A Field Trip into Secrecy
In spring semester 2007 eighteen freshman in Ted Gup's SAGES First Seminar set out for a most unusual field trip. The focus was secrecy in the nation's capital. For two days the class was immersed in government secrecy in all its myriad forms. Students stayed in a downtown hotel and dined at restaurants (Chinese, Pizza, etc.) recommended by Tom Sietsema, the Washington Post's food critic and a former student of Ted's.
First stop was Capitol Hill and a private briefing by senior investigators for the House Committee on Government Reform. Students were invited to take their seats not in the gallery but where the members of Congress usually sit, while being briefed by a team of House investigators on the fine points of secrecy, classification, and government oversight.
From Capitol Hill, students traveled by subway to the Pentagon where they were given an extensive tour of the Department of Defense headquarters, including the famous courtyard that during the Cold War was considered ground zero.
They were also taken to the memorial to the victims of 9/11 killed when a plane slammed into the flank of the Pentagon. Students were privy to a private briefing session at the Defense Intelligence Agency. The subject was the ethics of spying, offered by an expert from the Joint Military Intelligence College.
That evening at our downtown hotel, we were briefed by a former covert operative of the CIA who had been Jerusalem station chief. She told students what life was like under cover, the recruiting of foreign nationals, the background training for espionage, and the personal and ethical perils of constantly living a lie.
The next morning it was off to the spy museum, a tour that dovetailed perfectly with the briefings of the day before.
The afternoon was spent at the Washington Post with Pulitzer-Prize winner Sari Horwitz who described her life as an investigative reporter and how to acquire sources and penetrate secrets. Then, the class was given a personal tour of the Washington Post newsroom.
That evening, Ted and his wife, Peggy, long-time residents of Washington , took students on a walking tour of the monuments on the Mall.
Next morning the class boarded a plane and returned to Cleveland , super-charged and with an entirely new grasp of government secrecy. The entire trip was paid for with the generosity of SAGES and a university research fund. Not long after the semester ended, but for many of the students the Washington trip would have a remarkable and long-lasting affect on both academic and career plans.
This was not the first or last time Ted Gup would work with secrecy. A former investigative reporter for the Washington Post and Time Magazine , he had earlier written a book on the CIA, The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA (Doubleday, 2000), a bestseller and now on the reading list of new recruits to the CIA. Six months after the Washington field trip, his second book, Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life , was published by Doubleday and was featured on CNN, NPR, NBC Nightly News, and commented upon by the Chicago Tribune , the Washington Post , USA Today and numerous other newspapers. That book is one of the texts in another class on secrecy that Ted Gup is teaching this spring.
|
