It bears mentioning that Samuel Loring Morison was essentially leaking to himself, in that he was, per Wikipedia and my contemporary memory, at the same time working for the organization he was leaking to (Janes).
The 2 year sentence would argue his leaks were "anodyne" ... it all depends on how little you believe the Soviets knew or assumed about how good our spysats were.
Which war were you referring to? Certainly not fighting the Communist Sandinistas, that was about as secret as Obama's drone strikes in Pakistan are today, and you don't need any more justification than distracting them from other mischief, anything else is gravy.
As for transparency, where outside of the Cold War was Reagan significantly less transparent than Obama or Bush for that matter? While the hits are noisy, just try a search for obama in private for starters.
Reagan's desire to escalate the anti-Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua was so well-known that Congress passed a law banning it, which Reagan secretly bypassed. It's easy to call something "as secret as drone strikes" after it produces the Iran Contra Hearings.
The Congress passed a law forbidding various parts of the government not including the president's staff from prosecuting it, since they can't do that constitutionally. As I remember, an amendment to do the latter was voted down, further delineating exactly what the Congress was doing.
And I guess you weren't reading the same sources I was, and as I looked up the the Dear Comandante letter from 1984 I'm reminded of at least one overt, passed by the Congress in 1988 (!) aid bill to help the Contras, point your favorite search engine at contra aid bill. Which makes it crystal clear the simple picture you are painting is far too simple to be true.
"REAGAN SIGNS FOREIGN AID BILL, PRAISING CONTRA AID
AP , Associated Press
Aug. 9, 1985 1:37 AM ET
WASHINGTON (AP) _ President Reagan, hailing new funding for Contra rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government, has signed a $25.4 billion foreign aid bill.
''I am particularly pleased that the Congress approved the renewal of aid to the Nicaraguan freedom fighters,'' Reagan said Thursday before he signed the measure...."
Gaaah, bad memories. Anyone who thinks our foreign policy is messed up today should really review post-Vietnam War Cold War policy, where way too much of the nation up to and including Congressmen were openly on the other side. And then there's Carter's 1977 "inordinate fear of communism", and, oh, hugging and kissing Brezhnev on the signing of the SALT treaty, following in just 6 months by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Which we're still paying the price for (as well as Iran, but that wasn't so Cold War specific).
And if you wonder why today's domestic politics are so bad, it was noted when the Sandinistas theoretically fell in a popular vote in 1990 those people ran out of Socialist Worker's Paradises to support, leaving them pretty much with the US as their only target.
The 2 year sentence would argue his leaks were "anodyne" ... it all depends on how little you believe the Soviets knew or assumed about how good our spysats were.
Which war were you referring to? Certainly not fighting the Communist Sandinistas, that was about as secret as Obama's drone strikes in Pakistan are today, and you don't need any more justification than distracting them from other mischief, anything else is gravy.
As for transparency, where outside of the Cold War was Reagan significantly less transparent than Obama or Bush for that matter? While the hits are noisy, just try a search for obama in private for starters.