National Security Intelligence

by Loch K. Johnson

  A ladder of escalation for covert action

  In 1965, strategist Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute published an influential volume in which he offered an “escalation-ladder metaphor” for understanding the coercive features of international affairs. Kahn described his ladder as a “convenient list of the many options facing the strategist in a two-sided confrontation.”38 In a comparable ladder of escalation for covert actions (see Figure 3.3), the underlying analytical dimension traveling upward is the extent to which the options are increasingly harsh violations of international law and intrusions against national sovereignty. As the examples illustrate, covert actions can run the gamut from the routine on the lower rungs of the ladder to the extreme at the higher rungs.39

  Figure 3.3 A partial ladder of escalation for covert actions

  Source: The author's estimates, based on interviews with intelligence managers and officers over the years, along with a study of the literature cited in the notes of this chapter. Adapted from Loch K. Johnson, Secret Agencies: U.S. Intelligence in a Hostile World Order (New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 62–3.

  The lines of demarcation between high- and low-threshold covert actions can be indistinct, subject to debate and disagreement. Some members of the UN General Assembly's Special Committee on Friendly Relations argued in 1967, for instance, that covert propaganda and the secret financing of political parties represented “acts of lesser gravity than those directed towards the violent overthrow of the host government.”40 Other Assembly members rejected this perspective, especially those who wished to avoid legitimizing any form of covert action. As a result of the divided opinion, the Special Committee equivocated, neither supporting nor prohibiting covert propaganda and secret political funding. A perspicacious observer of the Committee's work concluded: “The texts that the General Assembly approved represent compromise formulations that are open to multiple interpretations.”41 What follows is also open to many interpretations, but the ladder metaphor does at least provide the reader with a sense of the rising levels of severity that covert action can entail.

  Threshold one: routine options

  At the lower end of the ladder for covert actions – Threshold One – are arrayed such relatively benign activities as support for the routine sharing of information (intelligence liaison, based on collection and analysis) between the CIA and friendly foreign intelligence services about potential “hot spots,” or rogue nations and groups, in parts of the world that may warrant some form of covert action in the future (Rung 1). Also at this threshold are attempts to recruit covert action assets from native foreign populations, who are quite often the same individuals tapped for overseas collection activities (Rung 2). At this threshold, as well, is the limited dissemination of truthful, non-controversial propaganda themes (Rung 3) directed against closed, authoritarian societies (such as extolling to Yugoslavians the benefits of trade with the West in the early years of the CIA's covert propaganda programs). These low-rung activities are commonplace for most nations engaged in international affairs.42

  Threshold two: modest intrusions

  With Threshold Two, the degree of intrusiveness against another country or group begins to escalate beyond the routine, and the risks increase. This category would include the insertion of truthful, non-controversial propaganda material into the media outlets of democratic regimes with a free press (Rung 4) – U.S. covert action aimed at like-minded governments. Further, within this zone would be the payment of modest sums to political, labor, intellectual, and other organizations and individuals aboard who are favorably disposed toward, say, America's counterterrorist foreign policy objectives (Rung 5).

  Threshold three: high-risk options

  Threshold Three consists of controversial steps that could trigger within the target nation a response significantly damaging to international comity. Here, propaganda operations remain truthful and compatible with overt policy statements, but now the themes are contentious and are disseminated into media channels within both non-democratic (Rung 6) and democratic (Rung 7) regimes – say, reporting that Taliban soldiers have sprayed acid into the faces of young girls on their way to school in Afghanistan or killed international health-aid workers in Pakistan. At Rungs 8 and 9 (maintaining the distinction between non-democratic and democratic regimes), propaganda activities take a nastier turn, employing deception and disinformation that run contrary to one's avowed public policies – say, falsely blaming an adversary for an assassination attempt or fabricating documents to stain an adversary's reputation. Even propaganda operations against a nation without a free media are of concern here, because of the way in which blow back can deceive citizens in the democratic regimes.

  Rungs 10 and 11 reflect first a large, and then a massive, increase in secret funding for political purposes within an autocratic regime. Rung 12 stands for an escalation based on relatively modest levels of secret funding to affect elections, but this time within a democratic regime – a much more questionable step. Damrosch underscores the distinction: “A political system that denies basic political rights is in my view no longer a strictly internal affair,” but rather one properly subject to international interventions.43

  At Rung 13, the use of covert action involves attacks against economic entities within a target nation. A power line is destroyed here, an oil depot contaminated there; a virus or “worm” is inserted into the computer infrastructures of a foreign government; labor strikes are encouraged inside an adversary's major cities. The measures are carefully planned to remain at the level of harassment operations, with a low probability that lives will be lost; nonetheless, a nation at this rung on the ladder has entered into a realm of more forceful operations.

  A nation resorts to paramilitary operations at Rung 14, supplying arms to counter weapons previously introduced into the target nation by an adversary. Secret military training may accompany the arms transfers. This is a major step upward, for now an intelligence service has brought weapons into the equation. An intelligence agency might provide a modest arsenal of unsophisticated, but nonetheless deadly, arms to a favored rebel faction, as a means for balancing the correlation of forces in a civil war. At Rung 15, weapons are supplied to a friendly faction without the predicate of prior intervention by an outside adversary. Rung 16 goes further still, with the training of foreign armies or factions for the express purpose of initiating combat. A hostage rescue attempt is envisioned at Rung 17, one that could well lead to the loss of life – although designed to be small in scale so as to limit the potential for losses.

  At Rung 18, massive expenditures are dedicated to improve the political fortunes of friendly parties within a democratic regime – perhaps $40 million in a small democracy and $100 million or more in a larger one. The objective is to bring that foreign faction into power that is the friendliest toward the United States. For some critics, this amounts to a troubling attempt to tamper with electoral outcomes in free societies; for proponents, it is simply an effort to make the world a better place by aligning nations along a compatible democratic axis. Attempts at covert influence against truly democratic elections – those in which the rights of political dissent and opposition are genuinely honored – represent a clear-cut violation of the non-interventionist norm (and related rules of international law) and have little claim to legitimacy, in contrast to lower-rung operations directed against self-interested autocratic regimes.

  Threshold four: extreme options

  With Threshold Four, a nation enters an especially dangerous and contentious domain of covert action: a secret foreign policy “hot zone.” Here is where the lives of innocent people may be placed in extreme jeopardy. At Rung 19, the types of weapons provided to a friendly faction are more potent than at earlier rungs – say, Stinger and Blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles or UAVs armed with Hellfire missiles that enable the faction to take the offensive against a common adversary. At Rung 20, a nation might attempt an elaborate hostage-rescue operation that could well en
tail extensive casualties, even if that was not the intention. Rung 21 involves an extraordinary rendition – the kidnaping of a hostage. In this case, force is intended, carefully planned, and directed against a specific individual. Depending on the intent, this approach might fall into the bailiwick of a collection or counterintelligence operation; but if the purpose is to use the hostage as a pawn in secret negotiations toward some policy objective, then it becomes covert action. Rising up another step, a hostage might be tortured in an attempt to coerce compliance in a hostage swap or some other secret deal (Rung 22). On the next rung (23), acts of brutality are directed against lower-level noncombatants in retaliation for a hostile intelligence operation – say, the rendering and torturing of a terrorist's relative in a pay-back for a raid carried out by the terrorist cell (said to be a Russian speciality).

  On the highest rungs, covert action escalates dramatically to include violence-laden environmental or economic operations, as well as paramilitary activities against targets of wider scope than is the case at lower levels on the ladder. Large numbers of noncombatants in the civilian population may become targets, whether planned or inadvertent. For example, the covert action may try to bring about major environmental alterations (Rung 24), from the defoliation or burning of forests to the contamination of lakes and rivers, the creation of floods through the destruction of dams, and operations designed to control weather conditions through cloud seeding in hopes of ruining crops and bringing about mass starvation. At Rung 25, the covert action aggressor attempts to wreak major economic dislocations within the target nation by engaging in the widespread counterfeiting of local currencies to fuel inflation and financial ruin; by sabotaging industrial facilities; destroying crops through the introduction of agricultural parasites (like Bunga) into the fields; or by spreading hoof-and-mouth disease or African swine fever among livestock.

  Rung 26 has the covert action aggressor adopting even higher-stake operations: overthrowing a foreign regime, though with minimal intended bloodshed (as in Iran in 1953 or Guatemala in 1954). The next step, Rung 27, arrives at the level of the assassination plot against specific foreign leaders or terrorists and includes, in recent years, the use of Predators and Reapers as the instruments of murder – with all the risks these operations carry of incurring civilian casualties. At the top of the escalation ladder are two forms of secret warfare that inevitably affect large numbers of combatants and noncombatants: the launching of protracted, full-blown paramilitary warfare against an inimical regime. At Rung 28, the covert action perpetrator provides combat-ready intelligence officers to guide and arm indigenous rebel armies, comparable in scope to the CIA's “secret” war in Laos during the 1960s. Finally, at Rung 29, a nation introduces WMD into the covert action calculus – nuclear, biological, chemical, or radiological arms – meant to inflict widespread death in the population of the target nation.

  Evaluating covert action

  As the ladder of escalation suggests, covert action raises profound ethical questions about what kinds of operations should be acceptable and what is beyond the pale. How one assesses these questions will depend on how one views the place of morality in the conduct of a nation's foreign policy. “Do no evil though the world shall perish,” admonished the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Taken to the extreme for covert action, a devotee of the Kantian school might well reject every rung on the ladder of escalation. In this spirit, a U.S. Undersecretary of State during the Cold War argued that America

  ought to discourage the idea of fighting secret wars or even initiating most covert operations [because] when…we mine harbors in Nicaragua…we fuzz the difference between ourselves and the Soviet Union. We act out of character…When we yield to what is, in my judgment, a childish temptation to fight the Russians on their own terms and in their own gutter, we make a major mistake and throw away one of our great assets.44

  At the other end of the ethical spectrum is a point of view so nationalistic that the use of almost any form of covert action might be considered acceptable by some, if it would serve the national interest. The specific consequences of a covert action – the protection and advancement of the state – become more important than the means one adopts. According to this “consequentialist” perspective, in the light of the anarchic and hostile world environment in which we live, a nation must defend itself in every possible way, including the full range of dark arts available through the auspices of a nation's secret services. As the Hoover Commission advised America's leaders in 1954: “We must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.”45

  Two former CIA officials have extolled this realist approach to covert action in the context of the Cold War (with logic that presumably applies to terrorism today). “The United States is faced with a situation in which the major world power opposing our system of government is trying to expand its power by using covert methods of warfare,” argued Ray Cline, a senior analyst, referring to the Soviet Union. “Must the United States respond like a man in a barroom brawl who will fight only according to Marquis of Queensberry rules?”46 G. Gordon Liddy, an Agency operative (and later a Watergate conspirator), stated the case more bluntly: “The world isn't Beverly Hills; it's a bad neighborhood at two o’clock in the morning.”47 The CIA would have to act accordingly.

  One thing is certain: covert action is tricky in more than one sense of the word. For example, certain conditions must be present for success, such as an indigenous resistance movement supported by the CIA against an outside invader, as in the Afghanistan model during the 1980s. It helps, also, to have a willing partner in the region, as was Pakistan during the Afghanistan covert action during the Reagan years; or, in another example, the Northern Alliance of local Afghanis, who joined with the CIA soon after 9/11 in attacking the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had provided a safe haven for Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders. Further, the more allies the better. Britain, China, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia joined with Pakistan and the United States in support of the mujahideen's struggle against the Soviet invaders during the 1980s.48

  Moreover, covert action outcomes can be highly unpredictable, for history is known to push back. Often there are long-range unanticipated, and detrimental, consequences that result from secret interventions. In the Guatemalan coup of 1954, for instance, the United Fruit Company was no doubt pleased at the outcome at the time – a result also sought by the U.S. Congress; but the impoverished citizens of that nation had to endure repressive regimes after the CIA intervention. As journalist Anthony Lewis writes, “The coup began a long national descent into savagery.”49 Not until 1986 did Guatemala enjoy a civilian government, in yet another change aided by the Agency. Moreover, following twenty-six years of repressive rule by the Shah of Iran (placed in power by the United States and the United Kingdom), the people of that nation rose up in revolt in 1979 and threw their support behind the nation's mullahs and a fundamentalist religious regime – one that remains at odds with the West.

  Even the celebrated ousting of the Soviets from Afghanistan during the 1980s, which one experienced CIA operative has referred to as “the most effective [covert action] in the spy agency's history,”50 had a down side. The Soviet defeat set the stage for the rise of the fundamentalist Taliban regime and its support for Al Qaeda during the build up for the terrorist attacks against New York City and Washington, DC in 2001. Moreover, the Stinger missiles and other CIA weaponry were never returned to Langley; they remained in the hands of Al Qaeda terrorists, Taliban extremists, and Iranians who purchased them on the open market from mujahideen warriors after the Soviets fled Afghanistan. “You get all steamed up backing a rebel group for reasons that are yours and not theirs,” President Kennedy's National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy once cautioned. “Your reasons run out of steam and theirs do not.”51

  The CIA's assassination plots against foreign heads of state eventually became known to
the world and left an impression of the United States as a global Godfather. This was hardly the image most Americans desired in a Cold War contest with the communist nations to win the allegiance of people around the world. Moreover, say that Castro had been killed during the Kennedy years. He would have been replaced by his brother, Raoul, who was equally truculent toward the United States. Furthermore, to order the killing of foreign leaders is to invite retaliation against one's own chief of state – and in the democracies our leaders are much more accessible and vulnerable. Assassination plots open a Pandora's box. As a Yale University School of Law professor has written: “Assassination in any form presents a cascading threat to world order.”52 Such has been the history of assassinations between Israelis and Palestinians, with murder plots see-sawing back and forth endlessly between the two without any resolution to the major policy differences that divide them.

  Of course, one person's perception of long-term negative effects may be countered by another's delight over short-term gains. Looking back on the Iranian coup, for example, DCI Colby argued that “the assistance to the Shah to return in 1953 was an extremely good move which gave Iran twenty-five years of progress before he was overthrown. Twenty-five years is no small thing.”53 He might have added that neither is a quarter-century of low prices for Americans at their gas pumps, which this allegiance with the Shah assisted.54

  For Daugherty, the CIA's “finest hour” of covert action occurred in Poland near the end of the Cold War, when the Agency helped to prevent a Soviet invasion of that nation and aided its movement toward democracy, setting an example for the rest of Central Europe.55 Another former DCI, Stansfield Turner (1977–80), points to the CIA's covert propaganda program aimed at communist regimes during the Cold War as a particularly effective use of covert action. “Certainly one thinks that the book programs [smuggling behind the Iron Curtain books and other reading materials that were critical of communism in general and the Soviet regime in particular], the broadcast programs, the information programs do good,” he has said. “When you get facts into a country where the truth is not a common commodity, you're doing some good.”56