POLITICAL ACTION
Political action is a more visible and, often, more aggressive form of covert action than propaganda, although political action operations should be supported and intertwined, “working hand-in-glove,” with propaganda operations. These programs, in general, are the exploitation of secret contacts and/or the provision of funds in order to affect the political situation in a target country. To this end, the intelligence service of a foreign government will recruit nationals of the target country, or at times third-country nationals, to commit the overt actions while clandestinely providing the funding and requisite materials to these recruited agents. “Front” companies or organizations may also be established to provide cover for the agents and to facilitate the funding process.
Political action operations come in many forms and may include secretly funding political campaigns, with or without the knowledge of the candidate; extending subsidies to agents of influence (individuals who are trusted confidantes of key policymakers, whether or not they themselves hold a government position); funding labor demonstrations or strikes; instigating and funding street demonstrations, marches, or rallies; supporting friendship societies, social groups, or other similar civic organizations that may exert influence on a government; manipulating political events or personages; manipulating economic circumstances (e.g., inserting counterfeit currency to undermine the monetary system, sabotaging key industrial facilities or essential materials or foodstuffs, and “invading” computers and databanks to manipulate or destroy information); and instigating coups to overthrow a sitting government.
At times it seems as though intelligence officers managing political action programs have, as Dr. Loch Johnson says, “resembled nothing less than a group of political campaign consultants, producing slick materials for favored foreign candidates: speeches, brochures, handbills, placards, campaign buttons, and even bumper stickers for remote regions of the globe where donkeys and camels are more common than cars.” And certainly political action operations (and propaganda, as well) have expanded in concept and capabilities as the characteristics of modern society—computers, communications, international finance, commercial air travel, and other aspects of a global community—have both facilitated operations and created new opportunities.19
For decades the secret funding of political organizations and party members was a staple of American foreign policy and covert action programs. In discussing a program supporting Japan’s rightist Liberal Democratic Party, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian Affairs in the Kennedy administration, Roger Hilsman, has stated that the subsidy payments were “so established and so routine” that they played a “fundamental role” in U.S. policy toward Japan. This belief was also shared by America’s ambassador to Tokyo in the early 1960s, U. Alexis Johnson, who acknowledged that “the principle was certainly acceptable” to him, for the United States was “financing a party on our side.”20 A few other notable CIA political action programs include intervening covertly in Italian political processes to prevent the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from winning elections between 1948 and the late 1960s, when the party was phased out; overthrowing potentially pro-Communist governments in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954); attempting to forestall a Communist government in Indonesia (1957); and providing funds, desktop publishing materials, and other means of support to the banned trade union Solidarity following the imposition of martial law in Poland after 1981.21
As mentioned, economic disruption and manipulations of markets are also staples of political action. For edification one need only look at an operation the Soviets executed against the United States in the Nixon years. According to a former director of international economics for the National Security Council, “in 1972 the Soviets surreptitiously bought 25 percent of the U.S. grain harvest, using phone intercepts of the grain dealers’ network to listen to both sides of the market. The purchase led to higher grain prices for consumers, and taxpayers provided for a 25-percent-a-bushel export subsidy.”22
Thus, a well-thought-out political action program, when employed properly and securely, and in consonance with an established overt policy, holds the potential to quietly further the national interests of the government that uses it. It is a means of exerting influence that is more visible and more direct than propaganda, but without necessarily escalating into situations that breed violence or possess the potential to do so. It is a means of placing discrete pressure on an enemy’s government at his precise points of weakness without resorting to provocative measures or letting the target government realize that its opponents are other than its own citizens working for a better life. And an agent of influence, highly placed in an adversary’s decision-making structure, can steer policies toward the direction that the government he’s working for desires in a manner that either prevents hostilities or reduces the chances of hostilities occurring between the two countries. In sum, presidents are attracted to the political action option precisely because it allows them a variety and range of options that will advance their goals while permitting them to escalate their operations in a controlled and graduated manner as circumstances dictate.
PARAMILITARY
The words “covert action” often conjure up mental images of guerillas fighting in Afghanistan or insurgent Contras in Nicaragua—both cases employing force on a scale sufficient to make secrecy impossible but about which the government nonetheless pretended it knew nothing. It is thus understandable if the average American is inclined to believe that paramilitary operations are the raison d’être of the CIA. In point of fact, however, paramilitary programs are the least utilized of the three traditional categories, and they are usually so limited in scope that they seldom rise to public notice. Perhaps surprisingly, they are also quite often the least costly of all the covert action programs.
The CIA’s paramilitary cadre is most often employed in training foreign military and security forces in such skills as small unit tactics and VIP protection, although of course beginning in 2002 actual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have placed heavy operational demands on the paramilitary elements. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, training that falls under the rubric of special activities but which requires the support of the Agency’s covert action infrastructure—rather than actual combat operations—was by far the most common mission for the paramilitary element. Even in the large, expensive, and well-known paramilitary programs just mentioned (and including the Bay of Pigs), the CIA’s role was that of organizer, trainer, and logistician rather than actual combatant. But there have been times when Agency officers were indeed conducting combat operations. One obvious example was the “secret war” in Laos in the 1960s, where Agency staff and contract officers not only trained but led indigenous tribesmen, predominantly the Hmong, in combat operations against the Communist Pathet Lao.23
During the 1980s there were occasional criticisms of the training programs that CIA paramilitary officers routinely provided to security and military forces in the Persian Gulf states, even though the cost to the U.S. government of each round of training was often only in the low six figures. The value of these and similar low-cost programs to the U.S. government was proven in the days following the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq: when American military forces needed air, land, and sea bases and other support mechanisms for Desert Shield/Desert Storm, none of the Gulf States denied use of their territory. While these paramilitary training programs cannot claim all the credit for this, the personal and professional relationships that these programs established and nurtured over the years with senior officers and government leaders in the Gulf states helped to lay the foundation for generating a pro-U.S. attitude. In many ways, then, CIA paramilitary programs are not only specialized operations, but they serve also as force multipliers for U.S. government policies.
INFORMATION WARFARE
The use of the personal computer, communications networks, and electronic databases by government agencies and businesses of every ilk—no
t all legitimate by any means—has permitted creative individuals to engage in a new pastime. Private citizens, sitting at their home computers, soon learned how to intrude clandestinely into large institutional computer systems and databases, no matter how distant the site, to steal, alter, and destroy data, or to damage or destroy hardware and software in the target computer. When done by individuals acting on their own initiative and for their own reasons, the intrusive act is called “hacking.” While definitions are malleable, the Japanese government has enacted a law defining hacking (or cyberterrorism) as “the unauthorized entry into computer systems through communications networks . . . and the damage caused to those systems as a result of the unauthorized access.”24
When hacking is carried out by a nation’s military, or by a government intelligence or security agency for national security purposes, the terminology is “information warfare.”25 Information warfare is a weapon applicable across the board against a country’s governmental infrastructure, power and energy producers, banks and financial institutions, and media, as well as the supporting infrastructures of outlaw organizations such as terrorist groups and narcotics traffickers (which are, ironically, structured very much as legitimate businesses in order to track income, expenses, inventory, production, and so forth).
Information warfare is also used to describe attacks against governments and civilian institutions by terrorists, organized crime, and other outlaw enterprises (as opposed to the individual who hacks for fun or sport). In short, what differentiates hacking from information warfare is the affiliation (or lack thereof) of the person or organization committing the act and their motive for doing so.
One example of the potential threat cyberterrorists pose to governments took place in Japan at the hands of the terrorist group known as Aum Shinrikyo, best known for releasing canisters of poisonous sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system in 1995. In 2000, Japanese investigators were shocked to learn that the Japanese Defense Ministry, nearly a dozen other government agencies, and almost one hundred key Japanese businesses, including Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, were using more than one hundred software programs developed by Aum Shinrikyo and sold through front companies. Damage that could have been caused by these programs was potentially devastating: the terrorist group could have “compromised security by breaching firewalls, gaining access to sensitive information or systems, allowing invasion by outsiders, planting viruses that could be set off later, or planting malicious code that could cripple computer systems and key data systems.”26
With the near-universal reliance on computer systems and databases by governments, businesses, and illegal organizations (e.g., front companies established by narcotics cartels and terrorist groups, or bank accounts utilized for money laundering), it was only a matter of time before governments began to look at information warfare (IW) for national security purposes. Complicating defenses against information warfare—while concomitantly facilitating the offensive work of IW warriors—is the very nature of the World Wide Web, which was, according to cyberterrorism expert Richard A. Love, “developed for efficiency, not security . . . [it] allows easy access [and is] difficult to control or exclude wrongdoers from committing illegal acts.” The same can be said for multitudes of other computer networks of all sizes and types utilized by institutions, which could be significant targets for cyberterrorists. In the United States, “85 percent of critical infrastructure is privately owned, rendering government solutions [for security and protection] without private cooperation hollow and likely to fail.” In Great Britain, a former foreign minister has allowed that “hacking could cripple Britain faster than a military strike” because the nation’s military infrastructure is managed and controlled predominantly by computers.27
As a covert action tool, information warfare is a capability that has existed for some years but which has rarely been employed by American presidents (for reasons discussed below) until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.28 While the CIA and U.S. military forces have many of the same capabilities and methodologies to conduct information warfare as covert action, their objectives are vastly different. Should a U.S. military service, in peacetime, clandestinely and remotely enter a potentially hostile military force’s computer system—for example, an air defense network or a command and control net—to alter or damage data, hardware, or software, this would be a technical or electronic form of “preparation of the battlefield,” intended to allow our military to disable the computer and its data just before an attack. While this act would be at least partially analogous to covert action, no Presidential Finding would be required, for battlefield preparation unambiguously falls within the military’s standing legal authorities. In contrast, were the U.S. military to be tasked by the president to use its capabilities to remotely and clandestinely enter, say, a database of a bank in a foreign nation to alter data in an account used by a weapons trafficker, then a Finding would indeed be necessary.29
It is a different matter if the CIA engages in a peacetime information warfare operation as covert action. As with any covert action program, it would manifestly require a Presidential Finding, be subjected to the intra- and interagency approval processes, and be duly reported to Congress.30 While IW might appear at first blush to be an ideal tool for a president to employ in a range of areas, there is at least one serious consideration that argues against it: the bad guys can use information warfare, too, with potentially serious consequences for millions. Specifically, the United States Treasury Department is deeply concerned about the ability of computer experts, working for terrorist groups or other criminal organizations, to breach the databases of finance ministries, central banks, stock and bond markets, and similar enterprises through which the international financial world operates, believing such electronic invasions would have a devastating effect. Paper money rarely changes hands anymore in the world of high finance: “funds” are withdrawn, transferred, and deposited electronically, with computers “holding” or accounting for the monies. Similarly, stocks are bought and sold internationally via computer transactions and, like money, the “shares” exist only in databases. The fear is that, for example, a narcotics cartel that has seen its electronically transferred funds mysteriously disappear, as they pass through multiple financial institutions during the laundering process, might retaliate by attempting to erase or otherwise corrupt databases residing in an international financial institution or a nation’s primary stock exchange. A successful attempt could create chaos in world financial markets.31
Thus, while computer intrusions as a covert action capability hold a great deal of promise and allure, as long as so many government and world enterprises are dependent on computer databases that have yet to be protected in an absolute manner, presidents will no doubt be wary of recommendations to resort to information warfare against other than military or terrorist targets. That said, information warfare has already been used on a limited scale, as “computer hacker technology has been used to disrupt international money transfers and other financial activities of [individuals in terrorist support networks].”32 Clearly, information warfare is the covert action tool of the future.
SIX
Approval and Review of Covert Action Programs in the Modern Era
By authorizing covert action and surrounding it with procedural safeguards, backed by specific criminal sanctions, we may be able to construct a web of vested interests and prudent fears that will better protect against abuse of [covert action], both in foreign and domestic affairs.1
Walter F. Murphy,
Professor Emeritus,
Princeton University
Until the mid-1970s, there was very little congressional oversight of the CIA, and particularly of covert action programs. Senior members of Congress who chose to be briefed would be informed of programs in the very broadest of terms sufficient to justify funding requests, although often they deliberately chose not to be briefed on programs while nonetheless approving the requisite funds. Clark Clifford
, close advisor to President Truman and other chief executives, commented that “Congress chose not to be involved and preferred to be uninformed.” Likewise, former CIA general counsel and distinguished intelligence historian Walter Pforzheimer recounted that “We allowed Congress to set the pace. We briefed in whatever detail they wanted. But one of the problems was you couldn’t get Congress to get interested.” And these opinions were corroborated by members of Congress themselves. The venerable Democrat and member of the Senate’s Armed Forces Committee John Stennis, when offered a CIA briefing on a covert action program, hastily cut in: “No, no, my boy, don’t tell me. Just go ahead and do it—but I don’t want to know.” And the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Leverett Saltonstall, stated in 1955, “It is not a question of reluctance on the part of CIA officials to speak to us. Instead, it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally . . . would rather not have. . . .”2 Whether covert programs succeeded or failed was of little concern: these veteran legislators had lived through World War II, and, with the onset of the cold war, they not only believed that vital American security interests were at stake but also that the president had sole authority to conduct secret programs aimed at preventing Communist (particularly Soviet) domination of the world. Moreover, they realized that such programs entailed risk of failure and expected only that the risks be calculated beforehand and that no high-risk/low-gain operations be undertaken unless absolutely necessary.3
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