The immediate issue is the makeup of a critical Supreme Soviet committee that will oversee the budgets and activities of those traditionally secretive institutions.

We inherited this well organized secretive institution for training spies; our leaders realized that our plans were similar to the Czarist plans.

Church and state have combined into one secretive institution, whose mythology, based on misinterpreted stories of the war and an old Catholic saint (Eustace), is enacted in puppet shows.

The armed forces, heir to a proud tradition that dates back to the Ottoman Empire, is the country's most formidable and secretive institution, revered and feared in equal measure.

The Fund is 'perhaps the most secretive major institution in the world'.

Nevertheless the country is considered to have the most secretive public institutions in Africa.

The Chinese military is a secretive and highly insular institution.

The Army's Fort Belvoir, like any secretive institution, might be more easily penetrated by pretending to be an old friend of a current employee.

The armed forces, one of the nation's most secretive institutions, has court-martialed 299 soldiers since December 2000, the military said.

To be sure, it is hard to dig beyond outsized personalities and to write well about important, unwieldy and largely secretive institutions, like the Supreme Court or a major university.