Categories of Covert Action

Another way in which covert action has sometimes been misunderstood or mischaracterized is in terms of what activities the term encompasses. As mentioned above, many authors and journalists have tended to focus on the more controversial, high-profile operations such as the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation and the US overthrows of regimes in Iran and Guatemala, while ignoring the subtler ways in which governments try secretly to influence each other’s actions, such as distributing propaganda or funneling money to political parties. Most scholars have traditionally cited three main categories of covert action (propaganda, political action, and paramilitary action, although they are often used in conjunction with one another), while Johnson (1989a) adds economic action as a separate category and Daugherty (2004) argues that it may be time to add a new one for information warfare (now known as information operations).

Propaganda, known in the US early in the Cold War as psychological warfare and now increasingly being referred to as psychological operations, involves the dissemination of information specifically designed to influence people’s opinions and behavior. It can be done overtly, as was the case for example with the United States Information Agency (USIA) during the Cold War. This variety is known as “white” propaganda. “Gray” propaganda is the dissemination of official policy lines through unacknowledged outlets. The best-known examples from the Cold War are those of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which broadcast anticommunist, pro-democracy messages to Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe and to people in the Soviet Union, respectively. Finally, “black” propaganda is the use of disinformation and outright deception to manipulate public opinion. One of the CIA’s most successful black propaganda operations was its effort in Guatemala in 1954, when it faked broadcasts from a dissident radio station claiming that a large insurgent army was crossing the border and starting a revolution, effectively scaring President Arbenz into resigning (Turner 2007). The Soviet Union was equally busy in the propaganda department during the Cold War, although it focused more on planting disinformation in neutral media, as with its late 1960s placement of a forged letter in the Bombay Free Press Journal recounting Washington’s use of bacteriological weapons in Vietnam and Thailand, a story that was then picked up by the London Times and other Western media (Andrew and Gordievsky 1990:503).

There are numerous studies of propaganda operations (see, for example, Aldrich et al. 2000; Saunders 2000), among which the most thorough account of US operations during the Cold War is Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer (2008). Wilford’s recounting of how the CIA tried to shape America’s image in the rest of world by influencing the content of Hollywood movies, funding abstract expressionist art and supporting a wide variety of cultural, student, women’s and labor organizations serves as a useful reminder that propaganda can come in subtler forms than merely the straight dissemination of information.

Political action includes a range of activities that constitute more direct involvement in the political process of the target country, from the provision of polling services and campaign advisers to discrediting political opponents and funneling support to political parties, media outlets, unions, or front organizations (Treverton 1987; Coleman 1989; O’Brien 1995; Saunders 2000; Wilford 2008). One oft-cited example of political action stems from the early Cold War years when the US successfully intervened in the 1948 Italian elections by giving assistance to the anticommunist Christian Democrats, a case that Treverton argues sets a precedent of “election projects,” which have been as important as any operations undertaken by the CIA (Treverton 1987:20). The KGB was also active in Cold War political action, seeing it, in conjunction with propaganda, as one of the key tools of Soviet foreign policy. Moscow supported a wide variety of parties, such as the MPLA in Angola, and front organizations, such as the World Council of Peace (Andrew and Gordievsky 1990; Andrew and Mitrokhin 1999, 2005). One of the Soviet Union’s most successful covert operations involved political action, when the Monarchist Association of Central Russia, better known as “The Trust,” conducted an elaborate deception operation aimed at penetrating White Russian émigré groups (Andrew and Gordievsky 1990:71–8). Two other states that have been particularly active in covert political action are apartheid-era South Africa (O’Brien 2001a) and Israel (Raviv and Melman 1990; Thomas 1999).

Economic action involves destabilizing the target state’s economy in some way. This could involve directly attacking crops, as the US did to Cuba in the 1960s, spreading disinformation to raise fears of economic instability, trying to manipulate another country’s currency, or convincing companies and other countries not to invest in the target state and disrupting international lines of credit, as the US did in Chile in the early 1970s (Treverton 1987; Sigmund 1993).

Paramilitary action involves the use of armed forces (either regular or irregular) employing unconventional military means to influence events in the target state. Covert paramilitary activity can range from training foreign military and security forces in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency techniques to assisting coup d’états, conducting direct action raids, and supporting large groups of rebels against their governments. One notorious (and notably non-superpower-related) example of a direct action raid is the 1985 attack on the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior by the French secret services in their attempt to undermine nuclear testing protests (Porch 1995).

The quintessential, albeit failed, example of a larger operation at the more involved end of the paramilitary continuum is the Bay of Pigs. These covert actions are clearly a type of hybrid operation, in that they are effectively military action, although they are covert in that the sponsorship of the attacking state is supposed to remain unknown. With operations this big, however, it is rare that they remain covert, whether successful, as in Reagan’s backing of the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, or unsuccessful, as in Eisenhower’s hapless 1958 Bay of Pigs prequel in Indonesia, when the attempt to overthrow Achmed Sukarno ended with the shooting down of a CIA pilot (Kahin and Kahin 1995). Thus, as Treverton (2007) notes, they really should be called “overt” covert operations.

One of the most controversial types of covert action is also included under the rubric of paramilitary operations: assassination (Thomas 2000; Soderblöm 2004). Probably the best-known examples are the CIA’s ill-fated attempts on Fidel Castro’s life during Operation Mongoose (United States Senate 1975a), but this method has also been used extensively by Israel (Byman 2006), which established its Committee X for expressly this purpose after the 1972 Munich massacre (Kahana 2007), as well as by the Soviet Union and South Africa under apartheid (O’Brien 2001b).

Finally, by far the newest category of covert action, having developed only in the 1990s, information operations involve actions to affect an adversary’s information and information systems while defending one’s own. Being such a new branch of the field, the literature on information operations is still evolving and currently consists largely of research conducted by the military as part of its effort to master what is widely seen as a critical future arena. Some useful sources that address the range of issues raised by this new subfield include Armistead (2003), Jones and Remenyi (2004), who bring together papers presented at a European conference on information operations, and Barrett, B.M. (2005), who focuses on China’s role in this new strategic area.

One last definitional point about covert action that should be kept in mind is that it can be and has been used both against other governments (including allied ones) as well as to help other governments (although economic action has normally been used only against opponents). While some critics of covert action point primarily to the actions used against opponents and some defenders point primarily to the operations used to strengthen friendly states, a thorough understanding of covert action should take both into account.

Case Studies

One area where the literature is particularly strong is in case studies of particular operations. Here, historians (in large part) have achieved impressive advances in bringing knowledge to light through the tireless use of the Freedom of Information Act as well as the archival records of non-intelligence agencies that were involved in policy decisions but have traditionally not been as strict as the CIA about classifying their records, such as the State Department and administrations’ presidential records. Not surprisingly, the best-known cases have the best-developed literature, only a sample of which can be mentioned here: Iran (Roosevelt 1979; Gasiorowski 1987; Bill 1988); Guatemala (Immerman 1982; Schlesinger and Kinzer 1982; Gleijeses 1991); Bay of Pigs (Wyden 1979; Higgins 1987; Gleijeses 1995; Blight and Kornbluh 1998); Chile (Sigmund 1993; Kornbluh 2003). Other operations that have been the subject of useful case studies include Indonesia (Kahin and Kahin 1995), British Guiana (Rabe 2005), Afghanistan (Coll 2004), Syria (Little 1990; Lesch 1992), and the Middle East more generally (Little 2004).

Post–Cold War and Post–9/11

The most recent branch of the field is that covering covert action since the end of the Cold War, a period that is effectively divided in two. The first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union saw the CIA fighting to retain its covert action authority in the face of the resulting severe budget cuts and questioning of whether the United States needed to engage in such controversial action any more. Gradually, the CIA began to justify a continuing need for covert action to enable it to combat the new, post–Cold War threats posed by terrorism, drug trafficking, information warfare, and economic espionage (Berkowitz and Goodman 1998; Johnson 2000). The post–9/11 branch of the field focuses on the role that covert action has played in the “war on terror” (Baer 2002; Clarke 2004), including specific cases such as Afghanistan (Schroen 2005) and the increasing covert responsibilities being assumed by the military’s special operations forces (Kibbe 2004, 2007).

OSS

Although much of the covert action literature focuses almost exclusively on the period after the creation of the CIA, there is a well-developed subsection within the field that deals with the role that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) played during World War II. While the early postwar work on the OSS emphasized the dramatic and daring nature of the operations, there have since been a number of studies that have taken a more sober, scholarly approach (for example Smith 1972; Smith 1983; Howard 1990; Warner 2000). The best studies are the more recent ones that are well grounded in the declassified OSS archives (Jakub 1999; Mauch and Riemer 2003). There have also been a number of studies of the significant role played by women in the OSS (for example McIntosh 1998).

Non-US Covert Action

Although the literature has been dominated by material on US operations, there have been a number of quality studies of covert actions undertaken by other states. Among the best studies of Soviet covert activity are Richelson (1986), Andrew and Gordievsky (1990), Deriabin and Bagley (1990), and Andrew and Mitrokhin’s two-volume study based on the KGB documents brought out of the Soviet Union by Mitrokhin (1999, 2005). On the UK, the most useful overall studies include Andrew (1985), Dorril (2000), and Aldrich (2002), while Davies (2004) focuses on the interaction between MI6’s organizational structure and operations. There have also been a few overall studies of Israeli covert action (Raviv and Melman 1990; Thomas 1999; Kahana 2007), as well as case studies of several well-known operations, including the Lavon Affair, a sabotage operation against British targets in Egypt aimed at preventing Britain’s pull-out from Suez (Golan 1978), and Operation Plumbat, which involved stealing uranium for Israel’s nuclear reactor (Davenport et al. 1978). Porch (1995) is the best English language treatment of the French secret services, as is Eftimiades (1994) on China’s, although these two (as well as a few of those named above) cover the state’s entire intelligence apparatus and are less focused solely on covert action.

Legitimacy of Covert Intervention

The most controversial aspect of covert action is its ethical dimension. Some question whether the very act of covert intervention is ever ethically acceptable, while others focus their criticism on the particular methods used, and still others raise the particular conundrum of what it means for a democracy to engage in covert action (Beitz 1989). The first question of whether covert action can ever be acceptable is a subset of the broader question regarding the legitimacy of any kind of international intervention. And, just as is the case with the broader question, most scholars contend that there are certain circumstances under which it would be morally defensible for a state to intervene covertly. The least controversial cases involve a state using covert action in self-defense or for compelling humanitarian reasons (Beitz 1989; Colby 1989). Even there, though, there will often be room for argument about whether the intervention was truly justified. For example, President George W. Bush’s justification of many of his actions in the “war on terror” as self-defense, including the 2002 Predator Hellfire missile strike against Abu Ali al-Harithi in Yemen, is by no means universally accepted. And one need only look to the case of Darfur to see the contentious nature of justifying intervention (albeit overt in that case) in the name of alleviating human suffering. Beyond the comparatively “easy” test cases of covert intervention for self-defense and humanitarian reasons, some contend that covert intervention is justified in a range of other situations as well, from protecting friendly regimes that ask for help to propping up strategic allies.

Other scholars approach the argument more generally, contending that because the international environment can be a dangerous place, covert action in pursuit of the national interest is justified. The most clear-cut version of this was put forth in 1954 when the Doolittle Report commissioned by President Dwight Eisenhower justified the US’s need to resort to the “repugnant philosophy” of covert action by pointing to the “ruthless” methods employed by the “implacable enemy” of the Soviet Union (quoted in Ranelagh 1986:276–7). Two intelligence officials updated that sentiment in 1989, stating that “given the depravity of the world around us […] free societies have no choice but to engage in intelligence activities if they are to remain free” (Hulnick and Mattausch 1989).

The problem, of course, is that once one accepts that some covert operations are legitimate, people from different agencies, organizations, and governments will never all agree on what constitutes an acceptable national interest reason and what does not (Beitz 1989). Moreover, a very real risk of the fact that policy makers perceive covert action as a relatively cheap and easy “third option” is that they may well utilize, knowingly or not, a quite flexible interpretation of the national interest and resort to covert action too readily (Beitz 1989; Kibbe 2002).

Clearly, too, the degree of acceptability of covert action varies in conjunction with the level of perceived threat. As the Doolittle Report so vividly highlighted, during the Cold War the threat posed by the Soviets served to convince almost everybody that at least some covert action was justified. Consequently, when the Cold War drew to a close, some observers argued that it marked the end of the need to resort to “the bastard child of that long confrontation” (Hodding Carter iii, in Twentieth Century Fund 1992:22; see also Goodman 2000). In response, however, others contended that “the world remains a dangerous place” and that covert action “may be justified when a prospective threat creates a compelling national interest that cannot be met prudently by overt means alone” (Twentieth Century Fund 1992:5). During the 1990s, covert action was seen as still being useful to defend US interests from the new, post–Cold War threats of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and narcotics. With the crystallization of the terrorist threat after 9/11, the launching of the so-called war on terror seems to have swung the pendulum of opinion back to favoring a lower threshold for the use of covert action. The clearest indication of this has been the resurgence of observers calling for the lifting of the US ban on political assassination (Pape 2002; Richelson 2002).

Several scholars have tried to delineate criteria for when it would be acceptable to use covert action and, in those cases, what specific methods would be appropriate. One starting point is former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s formulation that covert action should only be used when “absolutely essential to the national security” of the United States and when “no other means” will do (cited in Treverton 1989:28). Former CIA Director William Colby calls for covert action to meet the criteria of self-defense and proportionality (Colby 1989). The most comprehensive criteria stem from Barry’s (1993) effort to apply Just War theory to covert action. He settles on seven standards that should be applied: just cause, just intention, proper authority, last resort, probability of success, proportionality, and discrimination and control (i.e., taking measures to safeguard the innocent and minimize damage).

In its comprehensive study of covert action undertaken at the beginning of the post–Cold War period, the Twentieth Century Fund takes a more policy oriented approach, recommending that covert action be seen as “exceptional” not “routine,” be driven by “a compelling national interest,” undertaken “only in support of publicly articulated policy,” and “only when overt means are unavailable, insufficient, or (even if sufficient) judged too costly in terms of human life” (Twentieth Century Fund 1992:8–9, emphasis in original). Similarly, Treverton (1989) and Colby (1989) advocate that covert action be used only when it has a good chance of succeeding and when it coincides with an administration’s publicly stated policy positions.

Methods and Ethics

A second category of arguments concerning the ethics of covert action focuses on the specific methods used. The most obvious target is assassination, which has been described as “a brutal, cowardly and inhuman act” that cannot be justified by “noble ends” (Johnson 1992:434). The United States, according to one author, “must not adopt the tactics of barbarians and terrorists” (Johnson 1992:434). Other scholars, however, have made the opposite argument, contending that sometimes assassination is, in fact, the ethical choice (Reisman and Baker 1992). Peters, for example, in referring to the Gulf War, notes that:

while it was acceptable to bomb those divisions of hapless conscripts, it is unthinkable to announce and carry out a threat to kill Saddam Hussein, even though he bore overwhelming guilt for the entire war and its atrocities. We justify this moral and practical muddle by stating that we do not sanction assassination in general, and certainly not the assassination of foreign heads of state. Yet where is the logic in this? Why is it acceptable to slaughter […] the commanded masses but not to mortally punish the guiltiest individual, the commander, a man stained with the blood of his own people as well as his neighbors?

(Peters 1996:104)

Aside from assassination, ethicists call into question a variety of the other methods that comprise covert action as well. Some point to the fact that many actions undertaken in covert operations are themselves illegal (separate from a properly approved operation being legal under US law) (Goodman 2000). As the House Intelligence Committee reported in 1996, “[a] safe estimate is that several hundred times every day (easily 100,000 times a year) DO [Directorate of Operations] officers engage in highly illegal activities (according to foreign law)” (House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence 1996:205). Others raise questions about the morality of the manipulation that lies at the heart of many covert methods. Because covert action is, by definition, deniable, the whole point is that one country is trying to effect change in another without the target population being aware that they are being acted upon, whether it be by means of propaganda, support of unions or political parties, the surreptitious triggering of strike actions, or some other method. But that inherently interferes with the target population’s ability to make its own decisions and, because it is done covertly, “leaves a person peculiarly defenseless against this invasion” (Beitz 1989:214).

Covert Action and Democracy

The third category of ethical issues raised by covert action are those regarding whether its use by a democratic state calls into question that state’s adherence to democratic norms. Here, the controversy revolves around two key questions. The first concerns the policy making process and whether the secrecy required in the adoption of a covert action policy is inherently at odds with the norms of open debate and accountability on which a democracy is predicated (Wise and Ross 1964). This is what Treverton refers to as “the paradox of secret operations in a democracy” (1987:222). Hodding Carter III, in dissenting from the Twentieth Century Fund study on covert action, put this argument in starkest relief, stating that “covert action is by definition outside the ambit of democracy” (Twentieth Century Fund 1992:21).

Others take a more intermediate position, conceding that there is an inherent conflict between democracy and covert action, but pointing out that democracies make many concessions to accommodate the realities of governing (Beitz 1989; Colby 1989). These authors emphasize that, since the mid-1970s, the United States has chosen to deal with the conflict between covert operations and its democratic values by relying on the oversight role played by the Congress to ensure that the executive branch does not overreach itself (Beitz 1989; Johnson 1989b).

The second question raised by a democracy conducting covert action goes back to the issue mentioned above regarding such operations violating the target population’s democratic rights to make their own decisions about their government. One response to this argument holds that if the goal of a covert operation is to protect a democratic state from a nondemocracy or to spread democratic values such as pluralism and individual rights to new arenas, then it cannot be said to be inimical to democracy (Shultz 1989).

Congressional Oversight

The 1950s and early 1960s have long been portrayed as the veritable “golden age” of CIA covert operators, a time when Congress was largely content to approve broadbrush reports from the Agency about its covert operations and not ask too many questions (Damrosch 1989; Smist 1994). Barrett, D.M. (2005), however, comes to a somewhat different conclusion. In the first study to look carefully at Congressional involvement in covert action in the early years of the Cold War, he argues that Congress was both more active and more vigilant on the issue of covert action than it is usually given credit for. The result of Barrett’s more nuanced view of Congress’s role is somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, he maintains that, although legislative oversight was nowhere near as formal as it is now, Congressional “monitoring of the agency had become decidedly more extensive in the late 1950s, for example, than it was a decade earlier,” not least because of the much publicized intelligence “failures” that occurred roughly once a year, such as the failed uprising in Hungary and the surprises like Suez and Sputnik (Barrett, D.M. 2005:459). On the other hand, Barrett cites over two dozen cases where individual legislators urged the CIA to engage in covert operations, portraying a Congress that didn’t merely look the other way on covert action but, rather, actually “helped move the CIA toward aggressive covert action” (Barrett, D.M. 2005:460).

Congress first began trying to assert control over covert action in a concerted way in 1974, after allegations began to circulate in the press about the CIA’s role in overthrowing Salvador Allende in Chile and supporting rebels in Angola. The result was the Hughes-Ryan Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which prohibited the CIA from using appropriated funds for covert action unless the President found an operation to be important to national security and reported it to the Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Appropriations committees in both the House and the Senate (22 U.S.C. § 2422). Further disclosures concerning the CIA’s domestic spying operations and the FBI’s COINTELPRO program caused each house of Congress to establish a special investigating committee to find out what else its members had been unaware of, known as the Church and Pike Committees in the Senate and House respectively.

The Church Committee, in particular, was invaluable to covert action researchers, providing as it did a public record of a number of previously unknown operations including, most notably, that in Chile and Operation Mongoose, but also actions against Patrice Lumumba of the Congo and the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo. The Church Committee’s interim and final reports remain an important source of information on those operations (United States Senate 1975a, 1975b, 1976). Also valuable, in terms of the question of congressional oversight, are the accounts of the investigation itself (Johnson 1985; Treverton 1987; Smist 1994).

The Church and Pike investigation committees eventually led to the establishment of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), standing committees charged with oversight responsibility. However, despite the new committees and the passage of the 1980 Intelligence Oversight Act, which incorporated the covert action-finding requirement of the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, the Iran-Contra scandal served as a rude awakening that important gaps remained in the new system of congressional oversight of covert action. In response, Congress adopted more stringent provisions in the 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act, which is still the governing legislation on congressional oversight requirements. The Act codified two requirements for any covert action. First, there must be a written Presidential finding, which cannot be issued retroactively, stating that the action is important to US national security. Second, the administration must notify the intelligence committees of the action as soon as possible after the finding has been issued and before the initiation of the operation, unless “extraordinary circumstances” exist, in which case the president must fully inform the committees “in a timely fashion” (50 USC 413(b)(e)).

Not surprisingly, the literature regarding the oversight of covert action is considerably fuller for the post-1975 period, as various scholars have investigated how well Congress has fulfilled the oversight charge it gave itself in creating the two standing intelligence committees. In the wake of Iran-Contra, there was some debate over where the evident problem in the oversight system lay. Johnson (1989b) found that the oversight system had “struck an appropriate balance between control and discretion” and argued that the problem lay in the unwillingness of some members of the executive branch to abide by the rules set by Congress, while others argued that Congress needed to play a more active oversight role (Damrosch 1989). The next wave of analysis of congressional oversight was triggered by the events of 9/11 and the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq question, which served to highlight the ongoing and crucial need for better oversight. In this most recent phase of the oversight literature, which has become increasingly detailed and sophisticated, discussion of covert action oversight is usually subsumed in the studies of intelligence oversight in general (e.g., Johnson 2005; Snider 2005; McDonough et al. 2006).

The newest wrinkle in the covert action oversight question is the dilemma posed by the increased use of special operations forces post–9/11 for what is, in essence, covert action, although the Pentagon defines it as traditional military action (Kibbe 2004, 2007; Baker 2007). Here the focus of the problem is on the jurisdictional complexity involved in covert action oversight. While the intelligence committees are ostensibly the main oversight bodies, if it is an operation conducted by special operations forces, funding authorization and oversight in the Senate shift to the Armed Services Committee (in the House, they remain with the intelligence committee). Second, in both houses the Armed Services Committees have ultimate control over the intelligence authorization process in any case, since they must sign off on intelligence authorization bills before they go to the full House and Senate for votes. Finally, the appropriations for most intelligence activities are included as a classified section of the defense appropriations bill, meaning that the real control over the intelligence purse lies with the defense subcommittees of the two Appropriations Committees. While the 9/11 Commission, among others, recommended several ways of alleviating this longstanding obstacle to effective oversight, the entrenched bureaucratic power of various committees continues to doom much chance of reform, leaving the effectiveness of Congressional oversight of covert action questionable at best.

While the literature on legislative oversight is dominated by analyses of the US Congress, there has been an increasing amount of work done comparing legislative oversight structures across a variety of established and emerging democracies, and attempting to determine best practices for democratic accountability of intelligence operations (Born et al. 2005; Born and Caparini 2007).

Law and Policy Making

There are a number of useful analyses of the evolution of US law covering covert action, including Cinquegrana (1988), Johnson (1989b, 1996), and Reisman and Baker (1992). Gumina (1992) provides a detailed analysis of the covert action statutes in terms of the separation of powers (see also Eyth 2002). In addition, numerous scholars have focused on the legal issues raised by the covert aspects of the war against terrorism, including rendition (Neuman 2004; Weissbrodt and Bergquist 2006; Baker 2007).

Reisman and Baker (1992) provide what is still the best overall examination of the international legal issues involved in covert action, even though some legal experts are critical of their “contextual” argument that whether a particular covert operation is within the bounds of international law depends on the context in which it is taken, granting more leeway to major actors and beneficial purposes.

Another relatively recent development in the covert action literature has been the closer attention being paid to the process by which the executive branch arrives at covert action policies. Several scholars have carefully laid out the policy making procedures that various administrations have used to respond to the increased statutory requirements regarding covert action, including Johnson (1989b), Reisman and Baker (1992), and Daugherty (2004).