Covert Action: Central Intelligence Agency and the Limits of American Intervention in the Post-War World

"It’s on the list because it’s probably the first serious book on covert action. It’s from 1987 but it’s a classic and holds up really well. It offers a really useful insight that was relevant in the 1980s but is also very relevant to understanding the unacknowledged interventionism that we see all around us today. Treverton worked on the Church Committee in the 1970s, which was the big congressional enquiry into CIA excesses. A lot of the book draws upon his work looking at American covert action in Chile during the 1970s. Some of the operations included providing funds for various electoral candidates, fiddling the elections, and providing anti-Allende propaganda campaigns. I think Treverton’s take is really interesting and really important. He’s quite critical. He says that covert action is a tool and it must be used very cautiously if you’re going to use it at all. That is an important lesson which many policymakers today could heed. He comes up with what he calls the ‘ New York Times test’. He says that this is absolutely paramount when deciding whether to engage in covert action and it’s simply: if the operation leaks and ends up on the front of the page of the New York Times tomorrow morning, can we stand in front of the American people and justify it? Can we say, ‘this is why we did it’ and hold our heads up high? If you can’t, then you shouldn’t do it. So it’s a very useful book outlining covert action properly for the first time and creating some interesting ideas, frameworks, and lessons which are still of interest. It provides great insight into a really important part of state behaviour which currently goes misunderstood, despite being very widespread. He talks about the tension between secrecy and the open society that is America, the tension between secrecy and democracy. So, I guess, he’d prefer it be avoided, but he says that if you are going to use it, then you have to be extremely cautious and not be as gung-ho as the CIA had a reputation for being in the 1950s and 1960s. Yes, that dominated headlines as he was writing the book. That was, again, an example of excess of covert action going wrong and, indeed, failing Treverton’s New York Times test. When it was leaked in the newspapers, they couldn’t justify it and they couldn’t defend it, which obviously led to the scandal. I think that’s an important idea which definitely remains relevant today. A lot of people struggle with it because of the fact that it is secret and has an inherent tension with open democracy. They say that it is inherently wrong and that democracies like Britain and America just shouldn’t do it, full stop. But, at the same time, if the covert action is in support of an openly declared foreign policy and has appropriate oversight mechanisms, then I think it can be reconciled with democracy. It’s generally other tools. America has been conducting targeted killing using drones, particularly against terrorists, but assassination of foreign leaders is not regularly attempted. And even less so in Britain, where Britain has no track record of this to speak of since the 1950s. So, who knows? Maybe there are discussions about Kim Jong Un, but there are other tools available which might be more appropriate. Interestingly, just before the Iraq war, Tony Blair suggested to George Bush that they might want to try and overthrow—not kill—Saddam Hussein covertly, using MI6 and the CIA, instead of the intervention that we ultimately saw and which was so disastrous. There was an argument that trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein quietly, quickly, and cheaply would be better and more justified in the long run than launching an endless campaign of open warfare. But it wasn’t done. The CIA said no, and one of the reasons for that was because the CIA had tried, in the past, to use covert action to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Particularly in the aftermath of Gulf War I, they lobbied rebel groups and dissidents to engage in an uprising against Saddam Hussein. When Saddam launched a crackdown on the said uprising, the Americans looked the other way and offered no support. This led to a crisis of trust between rebels in Iraq and the CIA. The CIA recognised this and said, ‘Well, if we’re going to try to sponsor another revolution in Iraq instead of doing a military intervention, the rebels aren’t going to want to cooperate with us because we hung them out to dry last time.’ That was obviously very problematic."