Any work that seeks to address state secrecy after Wikileaks and the Edward Snowden National Security Agency (NSA) leaks will be confronted with an archetypical argument invoking an ideal of transparency that supposedly undergirds the U.S. democratic state. As Rahul Sagar points out in the conclusion of Secrets and Leaks, we would do better than to succumb to this appeal to “transparency” (p. 204). In fact, Sagar goes to great lengths to expose how the dilemma of state secrecy always inherently contains both its legitimacy and its disavowal. As Trevor Paglen, geographer and artist photographer of secret sites of the U.S. national security state, has aptly written, “[s]tate secrecy is an amalgam of logics and practices with a common intent: to conceal ‘facts on the ground,’ to make things disappear, and to plausibly deny their existence” (Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World, 2009). That duplicitous nature of the secret is indeed inescapable. Here enters the second book under discussion here, The Covert Sphere by Timothy Melley, which analyzes the popular representation of state secrecy in order to take on a critique of the national security state’s use and misuse of secrecy.

Commenting on these two “pre-Snowden” books provides one with many insights, as it gives even more credence to the arguments laid out in both monographs. These two studies evoke the elusiveness of state secrecy as they undertake to address the national security state head on, albeit with two rather different analytical processes. Both authors discuss state secrecy and its legitimacy while also bearing in mind its unmasking by publicity. Melley delves more into the cultural mind-set of state secrecy and ventures into the intricate and vexed relations animating publicity and secrecy when it comes to public knowledge. Sagar gives a more methodical and politico-juridical account of the dilemmas posed by and around state secrecy for all actors involved: from decision makers and statecraft intellectuals to the press and would-be whistleblowers and leakers, as well as the judges and lawyers involved in the regulation and litigation process.

In Melley’s work, the “covert sphere” is “a cultural imaginary shaped both by institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state” (p. 5). Melley captures well how the national security state has been part and parcel of its own narration in fiction with its “emphasis on secrecy and deception” (p. viii). He reminds us most forcefully that it is “through popular fiction” (original emphasis) that the public comes to “know” about the covert sphere, the covert actions of the state. He persuasively conveys how entertainment programs give us some knowledge about the secret activities and clandestine operations of the state, even if they are fictitious ones (p. 14). The type of knowledge the public acquires through such process is not anodyne, nor is it comprehensive and accurate, and it matters not. This is what he construes as “public half-knowledge” (pp. 9, 14): the fact that the public kind of knows things and events without really knowing them, as it does not know the actual unfolding of certain events (think of renditions and specific torture acts by the CIA under the George W. Bush administration). The public knows these events did happen, but at the same time it was rarely privy to the actual cases as they were happening and when they were.

Melley emphasizes what he sees as key characteristic of the national security state: its capacity to operate a playful register of practices oscillating between secrecy and publicity, where the secretive actions of the state are knowingly covert as “public secrets” (pp. 9, 13). He convincingly argues how popular representations in fiction—the fantasies—of the covert actions of the state provide “crucial vehicles of public half-knowledge” (p. 14). His argument is most persuasive when he highlights how the key interplay between the popular representation of state secrecy and the actual regime of state secrecy fuse when, inevitably, agents of the state come to imagine their own work through “the cultural imaginary of the covert sphere” (p. 18). This is why his book can, in many respects, be conceived of as a powerful tale of the way in which fiction can influence the real world. He looks at the history of brainwashing during the Korean War (Chapter 1) and the spy trials of the 1950s as “spectacles of secrecy” (Chapter 2) before skimming through espionage novels to discuss “false documents” (Chapter 3). He focuses on postmodern novels to uncover the “roots of postmodern historiographic skepticism” in dysfunctional narratives (Chapter 4) and then turns to the role of amnesia in many covert sphere novels (Chapter 5).

After this survey of Cold War cultural texts, Melley astutely reflects on the covert sphere (through popular TV series and films about terrorism) and how it acts as an ideological “geopolitical melodrama” that allows him to read post-9/11 events and reactions as a Cold War—like security state in a post—Cold War context (pp. 40–43). Though far from being original, this application of a Cold War script to a different context augments his wholesale argument about the crucial role played by the cultural representations of covert operations; fictions of terror like Fox’s show 24 afford us main vehicles for discussing the actual operations of the security state (p. 222).

It is admittedly a truism that the Edward Snowden case has launched a crisis in the public regarding U.S. surveillance programs in the age of big data and mobility. The revelations of the NSA’s large-scale espionage practices have been at the forefront of news media ever since they emerged in June 2013. Yet the Snowden affair is, in and of itself, an epitome of public half-knowledge (as discussed by Melley), where the public is both surprised and not at all by the revelation of a public secret. Movies and novels had long dramatized the U.S. security state tapping phones and collecting information of private American citizens. But when everyone learned what the Snowden-leaked documents revealed, that is, that the NSA has been tracking phone calls worldwide through the “complicit”/coerced cooperation of U.S. telecommunications and social media companies like Verizon, Facebook, Google, and so on, this information turned out to be already known by the public to some degree, even if not officially.

Here, I want to bring out one of the central claims of Melley’s book, though potentially somewhat controversial: not only that the national security state, with its cult of secrecy, has allowed space for fictions featuring “forms of suspicion, scepticism, and uncertainty” but also that they “would eventually find their fullest expression in postmodernism” (p. viii). In so doing, Melley is not saying that postmodernism is reducible to the Cold War and the national security state; rather, he evokes Alan Nadel’s main argument in Containment Culture (1995) by postulating that postmodernism is rooted in the postwar society (p. 37). What is more, he is invested in tracing the rise of postmodernism and especially to likening its epistemological “skepticism about how to know and represent the world, particularly as history,” to the ascent of the national security state (p. 36). Throughout the book, Melley offers a cultural history of the Cold War and the War on Terror by investigating filmic and televisual representations in order “to explore the cultural, political and philosophical consequences of a substantially covert foreign policy” (p. 40).

In Secrets and Leaks, Sagar provides us with a thoroughly researched and well-documented study of the politico-legal context of regimented state secrecy and offers an insightful analysis of the politics behind state secrecy going back to the constitutional debates and the Framers’ intent. Again, although this book was evidently written before the Snowden leaks, they in no way invalidate his claims but rather reinforce them. The author maintains that we cannot regulate state secrecy in full, and we are condemned to rely on whistleblowers as the best means to regulate misuse of state secrecy. Part of his leitmotiv is a defense of the practice of whistleblowing and document leakage for the sake of democratic politics and in keeping with a rationale for national security, while remaining aware of the inherent dangers these practices may represent. He contends that leaks, leakers, and whistleblowers are another pillar in the fight for privacy: they have always been there. And for Sagar, they are the only things that can ensure some kind of check on the national security state. It is not surprising that officials who resort to leaking will do it anonymously for fear of repercussions (p. 7). He explains how difficult it is for regulation to be effective in a national security state and poses the question: “Who watches the watchers?”

Sagar is fixated on state secrecy as it relates to national security, and he rightly believes that we cannot escape this specific need for secrecy, nor can it be misused. Contrary to many who would bring up either the Constitution or the system of checks and balances between secrecy and freedom in a democracy, he asserts that the success of the system of state secrecy for national security, as well as its toll, rely “on the virtues of those men and women who secretly take the law into their own hand in order to either open our eyes or close our mind” (p. 7). A vast amount of his energy is thus spent on the best ways to regulate state secrecy (Chapter 1) by reflecting on whether we ought to condone or condemn leakers and whistleblowers. He tackles this problem by looking at judges and judicial deference (Chapter 2), Congress and its oversight capacity (Chapter 3), the law and its legitimacy (Chapter 4), whistleblowers themselves and disobedience (Chapter 5), and, finally, leakers and the issue of trust (Chapter 6).

Sagar’s efforts culminate in his conclusion regarding the dilemma of the state of secrecy in a functioning democracy. For one, he is adamant that one cannot solve it but can only hope for the current state to go on. It is left to judges and lawyers to do their best to ensure that neither the executive branch nor the press abuse its power (in overzealous demands for state secrecy or in undermining national security with the publicizing of unscrupulous leaks and whistleblowing acts). He rightly asserts that both judges and lawyers cannot be the final arbiters of that game, that they cannot know whose side should win but can argue in favor of unauthorized disclosures as being legitimate in certain cases (p. 203). It is in this balance that the “abuse of state secrecy” in democracies can be fought. Much to the dismay of those who would like to point a finger at state leaders who usurp their power, Sagar shows that the “true dilemma of state secrecy” lies in the fact that one cannot easily set apart rightful from wrongful doing, and that the system of those who uphold state secrecy and those who regulate it can be balanced only by a sense of responsibility (pp. 2024). This is why he concludes that “we must rely on a regulatory weapon that has the tendency to backfire at least as often as it finds its target—this is the dilemma that state secrecy creates for democracy” (p. 204).

Coming at this conclusion from a different perspective and with a more critical twist, Melley nevertheless abounds in the same logic when he construes that the national security state reflects “the public secret at the heart of U.S. democracy: we have institutionalized undemocratic means of preserving our democracy” (p. 222). These two scholars thus seem to offer crystal-clear accounts of the national security state as the American way of life now tracing every contour of U.S. democracy.