(Of course if they were really secret we wouldn’t know, would we? )
Perhaps I should ask: is it plausible that there are or at least could be ultra-secret intelligence organizations, as depicted in countless works of fiction? So secret that their very existence is classified; that they’re funded entirely through blacked-out intelligence budgets or cooked books; that only a handful of outsiders such as the senators on an intelligence subcommitee have oversight of it? Or is all this a melodramatic convention of spy fiction that in real life wouldn’t be necessary: that sensitive government organizations simply have non-descriptive titles and obscurely dull cover mandates?
The National Reconnaissance Office was an ultra-secret agency from 1960 to 1992. In fact, it was so secret that oversight on its budget was embarrassingly lacking: it managed to hide away hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, without the CIA, Congress, or apparently anyone else catching on for years. Scandal ensued.
It could easily be happen. The CIA itself has been involved in some things that hardly anyone knew about. The history leading up to the Iran-Contra affair is exceptionally strange and shady and covers decades of involvement in Latin America that were never sanctioned by Congress itself and often broke off into true rogue activity.
I may be mistaken but I believe that the National Security Agency was super-secret at one time and even had a headquarters that most of the government didn’t know about.
The old joke was that NSA stood for “No Such Agency.” It was established within the DoD by executive order in 1952 and its very existence was denied until sometime in the 1980s as I recall.
I used to regularly see bid requests that were issued by the “Maryland Procurement Office”, which was a cover for the procurement activities of the NSA.
> The old joke was that NSA stood for “No Such Agency.” It was established
> within the DoD by executive order in 1952 and its very existence was denied
> until sometime in the 1980s as I recall.
First nonfiction book with substantial information about NSA: The Codebreakers by David Kahn in 1967.
First mention of NSA on a TV show: An episode of Star Trek in 1968.
First mention of NSA in fiction: The short story “Entropy” by Thomas Pynchon in 1960.
There’s a difference between “not discussed every single day in newspapers and magazines” and “its very existence denied.”
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