COVERT ACTION AND OPEN SOCIETY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000706820003-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 20
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 15, 2011
• Sequence Number: 3
• Content Type: MISC

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FOREIGN AFFAIRS
SUMMER 1987
Gregory F. Treverton
COVERT ACTION
AND OPEN SOCIETY
Ayear ago what was most striking about major Ameri-
can "secret" operations, from Nicaragua to Angola to Cam-
bodia, was how little was secret about them. Support for the
Nicaraguan rebels, or contras, the most controversial example,
was openly debated and openly funded. Neither opponents nor
supporters had reason to keep it secret; for its part the Reagan
Administration regarded "covert" action as good policy and
good d iii stlc politics, a e-y element o the Reagan Doctrine.
which is intended to challenge Marxist-Leninist states around
the world.
Now it turns out that the United States has come full circle.
In the case of Nicaragua, the Central Intelligence Agency
me t e_agent o "overt" covert action. Thus, when the
Reagan Administration decided to sell arms to Iran and keep
the operation secret, it turned inward, to the White House
staff. In embroidering that operation to divert money for the
contras, White House aides ap anent_cept t e resent
ignorant in order to protect him-providing him with "plau-
sible denial" of the sort the CIA had long since abandoned.
The Iran/contra affair raises questions that have not been at
the center of the public debate since the investigations of U.S.
intelligence activities by Congress in the mid-1970s. Should the
United States attempt major covert operations at all? Can it?
In what circumstances, and-crucially-how, if at all, can these
secret operations be made to square with the requirements of
governance in an open democracy?
'The most authoritative account of the affair is Report of the President's Special Review
Board (the Tower Commission), Washington: G.P.O., 1987.
Gregory F. Treverton, a faculty member of Harvard University's John
F. Kennedy School of Government, served on the first Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence (the Church Committee) in 1975-76, and on
the staff of the National Security Council during the Carter Administration.
This article is adapted from the author's forthcoming book, Covert Action:
The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World. Copyright ? 1987 by Basic
Books, Inc. Adapted by permission of Basic Books, New York.
STAT
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Spying may be the world's second oldest profession1 but for
the United States it was on y the cold wale comin&on the heels
of _America's wartime experience with secret o rations con-
ducted l_ the Office of Strategic Services,
that _ led to the
f
creation o an intelligence service in peacetirnP ^a jo C?vert
operations. Wartime success and postwar threat: these were
the backdrop for the creation of the CIA. In a ew years America
plunged from the euphoria of vic ory m or_ arTI to the
confrontation with a looming Soviet threat.
The first line o American response tot a onset of the cold
war was overt: the surge of assistance to Europe through the
Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. But the second line
was renewed interest in what was then called covert "psycho-
logical warfare"-what we could now call propaganda-as a
way to respond to the Soviet Union by means that were less
than war but more than nothing. In February 1948 a commu-
nist coup succeeded in Czechoslovakia, while communist agi-
tation grew in France and Italy; Western Europe seemed to
teeter in the balance. By March Washington whipped itself into
near-hysteria when the American high commissioner in Ger-
many, General Lucius Clay, cabled his warning that war with
Russia "may come with dramatic suddenness."
In this atmosphere the National Security Council in June
approved Nsc 10/2, a plan that had originated with George
Kennan, then director of the State Department's Policy Plan-
ning Staff and the author of the famous "X" article outlining
the policy of containment of the Soviet Union. NsC 10/2 was
the turning point for covert action, expanding it from propa-
ganda to direct intervention. In the words of the document,
covert action comprised:
propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabo-
tage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against
hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements,
guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-
communist elements..
NSC 10/2 also codified the notion of plausible denial: opera-
Quoted in Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries, New York: Viking, 1951, p. 387.
' Reprinted in William M. Leary, ed., The Central intelligence Agency. Historp and D.ctm.nt-,
University of Alabama press, 1984, pp. 131-33.
'/7
at
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tions were to be "so planned and executed that any U.S.
Government responsibility for them is not evident to unau-
thorized persons and that if uncovered the U.S. Government
can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them."
The fledgling CIA's first success came that same year_when.
its covert support to the Italian Christian Democrats helped
them beat back an electoral challenge from the Italian Com-
munist Party. By 1950-the United States h
covert _ad1WCeded in the
covert struggle
inne West a Europe, and in Eastern Europe its
gatherin . The center o the battle against communism move ,
as o cia- Washington saw the world away from ,~QP to
small, weak countries. Euro had put the CIA into the business
of covert itiica action, but it was Asia t at of a agen_y
into secret rams nary operations in t e orean War, Mat-
tern repeated a decade later in another- Asian war. Vi in
- 2m-
In November 1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected Pres-
ident; his-campaign had called for a more active response to
the Soviet Union than the passive containment of the Truman
Administration. John Foster Dulles became secrets of state,
and in Februa 1953 his brother, er, Allen Dulles, was named
director o centra ante hence. e campaign pronounce
ments and the new personalities suggested that covert opera-
tions would be a key weapon in the new Administration's war
against the global threat of communism. The operators soon
got their chance.
On August 21, 1953, after a week of turmoil in the streets
of Tehran, the Iranian prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq,
who had nationalized that country's oil industry, surrendered
to General Fazlollah Zahedi. Three days later the shah, who
had fled Iran the previous week with his queen, returned to
the capital. At his palace a few days later he offered a toast to
Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt, the chief of the CIA's Near East and
Africa Division and the man w o a im
11 111'(1 "
downfall: "I owe-_m~throne to _' o ovist! 1 e m meq _
and ou14 Y
The next year, on June 16, 1954, Guatemalan Colonel Carlos
Castillo Armas crossed the border-irno-his count -from Ffon-
duras with a few hundred men frame an armed-) y the CIA.
' Cited in Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran, New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1979, p. 199. As Roosevelt's account is not independently documented, his
recollections should be taken as evocative, not gospel.
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Pilots under CIA contract flew air cover. The president of
Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, was deserted by his air
force and his army, which refused his order to arm workers
and peasants. The American ambassador in Guatemala, John
Peurifoy, hastily arranged a transfer of power to the chief of
the armed forces, Colonel Enrique Diaz. (In a moment of
tragicomedy, Diaz immediately pledged that he would continue
the struggle against Castillo Armas, America's designated suc-
cessor to Arbenz. Peurifoy thereupon secured Diaz's resigna-
tion, and after complicated negotiations between the armed
forces and Castillo Armas, the latter emerged as president.')
It is eerie that thirty years later the targets of American
covert action are once again in Iran and Central America. Yet
the parallel may mislead as much as it instructs, for if the more
recent episodes testify to how difficult covert action is, the
earlier ones seemed to show how easy it was. The Iran and
Guatemala- operations-codenamed TPAJAX and PBsuccEss,
respectively-coming- within a few years of the ca's success in
Western Europe, made the agency's reputation an sett
pattern for covert action in the years ahead. Small, cheap, fast
and tolerably secret, they encouraged Washington to think
other covert actions could be likewise. When the next Admin-
istration decided to confront revo ution in Cuba, its covert
r u terra a o were t o C'iA, o ~cPTs
who carried it out. --
The b us of s ort-run success amidst the cold war obscured
several cautions. In the early 1950s both Iran and Guatemala
were eminently vulnerable to manipulation by an outside
power, particularly the United States. In both, contending
political forces were in close balance. Those balances might
have tipped against Mossadeq and Arbenz__even had the CIA
not intervened. So it appeared that relatively small operations
were enough to tip the balance. Yet in both cases those limited
interventions might have failed. In fact, Roosevelt's first plot
did fail; Dulles was ready to roll up the operation and -bring
the troops home. And the CIA officers who ran P?uccECC-were
under no illusions: if their deceptions failed and Arbenz were
able to get hi_s military into com t, t he invaders -would be
overwijeimed.
' The most authoritative account of the Guatemala intervention is Richard H. Immerman,
The CIA in Guatessala: The Foreign Polity of Intervention, Austin: University of Texas Press,
1982.
cotinoll
T?
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Thus success was purchased at the price of enlarging the
intervention. American purposes did not change, but the op-
erational requirements of achieving them did. Once the nited
States was committed, in secret and in a small way , its stakes
increase , an U IC CIA too Eric next ste . The effort to intim-
idate Arbenz became a paramilitary campaign, if a small one.
In the process, plausible deniability became more and more
tenuous.
Six years later at the Bay of Pigs, deniability evaporated
entirely. "How could I have been so stupid, to let them go
ahead? The words were John Kennedy's. When the CIA-
trained invasion force of Cuban exiles hit the beach in thear].y
dawn hours of April 1 , 1961, everything went wrong: the
lives of brave Cubans were spent; the United States was seen
to be intervening, and the intervention failed. Once the plan
had changed, without anyone outside the CIA quite noticing it
from _a___ ua operation into a full-fledged amphibious in-
vasion, tFie- cTiance of eepmg it tolerably secret diminished-lo
the vanishing point.
Evaluating covert action in retrospect is speculative, for it is
bedeviled by the imponderable of what might have been;
history permits no reruns. Failures, such as the Bay of Pigs, are
apparent, but successes are harder to judge. Consider the CIA
intervention in the Angolan civil war of 1975. On the surface
It was a failure: the Cuban- and Soviet-supported faction, the
MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), was
installed while the American role in trying to prevent that
outcome was being exposed. If, however, the initial purpose
was more limited-i.e., to raise the price of victory for the
MPLA and its Soviet and Cuban backers-then Angola might
be counted a short-run success. Yet American officials did not
convey the impression that their aims actually were so limited,
either at the time or later.
When covert actions have succeeded in their short-run pur-
poses, it may be that the action, while marginal, was just the
bit of "support for our friends" that tipped the balance in the
internal politics of a foreign country. On the other hand, it
may be that the American support was entirely superfluous,
Quoted in Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy, New York: Harper & Row, 1965, p. 309.
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that the same successful outcome would have ensued without
the U.S. involvement. If this is so, all the covert action accom-
plished was to implicate the United States and tarnish the
success by labeling it "made in America" when the existence
of the covert action became known.
A case in point was covert American support to opposition
political parties and media in Chile during the presidential
tenure (1970-73) of Salvador Allende, a self-proclaimed Marx-
ist. There is no question that those parties and media were
under pressure from the Allende government.' The opposition
forces did survive to fight another day, but there is no tellig
whether clA support for them was decisive or irrelevant.
What is clear Is t e signal conveyed to history by t__ the revela_
tions of American covert action. In retrospect, most reasonably
objective observers cone u e t at Salvador Allende's experi.
ment in Chile would have failed on its own terms." Yet history's
lesson is not that Allende fell of his own accord. History's lesson
is that the United States overthrew him in 1973. That is the
public perception even thou &h this lesson is untrue in thth
narrow sense: as ington did not engineer his coup. nor diet
the CIA or the American military parti i in t Th ver3
fact of American covert action meant that, at a minimum "i
is fair to say that a nit" tates cannot escape some respon-
sibility 'for [Allende s own a . '
By the same token, in 1975 when South Africa intervened
to back the U.S.-supported Angolan factions, the FNLA (Na-
tional Front for the Liberation of Angola) and UNrrA (National
Union for the Total Independence of Angola), a covert action
originally intended to counter the Soviet Union and Cuba then
signaled something else. It signaled an alliance with the apart-
heid regime in Pretoria. When, in December 1975 the Amer-
ican Congress reacted by cutting off the CIA operation, that
only ratified what was seen as the inevitable result- 'fat-
in the eyes of both Washington policymakers and the rest of
the world.
n a longer perspective, neither the Iran nor Guatemala
operations can fairly be given too much credit-or too much
' The best account of covert action during this period is Covert Action it Chile, staff report
to the Senate Select Committee ... on Intelligence Activities, 94th Congress. 1st Session.
December 1975.
s See, for example, Conor Cruise O'Brien, "How Hot Was Chile?" in The New Rijih .
Aug. 26, 1985, p. 37.
Author's press briefing on behalf of the Church Committee, in Washington. Dec. 4, 1975.
(O
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blame-for what happened afterward in Iran and Guatemala.
On one hand, TPAJAx restored the shah of Iran to his throne
where he remained for nearly a quarter-century, a pro-Western
bastion in a turbulent region. Twenty-five years of stability is
no mean feat in international affairs. On the other hand,
American covert action identified the shah's Iran more closely
with the United States than was good for either of them.
In any case, however, the aspects of American policy that
loomed so large in the shah's downfall in 1979 were overt, not
covert. They were his image as an American client, the waste
and corruption associated with his massive U.S. arms purchases
and his own dependence on the United States. These factors
owed much more to American policy during the 1970s than to
the event of 1953.
A similar conclusion also applies to Guatemala in 1953. If,
in retrospect, the "success" of PBsua ss also looks more
ambiguous than it seemed at the time, most of the blame or
credit lies with American foreign policy, not with covert action.
PasuccESS did not make it inevitable that Washington would
then forget about Guatemala; it only made it possible. David
Phillips, a CIA officer who worked on PBSuCCESS the Ba of
Figs and Chile, laments that "Castillo Armas was a bad presi-
dent, tolerating corruption throughout his government and
kowtowing to the United Fruit Company more than his own
people." But he argues that the United States:
could have prevented this with the vigorous exercise of diplomatic pressure
... to assure that he pursued social reform for the many rather than venal
satisfaction for a few. Instead, Washington breathed a collective sigh of
relief and turned to other international problems.10
Several covert operations of the 1950s remained secret for
a lonjZ time: the CIA assistance fo'Tibetans resistinggt the dom-
ination of their land by the People's Republic of _China, re-
rded in intelligence lore as a success u olding cis on, is still
a little-discussed operation, especially because it is an embar-
rassment now that Sino-American relations have thawed. he
effort to unseat President u carno o n onesia, who had
~2.
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earned Washington's opposition for his espousal of nonalign-
ment, ranged from covert political action to a paramilitary
operation; it is not much better known than the Tibetan
operation.''
Even in the 1960s several brief and limited-small in terms
of numbers of people involved though not in terms of pur-
pose-interventions remained secret for some time. So-called
Track II-a secret effort to touch off a military coup in 1970
to prevent Allende from being seated as Chile's president, an
operation run without the knowledge of the State or Defense
Departments-was not revealed for five years after it hap-
pened. And the sad plots in the early 1960s to assassinate Fidel
Castro stayed buried for ten.'2
Not so now, as the Iran/contra affair underscores. Major
covert actions will become public-sooner rather than later,
perhaps before the operation is over. Americans are more
skeptical of their government, of its information and its capac-
ity, a skepticism that is a legacy of recent history labeled
"Watergate." When Ronald Reagan, the most popular Presi-
dent in generations, first denied in 1986 that his Administra-
tion had traded arms sales to Iran for the release of American
hostages in Lebanon, most Americans did not believe him.
This skepticism has been reinforced by other factors. One is
the prominence of investigative journalism; every cub reporter
aspires to be Woodward or Bernstein of Watergate fame. The
media now contain more people asking hard questions, even
of secret operations, and probing for leaks; and there are fewer
who are prepared to take the government at its word.
If reporters are more likely to seek information on "secret"
operations, so are they more likely to find it. "Leaking," always
present, has become routine in Washington; it has become
almost acceptable. Officials sometimes leak information merely
for the gratification of being pandered to by journalists more
famous than they. More often, they leak to rally opposition to
or, more rarely, support for a given policy. Administration
after administration, regardless of its political persuasion, de-
clares war on leakers. Those wars always fail. They fail for a
" For accounts of both, see chapters 8 and 9 of John Prados, Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA
and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War 11, New York: Morrow, 1986.
's Both Track I I and the anti-Castro plots are detailed in Alleged Assassination Plots Invelvnsg
Foreign Leaders, an interim report of the Senate Select Committee... on Intelligence Activities.
94th Congress, 1st Session, Nov. 20, 1975.
S3.
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simple reason: the ship of state is like no other, for it leaks
from the top.
Officials at the top of government are precisely those who
know of covert actions and thus are most likely to take their
opposition to particular programs into the open. This is true
of the executive branch, and all the more so of Congress, where
this tendency is reinforced by institutional pride and, often, by
partisan politics. On the whole the intelligence committees of
the House and Senate have kept secrets at least as well as the
executive branch. Yet their role in overseeing covert action
means that those who might oppose a particular project are
more likely to know of it. The process creates a set of frustrated
opponents who will, on occasion, go public with their frustra-
tion.
Moreover, if the leak does not initially come from Washing-
ton, the scent will eventually be picked up by the American
press from overseas even if, as in November 1986, the first
article is published in Beirut and in Arabic.
Not every expose, however, has created a controversy. Even
now, not every covert action is controversial. Of the 40 or so
covert actions under way in the mid-1980s, at least half had
been the subject of some press account." Yet only several were
controversial enough that the original leaks developed into
continuing stories. Most of the rest were open secrets, more
unacknowledged than unknown; they were so because most
members of Congress thought they made sense, as did most
Americans who knew or thought about them-and, no doubt,
most of the journalists who reported them. Former ciA Direc-
tor William _Colb characterized the reaction to revelations of
American assistance to the resistance In A it', i anlstan an-
Ista n was atwo-c
l
o
umnea n Th w
e ineas
day, hi?&ton Post or one
then almost n
th
n
g -----
o
l
Certa y tere wI cycles in American attitudes, as there
have been before. Concern over Soviet power coexists with
worry about nuclear war and peace; one predominates, then
the other. In the early 1980s most Americans evidently shared
their President's concern with the Soviet threat, and their
congressional representatives went along with huge increases
" This number is rough, based on my interviews and on press accounts. In any use, the
precise number does not mean very much since operations vary widely in cost, not to mention
risk and degree of controversy.
14 Interview, Jan. 9, 1986.
4bw
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in defense spending-and in covert action. So, too, was Ronald
Reagan able to rebuild considerable authority and discretion
in the American presidency, thus ending a cycle begun by
Vietnam and Watergate. Indeed, the saddest consequence of
the Iran/contra debacle may be that it will set back this rebuild-
ing.
The changes in American domestic politics in the mid- I970s
have made it more difficult for the United States to achieve its
purposes secretly. Other changes make it harder now than in
the 1950s for the United States to intervene successfully at all,
covertly or openly. Despite the controversy and mystique that
surround covert action, history suggests that there is no magic
to it. It means providing foreigners, secretly, with money or
weapons or training as tokens of American support.
With the passage of time, however, a little money here, a
few weapons there became less likely to achieve grand foreign
policy purposes. Castro was a target of a different order than
Arbenz. To think in 1975 that a few million dollars might alter
the fate of Angola was a faint hope at best, and an illusion at
worst, especially-,qrven t at t e CIA recognized that the 96-viet
Umon ancT- other externs actors mig counter American
support with more assistance of their own. Even the CIA officials
who planned the Bay of_ Pi knew that to delay the invasion
until Cuba had received de ivei es ol`a vanced Soviet fighter
planes would be to condemn the plan to certain failure.
Also, notice the contrast between two Central American
cases three decades apart, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Castillo
Armas' liberators numbered no more than several hundred.
Their "invasion" was more conjured than real. Yet they had
control of the air, in large part because Arbenz, unsure of the
loyalty of his air force, was unwilling to risk putting his own
pilots in the air. Sulfatos-Spanish for "laxatives," the name
Guatemalans gave to the invaders' bombs-plus rumors exag-
gerating the size of the invasion were enough to induce Arbenz
to capitulate. In the case of Nicaragua, the contras numbered
about 10,000 by the mid-1980s, yet not even the most ardent
advocates of American assistance to them argue that they are
about to induce the Sandinistas to "say uncle," much less that
they now pose a threat sufficient to overthrow the regime by
sheer force of arms.
The makers of revolutions have learned their own lessons
from history, including the history of American cart _ion.
They are determined not to repeat the mistakes of Arbenz and
CAW
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Mossadeq. They have sought to assure themselves the loyalty
of the army or to build revolutionary cadres of their own. They
also have learned a related lesson: if the United States threatens
the revolutionaries, there are other sources of support, includ-
ing the Soviet Union if need be, to which they can turn. And,
unlike Arbenz or Mossadeq, they will turn to those sources
sooner rather than later.
Moreover, to some of these leaders the United States is
useful as an enemy. Arbenz and Mossadeq and even Allende
sought Washington's approval, or at least its acquiescence. By
contrast, if the United States is of any use to Castro, the
Sandinistas and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, it is primar-
ily as a foreign demon against which their revolutions can
rally-even though the Sandinistas were prepared to accept
American aid as long as it was forthcoming and the revolution-
ary Iranians were not above seeking American spare parts for
their military. In 1979 Iranians took Americans hostage and
released them only when they ceased to be useful counters in
the bargaining within the revolution.
V
In all likelihood, the record shows, covert o rations will
become 111, nown, an merica w< u e or vin un er-
ta en t em. Thus, the practical lessons lead into moral issues.
The issues are hardl unique to covert intervention, thouggh
they are powerfully present there, an they are often obscured
in policymaking by the presumption that covert actions will
remain secret. Overt interventions, such as the American in-
vasion of Grenada in 1983, or military attacks, such as the
bombing of Libya in 1986, raise similar moral and instrumental
concerns. These concerns are not absolute; they must be con-
sidered against the gravity of the threat and the adequacy of
other available responses.
In December 1976, when I was in Washington working with
several old friends who were making arrangements for the
transition between the Ford National Security Council and the
Carter Nse, we had decided to retain the basic structure of the
Ford operation, with its network of sub-cabinet committees for
particular purposes. Yet, of course, as a new administration, it
was necessary to change the names of those committees, and
so we joked about names. The 40 Committee, the Ford Ad-
ministration's group for discussing covert action, would be-
come the "If They Can Do It, So Can We" Committee.
s~.
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"If they can do it, so can we" seems an unacceptable rationale
on both moral and instrumental grounds. What the Soviet
Union or other nations do cannot settle the issue. We consider
ourselves different from them, and imagine that the difference
is not only basic to what we are as a people, but also a source
of American influence in the world, part of this country's moral
armor. Though our actions often belie our words, we do
believe that nations should not interfere in the internal affairs
of their neighbors.
We also believe that the example of democracy is a powerful
one, one toward which peoples all over the world will gravitate
if given the chance. Believing that, we must also believe that
the example is a powerful part of our external behavior, not
just of our internal arrangements. If people will choose democ-
racy when given the chance, then democracy is demeaned,
perhaps doomed to fail, if it is imposed from the outside. There
is something incongruous about helping to overthrow govern-
ments-especially ones that come to power through elections
that we would define as tolerably fair (as in Chile in 1970)-in
the name of democracy.
In this view even the "successes" of covert action seem
ambiguous or transient in retrospect, accomplished at signifi-
cant cost to what we hold dear as a people and to America's
image in the world. On the other hand, the world is a nasty,
complicated place. In that regard Americans' historical ambiv-
alence between the high moral view and the feeling that inter-
national politics is a dirty business is understandable. As Rep-
resentative Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.) put it: "Given Soviet vio-
lations of [accepted international] norms," for the United
States "perpetual indifference is neither politically practical
nor strategically prudent."15
Moreover, nations affect each other's politics in so many
ways that any too-tidy definition of "intervention" is suspect.
In all the examples cited, covert action formed only Part of
American policy. The United States decided whether to grant
economic aid to Cuba or Chile or Angola, and whether to
release Iranian assets held in the United States. Most of these
decisions were based on explicitly political criteria. Even if
similar decisions toward other countries are riot so explicitly
political, the decisions in any case have political effects on the
" "When To Intervene," Forsign Policy, Summer 1986, p. 21.
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country in question; of that fact, foreign political leaders have
no doubt.
The same is true of actions by private American actors. U.S.-
based businesses either invest or do not invest in a country,
and that decision too has not just an economic but also a
political effect. That is the case even if the decision is not
political in any narrow sense of the term. Most of the businesses
or banks that chose not to invest in Chile under Allende
probably did not make that choice for any specific political
reason, despite Washington's pressure. Rather, their decision
was a business one, based on the climate in Chile. They saw
that judgment as an economic one, though political instability
surely was a factor in it.
In this context a unilateral self-denying ordinance against all
intervention-open or covert-is too restrictive. Some threats
to Americakn national security require responses. Some Amer-
ican friends in the Third World deserve support. What is
imperative is to keep in mind the long-term costs of interven-
tion for a government that is not notable for attending to long-
term considerations.
Given that "covert" action is not likely to remain secret, why
not act openly? In the case of aid to the FNLA and UNITA in
Angola, covert rather than overt aid spared the first identifi-
cation with the United States for only a few months; as for aid
to the contras in Nicaragua, the "covert" form made not one
whit of difference, as the operation quickly became known.
Nor is it obvious that in these cases the recipients of American
largesse much minded the source of the money being known.
There is also the risk that covertness creates a self-fulfilling
prophecy: if the United States only aids its friends secretly,
then any link to the United States may seem sinister, portend-
ing much more than is the fact.
Doing openly what might earlier have been done covertly is
not out of the question. The American radio stations broad-
casting into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union from Mu-
nich, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, were in form
private organizations; advertisements exhorted Americans to
contribute to them. In fact, they were created and financed
covertly by the CIA as propaganda vehicles. When that support
was disclosed in 1967, the radio stations nevertheless continued
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to operate; they became supervised by a board and supported
openly by appropriations from the American Congress.
A still more promising model is the West German political
party foundations (e.g., the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung). They
are instruments of the major parties but are supported openly
by government money. They have openly assisted kindred
parties and labor movements around the world. The Reagan
Administration was moved in 1983 to create the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), an American parallel to the
German foundations. The endowment, with a 1985 budget of
$18 million, channels money to institutes of the two American
political parties plus an AFL-CIO group and a business group,
which then make grants in support of democratic institutions,
mostly in the Third World.
So far,-the record of the endowment is mixed but hopeful.
Its grants, and those of its four constituent institutes, have been
cautious and close to government policy. For instance, more
than $400,000 went, over two years, to the American Friends
of Afghanistan to develop educational and cultural facilities
inside those portions of the country controlled by the resistance
groups-activity that might in other times have been called
the "civic action" component of a paramilitary operation.1?
Acting openly, however, is neither easy nor a complete
substitute for covert action. It requires an explicitness about
influencing the politics of a foreign country that is uncomfort.
able for Americans, and hence likely to be controversial. More-
over, governments that feel threatened by that open assistance
can act to prevent it more easily than if it were covert. For this
reason, a bias toward openness would not settle immediate,
difficult cases: Given that the Sandinista regime has closed the
main opposition paper, would it prevent open assistance to
opposition political parties in Nicaragua? What are the pros-
pects in South Africa, where the regime has already blocked
assistance to the opposition United Democratic Front?
It also remains an open question whether, given American
politics, public funding is compatible with creative, and thus
controversial, acts by private groups. The NED budget is only
an eighth of that of the German party foundations, in a country
one fourth the size of the United States. In 1985 Congress
halved the endowment budget and denied any funding to the
Republican and Democratic institutes, though that prohibition
" See the NED report for 1985 and its listing of grants for 1986.
AWW
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was relaxed the next year. It is a sad fact about American
politics, even in the 1980s, that it is easier for the CIA to get
money from.- ongress secretly than for a not- her institution to
get it openly-even _ if_the purposes of the two are broadly
similar. Funding for the CIA remains wrapped. in the cloak of.,
national security, and so members of Congress maybe prepared
to fund particular activities but prefer not-to be seen-to votg
for them openly.
Open funding is thus likely to be restricted to small, politi-
cal-and not too controversial-projects. Yet as a long-term
direction for American policy, openness would reflect the
reality that, as the century ends, national boundaries are more
and more permeable. Given this reality, moreover, those
groups the United States would like to support may not be so
chary of accepting help, even-perhaps especially-if it is
open. The'United States would say to them: we are prepared
to support you but only openly. We think that is better for
you. In any case, we know it is better for us.
The circumstances in which opting for a major covert oppeer-
ation makes sense are more and more unusual. -U:S- aid-to
those in Afghanistan resisting Soviet occupation of their coun-
try is one such case. Americans, in and out of Congress, broadly
support the cause of the rebels, or freedom fighters as some
call them, and aid is a way to increase the cost of the Soviet
occupation. American assistance, reportedly begun in a small
way in the last year of the Carter Administration, escalated
sharply in the mid-1980s to an estimated $280 million for
1985, mostly for small arms, clothing and supplies."
The secret is an open one; the American role is not so much
covert as, by tacit agreement, unacknowledged. The reason
for circumspection is the touchy position of the Pakistan gov-
ernment, the conduit for the American supplies to the rebels.
Pakistan has been prepared to support the rebels but is unwill-
ing to be too visible in doing so lest it antagonize its powerful
neighbor, the Soviet Union. In these circumstances, the resort
to the CIA, rather than the American militar , was more a
matter of being discreet than of keeping the whole affair secret.
In deciding whether to choose the covert option, prudent
" As reported by The New York Times, July 29, 1986.
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policymakers should ask themselves a careful series of "what
if" questions. That injunction applies to all policies, foreign
and domestic. But it applies with special force to covert action
because of the presumption of secrecy.
The most obvious "what if?" is "what happens if-or more
likely, when-it becomes public? What if it becomes public in
midstream?" Large covert actions will not remain secret, a
reminder that is easy to state but hard to embody in the making
of policy when the pressures all go in the direction of wishful
thinking. Witness the reflections on the Bay of Pigs by Richard
Bissell, then head of the CIA's clandestine service:
the argument was [not] made that this is now a very public business, and
we'd better treat it as such, and either cancel it if we can't stand the
publicity, or else-do some of the things that will increase the chances of
success if we are going to go forward with it.19
If the Iran operation of 1985-86 had remained secret for
several years after all the hostages had been released, that
success might have outweighed the costs of being seen to have
traded arms for hostages when the operations became public.
Perhaps; we cannot know for certain. It did not, however, take
a sophisticated analysis to show that a covert policy targeted
on some Iranians was vulnerable to being publicized by oppos-
ing Iranian factions if and when it suited their political pur-
poses. And it was equally likely that, when the cover was blown,
trading arms for hostages, with a nation the United States had
denounced as terrorist, would be deemed unacceptable-by
America's allies, much of the rest of the world and, most
important, the American people.
Of course, whether a particular covert operation can bear
the test of disclosure is apparent in retrospect but often far
from obvious before the fact. Prudence suggests that presidents
pay careful attention to such warning signals as the review
process throws up-the views of cabinet officers, people in the
White House who attend to the president's interests, and
congressional overseers who are surrogates for public reaction.
One warning signal, however, is evident in advance: Does
the intervention contradict overt American policy? If it does,
as with arms sales to Iran, it is especially improbable that the
's My checklist parallels that suggested by Stephen Solarz, "When To Intervene," Ot.
p. 25, though mine is more specific to covert action.
"Columbia University Oral History project, p. 25.
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operation will withstand the test of disclosure. The arms sales
were exactly the opposite of the Administration's public poli-
cies, which had twisted the arms of America's allies not to sell
arms to Iran, had sought an end to the Iran-Iraq war with
neither a victor nor a vanquished, and had pledged not to
bargain with terrorists over hostages, much less to sell arms to
them.
A second "what if?" is "what if the first intervention does
not succeed? What then?" If covert action is to remain secret,
most of the time it will have to be small. Small operations have
often begun with grand purposes, objectives incommensurate
with the instrument. When the goals could not be achieved,
leaders were tempted to take the next step and the next. This
happened in the Bay of Pigs and Angola and Iran in the mid-
1980s. Sometimes a limited objective can be achieved, but its
achievement makes it appealing to hope for more-witness
Angola and perhaps Nicaragua, where the United States did
seem to achieve its initial aim of cutting weapons supplies from
Nicaragua to the anti-government rebels in El Salvador. An-
swering this "what if?" suggests, at a minimum, careful atten-
tion to the CIA's covert operators- tfienmse ves, oT signs of
skepticism about whether operations as ini[talry conceived can
achieve their purposes. Such signs were there between the lines
of Track II and Angola and Nicaragua. Some risks are worth
running, but few are worth running in ignorance.
A third set of "what if" questions is "what signal will be
received, by whom and with what result?" judgments that
are also easier with the benefit of hindsight, for they involve
calculations of threat and of American interests. Intelligence
assessments, by the CIA or the State Department, provide one
set of indicators. In 1985-86, or exam e, mer an i' nteiT-
gence on Iran was weak but what there was offered rectous
little ground for belie_ving_there_ were "moderates" who mtA t
be detached from their revolutionary colleagues. Later U.S.
intelligence cast doubt on the imminence of a Soviet threat to
Iran, one of the original premises of the operation. These were
cautions that the intended signals might go awry.
The nature of those who are to receive secret American
assistance can provide another warning signal. Since their
relationship to the United States is meant to be clandestine,
the CIA is often in a weak position to compel them to act to suit
American purposes, yet the United States inevitably will be-
come associated with "their" actions, like it or not, if and when
t II
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the fact of support becomes known. Aid to the contras has
been ogge By t Heir origins in Somoza's hated National Guard
and by continuing charges of human rights violations. Similarly,
support for resistance forces in Afghanistan may be justified as
a way to put strategic pressure on Soviet occupation of that
country; but, given the character of the resistance forces, it is
not a way to bring "democracy" to Afghanistan.
The regional context, in particular the attitude of American
friends in the region, is another source of guidance. In the
instance of Afghanistan, American assistance to the resistance
is supported, though with varying degrees of publicity, by
nations ranging from Pakistan to Egypt to Saudi Arabia to
China. In Central America this indicator is more ambiguous,
for most of the nations of the region publicly express qualms
about aid to the contras while privately hoping the Sandinistas
can be Made to go away.
The second round of covert action in Angola raised these
questions of signals given versus those intended, questions for
which the 1975 episode provided guidance. In early 1986 the
CIA was authorized to provide $15 million in weaponry, for
Jonas Savimbi'suNITA. For the Reagan Administration, the
intended signal was anti-communism. For it, there was nothing
incompatible about supporting anti-communism in Angola and
anti-apartheid in South Africa. Alas, the reality of southern
Africa frustrates that conception in the heads of Washington
policymakers. Whatever his attractions, Savimbi has one flaw,
a fatal one: he is almost completely dependent on South Africa,
his army almost a unit of South Africa's. To support him is to
signal to Africans that the United States is throwing its lot in
with South Africa, in 1986 just as in 1975.
These rules of thumb amount to establishing a presumption
against covert action. The guidance is mostly negative, a series
of cautions. It is unwelcome to officials who are looking for
something to do rather than something to avoid-a trait that
runs deep in the American character and is reinforced by the
circumstances in which covert action becomes an option. Yet
given how both America and the world have changed over the
postwar period, the circumstances in which major covert action
makes sense as policy are sharply limited.
Guidelines akin to these were articulated a decade ago by
Cyrus Vance, later secretary of state. For Vance, the criterion
for covert action in the National Security Act of 1974-
"affecting the national security"-was too loose. Instead, he
wow
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recommended covert intervention only as an exceptional mea-
sure, when it was "absolutely essential to the national security"
and when no other means would do.20 Decisions would still be
matters of judgment under this more restrictive guide, but no
one has improved on the Vance standard. It bears remember-
ing now, after so much damage has resulted from applying less
demanding standards to covert action.
If the United States remains in the business of covert action,
as it should, albeit under restrictive guidelines, it will continue
to confront the paradox of secret operations in a democracy.
At first blush the Iran/contra affair seems to suggest that the
paradox cannot be managed, that the reforms that resulted
from congressional investigations of intelligence a decade ago
have counted for little. When the President finally in January
1986 signed the authorization required by law, a "finding,"
for the Iran arms sales operation, that finding was explicit: do
not tell Congress. The congressional overseers did not find out
about the Iran operation until autumn-hardly the law's re-
quirement of "fully and currently informed" by anyone's def-
inition. Later on the President himself apparently was not told,
when the Iran and contra operations crossed.
In another sense, however, the system worked. In deciding
to sell arms to Iran, the President pursued a line of policy
opposed by both his secretaries of state and defense, about
which he was afraid to inform the congressional intelligence
committees, and which was liable to be revealed by Iranian
factions as and when it suited them. It is hard to imagine any
system providing more warning signals. When most of the
government's senior foreign policy officials are opposed, it is
likely that the policy, and not they, are wrong. The President
thus proceeded at his own peril.
With regard to the diversion of money for the contras, the
lesson is not that the NSC staff should be eliminated or the
national security adviser made subject to Senate confirmation.
Presidents will always need a source of private advice and a
means of brokering the actions of the many foreign policy
agencies of government. Moreover, if presidents are deter-
mined to get something done, they will be able to find someone,
Y0 Testimony before the Senate Select Committee ... on Intelligence Activities, Dec. 5.
1975.
44.
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somewhere in the White House, to do it. So, too, if the United
States continues to have a clandestine service, presidents will
be tempted to use it as a middle, not a last, resort.
Rather, the lesson is a caution for presidents and those who
advise them: do not run covert operations from the White
House. Two decades ago it would have been unthinkable for
an administration to do so; then the reason was that presidents
wanted to stay at arms' length from such things, even if they
could not plausibly deny them in a pinch. Now as then, if covert
actions are to be undertaken, they should be done by the
agency of government constructed to do them-the Central
Intelligence Agency. It has both the expertise and the account-
ability. The Tower Commission's report is a sad tale of high-
level meetings with no preparation in advance and no notes
afterward, and of operational amateurism.
Moreover, as occurred recently as well as two decades ago,
if the president's closest advisers become the operators, the
president loses them as sources of detached judgment on the
operations. The president's own circle become advocates, as
Allen Dulles did in the Bay of Pigs, not protectors of the
president's stakes (even if he does not quite realize his need for
protection). So it was with President Reagan's national security
advisers, Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter; once com-
mitted, they had reason to overlook the warning signals thrown
up by the process. Excluding the designated congressional
overseers also excluded one more "political scrub," one more
source of advice about what the American people would find
acceptable. And the chances increased that someone like Lieu-
tenant Colonel Oliver North would misguidedly interpret the
President's interest after his own fashion.
William Miller, the staff director of the first Senate Intelli-
gence Committee a decade ago, reflected on the Iran/contra
affair: "If clear lines hadn't been drawn a decade ago, there
would have been no hue and cry now."41 Drawing those lines
again, sharply, as cautions for future administrations is about
as good as we can do. If the congressional investigations com-
plete the task begun by the Tower Commission, those future
administrations will be on notice.
2' Interview, Jan. 16, 1987.
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