Abstract
This chapter discusses the reasons for why the U.S. government may seek ‘plausible deniability’ for PMOs, which in a major way impacts on the way operations are approached. The reasons that are discussed include: operational necessity, escalation control, elite control over foreign policy, secrecy as a legal fiction, and the role of bureaucratic politics. The chapter argues that major reasons why secrecy is favored in PMOs is that it is mostly directed at the American population rather than the enemy to allow elites to pursue controversial foreign policies and that secrecy also shields the U.S. government and key decision-makers from legal repercussions since international law tends to be violated in the context of pro-insurgency PMOs.
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Notes
- 1.
CIA defector Phil Agee has argued that NED has the function of destabilizing other countries and that this is similar to what the CIA used to do covertly. See Agee 2003. William Blum quoted one of the founders of NED, Allen Weinstein, who said in 1991: ‘A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.’ See Blum 2000, 180.
- 2.
The US interference in the democratic processes of other states, in particular the internal affairs of US allies, is a particular sensitive issue and it is no surprise that the US government has to be discrete about it in order to exercise hidden influence. The recent discovery of US meddling in the French election has been a major embarrassment.
- 3.
President Hamid Karzai had received tens of millions of dollars from the CIA delivered in suitcases, backpacks, and plastic bags, which was used to influence decisions of the Afghan government. See NYT 2013.
- 4.
The term originally refers to the Double Cross Committee or 20 (XX) Committee of MI5, which systematically captured and turned Nazi agents to the point that ran the entire German intelligence network in Britain during the Second World War. This is described in John Masterman’s book, The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939–1945 from 1972.
- 5.
For example, the Albanian PMO was apparently compromised by the penetration of the Albanian community in Italy by the Albanian intelligence service Sigurimi. There were even members inside the émigré political groups in exile that kept Sigurimi and the Soviets well-informed about developments and operations. See Lulushi 2014, 86.
- 6.
According to Richard H. Shultz, what started as an attempt of creating a resistance movement in North Vietnam through agent insertions morphed into a psychological warfare operation whose main purpose was to increase North Vietnam’s paranoia to an extent that it could be exploited for subversion and deception . He quoted DCI William Colby that his intention in North Vietnam was to ‘increase the insecurity in North Vietnam to match the insecurity they were producing in South Vietnam.’ See Shultz 1999, 111–112; 128–129.
- 7.
According to Christopher Robbins, Air America personnel were ordered not to carry weapons on their flights in war zones, but this prohibition was routinely ignored. See Robbins 1990, 134.
- 8.
This was the time when the CIA was sponsoring the KMT insurgency in Burma/Southern China, and it has been alleged that Redmond may have been connected to that effort. He was a member of the CIA paramilitary Special Activities Division with wartime experience in the OSS as a paratrooper.
- 9.
An almost bizarre case of successful blackmail by an adversarial power was the delivery of $400 million in cash by the Obama administration to Iran in order to free four American hostages, which completely undermined US financial sanctions against Iran and which represented a strange reversal of earlier policies towards Iran by the administration.
- 10.
In the case of Guatemala , the US was putting a lot of diplomatic and propaganda pressure on the Arbenz government to actually provoke them to seek assistance from the Communist bloc, which could be used against them. Indeed, Arbenz made the mistake of buying weapons from Czechoslovakia, which provided the US with an excuse to overthrow the ‘communist’ Arbenz.
- 11.
The culpability of Libya in the Lockerbie terrorist attack from 21 December 1988 has never been proven. Although Gaddafi did agree to pay compensation of $2.7 billion to the families of the victims to get US sanctions lifted, he never conceded Libyan responsibility. Gaddafi handed over two Libyan suspects to the International Criminal Court, but there was never enough evidence—one of them was declared innocent by the court and the second was released for ‘humanitarian reasons’ in 2009. It now seems likely that Lockerbie was in fact an Iranian retaliation for the downing of Iran Air 655 on 3 July 1988 by the USS Vincennes.
- 12.
Apparently, even renowned scholars of IR like Hans Morgenthau were not aware of US assassination schemes of the early Cold War since Hans considered assassination as an essentially obsolete political practice. See Gibbs 1995, 224.
- 13.
See also International Court of Justice, ‘Case Concerning Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua : Judgment of June 27, 1986.’ Available at: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/70/6503.pdf.
- 14.
The implicit assumption legal scholars are making, who consider US covert action as lawful is that of US exceptionalism: the US has a special responsibility towards the international system and may take actions that are not permissible for anybody else. See Reisman and Baker 1992, 3.
- 15.
According to SIPRI report on the Yugoslavian arms embargo , the ‘US Government later acknowledged that it had allowed deliveries to Bosnian and Croatian forces to take place, even though it knew that these violated the UN arms embargo.’ See Mark Bromley 2007.
- 16.
NATO tried to get around these legal restrictions by declaring the Libyan National Transitional Council the legitimate government of Libya in September 2011, which meant that the actual government of Libya was now relegated to rebel status.
- 17.
According to Mark Lowenthal , Obama administration lawyers had advised against overt support to the Syrian opposition because of its violation of international law. See Lowenthal 2015, 235.
- 18.
During the Reagan administration, Congress had become quite concerned about the CIA’s use of contingency funds and has subsequently sought to regulate these monies more tightly. See Snider 2008, 183.
- 19.
To be fair, not all of this is merely bureaucratic inertia or mindless habit: if US weapons were to be exported officially they would be subject to State Department ITAR regulation. Even so, there may have been a violation of export rules as it was reported that some of the shipments to a secret warehouse in Jordan included US-made weapons from Croatia, which would be still subject to end-user regulations that do not allow the diversion of weapons to other parties than specified in the export license.
- 20.
Bruce Riedel quoted a study from the National Security Archive, which suggested that ‘it was the CIA, ironically, that cautioned against too much covert aid for the rebels [because] too large a military support operation for the rebels might provoke Soviet retaliation against Pakistan .’ Quoted from Riedel 2014, 143–144.
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Krishnan, A. (2018). Dilemmas of Secrecy. In: Why Paramilitary Operations Fail. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71631-2_4
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