He also cut 800 positions from the covert operations side of the agency – mostly through attrition -- in a move that is still reviled (and often exaggerated) by agency supporters.  Only about 17 people were actually fired, but Turner’s sometimes ham-fisted efforts to clean house angered the old boys at the agency and energized hard-liners to oppose future reforms. 

In the end, Carter and Turner made few lasting changes at the agency.  During the Carter administration, Congress passed only one significant statutory reform – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court warrants for wiretaps – while the number of congressional oversight committees was actually reduced.  When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he replaced Admiral Turner with a man determined to return the agency to the swashbuckling days of the early Cold War. William Casey set out to free the CIA from the fetters imposed after Watergate — and, as the Iran-contra scandal showed, he was willing to evade and subvert the law to accomplish his goals.

Obama’s advisers clearly see a lesson in Turner’s experience: Don’t declare war against the spooks, because you can’t win.  Moreover, given their ambitious agenda for the year, the Obama aides don’t want to waste precious political capital on an issue that is clearly not one of their top priorities.

But their reluctance to make changes may encourage conspiracy theories about their administration.  As I detail in my new book, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11,  when presidents try to keep the public in the dark, they stimulate the imaginations of anti-government conspiracy theorists.  When President Lyndon Johnson decided to keep secret the details of the CIA’s plots against Fidel Castro, conspiracy theorists saw that he was participating in a cover-up – and concluded that he was covering up his own involvement in the murder of his predecessor, President John Kennedy.  When President George W. Bush suggested a conspiracy between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda in the September 11 attacks, conspiracy theorists outside the government decided that Bush and his aides were intentionally deceiving them.  And to what purpose? Many citizens – about a third of the public, according to polls – came to believe that the Bush officials were lying because they had actually condoned or even planned the attacks themselves.

To his credit, so far Obama has avoided the most egregious mistakes of his predecessors (at least, as far as we know): surveillance of harmless dissidents; the promotion of officially sanctioned conspiracy theories; and active conspiring by government agents against the people.  These real government lies, cover-ups, and conspiracies in the past have helped to fuel conspiracy theories like those advanced by the 9/11 truth movement.

But even the appearance of condoning a cover-up can encourage conspiracy theories about the government.  When the president says he’s committed to change and transparency but then continues the old policies of secrecy, he helps to convince the skeptics that the president is the tool of the secret, nefarious interests who “really” run the country.  This means that citizens have less trust in their government – and trust is what Obama needs if he truly wants to cut the number of nuclear weapons, slow climate change, and provide health care to all Americans.  In this case, too much caution can be a risky policy.