The Politics of Covert Activity

Manjikian, Mary

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-39894-1_7

Mary Manjikian²

261 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter presents three narratives often deployed to “rescue the state” from charges that it itself is queer—through deflecting the charges to another actor. Narrative One posits that states sometimes engage in covert activity/queer foreign policy (on the down low), but that doesn’t make them queer; other states in the international community collude to pretend they don’t notice such queer behavior—adopting a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it comes to state’s queer behavior. The second narrative suggests that the state’s policy appears queer only because the president, independently, behaved queerly and such behavior is therefore not indicative of the state’s identity. The third narrative suggests that while the IC sometimes oversteps its role and ends up making alternate foreign policy, this is due to an agency refusing to perform its expected role, rather than because the state itself is queer.

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Notes

1.
David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz, “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” Social Text 23, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2005): 84–85.
2.
Loch Johnson, “Spies in the American Movies: Hollywood’s Take on Lese Majeste,” Intelligence and National Security 23, no. 1 (2008): 6.
3.
Samuel Rascoff, “The President as Intelligence Overseer,” in Global Intelligence Oversight, 235–251, ed. Zachary Goldman and Samuel Rascoff (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016).
4.
Keith Rosenkranz, “The US Also Has a History of Meddling in Foreign Elections,” Star-Telegram, May 21, 2018, accessed https://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/other-voices/article211617394.html
5.
Melvin Small and David J. Singer, “The War Proneness of Democratic Regimes, 1816–1965,” Jerusalem Journal of International Relations 1 (1976): 50–69.
6.
Alexander B. Downes and Mary Lauren Lilley, “Overt Peace, Covert War? Covert Intervention and the Democratic Peace,” Security Studies 19 (2010): 269.
7.
Meredith Reid Sarkese. No Date. “The COW Typology of War: Defining and Categorizing Wars.” Unpublished manuscript available at http://cow.la.psu.edu/COW2%20Data/WarData_NEW/COW%20Website%20-%20Typology%20of%20war.pdf Retrieved August 10, 2018.
8.
Jules Lobel “Covert War and the Constitution.” Journal of National Security Law and Policy, Vol. 5 (2012), 394.
9.
Austin Carson, “Facing Off and Saving Face: Covert Intervention and Escalation Management in the Korean War,” International Organization 70 (2016): 103–131.
10.
John J. Nutter, The CIA’s Black Ops: Covert Action, Foreign Policy, and Democracy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 48.
11.
Carson, Facing Off.
12.
Elizabeth A. Anderson, “The Security Dilemma and Covert Action: The Truman Years,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 11, no. 4 (2010): 403–423.
13.
Anderson, 404.
14.
Austin Carson and Keren Yarhi-Milo, “Covert Communication: The Intelligibility and Credibility of Signaling in Secret,” Security Studies 26, no. 1 (2017): 124–156.
15.
Carson, “Saving Face,” 106.
16.
Michael Pozansky, “Stasis or Decay? Reconciling Covert War and the Democratic Peace,” International Studies Quarterly 59 (2015): 815.
17.
Poznansky.
18.
Downes and Lilley, 265–306.
19.
J. K. Gibson-Graham, “Queer(y)ing Capitalist Organization,” Social Organization of Knowledge 3, no. 4 (1996): 541–545.
20.
Ibid., 542.
21.
Laura Dickinson, “Outsourcing Covert Activities,” Journal of National Security Law and Policy (2012): 521–537.
22.
John J. Lumpkin. “Mercenary Use increases in CIA’s Covert Operations.” South Florida Sun. November 28, 2003. P. 2A.
23.
Aaron Ettinger, “The Mercenary Moniker: Condemnations, Contradictions and the Politics of Definition.” Security Dialogue 46, no. 2 (2014), 174.
24.
Sarah Percy, Mercenaries: The History of a Norm in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
25.
Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: State-building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
26.
Nutter, 50.
27.
C. Kevin Marshall. “Putting Privateers in Their Place: The Applicability of the Marque and Reprisal Clause to Undeclared Wars.” University of Chicago Law Review 64, no. 3 (1997), 953–981.
28.
Pamela Hess. “CIA hired mercenaries to kill terrorists, report says; Using Blackwater for covert program raises alarm about accountability in sensitive US operations.” Toronto Star. August 2009: p. A18.
29.
Anna Leander, “The Paradoxical Impunity of Private Military Companies: Authority and the Limits to Legal Accountability.” Security Dialogue 41, no. 5 (2010): 467–490.
30.
Elke Krahmann, “The United States, PMSCs and the state monopoly on violence: Leading the way towards norm change.” Security Dialogue 44, no. 1 (2013), 53–71.
31.
John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations since World War II (New York, NY: William Morrow and Co., 1986).
32.
Quoted in D. Bruce Hicks, “Presidential Foreign Policy Prerogative After the Iran-Contra Affair: A Review Essay,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1996): 962–977.
33.
Fred Burton. Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent. (New York: Random House, 2009), 67.
34.
Hicks.
35.
Burton, 137.
36.
Quoted as a source in Lumpkin, p. 2A.
37.
Dickinson, 522.
38.
Pamela Hess.
39.
William Daugherty, Executive Secrets: Covert Action and the Presidency (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 13.
40.
Daugherty, 14.
41.
Daugherty, 21.
42.
For example, see Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 2008) for an explication of this view.
43.
Jack Devine and Vernon Loeb, Good Hunting: An American Spymaster’s Story (New York, NY: Sarah Crichton Books, 2014).
44.
Downes and Lilley, 294–5.
45.
Elizabeth E. Anderson, “The Security Dilemma and Covert Action: The Truman Years,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 11, no. 4 (1998): 417.
46.
George W. Bush. Decision Points (New York, NY: Broadway Paperbacks, 2010).
47.
Bush, 409.
48.
Jimmy Carter. Faith: A Journey for All (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 78–9.
49.
Daugherty, 9.
50.
John J. Nutter, The CIA’s Black Ops: Covert Action, Foreign Policy, and Democracy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 37.
51.
Nutter, 39.
52.
Glenn Hastedt. “Doolittle Report.” In Glenn Hastedt, ed. Spies, Wiretaps and Secret Operations: An Encyclopedia of American espionage, ed. GLeenn Hastedt (ABC-CLIO, 2010).
53.
Shiva Balaghi. “Silenced Histories and Sanitized Autobiographies: The 1953 CIA Coup in ran.” Biography 36, no. 1 (2013), 73.
54.
For more on these events, see Vincent Bevins, “What the United States Did in Indonesia,” The Atlantic, October 20, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/the-indonesia-documents-and-the-us-agenda/543534/
55.
Ben Rhodes. The World as it is: A memoir of the Obama White House (New York, NY: Random House, 2018).
56.
Hicks, “Presidential Foreign Policy.”
57.
Hicks, 969.
58.
Ted Cruz, “The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Lawlessness,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 38, no. 1: 65.
59.
Hicks, 966.
60.
Hicks, 966.
61.
Cruz, 90.
62.
Harold Hongju Koh. “Why the president (almost) always wins in foreign affairs: Lessons of the Iran-Contra Affair,” Yale Law Journal 98 (1988): 1255–1266.
63.
Hicks, “Presidential Foreign Policy,” 962–977.
64.
Cruz, 89.
65.
Ibid.
66.
Hicks, 969.
67.
Hicks.
68.
Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978).
69.
John Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012).
70.
Johnson, “Spies in American Movies,” 18.
71.
Ibid.
72.
Stanley A. Renshon, “President Clinton’s Memoirs: Caveat Emptor,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 35, no. 3 (September 2005): 552.
73.
Quoted in Michiko Kakutani, “In Bush, Policy Intersects with Personality,” New York Times, November 3, 2010.
74.
See Gregory Treverton, “Covert Action: From ‘Covert’ to Overt,” Daedalus 116, no. 2 (1987): 95–123.
75.
Devine and Loeb.
76.
Cynthia Helms, An Intriguing Life: A Memoir of War, Washington, and Marriage to an American Spymaster (Lanham, MD: The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2013), 156.
77.
Mary Manjikian, “Two Types of Intelligence Community Accountability: Turf Wars and Identity Narratives,” Intelligence and National Security 31, no. 5 (2016): 686–689.
78.
Marvin C. Ott, “Partisanship and the Decline of Intelligence Oversight,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 16, no. 1 (2003): 29–44.
79.
Margo Schlanger, “Intelligence Legalism and the National Security Agency’s Civil Liberties Gap,” Harvard National Security Journal 6 (2015): 112–2015.
80.
New York Times. “White House Crisis: Experts from the Tower Commission Report.” February 27, 1987. Accessed August 2, 2019. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/27/world/white-house-crisis-excerpts-tower-commission-s-report-part-iii-arms-transfers.html?mtrref=search.yahoo.com&gwh=2D52925EDA028720B52498FB41E3CF4A&gwt=pay&assetType=REGIWALL

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Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA, USA
Mary Manjikian

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Manjikian, M. (2020). The Politics of Covert Activity. In: Gender, Sexuality, and Intelligence Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39894-1_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39894-1_7
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