There are no secrets in highly porous Manila

LOOSE LIPS: The WikiLeaks that have swamped many diplomatic capitals would have looked odd if they did not include breaches of confidence in highly porous Manila, where there is no such thing as a secret.

Thanks to a free-wheeling press and a society that thrives on tsismis, Manila is the worst repository of confidential information - and at the same time the most fertile ground for planting gossip and black propaganda.

But such a reputation for loose lips could be costly. My older colleagues on the diplomatic beat, which I covered as a cub reporter of the pre-martial rule The Manila Times, recalled the organizational meeting in 1954 of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.

The SEATO was the regional counterpart of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The two alliances were being used at the time by the United States and its co-conspirators to contain communism then being propagated by Moscow and Peking (old spelling).

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COSTLY LEAK: Delegates to the SEATO meeting in Manila were reportedly scandalized when they read in the papers one leaky September morn the verbatim copy of the declaration they still had to adopt in that day’s final session.

It turned out that some enterprising reporters managed to secure a working copy of the secret document the day before and went to town with it.

Delegates from eight participating countries set to sign the so-called Manila Pact protested the leakage, but it was too late to rewrite the declaration just to prove the newspapers wrong.

Our sources at Padre Faura, the street where the old Department of Foreign Affairs used to be located, said that as a consequence of the leak, the delegates took back the earlier consensus that the SEATO be based in Manila. Its headquarters was set up instead in Bangkok.

The SEATO, btw, was disbanded in 1977 for being a toothless tiger, but not before it was used as cover by the US for large-scale military intervention in the region during the 1955-1975 Vietnam War. In similar fashion, NATO is now being used to intervene in the civil war in Libya.

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SCAVENGERS: The Filipino newspaper reader will be aghast, or maybe amused, to know to what length reporters went at the time to score a scoop, especially in such tight corridors as the foreign office had.

Imagine diplomatic reporters, some of them proper in their ties or polo barong, rummaging through waste baskets when nobody was looking. Remember, that was the age of typewriters that took in sheets to compose and print out documents.

What did a secretary or clerk do after retyping or copying a draft? She threw the old sheet into the waste can. Mimeographing stencils and carbon papers, which could be read against the light, were similarly trashed.

It was not surprising, then, that some of us ended up “courting” secretaries or making friends (sometimes sharing snacks with them) with the janitors who emptied the trash cans.

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COCKTALES: Or we would linger after office hours to socialize with sources.

I remember one early evening when I crashed into a cocktail just to talk to then Foreign Secretary Narciso Ramos (father of then Col. Fidel V. Ramos who was to become president in 1992). With me was Francisco de Leon, my senior, of the Manila Chronicle.

Good for me that I already wrote an advancer with an advice to my editor, Jose Luna Castro, that I wanted to confirm my story from Secretary Ramos.

I had to talk to him, because my sources in Olongapo had told me that the USS Enterprise, the US Navy’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was to dock at Subic Bay within the week.

Under the 1973 (Marcos) Constitution, no nuclear-powered weapons or vessels may be brought in without the consent of the Philippine government. If a nuclear vessel steamed in without prior clearance, that would be a serious violation.

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PROTOCOL: Chatting with Secretary Ramos, I casually asked if he knew that the Enterprise was coming in. Still steadily holding his glass of scotch, Mr. Ramos said No, he was not aware of it. You mean, you have not been informed?, I asked to confirm what he just told me. He said No.

Pretending to go to the men’s room, I phoned confirmation of my story that said in effect that while hundreds of bar girls in Olongapo had known about it for weeks already, the foreign secretary – the government? – was still uninformed. The story stirred the diplomatic row.

Protocol dictates that the US embassy deals with the foreign office, not directly with Malacañang as is sometimes done these days. So, at that time, the first government official to know of the coming of a nuclear-powered vessel was the foreign secretary.

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‘ADOBO’ DIPLOMACY: Can you imagine the Philippine ambassador in Washington, D.C., dealing directly with the White House or hand-carrying communication straight to the US president, instead of the State Department?

Of course then Ambassador to the US Kokoy Romualdez was a class of his own. If his staff were to be believed, he was in the habit of bringing “regalo,” sometimes something as irresistible as “adobo,” to his contacts in the State Department and the White House.

Talking of “adobo,” a classmate who had sailed with the US navy and later served several US presidents as steward in the White House (and wherever the Chief Executive went) told me that “adobo” is now on the regular menu of US ships.

Sorry, this navy man cannot be identified since he signed an undertaking that he would not talk about what he heard or saw while in the presidential household, and he is keeping his vow of silence.

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