It was a late spring morning on Fort Campbell in 2002, the time of year when the post comes alive with a renewed sense of energy, but before the heat and humidity really began to settle in. I was enjoying a rare break from the dark recesses of the SCIF – Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility – in the basement of Building 52, where I’d spent most of my days and many of my nights since the 9/11 attacks the previous September. It had been six months since we’d deployed Task Force Rakkasan – the division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team – to Afghanistan, the surge in activity surrounding Operation Anaconda had ebbed, and the new day offered a rare moment to come up for air.
My window was open, and I could just catch the scent of bacon and eggs wafting in the breeze from a nearby dining facility. I leaned back and took in the moment. Then a loud voice bellowed down the hallway of the decrepit World War Two barracks that served as the logistics hub of the division.
I couldn’t quite make out the conversation, but certain words and phrases reverberated through the wooden structure, sending a shock wave through me. The voice belonged to our division transportation officer, and he was loudly discussing a subject that was unknown to everyone else in the building, largely because it was still classified as a special access program. Only a handful of leaders in the division had been read on to the program, and no one ever discussed it outside the confines of the SCIF.
Until today.
I stood up from my desk and quickly walked down the hallway, where I found my counterpart reclined in his office chair with his feet on his desk, loudly discussing a future deployment over his speaker phone. I walked in, leaned over, and disconnected the call. “What in the actual f$%k are you doing?” I asked.
The Cone of Silence
He returned a bewildered look. “You can’t discuss this here, and you sure as shit can’t talk about it on speakerphone,” I continued. “This is all cone of silence stuff. If you want to talk about any of it, you need to drag your happy ass down to the SCIF.”
Although I was speaking in pop culture reference mode, the meaning of my words couldn’t have been clearer. The cone of silence – a reference to the classic 1960s television spy comedy, Get Smart – was a well-understood fundamental principle of operational security: what we discussed in the SCIF stayed in the SCIF. This was a topic not to be discussed outside the walls of a secure facility.
As one of a select few division planners, dealing with classified information was just part of the job. While we all shared a very dark and often disturbed sense of humor about our roles, we didn’t joke when it came to operational security. So, while we might laugh amongst ourselves about wearing shoe phones and conducting planning under the cone of silence, the consequences of violating one of the basic tenets of operation security were simply too serious to ignore.
The OPSEC Puzzle
Writing about the October 7, 2023, Hamas surprise attack on Israel, Javed Ali compared intelligence analysis to “putting a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle together,” a concept I learned through personal experience over years of working with and around highly classified material. Much like the 9/11 attacks, there were signs that Hamas was planning something, clues that suggested something “large-scale and highly complex.”
Ali, a counterterrorism and intelligence scholar with years of experience working the intelligence community, noted that analysis revolves around taking “individual pieces of intelligence every day and trying to make judgments for policymakers to actually do something with those insights.” A good analyst doesn’t have to assemble the entire puzzle to discern the vital operational details. They only need access to enough puzzle pieces to see the big picture.
This is why the cone of silence was – and still is – so important to operational security. The puzzle pieces don’t all have to be classified data, either. With enough controlled unclassified information – sensitive information that, while not classified, still requires safeguarding – coupled with some basic detective work using open-source intelligence – publicly available information – an astute analyst can gain insights, discern key decisions, and assess threats, often in real time.
Assembling the Puzzle
Individual puzzle pieces, seemingly unimportant pieces of information by themselves, can be assembled into revealing and insightful sections of the larger puzzle. Breaking the cone of silence risks revealing critical pieces of the puzzle, essentially removing the safeguards put in place to assure operational security.
The words that shook me from my morning respite that day in 2002 were pieces of a much larger puzzle: “deployment,” “railhead,” “Charleston,” “Kuwait,” “throughput,” and “five divisions.” Although no mention of Iraq had been made, reports of Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction had been public knowledge since February 2001. Even a novice puzzle builder could pull those pieces together. We weren’t taking a vacation cruise to the Arabian Gulf; we were getting our war on.
As he stammered something about not violating operational security, I stopped him. Even for someone generally cavalier with classified information, this was beyond the pale. It was careless and stupid. It potentially put a highly classified operation at risk. He broke the cone of silence and in doing so, violated the most basic rule of operational security.
What’s discussed in the SCIF stays in the SCIF.
