Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [134]
Britain revealed in 1998 that its intelligence service considered assassinating Hitler during the war, even as late as 1945. The British abandoned the plan not because of moral qualms or concerns about success but because they decided that Hitler was so erratic as a military commander that he was an asset for the Allies.
THE ASSASSINATION BAN: A MODERN INTERPRETATION
In August 1998 the United States launched a cruise missile attack on targets in Afghanistan associated with al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The United States believed that bin Laden was behind the terrorist attacks earlier that month on two U.S. embassies in East Africa.
The Clinton administration later stated that one goal of the raid was to kill bin Laden and his lieutenants. Administration officials also argued that their targeting of bin Laden did not violate the long-standing ban on assassinations. Their view was based on an opinion written by National Security Council lawyers that the United States could legally target terrorist infrastructures and that bin Laden’s main infrastructure was human.
After the September 2001 attacks, bin Laden and other terrorists were seen as legitimate combatant targets, as the United States was at war against them.
ASSESSING COVERT ACTION
In addition to raising ethical and moral issues, the utility of covert action is difficult to assess. When examining a covert action, what constitutes success? Is it just achieving the aims of the operation? Should human costs, if any, be factored into the equation? Is the covert action still a success if its origin has been exposed?
Some people question the degree to which covert actions produce useful outcomes. For example, critics point to the 1953 coup against Iranian premier Mohammad Mossadegh and argue that it helped lead to the Khomeini regime in 1979. Proponents argue that an operation that put in place a regime friendly to the United States for twenty-six years, in a region as volatile as the Middle East, was successful. If no covert action is likely to create permanent positive change given the volatility of politics in all nations, is there some period of time that should be used to determine the relative success of a covert action?
As with all other policies, the record of covert action is mixed, and no hard-and-fast rules have been devised for assessing them. Assistance to anticommunist parties in Western Europe in the 1940s was successful; the Bay of Pigs was a fiasco. The view here is that the Mossadegh coup was a success, for the reasons noted earlier. But covert action is also subject to the law of unintended consequences. Abetting the fall of Allende helped lead to the regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Average Chileans were probably better off than they would have been under an evolving Marxist regime, but many people suffered repression and terror. Aid to the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan was highly successful and played an important role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the same time, Afghanistan remained mired in a civil war ten years after the last Soviet troops withdrew and was eventually ruled by the Taliban, who hosted the al Qaeda terrorists.
Covert action tends to be successful the more closely it is tied to specific policy goals and the more carefully defined the operation is.
KEY TERMS
blowback
covert action
paramilitary operations
plausible deniability
plumbing
presidential finding
propaganda
third option
FURTHER READINGS
The works listed do not go into the details of specific operations. Instead, they focus on the major policy issues discussed in this chapter.
Barry, James A. “Covert Action Can Be just.” Orbis 37 (summer 1993): 375-390.
Berkowitz, Bruce 1)., and Allan E. Goodman. “The Logic of