This tale from the 1950s continues to be told with glee at Langley. True or not, it is a fact that covert actions – and especially paramilitary activities – have often prompted concern and sometimes alarm on Capitol Hill, apparently even awakening octogenarian overseers. Of all the nation's intelligence missions, this one is the most likely to stir passions. Indeed, critics contend that covert action has done more to stain the reputation of the CIA – and, with it, the United States – than any other of the government's dark arts.
Covert action as an intelligence mission
Legal underpinnings
In the United States, covert action (CA) is sometimes referred to as the “quiet option” by officials inside the CIA, the organization normally called upon to plan and implement this approach to solving America's problems abroad. (“Active measures” is the Russian term.) The phrase is drawn from the questionable assumption that covert action is likely to be less noisy and obtrusive than a Marine brigade. While sometimes this is the case, there was nothing quiet about covert action at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 or against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. Another label is the “third option,” pointing to covert action as a choice that lies somewhere between diplomacy and overt warfare. As explained by Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State during the Nixon Administration: “We need an intelligence community that, in certain complicated situations, can defend the American national interest in the gray areas where military operations are not suitable and diplomacy cannot operate.”2 A favorite euphemism for covert action in more recent years, beginning with the Carter Administration, is the phrase “special activities.”
In 1990, Congress provided, for the first time, a formal statutory definition of covert action as “an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.”3 Specifically excluded from the definition were intelligence collection and counterintelligence operations, traditional diplomatic, military, and law enforcement activities, or routine support to overt U.S. activities aboard. Stripped down further to the basics, covert action may be thought of as “those activities CIA undertakes to influence events overseas that are intended not to be attributable to this country.”4 Simpler still, “Covert action is influence.”5
Prior to the specific legislative authority for covert action enacted in 1992, presidents relied on a boilerplate clause in the National Security Act of 1947 for legal justification. This founding statute for modern U.S. intelligence focused almost exclusively on the collection and analysis mission. Then, in a final section, the law (drafted mainly by one of President Truman's national security aides, Clark Clifford) provided authority for the Director of Central Intelligence and the Agency to perform “such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the President or the National Security Council may direct.”6
Rationale
Behind this spongy legal language lies the reality that covert action is nothing less than a nation's attempt to change the course of history through the use of secret operations against other nations, terrorist groups, or factions – “giving history a push,” as a senior CIA operative has put it.7 During the Cold War, the main concern of the CIA's Covert Action Staff within the Operations Directorate (the CAS, now known as the Special Activities or SA Division) was, according to one of its chiefs, “the global challenge of communism…to be confronted whenever and wherever it seemed to threaten our interests.”8 With rare, albeit significant, exceptions (such as the Iran–contra affair), the CIA has been the implementer – not the instigator – of covert actions. Almost always, the White House has ordered such operations; and, since 1975, special committees of Congress have been in the reporting loop.
A Cold War DCI, William E. Colby (1973–76), reasoned that covert action was vital to counteract the political and subversive threat posed by the secret operations of the Soviet intelligence services (the KGB and the GRU) in Europe and around the world – just as NATO provided a critical line of military defense in Western Europe and the Marshall Plan erected a bulwark of foreign aid to counter Soviet economic encroachments. When threats arise to America's interests in the world, “it is better that we have the ability to help people in these countries where that will happen, quietly and secretly,” Colby advised, “and not wait until we are faced with a military threat that has to be met by armed force.”9
Thus, taking a stand against communism became the primary raison d’être for covert action during the Cold War. Whether such targets as Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Angola (1975), and Chile (1964–72) qualified as “truly important” (in Colby's phrase) is a matter of debate. With respect to Angola, a CIA official maintained that, “ultimately, the purpose was to throw the Soviets out, at which point we would leave, too.” Critics, though, find these arguments unpersuasive. For example, with respect to Nicaragua during the 1980s, the German Nobel laureate in literature, Günter Grass, asked plaintively: “How impoverished must a country be before it is not a threat to the U.S. government?”10 Senator Frank Church, who led a Senate inquiry into the subject of covert action in 1975, concluded that “our targets were leaders of small, weak countries that could not possibly threaten the United States.”11
The implementation of covert action
The CIA has been the organization called upon by the President and the NSC to conduct covert actions. The Agency's covert action infrastructure (“the plumbing,” in CIA-speak) consists of the DO; the SA Division and its paramilitary wing, the Special Operations Group (SOG); overseas stations and bases; personnel on loan from the military; and civilian contractors. For much of the Agency's early history, the role of the President in the approval of a covert action was meant to be tightly concealed, through the practice of “plausible deniability.” According to this “doctrine,” presidents should be as pure as Caesar's wife; the reputation of the United States had to be protected if a covert action ran amok and ended up on the front pages of the world's newspapers. Keeping the White House at a distance from unsavory activities would allow a president to say publicly: “I never authorized this inappropriate secret operation and I am taking measures to punish those who carried it out.”
When the President is kept at arm's length from covert actions, however, the operations lack the proper accountability that comes with explicit White House approval. With no paper trail leading to the Oval Office, the danger arises that operations may be carried out without the President's approval or even knowledge. President Eisenhower rejected this approach in 1960, when the Soviets shot down a CIA U-2 spy plane over their territory on the eve of a Washington–Moscow summit. He chose to acknowledge responsibility publicly for the risky surveillance mission. The U-2 flight was a collection operation, not a covert action; nonetheless, for the first time, accountability had trumped plausible denial with respect to an intelligence activity. The implication was that presidents might henceforth take direct responsibility for covert actions, as well. The doctrine of plausible deniability proved more enduring than some anticipated, however. Not until the mid-1970s, in the midst of a spy scandal in the United States, did Congress at last decide to bury the doctrine. With the Hughes–Ryan Act of 1974, lawmakers passed legislation that required explicit presidential approval for all important covert actions. Such operations would now have to be authorized by the nation's chief executive and, in an even greater departure from tradition, the covert actions would have to be reported to special oversight panels on Capitol Hill.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and America's involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, another serious question arose about accountability in the implementation of covert actions. This new concern came about as a result of the Pentagon's Special Forces and CIA private contractors edging their way into this domain.12 The improper use of organizations other than the Agency to conduct covert action ha
d already produced a scandal of major proportions during the Reagan Administration: the Iran–contra affair. These covert actions, which involved a secret arms sale to Iran and escalating covert action in Nicaragua, were never properly reported to Congress, as required by the Hughes–Ryan Amendment and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980.13 Further, the Reagan Administration violated the Boland Amendments – a series of increasingly restrictive laws, named after their chief sponsor, Edward P. Boland (D, Massachusetts), and passed in the early 1980s. These amendments expressly prohibited covert actions in support of the contras in Nicaragua, who were attempting to overthrow the left-leaning Sandinista regime.
Staff on the National Security Council (NSC), including two consecutive National Security Advisers, schemed to bypass the Boland restrictions and the other statutory limitations on covert action dealing with approval and reporting requirements. The NSC staff established its own secret organization outside the government, called “The Enterprise,” and launched privately funded covert actions in support of the Nicaraguan contras. When this subterfuge eventually leaked to a Middle East newspaper in 1986 and played back into the United States, lawmakers realized Congress had been fooled and in 1987 they conducted a full-scale investigation. Congress instituted new legislative strictures related to covert action, including a more precise definition of its boundaries and a requirement that the President formally sign covert action approvals – not just say “yes” or offer a nod and a wink by way of approval.14
The methods of covert action
During the Cold War and since, covert action has taken four different forms, although they are often used together. The categories are: propaganda, political activities, economic disruptions, and paramilitary (PM) operations.
Propaganda
The most frequent form of covert action conducted by the United States has been various forms of propaganda, known more gently as “perception management” by Agency insiders. Nations have overt channels of information dissemination, of course, such as the United States Information Agency (USIA) or the White House use of press releases about presidential decisions; but governments frequently seek to reinforce these messages through hidden communications channels as well. These hidden channels are often more credible in other countries – say, Hans Beidenhofer (a fictional name used here for purposes of illustration) who writes op-eds for Der Spiegel and is widely read and trusted by Germans. If Herr Beidenhofer wrote during the Cold War that he liked the idea of U.S. intermediate nuclear missiles on German soil as a deterrent against a Soviet invasion through the Fulga Gap, that might have carried more weight with local readers than if the same idea were advocated by the U.S. secretary of defense. Foreigners who are newspaper reporters, magazine editors, television producers, or talk show hosts – anyone in a position to express a public point of view favorable to the United States as if it were their own – become fair game for recruitment by the CIA as a “media asset.”
Whatever foreign policies or slogans an administration in Washington, DC might be touting in public – perhaps the danger of renegade nuclear aspirations pursued by Iran – the CIA pushes the same themes through its hundreds of covert media channels around the world. During the Cold War, some seventy to eighty secret media insertions were made each day by the Agency into different parts of its global propaganda system – a “Mighty Wurlitzer,” as it was referred to proudly inside the Agency's Covert Action Staff.15 Once released, however, propaganda can drift here and there, possibly back to the United States – a phenomenon known as “blow back” or “replay.” When this occurs, information originally meant for the eyes and ears of audiences overseas (friend or foe) finds its way back home to influence – and perhaps inadvertently deceive – America's own citizens (see Figure 3.1). Most of America's covert propaganda, though, is truthful, a repeat of what officials are saying publicly in Washington. Yet sometimes, in 1–2 percent of cases, Agency propaganda is false (“black” or “disinformation”) and these media placements abroad become a particularly disquieting form of blow back. A senior intelligence official, Dr. Ray Cline, conceded once that it “used to worry me a lot that false CIA propaganda about mainland China might fool China experts in the Department of State, skewing their analyses.”16
Figure 3.1 Herblock on blow back
Source: “I SHOT AN ARROW INTO THE AIR…” – a 1956 Herblock Cartoon, copyright by The Herb Block Foundation.
An example of covert propaganda during the Cold War was the CIA's concealed sponsorship, until revealed by a leak in the early 1970s, of Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL). These stations broadcast programming into the Soviet Union and its satellite nations, in an effort to break the communist government's biased grip on news, entertainment, and culture, as well as to inculcate in listeners a favorable view of the United States and the West. Similarly, the CIA routinely attempted to infiltrate Western literature (books by Soviet dissenters and others, magazines, newspapers) into the communist world. A high-ranking CIA official offers this assessment of the Agency's propaganda program aimed at the Soviet Union and its puppet allies: “This has maintained several independent thinkers in the Soviet bloc, has encouraged the distribution of ideas, and has increased the pressures on totalitarian regimes.”17 Even among more neutral observers, the Agency's propaganda activities are generally credited with helping to sustain dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain and subtly contributing to the eventual fall of the Soviet empire – although the effects of this propaganda defy exact measurement.
Of greater controversy during the Cold War was the Agency's use of propaganda against the democratic republic of Chile. In 1964, at the direction of the Johnson Administration, the CIA spent $3 million to blacken the name of presidential candidate Salvador Allende, in an effort to prevent his election for fear that he was a socialist with close ties to Moscow. An expenditure of this magnitude in the Chilean election was equivalent at that time, on a per capita basis, to about $60 million in a U.S. presidential campaign – a staggering sum that could shape an election outcome in either nation. Although defeated in the 1960s, Allende persevered and eventually won the Chilean presidency in 1970.
Under orders from the Nixon Administration, the CIA then ratcheted up its propaganda operations to undermine the Allende government, spending an additional $3 million between 1970 and 1973 in negative publicity against the regime. President Nixon and his top aides feared that the Soviet Union might use Chile as a base to spread communism throughout the Western Hemisphere. Allende might become the next Fidel Castro in Latin America. To help protect their own interests in Chile, the International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) Corporation and other American businesses secretly offered the Nixon Administration $1.5 million to aid the anti-Allende covert actions, out of a concern that the Chilean President might decide to nationalize their holdings in Chile. According to Church Committee investigators in 1975, the forms of propaganda used by the CIA against Allende included press releases, radio commentary, films, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, direct mailings, paper streamers, and wall paintings. The Agency relied heavily on images of communist tanks and firing squads; and it paid for the distribution of hundreds of thousands of copies, in this Catholic country, of an anti-communist pastoral letter written years earlier by Pope Pius XI. The Allende government was overthrown in 1973.
Sometimes propaganda planners at the CIA seemed to be writing for the theater of the absurd. One scheme in the early 1960s envisioned the incitement of a coup against the Cuban regime, spurred by a flamboyant propaganda campaign. The idea was to have American submarines surface off the coast of Havana and fire starshells from their decks that would attract the attention of the islanders. Agency assets would then spread the word: “Christ has come! Rise up against the anti-Christ!” A DO officer explained to an investigative committee: “And this would be the manifestation of the Second Coming and Castro would be overthrown.”18 The CAS dubbed the plan “Elimination by Illumination.” The Kennedy Administration had th
e good sense to reject the proposal before it went forward.
One of the most successful CIA propaganda operations took place in Central America in 1954. The purposes in this instance were twofold: first, to protect the investments in Guatemala of the United Fruit Company, an American firm with a lucrative banana monopoly in Central America (America's spy chief, Allen Dulles, and his brother, the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, had both served on the board of directors for the United Fruit Company); and, second, to exhibit for world consumption the determination of the Eisenhower Administration to thwart any leader who might have some affiliation, however weak (or imagined), with the Soviet Union.19 The Agency set up a radio station in the mountains of Guatemala, where local CIA assets began broadcasting the fiction that a full-fledged revolution was taking place, and that the masses were rising up against the supposedly pro-communist dictator Jacobo Árbenz. The skillful broadcasts led a nervous Arbenz to resign, in the belief that a mythical people's army of 5,000 was marching toward the capital.20
Political covert action
The quiet option sometimes takes the form of financial aid to friendly politicians and bureaucrats abroad – bribes, if one wishes to put a harsh light on the practice; or stipends for the advancement of democracy, if one prefers a rosier interpretation. Whatever one chooses to call this form of assistance (“King George's cavalry” is the amusing British MI6 expression), the record is clear that throughout the Cold War the CIA provided substantial sums of cash to a number of political groups and individuals overseas, including a host of pro-Western parties and factions in West Germany, Greece, Egypt, the Philippines, and Chile, to mention just some examples that have made their way into the public record. An important part of political covert action during the Cold War was funding for anti-communist labor unions in Europe, an objective of high priority soon after the end of World War II. One well-publicized case involved support for the Christian Democratic Party in Italy during the 1960s against its principal opponent, the Italian Communist Party. Providing money to the Christian Democratic Party openly may well have discredited its reputation, causing Italian voters to conclude that the party was just a puppet of the United States. The White House turned to covert funding as a means of avoiding this taint.
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