When the Guardian of Secrets Sells Them

The spectacle is a startling one: a man who once presided over a nation’s intelligence service, now arrested at his home, strongly suspected of treasonous espionage, spying out state secrets, and attempting to pass them to a foreign power. We are told he received some two thousand documents, many fit only for the internal use of that service, and for years maintained close contact with a representative of another intelligence agency, to whom he is said to have passed political information. It is not yet known whether the material reached its intended recipient. But even this uncertainty does little to soften the moral impression, for the danger lay not merely in what was done, but in what he stood ready to do.

The same figure appears again in a different drama, more domestic and in some respects more chilling. Prosecutors suspect that he and a retired police official, having become executives in a private security firm, accepted a contract from a wealthy businesswoman embroiled in a custody battle, a contract to abduct her own children from another country. Here state-trained guardians of order, educated in the arts of surveillance and coercion at the public expense, are alleged to have turned those talents into tools for hire in a family quarrel. When public authority is thus rented out in the marketplace, it is not enterprise but a new species of banditry, dignified only by good tailoring and polite invoices.

In my Theory of Moral Sentiments I argued that justice is the pillar upon which the whole edifice of society rests: remove that supporting column, and the building not only totters, it crushes the inhabitants. Beneficence may ornament the structure, but justice keeps the roof from falling in. To sell state secrets to a foreign power, if that charge be made out, is to strike at the very defence of the community, one of the sovereign’s first duties. To conspire in child abduction under colour of private security is to subvert the exact administration of justice, another of those duties. An impartial spectator, well informed and disengaged from private affection, could hardly behold either project without indignation and a kind of horror.

We deceive ourselves if we suppose such conduct to proceed from some monstrous nature unlike our own. In every employment where secrets are kept and powers are exercised, there will be temptations: the vanity of being in the know, the prospect of money earned in the shadows, the pleasure of serving powerful clients in their private quarrels. As I observed in The Wealth of Nations, it is to be expected that men pursue their own interest, not that they practice uncommon virtue. A system that arms a few with great discretionary power, and then relies upon their singular probity without oversight, is ill contrived. It invites exactly the abuses now alleged, and then feigns surprise when ordinary self-love follows the path that has been opened before it.

The visible gains in these stories, if the accusations are true, are narrow and concentrated. A former official enriches himself by selling information; a wealthy parent secures, or hopes to secure, her will in a custody dispute; a security company finds a lucrative line of business between blackmail and commerce. The costs, by contrast, are diffuse and largely unseen. Confidence between allies is shaken by the prospect that confidential communications may be trafficked to unnamed powers; foreign counterparts become less candid, less willing to share knowledge that might save lives. Within the country, trust in public servants ebbs; every honest intelligence officer and policeman finds his word discounted in the marketplace of reputation. The labouring poor, who depend most on the quiet continuance of order they did not design and do not control, discover that those paid to watch over them were instead watching the highest bidder.

When I wrote of the sovereign’s duties in The Wealth of Nations, I placed defence and the administration of justice before roads and bridges, not because armies and courts are more splendid, but because without security and law the natural progress of opulence cannot proceed. The annual produce of the land and labour is not merely fields and factories; it is a fragile tissue of expectations that others will keep their contracts, that officials will not be bought, that children will not be spirited away by men in suits wielding old police credentials. Treason and privatized coercion do not only endanger strategy; they raise the general rate of distrust, which is a kind of hidden tax laid most heavily upon those least able to pay it.

We must, of course, distinguish allegation from proof; charges announced by prosecutors are not yet verdicts pronounced by judges. Yet experience with what I once called the vile maxim of the masters of mankind—all for ourselves, and nothing for other people—teaches that any defence mounted by men in such a position deserves the most suspicious attention. If they plead patriotism, one must ask what country was served; if they plead the interests of children, one must inquire why courts and laws were not sufficient instruments. The lesson is a stern but salutary one: a commercial society cannot flourish where its protectors treat secrets as merchandise and human beings as movable property, and where justice is not only imperfectly administered, but publicly put up for sale.