Are there security clearances higher than Top Secret?

[bordelond]

@Ravenman

Again, codewords like Yankee White, Gamma, Ultra, Keystone, and Canoe (I haven’t heard of that one before) are NOT higher clearances than Top Secret. They are compartments of Top Secret information.

I really need to dig around at home and look in my copies of Big Secrets and Bigger Secrets and re-read this section. Poundstone may have actually written something akin to “more exclusive clearances” rather than “higher clearances”.

Also, IIRC, Poundstone refers to his list of compartmentalized clearances as “in recent use”, which suggests that the clearance names he was passing along were no longer in use even as his books went to press (1983 for Big Secrets, 1986 for Bigger Secrets). “Canoe” could well date back to the late 70s.

[bonzer]

@KP

I know that Reagan’s briefings before the 1980 election (reagan v. Carter v. Anderson) were widely reported in both the general media at the time, and more recently, on the web. A simple we bsearch should turn up substantial information on what he was told, and his reaction (I did such a search a few years ago for a book I was working on then)

The briefing that Reagan received on the 20/11/80 forms the prologue of Woodward’s (somewhat controversial) Veil (Schuster, 1987).

@Ravenman

It may help to review why things are classified at different levels:

The version in Gerald Kaufman’s How to be a minister (1980; Faber, 1997, p28) is rather idiosyncratically British, but worth quoting:

[The security classification] can range, in ascending order of importance, from Restricted, through Confidential (or Commercially Confidential, if business secrets are involved) to Secret. I believe there is a Top Secret as well, but one of those never came my way. According to my own private system of classification Restricted was the kind of thing no newspaper would bother to publish, Confidential was interesting enough to warrent a couple of paragraphs in the Daily Mail, while Secret would rate an insight story in The Sunday Times or one of those Observer probes.