Guidelines for covert action
As these illustrations suggest, special activities can be useful. This fact was demonstrated by the U.S. rout of the Taliban in Afghanistan immediately following the 9/11 attacks. The first U.S. casualty in that counterattack against Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts was Johnny Michael “Mike” Spann of Winfield, Alabama, a CIA/SOG officer. America's combination of Special Forces, B-52 bombing, CIA paramilitary operations, and help from the local Northern Alliance in Afghanistan during 2001–02 provides a model of how covert action and overt force can be effectively intertwined to defeat enemies of democracy. Yet we know that the use of covert action can also be acutely embarrassing and damaging to a nation's reputation: witness the Bay of Pigs, the assassination plots, and the Iran–contra scandal. Hoping to avoid potential embarrassments caused by inappropriate CA activities, William H. Webster crafted a set of questions he posed to the Operations Directorate throughout his tenure as DCI (1987–91) each time its officers brought him a covert action proposal:
Is it legal? [with respect to U.S. law, not necessarily international law]
Is it consistent with American foreign policy and, if not, why not?
Is it consistent with American values?
If it becomes public, will it make sense to the American people?57
These questions make good sense and carry with them a set of principles that should be remembered by all covert action planners. So should the admonition of former presidential adviser Clark Clifford, a drafter of the National Security Act of 1947. In his testimony before the Church Committee in 1975, he stressed that special activities should be adopted only in circumstances that “truly affect our national security.” Cyrus Vance, who would become Secretary of State in the Carter Administration, advanced a similar thesis before the Committee. Covert action, he emphasized, should be used only when “absolutely essential.”58
Planting propaganda in the media of fellow democracies and tampering with democratic elections hardly seem to qualify as acceptable practices under these standards. Indeed, one should be skeptical about all covert actions designed to manipulate fellow democratic regimes. Professor Roger Fisher of Harvard University's School of Law has it right. “To join some adversaries in the grotesque world of poison dart-guns and covert operations,” he reasons, “is to give up the most powerful weapons we have: idealism, morality, due process of law, and belief in the freedom to disagree, including the right of other countries to disagree with ours.”59
One should reject, too, special activities that target a nation's environment and food supplies; or those that involve lethal targeting against individuals – except in the case of terrorist leaders wanted for murder who resist arrest for purposes of a fair trial. Al Qaeda was responsible for the death of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, with additional killings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere thereafter. Like ISIS, it hopes to bring about even larger casualties in the West. These terrorist groups are worthy targets for many of the covert action options presented in the ladder of escalation. The democracies of the world should coordinate their special activities against the enemies of open societies, just as they do their intelligence collection operations. Terrorists – with their agenda of suicide bombings, beheadings, mass executions, and savage attacks against schoolgirls, aid workers, and other innocents – have revealed themselves as barbarians. Even against such brutal adversaries, however, the West must avoid abandoning its own moral values by adopting the indiscriminate use of covert actions that reach beyond a pin-pointed targeting of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and related terrorist organizations.
Covert action will continue to have a significant role in the defense of the democracies against terrorist organizations, as well as in opposition to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. In the practice of these dark arts, however, the democracies risk taking on some of the attributes of the very enemies they oppose; therefore, the conduct of covert action must be narrowly cast, closely supervised, and sparingly used.
Notes
1 This scenario is drawn from Loch K. Johnson, “It's Never a Quick Fix at the CIA,” Washington Post (August 30, 2009), Outlook Section, p. A1.
2 Henry Kissinger, remark, “Evening News,” NBC Television Network (January 13, 1978).
3 The Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991 (50 U.S.C. 503 (e); Pub. L. No. 102–88, 105 Stat. 441, August 14, 1991); this statute amended the National Security Act of 1947, repealed the Hughes–Ryan Amendment of 1974, and codified into law Executive Order 12333.
4 John Deutch, DCI, speech, National Press Club, Washington, DC (September 12, 1995).
5 William J. Daugherty, Executive Secrets: Covert Action & the Presidency (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), p. 12.
6 The National Security Act of 1947, Pub. L. No. 80–253, 61 Stat. 495; 50 U.S.C. 403–3(d)(5).
7 Author's interview with a senior CIA official in the Operations Directorate, Washington, DC (February 1986).
8 B. Hugh Tovar, “Strengths and Weaknesses in Past U.S. Covert Action,” in Roy Godson, ed., Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s: Covert Action (Washington, DC: National Strategy Information Center, 1981), pp. 194–5.
9 William E. Colby, “Gesprach mit William E. Colby,” Der Spiegel 4 (January 23, 1978), author's translation, pp. 69–115, quote at p. 75.
10 Quoted in The Nation (March 12, 1983), p. 301.
11 Frank Church, “Covert Action: Swampland of American Foreign Policy,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 32 (February 1976), pp. 7–11, quote at p. 8, reprinted in Loch K. Johnson and James J. Wirtz, eds., Intelligence and National Security: The Secret World of Spies, 3rd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 233–7.
12 See Jennifer Kibbe, “Covert Action and the Pentagon,” in Loch K. Johnson, ed., Strategic Intelligence, Vol. 3: Covert Action (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), pp. 145–56; John Prados, “The Future of Covert Action,” in Loch K. Johnson, ed., Handbook of Intelligence Studies (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 289–98; and Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).
13 Section 662(a) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974; Section 662 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2422).
14 Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition, U.S. Senate, and House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran, U.S. House (the Inouye–Hamilton Committee), Hearings and Final Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1987). The statutory responses came in the form chiefly of the 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act (see note 3). See also Malcolm Byrne, Iran-Contra: Reagan's Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014).
15 See Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
16 Testimony, “The CIA and the Media,” Hearings, Subcommittee on Oversight, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979).
17 Author's interview with a CAS officer, Washington, DC (February 21, 1976).
18 Senior DDO officer, testimony, Hearings, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee), Final Report, 94th Cong., 2nd Sess., Sen . Rept. No. 94–465 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), p. 31; see, also, Church Committee, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Rept., S. Rept. No. 94–465 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, November 20, 1975), p. 181, note.
19 See Michael Grow, U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pressuring Regime Change in the Cold War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).
20 David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government (New York: Random House, 1964).
21 Tom Wicker et al., “CIA Operations: A Plot Scuttled,” New York Times (April 28, 1966), p. A1.
22 Joint
Chiefs of Staff, memo on SQUARE DANCE, dated October 30, 1964, and attached to a memo from R.C. Bowman to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, 1964 National Security Files (November 12, 1964), Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX.
23 Stephen R. Weissman, “An Extraordinary Rendition,” Intelligence and National Security 25 (April 2010), pp. 198–222.
24 Executive Order 12333, Sec. 2.11.
25 Former DCI Robert M. Gates, quoted by Walter Pincus, “Saddam Hussein's Death Is a Goal,” Washington Post (February 15, 1998), p. A36.
26 Unsigned editorial, “Lethal Force under Law,” New York Times (October 10, 2010), Wk. 7. See also Ken Dilanian and Courtney Kube, “U.S. Report Will Say Drones Have Killed Just 100 Civilians,” NBC News (June 24, 2016). For the corrected figure in 2016, see the unsigned editorial, “The Secret Rules of the Drone War,” New York Times (July 10, 2016), p. SR8. On the drone murder of Alaki, see Scott Shane, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015).
27 For accounts of U.S. drone attacks in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, see H. Gusterson, Drone: Remote Control Warfare (Boston: MIT Press, 2016); J. Kaag and Sarah S. Kreps, Drone Warfare (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2014); Jane Mayer, “The Predator War,” The New Yorker (October 26, 2009), pp. 36–45; Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth (New York: Penguin, 2013); Shane, Objective Troy; and Chris Woods, Sudden Justice: America's Secret Drone Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). On the CIA rethinking the wisdom of its involvement in drone attacks, see Mark Mazzetti, “CIA to Focus More on Spying, a Difficult Shift,” New York Times (May 24, 2013), p. A1.
28 “Lethal Force under Law” (see note 26 above).
29 Stansfield Turner, Burn before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence (New York: Hyperion, 2005), p. 32.
30 John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, rev. edn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 220.
31 Church Commitee, Final Report, p. 31.
32 Daugherty, Executive Secrets, p. 140.
33 Author's interview with senior DO manager, Washington, DC (February 18, 1980).
34 Author's interview with a senior DO officer, Washington, DC (October 10, 1980).
35 George H. W. Bush, letter to the author (January 23, 1994); and author's interview with DCI R. James Woolsey, Langley, Virginia (September 29, 1993).
36 Author's interview, Washington, DC (March 21, 1995).
37 Deutch, DCI speech (see note 4).
38 Herman Kahn, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (New York: Praeger, 1965), p. 37.
39 A CIA intelligence officer, James A. Barry, suggested to the author (who agrees) that the demarcation of broad thresholds on the ladder is more useful than the exact steps within each threshold, since it is difficult to agree exactly about whether some specific rungs should be higher or lower than other rungs. The key point, he argues, is that “there are degrees of damage – physical, economic and psychological/moral – and that these must be clearly articulated in a discussion of proposed covert actions” (letter to the author, dated May 18, 1992).
40 See Report of the Special Committee on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States, UN Doc. A/6799 (1967), p. 161.
41 Lori Fisler Damrosch, “Politics across Borders: Nonintervention and Nonforcible Influence over Domestic Affairs,” American Journal of International Law 83 (January 1989), pp. 6–13, quote at p. 11.
42 On this norm, see Damrosch, “Politics across Borders,” pp. 6–13. The Murphy Commission was known more formally as the Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy; see its Report to the President (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, June 1975).
43 Damrosch, “Politics across Borders,” p. 36.
44 George Ball, “Should the CIA Fight Secret Wars?” Harper's (September 1984), pp. 27–44, quote at p. 37.
45 A top-secret recommendation (since declassified) of the General Doolittle Committee, a part of the Hoover Commission in 1954, cited in Church Committee, Final Report, p. 9.
46 Ray Cline, former DDI at the CIA, quoted by Ball, “Should the CIA Fight Secret Wars?” pp. 39, 44.
47 Remarks, public lecture, University of Georgia, Athens, GA (May 4, 1986), author's notes.
48 On these ingredients for success, see Milt Bearden, “Lessons from Afghanistan,” New York Times (March 2, 1998), p. A19.
49 Anthony Lewis, “Costs of the CIA,” New York Times (April 25, 1997), p. A19.
50 Bearden, “Lessons from Afghanistan.”
51 McGeorge Bundy, remark to the author, Athens, GA (October 6, 1987). In 2016, the media revealed that CIA weapons shipped to Jordan, a U.S. ally, for dispersal to rebels opposing the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, were stolen by members of the Jordanian intelligence service (the General Intelligence Directorate, or GID, also known as the Mukhabarat). The theft included thousands of Kalashnikov (AK-47) assault rifles with millions of rounds, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and antitank guided missiles. In 2013, President Obama had approved the program (codenamed TIMBER SYCAMORE), based on an apparently misplaced faith in the GID as a reliable intelligence liaison partner. In the past, though, Jordan had worked closely with the United States through a joint counterterrorism center in Jordan, as well as at a secret CIA prison outside of Amman where the Agency confined suspected terrorists. See Mark Mazzetti and Ali Younes, “Thefts Redirect Arms from C.I.A.,” New York Times (June 27, 2016), p. A1. In 2009, a Jordanian physician serving as a CIA counterterrorism agent inside Al Qaeda also betrayed the United States by exploding a suicide vest he was wearing during a secret meeting with seven high-ranking CIA case officers (among them the Agency's COS stationed in Kabul), in a remote part of Afghanistan. All died in the attack (the most lethal against the Agency in twenty-five years), including a GID officer accompanying the double agent. On this tragic case of deception and murder, see Scott Shane and Eric Schmitt, “C.I.A. Deaths Prompt Surge in U.S. Drone Strikes,” New York Times (January 23, 2010), p. A1.
52 W. Michael Reisman, remarks, “Covert Action,” panel presentation, International Studies Association, annual meeting, Washington, DC (March 29, 1994).
53 Remarks, interview on “Larry King Live,” CNN Television, Washington, DC (February 2, 1987).
54 Journalist Tom Friedman has observed that the United States treated the Arab world “as a collection of big, dumb gas stations, basically. We told them, ‘Here's the deal. Keep your pumps open, your prices low, and be nice to the Jews. And you can do whatever you want out back’….”: Ian Parker, “The Bright Side,” The New Yorker (November 10, 2008), pp. 52–65, quote at p. 61.
55 Daugherty, Executive Secrets, pp. 201, 211.
56 Stansfield Turner, author's interview, McLean, Virginia (May 1, 1991).
57 Remarks, Aspin–Brown Commission staff interview (1996). Similarly, former National Security Adviser Bundy has said that “if you can't defend a covert action if it goes public, you'd better not do it at all – because it will go public usually within a fairly short time span” [author's interview, Athens, GA (October 6, 1987)]. Stansfield Turner has also commented: “There is one overall test of the ethics of human intelligence activities. That is, whether those approving them feel they could defend their decisions before the public if their actions became public” [Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), p. 178].
58 Testimony, Hearings: Covert Action, the Church Committee, Vol. 7, pp. 50–5.
59 Roger Fisher, “The Fatal Flaw in Our Spy System,” Boston Globe (February 1, 1976), p. A21.
4
Counterintelligence
The Hunt for Moles
In October and November 1969, the anti-war movement brought thousands of protesters to Washington, DC, in the largest mass demonstrations ever witnessed in the United States.
Not only the draft-age youth of America, but the entire nation was obsessed with the war in Indochina. In turn, the Nixon Administration became obsessed with the rising tide of protests that ebbed and flowed along the Mall in Washington to within a stone's throw of the Oval Office. At one point, presidential aides encircled the White House grounds with DC Metro buses, as if the protesters were Apaches and the executive office buildings an imperiled wagon train in the western territories. As historian Theodore H. White recalled, “Perplexed by a street madness which seemed beyond the control of either his staff, his own efforts, or the FBI, [President Nixon] groped for solutions.”1
Following riots by youthful protesters in April 1969, the President ordered one of his closest advisers, John Ehrlichman, to prepare a report on possible Soviet involvement in the financing of the student protest movement. Just as with President Lyndon B. Johnson before him, President Nixon could not believe that he or his policies could be so unpopular; there had to be a sinister foreign hand involved behind the scenes, inciting college radicals to turn against their own country by paying them off perhaps or by brainwashing them – maybe both. Ehrlichman turned to the Intelligence Community for answers, but they rejected the hypothesis of foreign involvement. There was simply no evidence to support the allegation. These were “credit card revolutionaries,” as one intelligence officer put it, using their parents’ credit cards to travel around the country demonstrating against a war they found illegitimate and unworthy of U.S. involvement.2 Ehrlichman reported this conclusion to the President, but both men remained skeptical that the intelligence agencies had sufficiently probed the possibility that Soviet “active measures” might be the hidden hand behind the riots.
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