The story of the Stuxnet and Flame cyber exploits is so compelling that you almost don’t care where it came from or if it represents a serious breach of national security. Almost. You can read David Sanger in the Times and Jonathan Last, here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and you crave more. Including Mr. Sanger’s just-published book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. The seductive power of this story resembles that of Enigma and Ultra and the codebreakers at Bletchly during the Second World War. And therein, of course, lies a problem.
The secret of the allied success in breaking Germany’s codes was considered so precious (and rightly so) that Churchill decided against warning his countrymen in Coventry of an impending Luftwaffe air attack, lest the Nazis suspect their message traffic had been compromised. It was, in fact, not until almost 30 years after the end of the war before the story was told. One does not ask why the secret was so closely guarded during the war – that much is obvious – but why the long post-war wait before the story was told?
