Shadow Warfare: The History of America's Undeclared Wars

Copyright 2014 © Larry Hancock with Stuart Wexler

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Data Is Available

ISBN 978-1-61902-357-4

Cover design by Charles Brock, Faceout Studios Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

Counterpoint Press

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Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

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10987654321

If we, the CIA are going to try something like this again, we must be absolutely sure that the people and the Army [in the targeted country] want what we want. If not, you had better give the job to the Marines.

KERMIT ROOSEVELT JR.,

senior officer CIA Middle Eastern Division,

White House debriefing remarks on Iranian

coup/Operation Ajax, 1954

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

From Solution to Illusion

CHAPTER 2

The Personality Of Covert Action

CHAPTER 3

Evolution Of A Covert Warfare Infrastructure.

CHAPTER 4

Armies of Opportunity

CHAPTER 5

Fighting Communist China . . . Deniably

CHAPTER 6

Regime Change

CHAPTER 7

Shadow Warriors

CHAPTER 8

The Tibet Project

CHAPTER 9

Face-Off in Indochina

CHAPTER 10

Covert to Overt in Laos

CHAPTER 11

Against the Castro Regime

CHAPTER 12

Autonomous and Deniable

CHAPTER 13

Holding the Line in the Congo

CHAPTER 14

Unanticipated Consequences

CHAPTER 15

Congressional Intervention

CHAPTER 16

Maintaining Anticommunist Regimes

CHAPTER 17

Targeted Infrastructure Warfare in the Southern Cone

CHAPTER 18

Pushing Back

CHAPTER 19

The Outsiders

CHAPTER 20

Risky Business

CHAPTER 21

It Happens

CHAPTER 22

New Enemies

CHAPTER 23

New Weapons

CHAPTER 24

A Turn to "Gray Warfare

CHAPTER 25

Other Boots on the Ground

CHAPTER 26

Merging Covert and Conventional

CHAPTER 27

The Evolving War on Terror

Epilogue: Benghazi

Endnotes

Index

Introduction

Hot war and Cold War, covert operations and shadow warfare. Some of it public, some of it secret, and some of it very real but ostensibly deniable.

The hot side of the Cold War was always in the news. In the 1950s the Korean conflict saw a large American military contingent deployed as part of a UN force to the Korean peninsula, to block the subjugation of a democratic south by the communist north. American combat personnel made up the vast majority of the 341,000-man UN force, a force coming from some twenty-one nations. And by the time of the final truce, American forces had suffered more than 125,000 dead and wounded in combat. There were reporters on the ground, combat photography in the newsreels, and the veterans returned to write extensively about their experiences in Korea.

Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, the Vietnam conflict was covered as another instance of communist territorial aggression, combat pitting the communist north against the anticommunist south——with the American fear that countries across Southeast Asia could begin falling to communism like dominoes. That combat was the first to be covered on the nightly television news and Americans watched that very hot war for almost a decade. Vietnam escalated to full-scale warfare including Army, Air Force, and naval deployments. The conflict lasted far longer than Korea, involving over half a million American personnel. Combat in and around Vietnam left far more than twice the American dead and wounded than that in Korea. Because the American effort in Vietnam ended in defeat and public embarrassment, it took longer for even individual combat stories to make it into print. Still, at the time, the hot side of the Cold War seemed easy enough to understand, win or lose—even if the complex ideological and political agendas in play required some years for a more accurate and penetrating historical analysis.

The cold side of the Cold War seemed equally visible, focused on nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union; immediately following the Second Word War the U.S. Army Air Force prepared contingency plans for an atomic strike on the Soviets and ultimately, with both sides having nuclear arsenals, the strategy of mutual assured destruction (MAD) emerged.¹ It would be decades before Americans learned the actual number of atomic weapons involved in the nuclear confrontation. The knowledge of an inventory of over ten thousand atomic warheads in the U.S. stockpile alone would have been staggering. The public was also not generally aware that each year, beginning under President Eisenhower, a special subcommittee of the National Security Council briefed senior government officials on their evaluations of the likelihood of a Soviet preemptive atomic strike on America. On occasion those discussions also turned to the subject of the possible necessity of a preemptive American atomic attack on the Soviets.²

During most of the Cold War, secrets—military secrets—were not a bad thing; they were accepted as a fact of life. The country was only a few years out of a bloody world war and military security was engrained in the population. Still, there was lots of popular media coverage of the military. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) was omnipresent during the Cold War era. Books such as SAC: The Strategic Air Command, published as early as 1958, gave extensive details on the force including the numbers of both its personnel and its aircraft.³ The level of SAC operations was indeed tremendous; in a random sample of sixty days in 1955, SAC had some 1,353 planes engaged on war maneuvers. Every three minutes of every day, seven days a week, both day and night, a SAC aircraft was engaged in a midair refueling or aircraft accident. Accidents and crashes came with that level of preparedness and SAC’s airmen suffered ongoing deaths and injuries, especially among bomber and tanker crews.⁴

The North American Air Defense Command⁵ was another extremely visible—and comforting—element of the Cold War. Children became used to seeing NORAD track Santa Claus around the world on Christmas Eve; if NORAD could handle that, the American public assumed that the DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line, the Pine Tree Line, the Offshore Line, and eventually BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) and SPASUR (U.S. Naval Space Command Space Surveillance system) could track any incoming enemy aircraft or missiles. All of those organizations, systems, and related weapons were frequently and extensively described in the press, and in a host of constantly updated books.⁶ The Air Force was also willing and eager to actively promote its atomic defensive capabilities. In 1957 a U.S. News & World Report interview with the Air Defense Command’s chief, General Earle Partridge, discussed the use of atomic weapons in air defense—those atomic interceptor missiles would come to include warheads ranging from 1.5-kiloton missiles (launched from F-89 jet interceptors) to the 6.5-kiloton warhead (approximately half the size of the Hiroshima bomb) on high-altitude Bomarc antiaircraft missiles deployed around major American cities.

There certainly were Cold War secrets, matters not necessarily related to weapons development or defensive capabilities—and not shared with the press. SAC’s first known nuclear weapons accident was in February 1950, when a B-36 bomber simulating a nuclear attack under artic conditions experienced mechanical problems and severe icing and was forced to ditch off the coast of British Columbia; its Mark IV nuclear bomb was jettisoned from eight thousand feet and reportedly the high explosives triggers detonated with no nuclear explosion. That accident was only the first of that year, with crashes in the Manzano Mountains east of Albuquerque (no damage to the weapons on board; the crash was following takeoff), the forced jettisoning of a nuclear bomb over the St. Lawrence River in Canada, and the crash during takeoff of a B-29 with an atomic weapon on board at an air base outside San Francisco. That aircraft was carrying weapons to be deployed in possible support of the Korean action and the crash not only killed twelve of the twenty crew members but also the following explosion of the bombs’ conventional explosive triggers killed another seven people on the ground and produced significant radioactive contamination on the airfield.

In 1958 a fully armed B-47 caught fire on the runway at a SAC base in Morocco and produced a considerable amount of local contamination. In 1957, a nineteen-megaton hydrogen bomb was accidentally dropped in an uninhabited area near Albuquerque; the conventional explosives detonated, producing a twelve-foot-deep crater some twenty-five feet across; some radioactive contamination did result. Later years would see accidents in 1959, 1960, 1961, 1964, 1965, and 1968. As with the previous incidents, some contamination occurred, some bombs were recovered, some were not, and SAC servicemen lost their lives. Almost all these accidents received little or no press at the time and some were only revealed decades later.⁷

The American public also knew little of such military incidents over our and our allies’ territory, including the closely held secrets of Air Force reconnaissance, conducted not only in international airspace and waters, but directly over Russia itself. In July 1960, Time magazine headlined the return of two Air Force servicemen who had survived after their RB-47 aircraft had been downed by a Russian fighter in international waters, over the Barents Sea, off Murmansk. Only two of the six-man crew survived, spending seven months in Lubyanka prison before being returned to America. The incident was tragic and definitely served to harden public opinion towards the Soviets.

But there was a good deal more to the overall picture of American aircraft around and over Soviet territory than made it into the Time article. Behind that single story were literally hundreds of signals of intelligence and reconnaissance missions flown by Air Force and Navy aircraft, not only around the borders of the Soviet Union, but for years, directly over Soviet territory, including major cities and military facilities. As early as 1954 a single RB-47 Stratojet had cruised directly over Murmansk, the largest city and major port in northwestern Russia, at forty thousand feet, on a photo intelligence mission targeting several key Soviet airfields. MIG fighters made a series of attacks against the American aircraft, which responded with fire from its own tail cannon. After surviving attacks by several MIG flights, the Stratojet finally took a hit into its wing and fuselage, causing serious damage and loss of fuel. The RB-47 managed to make its way back across Norway to its home field in England, but sounds of the air battle were heard in northern Finland and the report was even repeated in a U.S. newspaper—the Air Force responded by saying that it had no planes in that area.⁸

In 1956 a SAC aerial intelligence effort, Project Homerun, dramatically escalated flights over the Soviet Union. Some twenty-one RB-47’s, supported by twenty-eight tankers, flew 156 missions over a route covering a 3,500-mile stretch of Soviet territory. In the final effort of that year, SAC flew a formation of six bombers over Soviet facilities in eastern Siberia with the Soviets totally unable to intercept them. The RB-47 formation took off from Thule, Greenland, and flew over the North Pole and across Soviet territory, landing at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska.⁹ SAC commander General Curtis LeMay had made a definite point to the Soviets: SAC was unstoppable.¹⁰ ¹¹

America had Cold War military secrets and it had other secrets as well; it took decades for activities and incidents such as those above to emerge. This book is about another class of secrets that also have been revealed—the covert and clandestine warfare operations that not only occurred during the Cold War but continued after its end, into the current War on Terror. That part of the Cold War, involving undeclared, covert, deniable warfare—organized by American intelligence officers but carried out by others—has been perhaps best and most bluntly characterized by a well-known military officer who personally participated in activities ranging from Vietnam and Laos to Iran and Nicaragua:

In a tactical sense, that’s what the Cold War was about; the two major powers fencing, and taking their lumps, through proxies, with the local people picking up the tab, at least in terms of bloodshed."

—GENERAL RICHARD SECORD¹²

Covert warfare, as explored in this work, is not simply secret military action, black operations, sabotage, dirty tricks, or intelligence collection. On occasion it was something of a far greater magnitude, involving the commitment of large-scale American resources to secret military action against another country. Yet even on those occasions, the declared intention was that it had to be deniable—the actual combat was not to be carried out by identifiable American service members. Instead, surrogate fighters would be involved and as far as possible any American funding or involvement would be concealed or at a minimum obscured. The actual combat might be bloody, but the goal was to obtain results without visible American military involvement in the actual fighting.

We will be detailing the operational history of American involvement in shadow warfare, examining how surrogate actions have been authorized and practiced, the types and techniques of deniability (and their effectiveness), and the consequences of successive presidents’ uses of the practice. We will also delve into a number of unanticipated consequences of these activities. Of course the practice of covert warfare was certainly not unique to the United States; and other powers including the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba were actively involved in such activities around the globe. In a number of instances, surrogates plus military advisors and even regular military units from America’s Cold War opponents were mutually engaged in active combat—with active denial from all parties involved.

United States involvement in covert, surrogate warfare differed in one critical aspect—American deniability was not simply an artifice for foreign relations; it was equally important for domestic consumption. Time after time, the administrations involved chose covert over declared warfare—at times due to a lack of support by Congress and at other times due to a perceived lack of support from the general public. In numerous instances this led to a level of operational dysfunction unique to the American efforts, a problem not encountered in either Moscow or Havana.

We will find that the practice of deniability did work, at least to some extent, in several operations. In many other instances the complex and expensive practice of deniability seemed questionable even at the time—even to the covert operations professionals charged with making it happen.

We’re going to mount a secret operation in the Caribbean with tanks?

—DAVID PHILLIPS, CIA Plans/Operations Directorate, commenting after his first briefing on what was to become the disastrous landing at the Bay of Pigs

Given that the Cuban exile force landed on the beach, coming off World War II–era landing craft, accompanied by a tank brigade carried in by tank landing craft and supported by parachute landings and both troop and transport aircraft, Phillips’s concern can certainly be appreciated. That operation was arguably the least deniable and most disastrous in some forty years of American surrogate warfare. On the other hand, as late as 2001, we still find American CIA officers going into Afghanistan covertly, to organize attacks against Al-Qaeda after America itself had been attacked—yet in 2001, as in all the cold, hot, covert, and clandestine military actions in between, the United States Congress still had not formally declared a state of war.

But there were many other operations, many other surrogates, and for some of them, at the time, the denials generally worked. At least they worked domestically and politically. On other occasions the denials worked far better than the military operations themselves. This book is an exploration of America’s conduct of surrogate warfare before, during, and after the Cold War. Readers will be introduced to the details of both the practice and tradecraft of shadow warfare—how to cover elephants with handkerchiefs, as the covert operations saying goes. Not only operations and practices are explored but also a number of individual participants, both CIA and military—some involved with covert operations over three decades and three continents. But beyond the Cold War, and covert, deniable warfare, we continue by tracing the evolution of the next generation of American military action—a new and very different type of warfare dramatically accelerated by the global war against terror. Today’s contemporary military and counterterrorism activities have become much less deniable, instead representing a combination of low-profile military assistance, clandestine operations, and extremely advanced intelligence and communications technologies. The story of the new generation of American military capabilities and contemporary activities conduct is one that actually started long before 2001 and the attacks of 9/11 on New York and Washington, D.C. We will explore that evolution in detail, through the most contemporary global events.

Shadow Warfare presents extensive detail on both the practices and tradecraft of covert operations, over some seventy years around the world. Covert operations in Latin America, Africa, Southwest Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the Pacific are examined and profiled. Beyond that, you will find an exploration of the personalities and activities of a number of the individuals involved in those operations. However, the book’s overall goal is even more ambitious, addressing both the character and concerns of the senior decision makers who made the determination to go to conventional military action, or to go covert and deniable. We will examine the legal and political context for their decisions as well as the concerns and risks that arose—including a host of unintended consequences and risks not only for the deciders but for the individuals receiving the marching orders. When national security appears to be on the line, it would seem that the most obvious solution would be to turn to conventional military action. The fundamental question would seem to be why American presidents consistently turned to covert solutions.

CHAPTER 1

From Solution to Illusion

The American government operates under a system of checks and balances. The executive, legislative, and judicial branches have their own defined roles and one of the significant responsibilities of Congress is to declare war if circumstances demand that the nation move to active military combat. As commander in chief, the American president directs the conduct of the wars declared by Congress. Given that general understanding, most Americans may not actually realize that the United States has not declared itself to be in a state of war since 1941. The American military fought and died during years of major conventional military action in Asia, ranging from Korea in the early 1950s to Vietnam throughout the 1960s and 1970s. We even call those the Korean and Vietnam wars. Later there were major American military engagements in the Arabian peninsula, the invasion of Iraq, and years of ongoing combat deployments in Afghanistan. None of that combat occurred with a formal congressional declaration of war. In between those undeclared, conventional wars there were literally dozens of shadow wars, with their own engagements, combat, and casualties—each directed under the authority of the president as commander in chief and none declared as wars by Congress.

In reality there are a number of alternatives to the formal declaration of war, all of which lead to military action. In profiling shadow warfare, our first challenge will be to examine how the system really works. We will consider to what extent the checks and balances concept applies to presidential decisions to initiate or approve covert operations and how America enters into military action with its own personnel or with surrogate forces—without congressional declarations of war. In doing so we will pay particular attention to why virtually every president has turned to covert, deniable warfare as a solution for international problems.

More than one president has ordered deniable military operations strictly on his own initiative. More than one president has suffered extreme political and public censure for covert actions. Still, such operations have continued for decades, varying only in frequency and duration. In overt conventional warfare Congress is asked to either declare war or at least pass resolutions endorsing some level of military action. No such legislation is required for presidential directives ordering covert actions; in fact, it was not until the 1970s that Congress passed legislation mandating presidential findings that at least would notify select members of Congress that such operations were going to be conducted—or were already in progress. Given the uncertainty of shadow warfare and its huge political risk, we will also address the question of why virtually every president makes the personal decision to choose it as a solution, oftentimes deciding to essentially go it alone.

We must look to the past and to the evolution of warfare itself to understand the development of undeclared warfare and covert operations—concepts generally foreign to the Founding Fathers and to combat in the early years of the American republic. Under the Constitution of 1787, Revolutionary War veteran Alexander Hamilton justified the creation of a unitary executive—the president—in large part on the belief that having a single commander was necessary to protect the United States in an efficient and decisive manner during war and times of emergency.¹³ Hamilton, one of General George Washington’s chief advisors during the Revolutionary War, argued that, in contrast to a triumvirate or other forms of leadership, a presidency with one energetic executive could make the decisive, efficient, and coherent choices required by the exigencies of war. Yet Hamilton’s cohort James Madison recognized the need to circumscribe such power through a system of democratic checks and balances, lest war become a justification for tyranny.¹⁴ Therefore under the Constitution, Congress declares war and the president, as commander in chief, prosecutes or directs the conflict. With the industrialization of warfare and the emergence of totally new forms of weapons, the president’s role became further emphasized. New weapons and technology not only changed the nature of combat itself, but posed unique challenges to the decision to engage in warfare.

During World War II, America was extremely fortunate to have the time needed to mobilize and deploy a modernized military force. But post–World War II missile and rocket technology severely limited the reaction time for America’s military commanders. The risk of first strike nuclear warfare only amplified the dilemma. This threat of instant warfare grew to become a justifiable reason for the creation of intelligence agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947 and the National Security Agency in 1952. Those organizations were created with the intent to identify threats before they materialized. Weapons innovations also catalyzed the centralization of America’s military forces and assets under the national command authority of the president and secretary of defense. Only they could give orders to the Joint Chiefs and the Pentagon to move the United States to immediate combat readiness in defense of the nation—and only they could order the launch of atomic strikes.¹⁵

More than anything, the exigencies of modern warfare placed an even greater premium on Hamilton’s original goals of efficiency and decisiveness in command. In a world with no more than fifteen minutes’ notification of an impending atomic attack, Hamilton’s issue of decisiveness had assumed an overwhelming importance. There is no doubt that compression of decision time in the twentieth century contributed to the shift of discretion to the president, in his role as commander in chief of the American military. Congress has, at times, attempted to reassert its control over military affairs yet the demand for immediate response to crises has left the initiative with the president. And, as will be discussed in a later chapter, and demonstrated in the shadow wars profiled throughout this book, while lawmakers tend to complain about a lack of respect by the president for congressional oversight, exemplified by vague or nonexistent notification and guidance about covert operations, the lack of presidential accountability actually has the potential to work in favor politically for members of Congress.

It is significant to note that the United States Congress has not officially declared war since 1941, but that hasn’t stopped America from fighting full-scale conventional actions and conducting long-term covert operations. By allowing the president to be left holding the bag for military commitments, elected representatives can avoid negative publicity surrounding failed operations. This works both ways, as lawmakers can be blamed for votes in favor of unpopular wars (as in the case of the Vietnam War) or for failing to vote in favor of successful wars (as was the case in the first Iraq War). Avoiding a vote altogether provides political advantages, especially in the case of covert warfare—which by its very nature becomes public only when it fails, sometimes dramatically.

As far back in American history as the early eighteenth-century predations of the Barbary pirates against American commercial ships, the congressional view has held that presidents are free to act in the defense of the nation. Facing ongoing attacks on America’s ships and kidnapping of American sailors, Congress considered the need to declare war against the pirates. Alexander Hamilton argued that while a formal congressional declaration of war was required to initiate a war, the circumstances in question involved ongoing attacks on American interests. Thus, Hamilton argued, America was already in a state of war initiated by the pirates, and a president did not need any formal inspiration from Congress to engage the enemy and defend the country’s interests. Congress seems to have accepted that proposition, as no resolution was put forth and President Thomas Jefferson did send the U.S. Navy after the Barbary pirates in North Africa.

The overt military actions since 1941, however, have most often carried the endorsement of some type of congressional joint resolution. Passed by majority votes from both chambers of Congress and signed by the president, the resolutions have the effect of law. But unlike a declaration of war, they are often broadly constructed, providing lawmakers with less detailed accountability for military actions and allowing the president much broader discretion. Still, even with joint resolutions, the court of public opinion indirectly imposes limits on overt wars, as it did with the protests against the Vietnam War. In a broad sense, the exposure to such popular opinion may have reinforced the temptation to engage in less public military operations, namely covert wars fought via surrogate combatants.

A considerable amount of current media dialogue on covert action and secret warfare appears to take the view that such actions are either fundamentally illegal or at least legally questionable. However, since 1947, all American presidents have taken such action based on provisions in the National Security Act of 1947, which describe and sanction the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. Based on that act and the U.S. legal code that embodies its provisions, secret warfare actions have been authorized by a succession of presidents over some seven decades. The language of this legislation has been interpreted to mean that the president does not need additional congressional action for such actions. Indeed in the early decades of the Cold War, the interpretation was that the president was not even under any specific legal requirement to inform Congress about such actions in order to ensure maximum operational security and deniability. In some instances presidents did communicate with key congressional leaders; in others they did not. While issues and questions have been raised as to what exactly constitutes covert operations, until this point in time the constitutionality of the National Security Act has not been challenged, much less ruled on by the Supreme Court—leaving it as standing legal justification for presidential covert action.

Even so, it is also clear that individual activities conducted during those operations are still open to arguments of legality. Early in the Cold War years, President Dwight Eisenhower was concerned about defining his parameters as commander in chief. In effect, a five-star general such as Eisenhower was still uncertain of what the president’s constitutional and legal options were in regard to both conventional and covert military action. This led Eisenhower to ask the Justice Department to explore the legality of his desire to dispatch the military into potential combat operations, without a formal congressional declaration of war, on his own authority as commander in chief. Justice responded with an opinion as to what a president, as commander in chief, can do outside the country without a declaration of war from Congress.

As it happened, a body of legal precedent had recently developed in regard to unilateral presidential behavior in foreign affairs. Several Supreme Court cases related to the issue of executive agreements—agreements between a president and a foreign country that do not require the constitutionally prescribed threshold of ratification by two-thirds of the Senate. Scholar Vikki Gordon noted that these cases collectively established the president’s authority to issue directives involving ‘external affairs.’

In keeping with this established line of thinking, Eisenhower’s Justice Department provided him with an opinion about the president’s unilateral authority on military commitments. It provided him with several scenarios under which a president could commit military resources to a mission with limited or no congressional approval:

1.In a state of emergency, the president can commit troops to conventional combat based on a resolution of approval by Congress.

2.If the U.S. military is not personally going into combat or into a live combat zone, the president can approve military assistance to friendly governments as a matter of routine international relations. So, while the president cannot just say, Go ahead, guys! Go get ’em! he can send troops in for military assistance. And in the case of Indochina, that’s what Eisenhower did.

3.Finally, and most relevant to a discussion of the legality of covert warfare, it provided a third allowance: self-defense. The president was seen as justified in commanding the deployed military personnel to defend themselves. Given the multiple ways a president can interpret self-defense, this becomes an important legal underpinning for the future of covert wars. That general advice provided to Eisenhower by the Justice Department set the context for everything a president can do today. It is, in its simplest form:

If a president wants to send the military into hostilities, Congress needs to pass a resolution that says the president can go ahead and enter combat. If a president wants to act preemptively, in self-defense of the nation or its military personnel, or in providing military assistance to its allies, he can do so without a Congressional resolution.

Following this guidance, Eisenhower and his successors have routinely dispatched American military personnel overseas under the umbrella of military assistance, in training, advisory, and aid program evaluation roles. In addition, President Eisenhower established a basic practice in deciding between overt and covert warfare. On several occasions, the Eisenhower Administration approached Congress in regard to potential military interventions that it viewed as necessary. In instances when Congress was receptive and passed resolutions to support military deployment (the Taiwan Strait in 1955; the Middle East in 1957), combat resources were openly dispatched. When Congress balked, however, Eisenhower limited the American military role to non-combat support and logistics assistance (Indochina in 1954). But when it came to sensitive international or domestic political situations, Eisenhower turned covert, enlisting the operational resources of the Central Intelligence Agency. As initially implemented during the Eisenhower Administration, the context and guidelines for the practice of deniable warfare also became relatively consistent, driven by the language in the National Security Act and the legal code supporting it.¹⁶ In essence, as interpreted by presidents from Harry Truman through Barack Obama, the National Security Act of 1947 said that in regard to covert operations:

1.The U.S. government was not to be officially on record as being in a state of war.

2.No public congressional authorization or declaration was required and all necessary activities were authorized under presidential direction, in the president’s role as commander in chief.

3.Covert action was allowed to be preemptive; the nation was not required to wait to be physically attacked. The president would make the decision to turn to covert, deniable warfare in the interests of national security.

Successive presidents applied the same basic practices, and continued to accept the fundamental precept that in self-defense, preemption is a legitimate reason for covert action. It should also be noted that the provisions of the National Security Act and the concept of preemptive action were so well established that multiple presidents, including Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, all initiated projects intended to assassinate targeted individuals including Patrice Lumumba, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein.

We will see that the president’s decision has occasionally been unilateral, but more frequently has been supported by the participation and policy of a highly select body convened to deal with national security issues. Late in 1947, President Truman formalized such a body, describing it as a channel for collective advice and communication. Truman initially designated the group the National Security Council, which was comprised of the vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, and other members as designated by the president.¹⁷ Yet even in Truman’s first characterization, he made clear that the council’s role was strictly advisory, asserting that the ultimate decision was the president’s alone. With complete freedom to accept, reject, and amend the Council’s advice . . . it is the prerogative of the President to determine such policy and enforce it.

In 1948, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was established to conduct both psychological and paramilitary activities. In 1951 the OPC was merged with the CIA, and in 1952 its functions were assumed by the CIA’s Directorate of Plans. In 1973, the Directorate of Plans was renamed the Directorate of Operations and as of this writing the organization is designated the National Clandestine Service. Truman’s primary objective in setting up the new Cold War–era national security organizations had not been specifically to pursue covert operations, including deniable warfare. But the advent of full-scale warfare in Korea in 1950 proved a huge stimulus for such activities.

The escalation in demand for covert military and psychological warfare operations during the Korean conflict was so significant that CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith asked the National Security Council for direction on the limits of the CIA’s scope of operations. The NSC provided no itemized response but based on a growing belief in the importance of psychological conditioning and its impact on warfare, in 1951 President Truman authorized the creation of an additional entity, chartered with focusing on that area—the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB). The PSB’s primary function was to assist in the planning and coordination of psychological warfare activities. The PSB initially supported the activities of the Office of Policy Coordination, and its senior members included the deputy secretary of defense, the undersecretary of state, and the director of central intelligence. With the merger of the OPC into the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951, the OPC began to coordinate its work with the CIA.

President Truman also issued a presidential directive (NSC 20/5), which reaffirmed the presidential mandate for covert action and assigned the CIA further authority over guerrilla warfare. According to the State Department’s historical studies conducted at the end of the Truman Administration, the CIA was at its peak of independence in terms of covert action: no group or officer outside of the DCI [director of central intelligence] and the President himself had the authority to order, approve, manage, or curtail operations.¹⁸ At that point in time Congress exercised no control or oversight over covert activities. Such operations were frequently funded from presidential discretionary and military accounts, a practice that would continue in future presidencies. As the Truman Administration ended, the CIA was escalating in independence and authority in the field of covert operations, which would peak during the Eisenhower Administration. The composition and function of the statutory advisory group for both conventional and covert operations (the National Security Council) evolved and morphed under successive presidents. The evolution of the NSC is extensively detailed by historian John Prados in his book Keepers of the Keys.¹⁹ Eisenhower continued the NSC much as Truman had created it, by clearly retaining the sole decision-making power Truman had described.

In 1958, after a relatively brief dialogue with select NSC principals and limited questioning of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Nathan Twining and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower ordered a major American military intervention in Lebanon dubbed Operation Blue Bat. It deployed seventy-seven American warships, four Marine brigades, and a reinforced Army airborne brigade.²⁰ Prados writes that almost all Eisenhower’s decision making had occurred without consulting the National Security Council and that the decision to deploy had taken less than an hour.²¹

During his administration, President Eisenhower did generally use the National Security Council in the capacity of advisors, a practice he inherited from Truman. Eisenhower seems to have relied primarily on NSC board meeting minutes as a topical record, while personally issuing verbal instructions to the CIA director or appropriate military commanders for national security actions. Based on those instructions, the CIA or appropriate military command created specific operational plans to implement the presidential direction. Succeeding Eisenhower, President John F. Kennedy met extensively with NSC members early in his administration but the number of such meetings declined significantly during the following two years. Later Kennedy, more personally comfortable with extended dialogue and give-and-take among a smaller group, assembled the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM). EXCOMM met extensively during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy formalized the group on October 22, 1962, with National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 196.

Presidents from Truman on have generally issued written national security–related guidelines for studies, policy, and actions. To some extent those guidelines define the overall administration—in some respects even the designations the presidents choose to use reflect something of their attitudes towards national security. In line with his formation of the NSC, Truman designated them as National Security Council intelligence directives, Kennedy as national security action memorandums, Richard Nixon as national security decision memorandums, and Jimmy Carter as simply presidential directives. Ronald Reagan issued both national security study and national security decision directives. President Obama has issued Presidential Study and Presidential Policy directives.

Scholar Philip Cooper quoted President Lyndon Johnson’s description of his National Security Action Memorandum as being a formal notification to the head of a department or other government agency informing him of a presidential decision in national security affairs, generally requiring follow-up action by the department or agency addressed. Comparing them to another widely used tool of unilateral presidential behavior—the executive order—Cooper noted that both presidential security directives and executive orders allow a president to bypass Congress and control the specific behavior of many bureaucratic agencies within the purview of the executive branch, most relevantly the CIA and the military. But while they are similar to executive orders, national security directives are not defined as such and therefore are not covered by the Federal Register Act. This means not only that they (like executive orders) bypass Congress, but that the vast majority are classified from public and congressional review. As time went on, certain congressional figures gained access to these directives, or to presidential findings that describe the contours of covert operations. But to presidents who wanted to engage in covert activity with little or no scrutiny from Congress or from the public, national security directives became, according to Cooper, increasingly attractive tools for the commander in chief.

Such directives address a broad range of concerns—from national security organizational and operational issues to more specific concerns—and range from classified executive orders to fully classified directives. President Reagan’s NSDD-84 dealt with Safeguarding National Security Information while NSDD-17 was more operationally oriented, dealing with Cuba and Latin America. Directives also order very specific covert warfare actions—authorizing full-scale covert political action, paramilitary operations, or surrogate warfare operations.

Experts on presidential power, such as William Howell, place national security directives within the broader range of presidential prerogatives that allow the chief executive to exert unilateral power outside the scope of the normal system of checks and balances, such as executive orders and executive agreements. It is worth noting for context as we move forward that Howell is among an increasingly vocal group of scholars who argue that such prerogatives are now ubiquitous for American presidents both in domestic and foreign affairs. Most political scientists recognize that as the central government has become more complex since Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, Congress has deferred to the executive branch not only on matters of national security, but in domestic affairs. For the past seven decades, there has been a noticeable increase in the willingness of presidents to use executive orders, executive agreements, and other prerogatives to direct policy in what some historians have referred to as the imperial presidency. Presidential directives may simply be one manifestation of this growing authority. They may be kept secret for unspecified periods, but to the extent that they do become public, they represent a critical window into covert operations. Formal directives have been issued by presidents for many of the major covert operations that we will explore in detail in the following chapters. Sometimes they are very specific, such as the directive ordering the creation of a specific program of covert action against Cuba during the Kennedy Administration; in other instances they can be as broad as simply referencing the initiation of a new operation by Henry Kissinger during the Nixon Administration, to block communist revolutionary action in Africa.

There have been several instances in which the presidential directives have been even more open-ended, or simply vague—intentionally or not. On at least one occasion, an operation to assassinate a foreign leader (Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the Republic of Congo) was initiated by CIA Director Allen Dulles based on Eisenhower’s general remark that Lumumba had to be eliminated.²² When President Eisenhower issued a directive to oust the elected but leftist-leaning Árbenz regime in Guatemala, it was with a broad directional statement only. There were no restrictions, funding was open-ended, and the goal was definitive.

One example from the 1970s involves America’s covert effort in Angola, which was aimed at preventing the Angola civil war from shifting the Southwest African country in a procommunist direction. According to CIA officer John Stockwell, assigned as chief of the Angola Task Force in 1975, the Angola proxy warfare project was initiated with a very general presidential finding issued by President Gerald Ford. Stockwell describes the congressional notification as stating that the effort was important to the national security of the United States, and noted that it did not even specify the country in question, merely the continent of Africa.²³

Stockwell’s CIA superior informed him that the president had submitted the finding to the Senate and that the appropriate committees had been briefed by CIA Director Colby. Stockwell was also told that the Covert Operations Review Committee had allocated $14 million to the effort, with the direction of the Angola Task Force being to prevent an easy victory by Soviet-backed forces in Angola. Reportedly Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wanted the Soviet surrogates in Angola stopped but felt that he would not be able to get the funding for a full-scale effort passed by Congress. The compromise was a much less expensive operation, aimed at simply creating a program of paramilitary harassment.²⁴

In our examination of covert warfare against Nicaragua, which involved the scandal generally known as the Iran–Contra Affair, we will see that the initial presidential finding submitted to Congress discussed only interdiction of Nicaraguan arms shipments to El Salvador. The finding defined a limited operation quite different from the military activities that actually followed. A study of Nicaraguan operations also reveals that deniability in covert operations is not an issue strictly of operational security but more often a matter of dealing with incongruence between official government public position and actual government covert practice. If that sounds a bit conflicted, it is. By the end of the surrogate warfare in Nicaragua, three senior CIA officers would be indicted for giving false testimony to Congress. Charges were also brought against a number of other administration officials and staff. Yet even in such matters, the president has one final option—an option beyond congressional checks and balances—the presidential pardon. On Christmas Eve 1992, President George H.W. Bush issued a presidential pardon for virtually all those who had faced the legal consequences of the Reagan-era Iran–Contra Affair.

As a result of the Iran–Contra scandal, the political conflict over covert warfare took on a legal dimension with limitations imposed by Congress. It also introduced the issue of supporting a covert operation through secret agreements with a publicly identified enemy. In that case the enemy was Iran, which at the time of the Nicaraguan operations openly opposed the United States and held American hostages. The public outrage over the Reagan Administration’s dealings with Iran illustrates the extent to which exposure and the weight of public opinion can bring serious political consequences to a presidential decision to choose covert solutions to international problems.

During the Cold War, concerns over public opinion extended not only to domestic but to foreign audiences. America was continuously fighting an image battle, hoping to convince neutral nations to embrace liberal democracy instead of Soviet-style communism. Yet a foundation of Soviet counterpropaganda was to charge that America was expanding its influence overseas to exploit other nations economically. Any overt U.S. military activity played directly into these charges. That was especially true in Latin America, the scene of prior, highly visible American military interventions over almost a century. Yet any shift toward a socialist or communist regime quickly brought congressional calls for presidents to act. Presidents recognized that they had to thread the needle between stopping the spread of Soviet influence while not appearing to be the very Yankee imperialists the Soviets were warning the world about. With communism infiltrating Latin America, and anti-American propaganda being spread by the Soviets, it’s no wonder Latin America would become the scene of American covert operations for close to four decades.

Shortly after his popular election in 1950, U.S. policy makers began to view Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and his government with considerable concern. By 1952 they were seriously worried that growing communist influence over Árbenz might offer a foothold for Soviet influence within Latin America. Perhaps equally important, Árbenz’s agrarian reform polices had begun to damage U.S. business interests in the country, especially those of the United Fruit Company—a business with considerable influence within the U.S. government, all the way up the chain to President Eisenhower. Of course there was really nothing all that new in the consideration of commercial concerns. America began as a commercial republic and one of its earliest foreign military actions (against the Barbary pirates on the coast of North Africa) had been motivated in large part by their impact on America’s rapidly growing international trade.

In general, CIA and intelligence community analysis supported the view that the Árbenz regime was falling more under communist influence, a view strongly supported by then–CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith. Internal CIA dialogue began to call for a sanctioned but covert support program to assist the anticommunist elements in the country (the Catholic Church hierarchy, landowners, and business interests, as well as certain university groups and the army) in a move against the Árbenz government. President Truman took the concern seriously and authorized the exploration of options to oust the Árbenz regime. Later he gave approval to launch the first CIA effort against the Guatemalan regime.

President Eisenhower, having just ended one conventional war in Korea, and having promised to reduce the U.S. budget, inherited the initial regime change effort—which he preferred to launching a conventional military effort against Árbenz. In addition, the U.S. maintained a position of noninterference in others nations’ political affairs and certainly had no wish to draw new public criticism over American imperialism in Latin America.

Still, Eisenhower was politically sensitive to the ongoing and strident calls for action coming from Congress. In public sessions, the U.S. Congress discussed a resolution proposed by Senator Lyndon Johnson that was intended to serve as an unmistakable warning that we are determined to keep Communism out of the Western Hemisphere. congressional rhetoric was hotly inflammatory, with Representative Jack Brooks of Texas endorsing the resolution as so basically American and so basically anti-Communist that support for it was urgent. The whole situation was a challenge to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which held that any European interference with the nations of North or South America would be viewed as an act of aggression and would demand intervention by the United States. Soviet support of communist expansion within Latin America was to be treated as such interference and there could be no question of an aggressive response.²⁵

In a study titled Congress, the CIA, and Guatemala, 1954—Sterilizing a ‘Red Infection,’ David Barrett presents the proposition that Congress and the American press were both aware and quite supportive of American intervention in Guatemala. Even operating deniably, the CIA certainly was acting not only under a presidential directive but in accordance with congressional encouragement and extensive popular support. And none of the congressional resolutions had addressed specific tactics; they adamantly demanded that the administration do whatever it took to stop the commies.

In that ongoing, passionate political environment, Eisenhower turned to the CIA and launched an even more significant covert operation beginning in 1954, using surrogate troops, mercenary air support, intense psychological warfare, and threat of political assassinations. Ultimately the project was even supported with the deployment of an American naval force off Guatemala and the implementation of a naval blockade. This second phase of the secret war against Guatemala was designated PBSUCCESS and it did indeed succeed. PBSUCCESS was lauded by Eisenhower and did a great deal to validate the concept of deniable Cold War surrogate warfare, up to and including regime change in foreign governments.

Early in this chapter we discussed issues of legality and authorization in regard to covert action. But beyond those issues, a host of other concerns arise, including questions of whether or not the risks of collateral damage involved in such shadow warfare are truly justified, whether the concept of deniability actually works, and what other unanticipated consequences may come from such practices. Many countries that were the subjects of American covert intervention during the Cold War suffered horrendous internal political conflict and ongoing civil war in subsequent years, even decades after. In some cases additional bloodshed was brought about by regimes that were put in place or supported by American action, in other instances the same sort of thing happened in countries in which American intervention had failed.

From one perspective, the interventions can to be judged simply in terms of whether or not they accomplished the goals of the presidents who directed them. Often the action is also an attempt to deal with political pressure for assertive national security action, which can be an overriding concern for virtually any president and any administration—whether the pressure is from the president’s ideological base or a challenge from the opposing party. The president can decide to act overtly or covertly, but some action must be taken—inaction is simply not acceptable. The decision between overt and covert involves many elements, but presidential personality and character are major factors. A related and pragmatic concern also seems to be whether presidents intend to run for reelection and how soon the next campaign commences. We will find that such political concerns have frequently led presidents (and their key advisors) to decisions that counter the best advice from their military staff, the State Department, or even the intelligence community.

As discussed above, the classic and normative system of checks and balances often fails to apply to covert action. Once the slide down the slippery slope of shadow warfare begins, consideration of imminent threats, national security, public opinion, political interests, and, on occasion, even international business interests all play a part in ongoing decisions. But in addition to all of those, presidential personality and character are evergreen.

CHAPTER 2

The Personality of Covert Action

Without a doubt, the presidency attracts certain types of individuals, and political scientists have long recognized that personality types orient people to political opportunities both foreign and domestic. For the purposes of the book, we reference the personality typology put forth by political scientist James David Barber, who, in his book The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House, identified four presidential personality types that characterize the presidents whose decisions we explore in this book. Barber found that presidents’ levels of assertiveness and internal disposition predictably determine their real-world behavior.

1.Active-positive: Adaptive while in office, flexible in their approaches, active-positive personalities create opportunities for presidential action. Examples include Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. By and large these personalities tend to engage in covert action as a means of asserting their energy in foreign affairs. Sometimes this takes the form of risk-taking that can border on recklessness. Yet, generally speaking, active-positive presidents also tend to learn from their mistakes.

2.Active-negative: With a tendency toward compulsion in their activity, active-negative personalities are rigid, highly driven, and obsessed with failure or success. Examples include Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The personalities show a tendency to double down on covert actions. That can be advantageous when it is necessary to overcome obstacles. Unfortunately, it is often the nature of covert warfare that dynamic circumstances, outside the control of even the president of the United States, create unanticipated yet major roadblocks to a successful mission. In those instances, active-negative presidents may not simply continue a failed mission; they may well exacerbate what some consider to be the worst, if sometimes unintended, features of covert war—human rights abuses and illegal side ventures.

3.Passive-positive: These personalities tend to be compliant in their presidential behavior; they may be manipulated by those they trust, and are often reactive rather than proactive. Ronald Reagan is the primary modern example. While Reagan was passionate about the presidency, even in the face of an attempt on his life he delegated a considerable amount of both policy making and management to subordinates, especially in regard to his administration’s covert warfare operations.

4.Passive-negative: Motivated by a strong sense of duty, passive-negative personalities prefer to set procedures and routines to the usual business of politics, which they often disdain. The only clear-cut passive-negative president is President Dwight Eisenhower, who epitomized someone who serves out of a sense of duty, but who also disdained the accepted give-and-take of politics. Intuition might suggest that any passive president would avoid covert action, for the opposite reasons that an active president pursues it. However, covert action requires less political and public action on the part of a president; covert operations do not have to be sold to the public and in the first three decades of the Cold War, they didn’t even need to be sold to Congress.

While the sample size is small and must take into account political pressures and institutional arrangements, through understanding of these personality types we can see a pattern emerge. All of these presidential personality types are no more or less likely to pursue covert warfare to begin with. However, some (for example, passive-negatives) are much more inclined to continue operations even when the facts on the ground suggest failure.²⁶ The president is generally not alone in reaching the decision of commencing covert warfare. There are groups as well as official and unofficial advisors involved in that process. But presidential personality affects to what extent the advice has impact, and in some instances to what extent the president turns over the operation to those same advisors.

All presidents consistently face the challenge of looking strong on national defense and national security. For example, Lyndon Johnson assumed an aggressive position on national security (a position consistent with his voting record in the Senate), while promoting his liberal positions on civil rights. He could not be seen as weak on national security issues if he was to aggressively pursue his liberal policy agendas, including the Voting Rights Act and social programs associated with his election campaign for a war on poverty. The Johnson Administration’s Great Society initiative established programs ranging from Medicare and Head Start to the Economic Opportunity and Housing and Urban Development acts. Johnson was well aware that his programs could play to the charges of bleeding heart liberalism, which were just starting to be promoted by his conservative opposition. To pass his social legislation programs, Johnson had to play a supreme balancing act, one that led him to react aggressively to events such as the reported exchanges of fire between American destroyers and North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin during 1964, and possible communist involvement in the Dominican Republic in 1965. Johnson’s personality actually amplified the political pressure to take aggressive foreign policy action. Presidential historians describe Johnson as a man consumed with the notion of outdoing his opponents. Journalist Nicholas Lemann observed that Johnson wanted to set world records in politics, as a star athlete would in sports. As with many great athletes, this was as much, if not more, about never wanting to lose as it was about wanting to win. Johnson famously bullied and cajoled lawmakers to support his policies on an ongoing basis, to the point that it was labeled the Johnson treatment.²⁷ Johnson’s tenacity and political skills made it possible for him to pass his Great Society legislation, which fueled an immense desire to demonstrate that he could also win overseas.

On the international scene, Johnson was politically exposed to Republican political pressure on the issue of the Vietnam conflict. He needed to present a strong image for the upcoming presidential election of 1964. When provided with the initial information on the second apparent attack on an American destroyer by the North Vietnamese in the Tonkin Gulf, it appears that Johnson chose military escalation with no discussion. According to Assistant Secretary of State William P. Bundy, even when conflicting information began to appear from pilots and others in command on the scene, Johnson was in no mood for discussion.²⁸ And with his political instincts running true, Johnson’s action neutralized Vietnam as an issue and significantly bumped his Harris Poll numbers against Barry Goldwater.

Johnson used the congressional Gulf of Tonkin Resolution²⁹, which allowed American military forces in Southeast Asia to defend themselves against aggression, as authority for all American military combat in Vietnam.³⁰ In 1965, Johnson again used preliminary remarks made by the newly appointed and inexperienced CIA Director, Admiral William Raborn (who had been on the job for approximately fourteen hours), which seemed to support possible communist involvement in the Dominican coup, to begin a media campaign opposing a purported Cuban/communist revolution in the Dominican Republic.³¹ Almost immediately he began referring to the Johnson Doctrine, which would not allow such takeovers under his watch. Unfortunately for the president, within days the media questioned Johnson about the issue and about the CIA’s new (more detailed) information contradicting that the revolt was Cuban/communist inspired or led. The initial CIA lists of purported communists involved in the coup proved to be ill-founded at best. A military history study of the entire Dominican Republic intervention (designated Operation Power Pack) describes the CIA’s initial roster of communist involvement as containing so many errors (duplicate names, dead persons, people not in the country or in jail) that it helped fuel a groundswell of domestic and international protest against U.S. intervention.³²

In spite of a revised CIA position, Johnson continued to argue his stance that there was a communist threat in briefings to Congress, and sent the full 82nd Airborne Division to the Dominican Republic.³³ Senior CIA officer David Phillips, who was immediately assigned to the crisis and was later sent to the island as the new CIA chief of station, wrote that the communists had absolutely nothing to do with the original revolt, but did attempt to involve themselves as the conflict continued. They were actually assisted in that effort by a general spike in anti-American sentiment and antagonism towards the United