On its face, covert action—which I define for my students as “secret attempts by one country to alter conditions and events in another country”—is immoral and violates international law. For citizens of nations that are targets of covert action, such operations reek of arrogance. Just ask those Americans who accept the evidence that Russia attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. (Whether those attempts actually had significant effects is debatable.)
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 15-20
Loch Johnson, The Third Option: Covert Action and American Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-0-19-760441-0 (hardcover, $37.99). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197604410.001.0001
2 January 2024 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt15-20 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Daniel R. Hart
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan
Contents
Introduction by David M. Barrett, Villanova University. 2
Review by Katy Doll, Nova Southeastern University. 8
Review by Barbara Elias, Bowdoin College. 11
Review by David Hadley, National Defense University. 14
Review by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, University of Edinburgh, emeritus. 18
Review by Jennifer Kibbe, Franklin and Marshall College. 22
Review by Stephen Kinzer, Brown University. 27
Response by Loch K. Johnson, University of Georgia, emeritus. 31
Introduction by David M. Barrett, Villanova University
On its face, covert action—which I define for my students as “secret attempts by one country to alter conditions and events in another country”—is immoral and violates international law. For citizens of nations that are targets of covert action, such operations reek of arrogance. Just ask those Americans who accept the evidence that Russia attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. (Whether those attempts actually had significant effects is debatable.)
Nonetheless, nations do it. More precisely, in relation to this roundtable, the United States has engaged in covert action fairly routinely for a very long time. Early in the Cold War, in the summer of 1948, President Harry S Truman signed a secret order which authorized the year-old Central Intelligence Agency (CIA or Agency) to carry out covert operations “against hostile foreign states or groups, or in support of friendly foreign states or groups, but which are so planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that, if uncovered, the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.”[1]
The order’s justification for enabling “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, 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 in threatened countries of the free world” was the “vicious covert activities of the USSR, its satellite countries and Communist groups to discredit and defeat the aims and activities of the United States and other Western powers.”[2]
During the presidency that followed, an advisory board in 1954 counseled President Dwight D. Eisenhower that
We are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We…must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated means than those used against us.[3]
Notably, the so-called Doolittle Report (named for the group chaired by retired General Jimmy Doolittle), which argued on 30 September 1954 that existing covert action capabilities were insufficient, was read by Eisenhower at a time when the CIA had already carried out what were widely regarded as major successes in covert action: replacing leftist, democratically elected governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954. Eisenhower was a willing recipient of Doolittle’s advice, and his Agency went on to attempt other operations around the world.
Every subsequent president—even the sometime skeptic, President Jimmy Carter (1977–1981), who made covert action something of an issue during his 1976 presidential campaign— directed the Central Intelligence Agency to carry out such operations. Though Truman’s executive order and the equally secret Doolittle Report offered brief answers noted above, the question of “Why?” remains important and not fully answered.
Though few have noticed it, the Doolittle Report also advised that “it may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand, and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.” Neither Eisenhower nor his successors through the mid-1970s took this to heart. Nor did the US Congress.
Professor Loch Johnson has pondered these matters and researched and written prolifically about them since the time of his service as a senior aide to Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), who chaired the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. The Church Committee, as it has been known, along with a less productive committee of the House of Representatives, investigated and revealed significant improprieties and illegalities on the part of US intelligence agencies over the prior three decades. One of the committee’s book-length reports was entirely devoted to assassinations plans and operations. Against the wishes of President Gerald Ford (1974–1977) and CIA leaders, the Senate made that report public.[4]
After a period of time in Washington, Johnson took up teaching and the scholarly life at the University of Georgia. He authored A Season of Inquiry, one of the best-selling books ever published by University Press of Kentucky.[5] The highly readable memoir/history was one of the United States’ early scholarly treatments of congressional oversight of intelligence.
In the ensuing decades, Johnson has treated the covert action topic in books and articles which mostly focused on other aspects of intelligence—human espionage, the diverse methods of collecting intelligence with technology, counterintelligence, and the imperfect ways in which presidents and Congress have monitored and directed intelligence agencies’ functioning. His latest volume, however, is entirely devoted to covert action, chiefly from the CIA’s creation in 1947 through the present.
When, in the early 1990s, I first thought to become a scholar of the history of US intelligence and its oversight by Congress, I decided to teach a seminar on the subject, so as to educate not only senior undergraduates, but also myself, on the subject. Whatever else we read that semester, I know that we read Johnson’s Season of Inquiry and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’ The CIA and American Democracy.[6] They were good primers for someone, like me, who had been focused mainly on presidents and wars.
In his review here, Jeffreys-Jones, a longtime leading scholar of US intelligence, describes The Third Option as a “beguiling combination of constructive thinking and clear prose.” He notes that “despite his deeply considered reservations about irresponsible covert actions,” Johnson “has no time for the abolitionists. The abolitionist Senator Daniel P. Moynihan does not feature in his book.” Johnson is aptly considered a “minimalist,” who believes covert operations carried out by the CIA have, across the long run, very often done more harm than good (especially to the target nations). As is clear from his review, and despite his high regard for the book, Jeffreys-Jones is more minimalist than Johnson.
Jennifer Kibbe has specialized in her scholarship on presidents, Congress, and covert action. Notably, she did pioneering work on the conduct of the “shadow wars” of the administration of President Barack Obama.[7] Kibbe praises Johnson’s “meticulous research, thorough investigation of primary documents, fluid writing, and a witty flair for description.” For her, Johnson’s most valuable chapter, “Decision Paths and Accountability,” takes “the reader through what actually happens in the executive branch and then the legislative branch when a covert operation is being considered.” I take her most important criticism of the book to be that Johnson “often minimizes the numerous operations where the US has not lived up to his optimistic vision of it. Critics of US foreign policy can easily ask how many exceptions it will take to invalidate that vision.”
Barbara Elias brings relevant background to her critique of Johnson’s book. Elias previously worked at non-governmental National Security Archive, heading its documentation program on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Taliban, and has written about junior allies that the US government has found to be difficult in countries such as Vietnam and Afghanistan.[8] Elias notes that Johnson’s book “features his aim towards balance in assessing CIA operations, setting a tone that is neither overly sympathetic nor scathing.” She appreciates his “easy-to-read and even playful style,” while taking exception to some “overly simplified, or even orientalist metaphors that obscure more than they clarify.” Overall, though, she finds The Third Option to a “fascinating investigation of an intriguing, important, and hard-to-study topic.”
David Hadley, who has published work on the unique and shadowy relationship between the press and the CIA during the Cold War,[9] brings a unique perspective to his review of The Third Option. He finds its contributions particularly worthwhile in light of the world’s current “period of renewed geopolitical competition and clashes in the so-called ‘Gray Zone’ that lies somewhere between peace and war.” Though he seemingly agrees with Johnson’s aspirations for US covert action—that it be well thought-out, morally defensible, limited in its frequency, and fiercely monitored by elected leaders— he argues that they will be “difficult if not impossible to achieve.”
Stephen Kinzer, a longtime journalist and commentator, came to the attention of many scholars upon the publication of his and Stephen Schlesinger’s book, Bitter Fruit, about the infamous CIA covert action against the government of Guatemala in 1954.[10] Many other books have followed, including Poisoner in Chief about the Agency’s Sidney Gottlieb and attempts at “mind control” in the 1950s.[11] In his review here, he notes that “stories of American coups and other covert operations have long been the stuff of popular histories. Now they are being assessed with academic rigor.” About Johnson’s plea that Americans “encourage their elected officials to support a more judicious use of covert action,” Kinzer judges, “If that is the best hope, the US is probably doomed.”
Kinzer heartily agrees with Johnson that congressional oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency is crucial. Although Johnson has a nuanced understanding of the rather informal and limited oversight performed by Congress prior to the mid-1970s, Kinzer repeats a story that an aide to CIA Director Allen Dulles told years later, suggesting that it was essentially non-existent.
Representative Clarence Cannon, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, would interrupt Dulles’s testimony to say, “Now don’t tell us about that if we don’t need to know.” “Clarence Cannon more often than not would say, ‘Now there is one question I want to ask. Do you have enough money to do your business properly?’ And Dulles would say, ‘I think, Mr. Chairman, I have asked for as much as I can spend wisely. If I get into trouble, I will come back to your committee.’ And Cannon would bang his gavel, ‘Meeting adjourned.’ That was that.”[12]
In fact, Cannon was comparatively aggressive in monitoring the CIA in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Agency’s legislative liaison hated him for setting hearings with the subcommittee on CIA on weekend mornings, and on short notice, as a way of keeping the CIA on its toes. Though few noticed, in 1960 Cannon publicly claimed partial credit for the Agency’s creation of the U-2 aircraft and program in the 1950s. A year later he and his subcommittee were privy to Bay of Pigs plans in advance of the operation. In 1963, he authorized a subcommittee to investigate coordination (or lack thereof) of counterinsurgency programs of the Defense Department and the CIA. But his reputation has been mostly defined by that oft-told tale. In part, this is because the Agency stupidly keeps many detailed memoranda of CIA testimony in that era classified. From 1963 alone, dozens of pages detailing CIA appearances before Cannon’s subcommittee remain classified.[13]
Like other reviewers, Kinzer noticed a surprising number of typos and minor historical errors in the book, a matter to which Johnson gives attention in his response. Unlike the comments in the other reviews, Kinzer finds Johnson’s “notably mild” conclusions about the Third Option to be troubling.
Katy Doll is currently writing about US overt propaganda and psychological warfare from the 1950s through the 1970s, especially in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. She observes that, because most recent covert activities are highly classified, and there has been “no [recent] comparable Church Committee,” The Third Option’s treatment of these are limited when compared to those of earlier decades. “For example,” she writes, despite the efforts of scholars to understand more about cyber covert actions, these activities mostly remain secret.” Like all of our reviewers, she considers the book to be valuable for those who are new to the subject and those who have studied intelligence for a long time.
From my vantage point as a scholar of the modern presidency and national security and intelligence policies, I am intrigued by the motivations of US leaders. No doubt there has been a conviction at the high government levels that the nation’s enemies are vicious in what they do. Since presidents authorize major covert action, their particular motivations obviously matter in their decisions to say yes or no to covert operation proposals. In my current book project on President John F. Kennedy and the CIA, I have encountered direct evidence of his worries about forthcoming elections when he considered such actions, though he only admitted this privately. Though his attention to individual presidents is usually brief, Loch Johnson knows them very well, analyzing Truman through Donald Trump shrewdly.
Johnson has also interviewed numerous CIA leaders. Two who served before Johnson’s time on the Church Committee are the Truman-era’s Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter and General Walter “Beetle” Smith. Neither man was a covert action enthusiast, owing to their shared conviction that taking on that role would inevitably lessen the CIA’s attention to actual intelligence matters and the gathering and analyzing information for presentation to top leaders. No matter, though. Others in the Truman administration were convinced that the Agency should carry out the Third Option, and Hillenkoetter and Smith followed orders. Allen Dulles certainly was an enthusiast, along with his boss, President Eisenhower. The fact, however, that some subsequent directors doubted the efficacy of covert action shows that it will occur despite what one Agency head may wish.
I join the other reviewers in hailing The Third Option as the new “go-to” book for those interested in the topic. It will likely retrain that status for a long time.
Contributors:
Loch K. Johnson is Regents Professor Emeritus of Public and International Affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. He is the author of over forty books, including Advanced Introduction to American Foreign Policy (Elgar, 2021) and Spy Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States (Oxford, 2018). He has been an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow; a Visiting Fellow at Yale and Oxford Universities; a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar; and, for eighteen years (2001-2019), editor of the international journal Intelligence and National Security. He also served in the US government as the senior aide to the chair of the Church Committee on Intelligence in the Senate, as well as the chair of the Aspin-Brown Commission on Intelligence in the White House. He was the first staff director of the Subcommittee on Oversight in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The consortium of universities that comprise the Southeast Conference (SEC) selected Professor Johnson as its inaugural “Professor of the Year” in 2012; and the University presented him with its Presidential Medal in 2022. From 1997-2001, he led the founding at the University of Georgia of its School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), which now rates as one of the top such school in the United States.
David M. Barrett is Professor of Political Science at Villanova University, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His books include Uncertain Warriors: Lyndon Johnson and His Vietnam Advisers (University Press of Kansas, 1993); Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam Papers (Texas A&M University Press, 1997); The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy (University Press of Kansas, 2005); and (with co-author Max Holland) Blind Over Cuba: The Missile Crisis and the Photo Gap (Texas A&M University Press, 2012). For the past decade, he has been researching (at two dozen archives) and writing a book tentatively titled, John F. Kennedy and the CIA: Intelligence and Politics. His most recent journal article was “The Bay of Pigs Fiasco and the Kennedy Administration’s Off-the-Record Briefings for Journalists” in The Journal of Cold War History, 21:2, Spring 2019. He has published op-ed pieces in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications.
Katy Doll is an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities and Politics at Nova Southeastern University. Her new book project examines US overt propaganda and psychological warfare from the 1950s through the 1970s with an emphasis on the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
Barbara Elias is the Sarah and James Bowdoin Associate Professor of Government & Legal Studies at Bowdoin College, specializing in international relations, insurgency warfare, US foreign policy, national security, and Islam and politics.
David Hadley is an Assistant Professor of Security Studies at the National Defense University’s College of International Security Affairs, located at their Fort Liberty office. He earned his doctorate from the Ohio State University in 2015, and prior to his current position has taught at Gettysburg College and Ashland University. His work focuses on the intersection of intelligence, culture, and national security. He is the author of The Rising Clamor: The Central Intelligence Agency, the American Press, and the Cold War (University Press of Kentucky, 2019), which explores the relationships that developed between the Central Intelligence Agency and the American press in the early Cold War.
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh and honorary president of the Scottish Association for the Study of America. He is currently completing Allan Pinkerton: His Life and his Legacies, a book for Georgetown University Press. His latest publication is A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
Jennifer Kibbe is a Professor of Government at Franklin & Marshall College. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Drake University in 1982, a Master’s in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 1986, and a PhD in Political Science from UCLA in 2002. Her work has appeared in the Journal of National Security Law & Policy, Intelligence and National Security, and Foreign Affairs.
Stephen Kinzer is a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and writes a world affairs column for The Boston Globe. Prior to that he was an award-winning foreign correspondent who covered more than 50 countries on five continents. His articles and books have led the Washington Post to place him “among the best in popular foreign policy storytelling.”
Review by Katy Doll, Nova Southeastern University
In The Third Option: Covert Action and American Foreign Policy, Loch K. Johnson presents a thorough overview of the United States’ use of the “Third Option,” or covert actions, from the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947 to the present. Covert actions, which Johnson defines as “clandestine intervention in the affairs of other nations for the purpose of advancing the global interests of the United States,” are the “Third Option” available after diplomacy and warfare (1). Johnson’s work is both chronological and thematic, focusing on US covert actions, foreign policy, and legal and ethical frameworks of covert actions.
Johnson divides his work into five major sections and devotes his first section to providing important definitions and operational concerns. After introducing covert action and its various forms, including propaganda, political, economic, and paramilitary operations (19), he next devotes a chapter to the “escalation ladder” of covert operations. On Johnson’s ladder, each rung represents a higher operational and ethical risk, from the least worrisome (truthful propaganda to adversaries) to the most objectionable (nuclear, biological, chemical, or radiological weapons) (41-42). Johnson returns to this ladder throughout the book, especially in the later sections devoted to ethics and legal assessments. Sections II and III of his work focus on case studies from 1947 to 1975 and again from 1975 to 2020. These sections are the most dynamic, as Johnson includes details on CIA action in both familiar Cold War conflicts such as the Korean War, as well as on CIA failures, such as the effort to depose Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (88). In section IV, Johnson turns to the legal foundations of the CIA, including the role of the US Congress in providing oversight and accountability. This section also presents a thorough history of how the layers of bureaucracy through US agencies and departments shaped the history of covert actions. Finally, in section V, Johnson turns to the ethics of covert action and assesses whether current systems of covert action should continue.
With such an expansive scope and topic, Johnson highlights several case studies to illuminate the larger trends and cycles of covert action. After exploring these case studies, he returns to them later when providing assessments of the “best” and “worst” covert actions as judged by ethical and legal frameworks. This choice allows him to highlight large trends, such as early covert actions that focused more on propaganda, compared to later actions that relied mostly on paramilitary action, which would be missing from an in-depth study of only one or two cases (272). Many of his case studies will be familiar to those versed in this field, from the Bay of Pigs and the Iran-Contra affair to the CIA-assisted coup d’état of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz. Because his work aims to examine larger trends, these case studies do not provide the mechanics of specific actions.[14] The bibliography, however, provides many leads for those wanting in-depth studies of his chosen case studies. His focus on breadth over depth allows Johnson to use these case studies not just to examine covert actions, but also to illuminate ethical and legal issues that help him weave his larger narrative. By combining these many years and efforts, he deftly highlights those long-term trends.
Johnson’s section on the laws and accountability of the Third Option provides an organizational history of how the CIA came to have its various duties and how Congress has responded to Third Option actions. The CIA was formed under the National Security Act of 1947, which contained vague language about the extent of the CIA’s powers. The CIA had authority over “such other functions and duties” as might be assigned beyond intelligence gathering and analysis; over time, these other functions came to mean covert operations (168). Johnson spends a good portion of this section focused on the Hughes-Ryan Act of 1974 and its requirement that CIA funds for anything beyond “obtaining necessary intelligence” had to be reported to Congress and that the president had to deem the operation important for national security (182). While he uses the Hughes-Ryan Act as a dividing line in covert operations oversight, as the events of Iran-Contra in the 1980s proved, it was not a perfect solution. His focus here reveals the importance of Congress in the process of accountability. As Johnson notes, even with reports to Congress, sometimes those involved in the review served only as sycophants, happily agreeing to whatever the CIA asked. Johnson’s work makes a strong argument for the importance not only of competent Congressional members who are willing to investigate the CIA, but also the need for mechanisms to better respond to the cheerleaders who rubberstamp CIA actions.
Johnson’s focus on the ethical framework of US covert actions is an important element of this book. He avows that serious consideration must be given to the role of ethics, legal restrictions, and information transparency in clandestine work. As Johnson notes, it is too often easy for people to charge that ethics and covert affairs are antithetical. Because covert actions, even with legal restrictions, show no signs of ending, it is important to assess these actions. “The American people have the right to judge the covert action record,” Johnson writes in his preface, “then to determine whether to continue on with these endeavors as practiced in the past or to make course corrections” (xv). His work provides frameworks and tools, such as his use of the ladder of clandestine escalation, to help assess these past actions by analyzing their odds of success, how the public might react to them, and the legal and constitutional considerations (236).
One of Johnson’s major arguments about ethics is the need for power-sharing within the government and officials who are willing to hold the CIA accountable. Though the Third Option is needed in some cases, and even extreme measures on the escalation ladder might be necessary, he argues the decision process is what keeps the CIA from acting on the desires and demands of only one or two people. Johnson argues that “most important, though, since the world changes and unforeseen events arise, is having a reliable and democratic method for deciding when the Third Option should be used. Here is the central place that process must claim in any free society” (emphasis in the original, 258). As Johnson argues, the Third Option can fit into American democracy when it follows these reviews and transparency efforts. Because the US public is represented in these conversations by its elected officials, Johnson’s book also provides an important call for considering the role of many people and organizations beyond the CIA in assessing covert action. As Johnson notes, however, even with all systems in place, sometimes individuals work outside the law or the systems do not work smoothly, as in the Iran-Contra affair, or more recently in the contentious relationship between President Trump and the CIA. Even though American elections often have a greater focus on domestic policies, Johnson’s argument is a needed reminder of how much is at stake in foreign affairs.
As Johnson highlights early in his work, propaganda is an important element of covert action, and is often seen as the least objectionable, lowest risk option. However, because propaganda has not captured the American public in the manner of fictional portrayals of the dynamic life of spies, it often receives less attention than tales of assassination or secret infiltration.[15] Propaganda also receives less attention than other types of covert action in Johnson’s work, especially with the recent trend in the CIA to utilize paramilitary operations, such as drone warfare. But propaganda deserves additional attention, as the modern era of cyberwarfare indicates renewed focus on influence operations.[16] Johnson highlights the problem of “cyberterrorism” as a particularly common present-day practice, and advocates for global agreements to restrain or refrain from cyberwar to prevent “the disintegration of the civilized world” (162). A strong focus on both the more dynamic ideas of cyber terrorism, such as electronic financial attacks, as well as the more mundane but ubiquitous misinformation in social media posts, is imperative for continued studies of covert actions. Just as Johnson looks to past arms deals to imagine a cyberterrorism deal, scholars should continue to look to past information activities, especially those performed by the US against other nations, to understand the threat of current attacks on the US and others.
One of the challenges of working on this topic is its clandestine nature. Johnson uses multiple sources of public and private information to complete his study. Johnson himself worked as a special assistant to the 1975–1976 Church Committee that investigated potential abuses or illegal intelligence actions conducted by agencies of the federal government. He also had other congressional affiliations that provided him with intimate knowledge of the procedures of Congressional review of CIA actions.[17] Additionally, his interviews with intelligence professionals provide valuable insights into the character of different CIA leaders. Because most of the more recent covert activities are still classified, and there has been no comparable Church Committee, his comments on more recent actions are limited when compared to earlier actions. For example, despite the efforts of scholars to understand more about cyber covert actions, these activities mostly remain secret.[18]
Each section is organized by theme, which can lead to jumps in time, or references to later sections where Johnson will establish the history of a legal or procedural process, such as the Church Committee or the Hughes-Ryan Act. However, the thematic divisions also assist readers by allowing them to dive directly into his case studies for dynamic overviews of US covert action. With the focus on all parts of US covert action from 1947 to the present, from its formation, legal structures, famous cases, and systems of moral and security evaluations, this book will be valuable for both those who are new to the field and those who are more familiar with elements of US covert operations.
Johnson has presented a comprehensive history of US covert action that demands that readers focus on all parts of the process, from the actions on the ground to the decisions behind closed doors to the debates in the halls of Congress. Readers from all backgrounds will find useful sections of the book, and those who study national security and US foreign policy will benefit from his synthesis of so many actions and their legal and ethical implications. As the United States continues to face potential threats from both old and new rivals, Johnson’s book provides a strong argument for keeping foreign policy and covert policy as a central component of modern political discourse.
Review by Barbara Elias, Bowdoin College
Poison that had been personally brewed by agents of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to assassinate democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba carried into the Republic of Congo “in a locked satchel… [with] rubber gloves, a mask and a syringe” (94), and a CIA-produced porn film featuring a look-alike of President Sukarno of Indonesia distributed before a CIA-backed attempted coup (89) are just two examples of the deeply intrusive, wildly creative, and patently violent history of CIA covert operations. Lumumba was brutally killed (not by poison, but with CIA backing), while Sukarno survived in office, despite Agency efforts. Reading, let alone writing, a sweeping history of CIA covert operations is a daunting undertaking. In his latest book, Loch Johnson, a formidable expert of national security and intelligence, describes and categorizes “The Third Option” in US foreign policymaking, which is defined as the diverse uses of covert action that complement the “first option” (formal diplomacy), and the second (military force). The book ambitiously covers the history, legality, and morality of CIA-led covert operations since 1947.
The author has remarkable experience and expertise as both an academic and policymaker, which is evident through the details provided in his analysis. For example, when discussing the perils of working with local security partners, Johnson quotes National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, who commented that “you get all steamed up backing a rebel group for reasons that are yours and not theirs. Your reasons run out of steam and theirs do not” (134). The cited source of Bundy’s intriguing comment is Johnson’s interview of Bundy in October 1987. It is just one of many interesting details in the book, which is a testament to Johnson’s standing and resource as a scholar.[19]
Yet despite this established, semi-insider position, Johnson is unwavering in aiming for fairness when judging CIA operations, balancing his critique with appreciation for the importance of Agency efforts to protect US national security. He argues that “the Third Option has occasionally registered successes and should be kept at hand” (258). He also strongly implies that covert operations are overused and asserts that systematic oversight is critical. Johnson details that dodgy CIA activities have a real risk of backfiring, as they have in the past, and thus undermining the strength of American democratic institutions as well as the nation’s security and international standing in ways that are difficult to undo. Quoting Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Robert Gates, Johnson writes that it “should always be remembered” that moving forward with a covert operation “at the last minute in the absence of any better solution nearly always ensures failure” (262). Johnson’s argument is clear. Covert operations should be kept on hand for US policymakers, but with persistent oversight, and scrutiny, and skepticism.
As the book details, critiques, and catalogs CIA covert operations, the underlying theme is a persistent call to protect US democracy and ensure that covert activity does not undermine “traditional American values” (51), which are loosely implied to be democratic processes. Johnson argues that ethical norms should be a primary consideration for covert operations instead of a hard-nosed US fixation with gaining global power, economic advantage, or the weakening of its adversaries. Johnson offers a “ladder of clandestine escalation” drawn from some of his earlier works, providing a non-exhaustive, but lengthy list of potential covert actions that he ranks from “modest intrusion,” such as funding existing pro-democracy groups abroad to “extreme operations,” including drone strikes, torture programs, and coups (40-66).[20] He also provides a general guide of moral considerations for policymakers to think through when determining whether they should reach for “The Third Option” in any given situation. They are: the level of covert action on the ladder of clandestine escalation; the likely public reaction in the US and abroad if the operation is exposed (which is also called The New York Times test)[21]; the estimated likelihood of success; and the CIA’s process in following (or violating) legal and constitutional processes (236). Thus, Johnson defines ‘moral’ covert operations as those that are less intrusive and risky, publicly defensible, likely to succeed, and in step with US legal and constitutional standards.
Johnson’s intentional discussion of morality in the history and future of covert operations is a welcome one, and he skillfully confronts readers with hard questions regarding the consequences for US violation of the golden rule in several CIA operations to destabilize democratically elected leaders that were tactically effective but strategically disastrous. He explores the cases of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Lumumba in the [then] Republic of the Congo, President Salvador Allende in Chile, and President Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala. Moreover, his discussions of morality come at moments in the narrative where many security scholars have instead stuck to rote description, avoiding moral appraisal, since, as Johnson admits, “one can easily become the object of ridicule by advocating a moral approach to intelligence activities, especially when it comes to covert action” (223).[22] Yet as CIA officer Charlie Allen commented, moral questions are a central issue when covert operations are being planned and executed, because “at the CIA you get into moral ambiguities more than you do in other agencies” (40).
But ethical norms can, and happily at times do, converge with certain longstanding US strategic interests. Johnson’s call that the CIA do more to respect human rights norms, for example, is at least partially driven by his strategic assessment that violating these norms undermines US long-term reputational and security interests by diminishing America’s identity as a global democratic leader and inviting retaliation, such as assassination threats against US government officials. He condemns the Trump administration’s decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. Morality here is less defined as norms determining proper vs. improper action that is distanced from US material and political interests so much as a call that short-term US interests should not outweigh long-term interests. For Johnson, these include promoting a brand of US democratic exceptionalism abroad, maintaining international human rights norms that serve US interests and, protecting US domestic democratic institutions, which seem to be the most important. In short, the moral considerations that Johnson highlights in the book seem to be a call not to lose sight of the forest (long-term interests promoting democratic norms) for the trees (short-term localized security interests).
Notably, Johnson agrees with the members of President John F. Kennedy’s National Security Council (NSC) for rejecting CIA proposals to poison Communist-controlled crops in South Vietnam and, in an effort to drive a wedge between Moscow and Havana and undermine Cuban sugar exports, to covertly spray chemicals on sugar that was shipped from Cuba to the USSR (229). He observes, however, that Kennedy and his advisers were not motivated by moral concerns regarding tainting civilian food supplies, but instead were focused on the “‘what if we get caught’ problem” (230), implying that these proposals involved a moral failure on the part of Kennedy and company, despite their sound rejection of the CIA proposals. But Johnson’s framing of moral and ethical considerations in covert operations is at least partially parallel to Kennedy’s in that they are informed by long-term US reputational and domestic interests. This is not a critique, but an observation that “morality” is a slippery concept in foreign policymaking and that discussions regarding morality tend to be deeply embedded with US material and security interests in ways that obscure how “morality” is conceptually distinct from interests.
A notable aspect of Johnson’s approach in The Third Option is his aim towards balance in assessing CIA operations, setting a tone that is neither overly sympathetic nor scathing. He maintains a healthy appreciation of the corrosive power of bureaucratic inertia when it is combined with secrecy and insufficient institutional checks, discussing a plethora of process problems including the CIA’s practice of pressing the media to “write negative reviews and commentary about books critical of the CIA or thumbs-up evaluations of volumes that portray the agency in a more positive light [while] reward[ing]… compliant writers [with] newsworthy leaks, maybe even Pulitzer prize-winning scoops” (28-29), as well as corruption at critical levels of the Agency, such as the commercial connection of Secretary of State John Foster and DCI Allen Dulles to the United Fruit Company through their law firm Sullivan & Cromwell at a time when as the company lobbied heavily for US intervention against President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in Guatemala (83-85).
Johnson also writes with an easy-to-read and even playful style, which is too rare in serious scholarship. He does this in his preface, among other places, writing,
Down the rabbit hole we go, into a dimly lit world of secret agents; poison-dart guns; vials of curare, cobra venom, and shellfish toxins; barrels of ink for writing propaganda tracts… a largely invisible realm of clandestine activities governed by the best of intentions, yet sometimes yielding the worst of results; a world that merits the thoughtful attention and judgment of every citizen (xvi).
There are, however, occasions where the book relies on overly simplified, or even orientalist metaphors that obscure more than they clarify. For example, the comment that “alliances can shift as quickly as sand dunes in the Middle and Near East” (152) is not particularly illuminating. Specific details about which alliances the author had in mind, and where the CIA had a hand (or not) in shifting those allegiances, would have been more constructive.
Overall, the book offers a fascinating investigation of an intriguing, important, and hard-to-study topic. It provides a sweeping appraisal of CIA covert operations that was written by an established expert and will interest practitioners, specialists, and non-specialists alike.
Review by David Hadley, National Defense University
As America enters into a period of renewed geopolitical competition and clashes in the so-called “Gray Zone” that lies somewhere between peace and war, Loch K. Johnson’s The Third Option is a valuable contribution to the topic of covert action and its role within US foreign policy.[23] This work considers several vital and interlinked questions that covert action raises: can the perceived need for covert action be reconciled with the open, constitutional structure of the US government? What ethical standards should be applied to covert action? Is covert action an effective means of achieving national goals? While covert action is an often-nebulous term, the most basic definition provided by Johnson in his preface is the most useful, capturing in its broadness the wide variety of activities that fall under the umbrella of covert action and the appeal it holds for political leaders: it is “a means for secretly influencing world events” (xi). Surveying covert action mainly from the end of World War Two to the present, Johnson focuses on the record of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which is the most regular, experienced practitioner of covert action within the US government. He ultimately presents a compelling case for the US government’s disciplined and infrequent reliance on covert action, and for its respect for ethical boundaries when it does need to be used. Johnson argues that in general, diplomacy and leading through positive example are better ways to achieve US goals, even if they are often slow and frustrating.
By its nature, covert action is a challenging subject to study, especially in the contemporary period when most of the records pertaining to it remain shrouded in secrecy. While intelligence disclosures can be, and have been, quite damaging to US national security in a variety of ways, the resulting necessity for some level of secrecy can become a justification for keeping almost anything from seeing the light of day. Beyond the challenges of access are the “layers of darkness and mythology” that surrounds covert intervention (xv). The media attention around intelligence and covert action has probably done far more to shape public beliefs and expectations than reporting or scholarly studies.[24] Even professionals have at times not been immune from the charms of spy fiction. Famed Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen W. Dulles was, as Johnson notes, a fan of Ian Fleming’s stories (176); the adventures of James Bond were apparently widely read throughout the Directorate of Plans, which housed the early CIA’s covert action capability.[25] Johnson’s sober accounting places covert action within its proper place. It is an important element of national power, but most likely to be successful when used as a supplement to overt policy. It is profoundly difficult, it turns out, to engage in activities that have a real-world impact but remain secret.
That is a lesson that, as the historical accounting Johnson provides makes clear, ought to be regularly reinforced to policymakers, given how attractive the “third option” can appear when compared to its alternatives. Johnson notes that “in light of diplomacy’s limitations (chiefly its glacial pace), as well as the risks—and the staggering erosion of the federal treasury—that accompany warfare, one can readily understand why America’s leaders have found covert action an attractive alternative in this triad of foreign policy options” (5). The promise of faster and less costly results, however, is often a mirage. Johnson’s view of covert action is not wholly negative, and his account suggests, especially after the investigations into the CIA in the 1970s, that unrealistic expectations are coming more from the political leadership than from the agency’s personnel. He does warn, however, that the understandable “can-doism” of a motivated, professional workforce to respond to their leadership’s demands can push covert action against the boundaries within which it has been placed (261).
To balance a leadership that naturally wants an efficient and quiet solution to vexing foreign policy problems on the one hand, and a group of national security professionals who by temperament want to respond positively to their leadership, Johnson argues for clear guidelines as to what constitutes unacceptable covert action. He utilizes the metaphor of a football field in setting these guidelines, with the two red zones of always unacceptable behavior on either side. One red zone consists of covert action that is simply absurd, such as a proposed effort to overthrow President Fidel Castro by convincing the Cuban people that the second coming of Christ was at hand (228). The other red zone consists of covert action that is too extreme, action that is “so repugnant and contrary to American values that they should automatically denied as well.” His main example is the covert use of chemical or biological weapons (229). Presumably, covert action that would count as both absurd and too extreme would be doubly prohibited.[26]
For what lies between these two zones, Johnson provides a set of questions to assess the acceptability of the activity: is it legal, as defined by the US Congress? Is it consistent with US foreign policy, and if not, why not? Is it consistent with American values? How would the American people likely react if the action were made public? (233) Additionally, Johnson stresses the need to consider the likelihood of success. Congress must set the guidelines and then provide the oversight to ensure their adherence. Johnson traces the laborious process of establishing effective oversight, with the watershed Hughes-Ryan Act of 1974 serving a particularly critical role in demanding that the president notify Congress in a “timely” manner via a presidential finding that a covert action is necessary, thereby weakening the president’s plausible deniability and strengthening Congress’ hand to avoid repeating the egregious uses of covert action that occurred prior to 1974.
These principles can be seen across the four different types of covert action that are categorized within The Third Option: propaganda, political, economic, and paramilitary operations (19). Propaganda and political support seem more likely to fall within the standards that Johnson establishes. For example, he views US support to Solidarity in Poland, in its conception and execution, as clearly meeting his criteria, as it was conducted under existing US law, was consistent with US foreign policy and American values, and was unlikely to have been problematic to a US audience if revealed. It had the added benefit of being carefully carried out to avoid provoking the Soviet Union. That would not be the case with all propaganda or political operations, of course, especially if directed towards fellow democratic countries. Additionally, economic and paramilitary covert actions are not excluded automatically within Johnson’s framework. For example, he sees the US support of the Afghanistan mujahadeen during the 1980s as meeting the requirements he lays out.
While these principles are straightforward, Johnson does not pretend that applying them always leads to simple answers. For example, he acknowledges the questionable nature of US covert action in friendly or neutral countries, including secret or “black” propaganda; he notes the risk that the United States could damage the forces it was trying to support if its assistance became known. Johnson also includes, however, support for the Christian Democrats in Italy from 1947–1950 as one of the best of the CIA’s covert actions. Much of the Italian public, though, including elements outside of the Italian Communist Party, resented US interference. Continued US involvement in Italy increased the risk of damage to the elements of Italian politics that covert action was designed to support.[27] Johnson’s identification of covert action specifically in 1947–1950 considers the exceptionally difficult circumstances of the immediate aftermath of World War Two.
To complicate the situation further, Johnson makes it clear that covert action could meet all of his ethical criteria and still not be effective. This is especially true for propaganda, about which one CIA officer whom Johnson interviewed could only judge that it “didn’t hurt and maybe it helped” (25). It is impossible, for example, to say just how important CIA support to Solidarity was to the downfall of the Communist government in Poland. As Johnson notes, the reasons for Solidarity’s victory include the leadership of Lech Walesa, the courage of Polish workers, the declining Polish economy, the public support of Pope John Paul II, the vacillation of Poland’s Communist leader Wojciech Jaruzelski, and the rise of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev (138). In other words, the overall political situation in Poland and Eastern Europe produced the situation which ended Communist rule in Poland. Even cases where a covert action can be more directly seen as a causal factor, such as the joint CIA-MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom) effort to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, can have unexpected and ambiguous legacies, as the Iranian Revolution of 1979 amply demonstrates.
Johnson also considers the risk that particular covert actions pose to escalation; he applies work from his earlier US Intelligence in a Hostile World to divide covert action’s escalation risk into four categories: routine operations, modest intrusions, high-risk operations, and extreme operations (46).[28] These risks are related to, but distinct from, the ethical concerns that The Third Option explores; the escalation tends to increase from propaganda and up in paramilitary operations. The extreme escalation risks are also those that, for ethical reasons, Johnson rejects entirely.
Ultimately, Johnson’s comprehensive consideration of the risks, ethics, and control over covert action leads him to a consideration of the different factors that should be evaluated when judging covert action. His analysis draws from just war theory, including factors such as the imminence of the threat being countered, the proportionality of the US response, the nature of the target, and related concerns. Johnson reminds us that it is worth considering whether in many cases it may be better to do nothing than to act for its own sake. The United States needs to adopt, Johnson argues, “a more discriminating approach to the Third Option,” and put the main effort in achieving national goals behind US diplomacy and what he refers to as the fourth option—the power of example (277). He proposes that actions that contribute to the US image as a moral actor in world affairs will be more useful than secret efforts to advance US interests.
Johnson’s closing argument is a compelling one, even if it his account demonstrates that it will be difficult if not impossible to achieve, for two main reasons. First, exigency—it will always be harder to refrain from riskier or more escalatory covert action when the threat seems greater. The escalation ladder that Johnson provides is a useful one, but the subjective ranking of the different risks certain actions pose is likely to change in a crisis, especially a prolonged one. For example, an activity that is viewed in hindsight as a modest intrusion, such as propaganda operations in friendly or neutral countries, certainly seemed like a routine operation at the time of the early Cold War. Public opinion will be vital to shaping what the CIA can do, and if that opinion perceives a threat, political leaders and the CIA will respond. As DCI William Colby explained in 1975, “When American opinion says go, we go. When American opinion” says stop, “we stop.”[29] The second and related reason is the role that Congress plays in oversight. Johnson surveys the history of Congressional leaders in intelligence oversight, many of whom are role models for future congressional watchdogs. Partisan divides within Congress seem likely to continue to challenge oversight arrangements, however.
The Third Option is useful as a synthetic study of the larger concepts behind covert action; Johnson draws on his long career as a scholar in his exploration of the difference aspects of covert action. He has amassed an impressive bibliography of secondary sources and, unsurprisingly given his background, his analysis of the legal framework for covert action and the role of Congress is particularly noteworthy and will likely become a common point of reference for intelligence studies. By necessity, Johnson’s treatment of the history that contributes to his overall analysis is broad. While this scope in itself is not a problem, it contributes to a few misstatements and factual errors in the historical record. For example, the death of Chilean General René Schneider is described as having taken place “during [the] events” of the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (111). While possibly referring to the overall course of US involvement in Chile, the impression created is that Schneider died during the coup in 1973, and not in 1970 during a botched kidnapping attempt that became an assassination. While the details of what, if any, connection existed between the particular group that killed Schneider and the CIA remains murky, the continued funding of anti-Allende factions after Schneider’s violent death casts a different light on US policy towards Chile than if the violence had been limited to September 1973. This error does not detract from Johnson’s overall analysis but may stand out to an expert audience.[30]
The Third Option is a noteworthy work that will help a wide audience understand and contextualize an all-too-often misunderstood topic. Achieving a balance between secrecy and national security on the one hand and the openness upon which democratic governance relies on the other means that political leaders and the citizenry that elects them need to understand covert action—what it actually is in reality rather than in myth, and what it can be realistically expected to achieve. It will be a challenge to build and maintain such a balance; the stories and myths of intelligence may always outweigh the reality for much of the population. Even so, the effort to dispel such stories and myths through continual, sober study remains a worthwhile venture.
Review by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, University of Edinburgh, emeritus
The Third Option is a beguiling combination of constructive thinking and clear prose. Furthermore, one need only inspect the author’s bibliography to realize just how erudite he is. Loch Johnson conducted more than six hundred oral history interviews with a roster of historical figures that includes the majority of the United States’ directors of Central Intelligence (DCIs). It takes several densely populated paragraphs for the collegiate and well-connected Johnson to thank the individuals who have helped him understand the phenomenon of US covert action. They range from intelligence personnel through academia to the hierarchy of Oxford University Press, New York.[31]
Johnson asks whether, and, if so, when and to what degree, covert action as typically undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is wise, and whether and under what circumstances it may be ethical. Applying the methodology of a political scientist, he presents an escalation scale of covert actions ranging from “truthful propaganda” (43) directed at the citizens of autocracies, to assassinations conducted in an irresponsible manner (264). Then in chapter 9, he assesses a selection of notable covert actions. Here, he adheres to the maxim that varying degrees of threat require the enactment of responses on appropriate points of the escalation scale. He places his selection of covert actions on a further scale, ranging from best to worst.
The Third Option offers a framework for debate. Johnson is conscious of the controversial nature of his subject matter. Let it be said at the outset that he strives to be fair-minded not just about concepts, but also about personalities. Foreign leaders like Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, Guatemalan president Guzmán Arbenz, Cuban president Fidel Castro, Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh, and Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, all of whom ran afoul of the CIA, receive even-handed treatment in his study. Here is his judicious comment on the first of those figures: “Mohammed Mossadegh had been elected prime minister of Iran 1951 and began to behave far too independently for the tastes of Washington officials, not to mention British and American oil executives” (77).
Ethics are an important concern for Johnson. The final section of his book is devoted to the morality or otherwise of different types of covert action. Questions arising from Johnson’s approach are: whose ethics, and what do we mean by ethics? Let’s begin with the ethics of Christians. The sixth Christian Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” is an implicit rebuke to slayers that resonates throughout the book. It clearly influences Johnson’s qualms about assassination, even if there is no suggestion that it should be taken as an absolute. However, Johnson is less concerned with moral or philosophical distinctions, than he is with rules and regulations. He argues that the US Constitution established a seminal set of rules, assigning a role to the legislature as well as to the executive in the governance of foreign affairs. Congress is thus authorized to be a second rule maker (224). Finally, Johnson measures the morality of covert actions against the rule books written by CIA directors Stansfield Turner (1977–1981), William H. Webster (1987–1991), and John Deutch (1995–1997).
Although other writers have shared aspects of Johnson’s methodology, for example his deployment of an escalation scale, his emphasis on laws and rules is a defining characteristic of his work, and, as St. John de Crèvecoeur’s eighteenth-century observation about litigiousness in the new nation anticipated, is perhaps distinctively American.[32] Its criteria differ, for example, from the ethical measurements deployed by the British political scientist Ross Bellaby, who explores the idea that morality regarding both surveillance and covert action should be judged by the degree of “harm” caused.[33]
Johnson’s approach is as much that of a historian as a political scientist. Here, his own experience shapes his approach to chronology. While his record as a public servant and educator covers several decades, his youthful time as special assistant to Frank Church, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (1975–1976), was formative. Though he is not uncritical of Senator Church, he sees the 1970s as a positive turning point in legislative intelligence oversight, and thus in the wisdom and ethics of US covert operations. He points to the establishment of full oversight committees (as distinct from subcommittees) in both houses of Congress. They were the culmination of the decade’s reform impulse. The Case-Zablocki Act of 1972 had earlier required the executive to report to Congress on all foreign-nation agreements (commitments short of treaties that needed mandatory Senate ratification). The Hughes-Ryan Amendment of 1974 made it mandatory for the CIA to report to Congress on covert operations.
Johnson’s style is not historiographically discursive. Only implicitly does he reject the scholarship of David M. Barrett, who challenged the view that Congress seriously neglected its oversight duties prior to the 1970s.[34] Similarly, he fights shy of an explicit assessment of the work of historians such as Kathryn S. Olmsted, who asked why, in the 1970s and their aftermath, “did most members of the press and Congress back away from challenging the secret government?”[35]
Regarding the “Third Option,” Johnson shows respect for the minimalists but, despite his deeply considered reservations about irresponsible covert actions, has no time for the abolitionists. The abolitionist Senator Daniel P. Moynihan does not feature in his book. When serving as ambassador to India, Moynihan had been shocked by the way on which US covert operations alienated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (who feared that the CIA might assassinate her) and many of her compatriots. At the end of the Cold War, Moynihan advocated the abolition of the CIA, with intelligence functions being reabsorbed into the Department of State.[36] Moynihan’s abolition bill failed to progress in Congress. The arrival of the terrorist threat spelt the end of abolitionism and helps to explain Moynihan’s absence from Johnson’s text.
Johnson pays some heed to the minimalists. He notes Senator Church’s assertion that the CIA was copying underhand tactics from the Soviet Union’s KGB, and his further remark that it had cost America dear in terms of its “good name and reputation” (Church quoted, 269). He cites future Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s view that covert actions should be used “only when they are absolutely essential to the national security” (Vance quoted, 270). He further recites a remark by National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair (2009–2010) on covert activities: “If we’d have none of them we would probably be better off, and certainly no worse off than we are today” (Blair quoted, 258).[37]
The Third Option’s adverse impact on opinion is a significant drawback to its deployment. Often for ethical reasons, the American public can be critical of devious behavior. Johnson refers to the “New York Times test” (233). Before launching a covert initiative, its promoters should ask themselves, “How would the covert action story play on the front page of the nation’s newspapers?” (233).
Equally, Johnson is conscious of the impact of covert operations on foreign opinion. Dirty-tricks scandals undermine the nation’s soft power capability. He credits some leaders with being aware of this. President John F. Kennedy was hesitant about a plan secretly to contaminate Viet Cong-controlled rice fields in South Vietnam. His reticence sprang not from moral grounds, but because of the difficulty in “keeping it from becoming an American enterprise, which could be surfaced as [the United Stated] poisoning food” (Kennedy quoted, 230). Not being found out was a key issue for Kennedy, a lesson the Bay of Pigs fiasco drove home.
Johnson subscribes to the notion that the Bay of Pigs was “the first major setback for covert action in the modern era” (xii). My own view is that the writing was already on the wall. The so-called triumphs of the 1950s, the removals of democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, were in fact catastrophic failures that masqueraded as success, impressing only a blinkered and limited circle of American leaders. The American public was in the dark about America’s anti-democratic subterfuges. It seems to have been unique in this respect. When a 1967 exposé of CIA European activities finally alerted and shocked so many Americans, foreigners were not so surprised, as they had long assumed that the CIA was acting as it did. The English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge observed, “In France, Italy and West Germany the [West Coast magazine] Ramparts disclosures have caused scarcely a ripple.”[38]
CIA subterfuges were the single most important reason for anti-Americanism in the 1960s.[39] They likely contributed to America’s loss of a majority on the floor of the UN General Assembly. Johnson is aware of such issues. With the qualification that there is no reliable way of measuring international opinion, he remarks that “few would confidently argue that the standing of the United States in the world has gone up with the revelations over the years of the CIA’s secret interventions” (269). He acknowledges the case for a “Fourth Option: the virtue of leading by example” (275).
On a related theme, Johnson, in one of his boldly conceived illustrations, tabulates “Covert Action Targeting, by Level of Development and Region, 1947–2020.” The table covers “major operations explored in this book” (274). Here, we see that such operations were directed at fifty-four “developing” nations compared with just twelve “developed” nations. Of course, that is partly because poor nations outnumber rich nations. But it does illustrate why poorer, non-white nations look with special concern at operations emanating from Langley, Virginia that seem to be more prevalent—and drastic—in their own regions.
Nations have long used assassination as an instrument of foreign policy, and such killings are often carried out in actual or attempted secrecy, thus falling into the category of covert action. President Gerald Ford uniquely banned assassination by executive decree. Since then, the policy has become once again routine, but it remains controversial. For Johnson, it is a sensitive issue. He condemns the collateral killing of a crew member of the Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior by French intelligence agents when the vessel was at anchor in the port of Auckland: it “provides an illustration of how important honoring non-violent principles can be in the world of covert action” (63).
The deployment by Israel’s Mossad of a bomb crafted by the CIA to kill Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyah in 2008 was, in contrast, justifiable, as the target had blood on his hands. Johnson holds that the joint operation “met its goal” (49). Also laudable was the dispatch of al-Qaeda founder and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden in 2011. Bin Laden died “while resisting capture” (236), “the laws for the Third Option were honored” (237), and the victim of this CIA-orchestrated hit was responsible for many American deaths. However, Johnson acknowledges that in the latter case and others like it “the capture and fair trial of international criminals would be morally superior outcomes” (256). While many Americans (in fact all the Americans I have spoken to) think the assassination of an unarmed man in his pajamas was just retribution for 9/11, one might ask if it was wise, in being such a powerful negation of the principle of fair trial—and thus of the “Fourth Option.”
My penultimate observation about The Third Option arises from the author’s encapsulation of the question that defined the Cold War struggle: “Would the planet be painted in crimson hues by a Soviet brush or would the democracies and capitalism prevail?” (15) This ideological framing is important because it was what so many in the West believed at the time. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the equation of democratic America with capitalism needs to be qualified: socialist aspects of American society range from widespread social security to public ownership on a large scale.[40] One also needs to bear in mind that one of the CIA’s more effective policies was its “opening to the left.”[41] Why that policy was confined to the European theatre is a provocative issue. It seems to me that the peoples of the “developing” world wanted to experience all three commodities, capitalism, socialism, and democracy. Through covert operations, both power blocs tried to deny one or more of those benefits to the people who wanted them.
Loch Johnson’s The Third Option is perhaps the most erudite book to have appeared on the history and politics of the CIA. It is also one of the more thought-provoking works to have been published about US secret intelligence. In clear and eminently readable prose, Johnson has done much to unravel the moral and practical complexities of covert action.
Review by Jennifer Kibbe, Franklin and Marshall College
In The Third Option: Covert Action and American Foreign Policy, Loch Johnson, the preeminent American scholar on intelligence, aims to “offer a frank assessment” of covert operations, which he describes as an “obscure but vital component of America’s foreign policy” (xvi). Since serving on the staff of the Church Committee, Johnson has written thoughtfully and profoundly about intelligence over his long career. [42] The value of this book is its refining and condensing of much of that work into a one-stop shop for information about America’s covert action.
This volume has all of the traits that we have come to expect from a Johnson work, including meticulous research, thorough investigation of primary documents, fluid writing, and a witty flair for description,[43] such as describing President Donald Trump’s approach to leadership as “reminiscent of the ancient Roman emperors who read animal entrails to predict the future” (156). Another favorite is his characterization of the reporting of several National Security Council (NSC) officials to the intelligence committees during Iran-contra: “Their passports for travel into the Republic of Mendacity were heavily stamped” (214).
This masterful account of the United States’ covert actions has plenty for both general readers and experts alike. For the former, the historical chapters (chapters 3-6), covering the period from 1947 through 2020, provide a cogent overview of major US covert activities over four different time periods. As Johnson explains in the preface, his aim was not to write a complete history of American covert action but rather to conduct a “meta-analysis… highlighting key illustrations of America secret operations abroad” (xii). As such he cannot cover every operation, and the analysis in the rest of the book rests on his choices. While most of these operations will be well known to the expert reader, his historical overview provides an informative and well-balanced introduction for the general reader. In chapters 3 and 4, which cover the early to mid-Cold War, Johnson makes a concerted effort to note the perspective of the leaders of various target countries. He shows why US leaders saw particular countries as Communist threats, despite the fact that their leaders were often nationalists, as was the case in Iran, Guatemala, and Indonesia. These two chapters highlight the recurring pattern of US policy being driven by a combination of anti-Communism and pro-business interests, which led to missed opportunities to work with nonaligned leaders, and in turn often drove the latter closer to the Soviet Union.
One of Johnson’s distinctive contributions is chapter 2’s detailed “Ladder of Clandestine Escalation,” which builds on work that he has previously done in laying out the range of activities included under the mantle of covert action.[44] Johnson’s ladder includes a series of no less than fifty-five rungs grouped into four thresholds of risk, with each rung categorized in terms of the type of operation, ranging from propaganda, to political activity, economic activity, and paramilitary activity. As Johnson explains, the ladder provides “a framework for understanding a series of practical and moral considerations presented to the United States” as its leaders move from considering low-risk propaganda activity through a series of operations posing increased risk and rising ethical implications, all the way to the top rung on the ladder, the use of weapons of mass destruction against an adversary, the last of which is thus far hypothetical (40). This detailed ladder also enables Johnson to assess the various operations he analyses in terms of where they fall on the ladder, enabling him to qualify and quantify the types of operations the US has used more and less frequently.
With fifty-five rungs, there will no doubt be quibbles about the relative rankings between some of the types of operations. Are “economic disruptions without loss of life” (Rung 24) really one step riskier than “operations carried out against a target nation or organization without a local allied faction,” (Rung 23) and one step less risky than “limited arm supplies to pro-Western nations for defensive balancing purposes” (Rung 25, 41)? It is difficult to say. But the overall framework and Johnson’s discussion of the issues entailed in moving up the ladder usefully highlight some of the nuances involved, particularly the point that these operations carry different levels of risk depending on the nature of the target state. For instance, while many studies highlight the difference between white, black, and gray propaganda,[45] Johnson notes that each presents a different risk proposition depending on whether it is aimed at adversarial, neutral, or friendly nations. There is a bit of imbalance in this chapter in that most of the rungs are covered by relatively short sections, most with examples, but then there is an extended discussion of assassination, some of which goes into the morality question which would seem to have been better placed in the chapter on ethics (chapter 9).
It is the later part of the book, though, that distinguishes it from other books on covert action.[46] In the last four chapters, which will be of most interest to the expert reader, Johnson analyzes the intricacies of intelligence legislation and the policy judgments involved in using covert action, and assesses the record of the US in terms of morality and success. Chapters 7 and 8 benefit from Johnson’s long experience not just as an academic, but also as a staff member for key investigative committees looking into covert action (the aforementioned Church Committee and the Aspin-Brown Commission).[47] In these chapters Johnson presents his key argument that in a democracy, even something as secretive as covert action must be subjected to the norm of democratic accountability. Chapter 7, “Legal Foundations,” provides an in-depth explanation of the institutional evolution of covert action during the early years of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The second half of the chapter provides a careful, explicit delineation of what each of the major intelligence laws have produced in the effort to bring covert action, and intelligence as a whole, into the realm of democratic governance. Beginning with what he appropriately terms the “Hughes-Ryan Watershed,” Johnson describes the 1974 Hughes-Ryan law as “majestic in its departure from previous practices that had been reliant on secret, and shifting, executive directives,” in that it introduced two key features to covert action policy: the notions of presidential accountability and Congressional awareness (181-182). Johnson then goes on to show how these criteria were further strengthened by the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 and that of 1991.
Chapter 8, “Decision Paths and Accountability,” is the most valuable one in the book. As implied by the title, Johnson takes the reader through what actually happens in the executive branch and then the legislative branch when a covert operation is being considered. His account provides considerably more detail and useful insight about the policy making-process than usually appears in accounts of covert action. For instance, the chart, “Decision and Reporting Paths for Covert Action, Established in 1975,” meticulously notes each body or official that has input into covert action proposals, from the president’s original finding, through the generation of ideas to implement the finding and the various levels of review on the executive branch side, including numerous steps within the CIA and the NSC (196). This chart and his explanation provide a fuller picture of how executive branch review works, at least in the ideal, than is usually found even in most academic accounts of covert action.[48] The combination of Johnson’s experience on Capitol Hill, his decades of academic study, and his access to numerous intelligence officials past and present, allows him to include important details such as that “a high percentage of proposals are canceled” at the stage of review by the NSC staff working group, and that for propaganda operations it is expected that the CIA will coordinate with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (200).
In the second half of the chapter dealing with the role of Congress, Johnson presents a useful discussion of the presidential finding process and how the executive branch has often tried to skirt its obligation to report covert actions to Congress by making presidential findings vague and broad. Johnson also effectively addresses two of the “canards” about covert action that have been a continuing theme among at least some in the executive branch ever since the Hughes-Ryan Act was passed in 1974. First, did the accountability process laid out in Hughes-Ryan unnecessarily slow down covert operations? His answer is no. And second, has Congress proved itself unable to maintain the necessary secrecy for these operations? Also no. For all of Johnson’s lauding of the importance of accountability for the democratic process, he also notes that even the best process is reliant on two key components. First, executive branch officials must abide by the process and cooperate with Congress. As highlighted in various places throughout the book, when officials act as the Reagan administration did during the Iran-Contra affair, and completely ignore Congress, there is not much the latter can do. The second necessary component is for the members of the House and Senate intelligence committees to be “sufficiently motivated to carry out their duties” (218). Given Johnson’s overall focus on the importance of the democratic process and of Congress’ role in that process, one area where he might have usefully provided more detail involves the reasons why conducting intelligence oversight is so difficult for members of Congress, including the steep learning curve involved, their required attention to numerous other issues, and the continual pressures of re-election.[49]
Chapter 9, “Drawing Bright Lines: Ethics and Covert Action,” is the most interesting in the book. As Johnson develops a set of ethical guidelines and then applies them to some of the cases he has covered, he provides the reader with much food for thought. He maintains that despite the “morally mottled nature of some intelligence activities,” there “is indeed a place for ethical considerations in the conduct of covert actions” (224). He begins by arguing that “an important distinction between the Western democracies and autocratic regimes, like Russia and China, is the more honorable approach to intelligence operations the West has normally—though by no means always—adopted” (224). While he contends that US covert action is more ethical than Russia’s, for instance, because the US is attempting to advance democracy while Moscow’s goal has been to destroy free societies, he does concede that in a “few” cases like Nicaragua, Chile, and Guatemala, that argument does not quite stand up (328 note 41).
Indeed, throughout the book there is a tension between Johnson’s frank assessments of some of the less savory covert operations of the US and his contention that US covert action and foreign policy are generally honorable. For instance, he draws attention to an episode where President John F. Kennedy approved a Department of Defense (DOD) plan to work with the South Vietnamese military in poisoning rice fields in South Vietnam that were controlled by the Viet Cong. He describes this as “a stunning departure from America’s championship of humane values in the world—an apparent singular, and deeply shameful, exception to this country’s normally honorable behavior in the conduct of its foreign affairs” (230). Similarly, when he discusses US interventions in Chile’s democracy (which he characterizes as one of the worst US covert actions in ethical terms), Johnson describes it as one of the exceptions to the United States’ “embrace of fellow democracies” and as one of “the misguided intrusions by the Agency against freely elected regimes in small nations, as with Guatemala and Nicaragua” (247). He posits that “these are embarrassments, surely; but they represent a small percentage of America’s full array of covert actions” (247). While Johnson certainly does not shy away from covering these operations, he often minimizes the numerous operations where the US has not lived up to his optimistic vision of it. Critics of US foreign policy can easily ask how many exceptions it will take to invalidate that vision.
In developing a list of ethical guidelines by which to judge the Third Option, Johnson’s starting point is his argument that “the principles of representative government” are “the soul of moral goodness in an open society” (227). Thus, his central criterion is whether an operation has been carefully reviewed by lawmakers, as required by law ever since the Hughes-Ryan Act, and not just by executive branch officials. He then combines this observation with the ethical guidelines laid out by two former CIA directors, William Webster and John Deutch. From Webster, Johnson adopts the criteria of whether the operations are consistent with US law, foreign policy, and values, and the so-called “front page” criterion of whether the American people would support a particular operation if it became public. From Deutch, Johnson adds the question of potential success. He then uses these criteria to rank the five best of America’s covert actions (Afghanistan 2001–2011 versus the Taliban and al-Qaeda; Afghanistan 1979–1989 versus the Soviet Union; Laos 1962–1968 protecting US soldiers in Vietnam; Italy 1947–1950; and Poland 1978–1991) and America’s five worst (Iran-Contra; Cuba 1960–1964; Congo 1960–1961; Chile 1962–1973; Syria 2013–2017).
Johnson’s assessment of the Iran-Contra episode highlights his predominantly legalistic approach to the question of morality. To Johnson, the multiple violations of US law that were involved place the Nicaraguan part of the operation on Rung 53 of his ladder of escalation (“an assault on the US Constitution,” 42), such that “only the covert use of WMD [weapons of mass destruction], along with involvement in a gross violation of human rights, surpass in immorality this alarming assault on the nation’s founding principles” (243). While the shocking illegality of Iran-Contra is starkly apparent, other operations that the US has conducted are more immoral, in the normative sense, even among the ones he covers in the book. For instance, he decries the poisoning of South Vietnamese rice paddies and the role of the US in the murder of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and he does include the Lumumba case as one of his five worst operations, but because of the criteria he uses, they rank as less immoral than Iran-Contra (245-246).
Another issue with Johnson’s ethical guidelines is that they do not give any consideration to the aftereffects of the operations. As Johnson himself notes in several places in the book, some of these operations have led to the US abandoning its local allies (e.g., the Hmong in Laos), and sometimes removing one government only to replace it with a worse, albeit anti-Communist, one (e.g., Chile). While Johnson laments and even criticizes these effects, one questions why these consequences of covert action are not included in his ethical criteria.
Johnson at times offers other moral judgments about particular cases without incorporating them in his overall guidelines. For instance, in discussing Iran-Contra, he suggests that Rung 45 on the ladder of escalation, a “small-scale coup d’état that includes a paramilitary component” (42) “can be morally acceptable if the regime target is reprehensible” (242). This introduces the notion that the characteristics of the target government have a role in determining whether or not an operation is ethically acceptable, a criterion which is not included in his ethical guidelines. This concept is implicit in his discussion of the various rungs of the ladder of escalation but the ethical criteria he uses should be clear and consistent throughout. He further contends, in discussing the Nicaraguan half of Iran-Contra, that “these were affairs for the people of Nicaragua to solve,” which raises the question of why he makes that point for Nicaragua and not for any of the other operations he discusses (243). He goes on to argue that the values of the American people do not include “intervening needlessly in the affairs of other nations,” which raises a similar question about why he interprets the Nicaraguan case this way but not others, and introduces a new facet for evaluating these operations without explaining the parameters of the term “needlessly” (243). Despite the questions raised here, and indeed because of them, I found his effort to develop and apply specific ethical criteria for covert action to be a valuable exercise in helping to think through these crucial nuances.
In the preface, Johnson notes that the central question the book is: “of what value has the [CIA] actually been in trying to contour global events” as a complement to the overt US foreign policy organizations such as State and DOD? (xi-xii). In his concluding chapter, “The Third Option Reconsidered,” he offers his final summation of the overall effect of American covert operations. He notes that while he has “sung the praises of some Third Options,” his judgment is that “far too many have proven feckless or, more alarmingly still, harmful to the global standing of the United States—and truly devastating to the target nations” (272). His assessment is rather more negative than perhaps one is expecting, but rings true as the endpoint of the tension in the book between his generally optimistic take on US policy and his candid assessments of the morality and effectiveness of US operations.
Review by Stephen Kinzer, Brown University
A central contradiction lies at the heart of all efforts to control intelligence agencies: Effective control requires openness, but covert action is secret. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has traditionally sought to tell Congress as little as possible. Few members of Congress want to know more. Given this reality, can there be any real legal control over covert action?
Loch Johnson, a renowned scholar who studies American intelligence from a legal and constitutional perspective,[50] offers a mixed answer. He portrays the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Amendment and the Intelligence Oversight Acts of 1980 and 1991, which imposed restrictions in intelligence gathering, as major achievements “invested with moral goodness” (224). Yet he accepts the reality that there can be no effective Congressional oversight of intelligence operations unless both the executive branch and Congress want it. Often, they do not.
Johnson’s book is an exploration of what he calls the “third option,” which is open to governments that cannot achieve their goals through either diplomacy or war (1-2). He defines it as “the use of ‘covert action’ as a means for secretly influencing world events” (xi). His thoughtful study is a welcome addition to the still-sparse literature on this subject. Stories of American coups and other covert operations have long been the stuff of popular histories. Now, they are being assessed with academic rigor. Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s pathbreaking 2018 book Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War helped deepen the field.[51] Johnson adds to it with a book that combines a grab-bag history of covert operations with sober reflections about whether American intelligence agencies can ever be made accountable to Congress. The Third Option is not a lament or a cry of rage, but a thoughtful and painstakingly even-handed account of Congressional efforts to impose the law on the CIA.
By Johnson’s account, there have been three “golden ages” for American covert action. The first came during the 1950s, when Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles’s relentless adventurism paired nicely with President Dwight Eisenhower’s strong support for covert operations. Next came the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan’s obsession with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua led him to extremes that ultimately produced the Iran-Contra scandal. The final and most gilded of the golden ages is right now: the post-9/11 era, in which threats are relentlessly inflated and the value of covert action routinely overstated.
The hinge on which this book turns is the effort by Congress to curb the CIA in the wake of scandals that exploded in the 1970s.[52] Johnson brings his expertise to a close description of Hughes-Ryan, an amendment to the 1974 Foreign Assistance Act that forbids the use of funds for covert operations “unless and until the President finds that each such operation is important to the national security of the United States and reports, in a timely fashion, a description and scope of such operation to the appropriate committees of Congress.” He describes this and the two subsequent Intelligence Oversight Acts, which sharpened reporting requirements and stipulated that all secret operations be approved by the president, as attempts to promote “a culture of law and morality” at the CIA (265). No doubt they have had an effect. Congressional committees now review covert operations in ways that would have horrified Eisenhower and Dulles. Yet, as Johnson admits, Congressional restrictions have not substantially changed CIA culture. Perhaps no law can.
In the end, intelligence oversight may be based less on law than on the will of individuals. Johnson applauds the requirement that the CIA notify Congress of presidential “findings” that authorize covert action. He reports, however, that in practice the findings are often “so vague as to permit almost any approach” (203). Iran-Contra showed that presidents do not always feel fully constrained by the law when it comes to covert action. “The most elaborate rules for covert action proved to be of no avail in stopping an administration hell-bent on having its way in that instance, regardless of the law,” Johnson writes. “It was a lesson from antiquity—the writings of Plato and Aristotle among others—that officials of good character in high office are an essential ingredient for constitutional government to work” (204).
Later Johnson asserts that “it is incumbent upon voters” to choose leaders who will effectively monitor the CIA (212). He urges Americans to “encourage their elected officials to support a more judicious use of covert action” (276). If that is the best hope, the US is probably doomed. Voters rarely focus on such issues. Johnson pairs his judicious account of intelligence reforms with an admission that they can only work if both Congress and the White House want them to work. Yet at the CIA, as he observes, accountability “may as well have been an ancient Greek word that no one in the Directorate wanted to look up in the Oxford English Dictionary” (177).
Real accountability, Johnson writes, depends on “executive cooperation and legislative motivation” (219). Both have traditionally been in short supply in the US. Lawrence White, who was Allen Dulles’s administrative aide during the 1950s, recalled hearings at which Senator Richard Russell, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, or Representative Clarence Cannon, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, would interrupt Dulles’s testimony to say, “Now don’t tell us about that if we don’t need to know.” “Clarence Cannon more often than not would say, ‘Now there is one question I want to ask. Do you have enough money to do your business properly?’ And Dulles would say, ‘I think, Mr. Chairman, I have asked for as much as I can spend wisely. If I get into trouble, I will come back to your committee.’ And Cannon would bang his gavel, ‘Meeting adjourned.” That was that.”[53]
Johnson urges us to recognize “the central place that process must claim in any free society” (258), but ruefully concedes that in the intelligence world, process is often overwhelmed by “the nature of the human mind” (251). Placing legal restrictions on covert action is a good idea. History suggests, however, that it is delusional to expect presidents and overseers of intelligence agencies to respect those restrictions fully and at all times. The effort to pass Hughes-Ryan and the two Intelligence Oversight Acts was worthwhile and commendable. Their effect, however, has been more modest than some in Congress had hoped.
Johnson’s run-through of highlights and lowlights in the history of American intervention is uneven. His accounts of the 1999 bombing of Serbia (“diplomacy was not going to resolve Serbian aggression” (141) and covert action in Syria (which was launched not because Syria defied the United States but “because of the harboring by its government of terrorists and its engagement in acts of barbarism against dissenters among its own citizens,” 145) feel superficial. Edward Lansdale, a premier American covert operative in the 1950s and 1960s, merits just a single paragraph. The name of Senator Mike Mansfield, who during the 1950s proposed a Congressional “watchdog commission” to review CIA operations, does not appear in the index.
A few distracting errors complement those omissions. Eisenhower became President in 1953, not 1951 (78). The Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini spent one year in exile in Paris, not fifteen (81). Deposed President Saddam Hussein of Iraq was tried by Iraqis, not “by a US military tribunal” (149). Liberation theology was a leftist movement within the Catholic Church, not an anti-Communist policy championed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (91). The Dulles brothers were not “consultants and investors” at the legendary Sullivan & Cromwell law firm, but partners (79).[54]
Johnson astutely singles out one of the greatest obstacles to true control over intelligence activities: the compulsive activism that is woven into the CIA ethos. Since the days of Allen Dulles, station chiefs have been judged by how many operations they run. Indeed, the CIA was founded in 1947 partly because Dulles and others who had run covert operations during World War II were unbearably bored back at their law firms and investment banks and itching to get back into action. Johnson quotes a deputy CIA director as wondering, “What do you do with the fire horses when there’s no fire?” Then he adds his own observation: “Tough, combat-ready intelligence officers are good to have around in times of emergency; however, they are often restless, happy only when they are parachuting out of aircraft, scaling enemy walls, crawling through jungles on their belies, and shooting long guns at commies or terrorists. What does one do with these warriors during normal times?” (39) Often the answer has been to let those officers dream up ever more operations, trusting that Langley will approve and no one in Congress will seriously inquire. As Johnson puts it: “‘No can do’ is simply not an acceptable response to most national security operatives” (261).
At the beginning of his book, Johnson asks “what clandestine methods, if any, should be considered beyond the pale of acceptability for the United States” (xiii). Later he offers some of his own answers. He believes that as a general principle, “the United States should reject the use of high-risk covert interventions that have a strong chance of leading down a pathway toward violent outcomes that involve the death of innocents” (63). He disapproves of targeted assassination—citing the example of Iranian General Kassim Soleimani—because “in that direction lies global anarchy” (161). He concludes that drone attacks “have been ordered too often,” (256) and wishes that the CIA would “leave such ‘kinetic’ activities as drone hunting to the military” (155). With the measured understatement that runs through this carefully balanced study, he longs for a day when “the opacity of long-range outcomes” will lead intelligence agencies “to ponder, more deeply than is often the case, what might go wrong over the horizon with a proposed operation” (237).
“The Third Option should be resorted to only in a few specific situations,” Johnson writes. He continues, “these include when the United States is faced with an imminent threat; when paramilitary operations might usefully assist the Pentagon in times of authorized US overt warfare; and when the Third Option might thwart terrorist activities aimed at the United States and its allies” (258). There seems little chance that the American security establishment and “intelligence community” will allow themselves to be restricted this way. As Johnson points out, covert action “promises a quicker remedy to problems overseas than diplomacy” (6). That promise has led the United States to repeated intelligence catastrophes. Countries from Guatemala to Iran to the Congo are still living with the immense trauma that has followed CIA covert action. Diplomacy takes time, and even when it succeeds, it rarely brings complete victory. Covert action appeals more to the impatience of policy makers who want immediate results and do not think much about long-term consequences.
Johnson’s conclusions are notably mild. After citing various views about the efficacy of covert action, he offers his own: “America’s secret approach to foreign policy objectives has been useful in its paramilitary forms as a supplement to overt American warfare” (256). Most puzzlingly, he calls US operations in Afghanistan, which have often been considered a disaster from almost every perspective,[55] “a shining example” of effective cooperation between the military and CIA (256).
Johnson begins his book by asserting that the United States has three options in dealing with the world: diplomacy, war, and covert action. He ends with an inspiring call for “a Fourth Option: the virtue of leading by example. This means doing the right thing that others, at home and abroad, will respect and admire: acting with a dignity and patience that befits the world’s oldest and strongest democracy; staying within the white lines of law and propriety; keeping the high moral ground by pursuing a principled relationship with other nations…becoming again the beacon of hope and democratic ideals that it once as for freedom-loving peoples everywhere.”
Laws can help lead us toward that goal. As Johnson makes clear, however, legality has only a limited meaning in the intelligence world. A true course change in American foreign policy would require concerted pressure from voters, leading to a new crop of leaders or at least a new set of attitudes in Washington. That seems highly unlikely. Johnson calls covert action the “third option.” For many in Washington, it remains the first and the most attractive one.
Response by Loch K. Johnson, University of Georgia, emeritus
I am grateful to each of the H-Diplo Roundtable reviewers for their commentary on The Third Option: Covert Action and American Foreign Policy. I am thankful, as well, to Dan Hart for his good service in managing this exchange of ideas. Having written several critiques myself in this venue, I know how much time and effort is involved in these reviews. Each of us is a willing volunteer for this duty because we understand how valuable these forums are to our community of scholars. It is never an easy assignment, though, and sincere thanks are warranted.
I wrote this volume for an obvious reason: this is an important national security topic. Most students of US foreign policy would agree, even noting (as Stephen Kinzer does in his review) that for many in Washington, D.C., the “third option” is often selected as the “first option” in America’s relations with other nations. The topic has spawned a rich literature and I have benefitted greatly from what colleagues in International Relations (IR) have written on this subject in recent decades.[56] Further, I have learned from the excellent comments the reviewers offer in the critiques presented here. Let me turn to those reviews and respond briefly, proceeding in alphabetical order of those who participated.
Katy Doll provides a first-rate summary of the study and believes, as I do, that the words “ethics” and “intelligence” are not oxymorons when used in association. She is also interested, as I am, in the matter of propaganda as a foreign policy tool, in both the forms of covert action and overt dissemination. She offers useful source material for those who share this interest and on related topics. I look forward to reading her new book on US covert propaganda and psychological warfare from the 1950s–1970s, which will focus especially on the Korean and Vietnam wars.[57]
Barbara Elias also well summarizes my core argument in her review. As she puts it with admirable economy, “Covert operations should be kept on hand for US policymakers, but with persistent oversight, and scrutiny, and skepticism.” She, too, is interested in the moral dimensions of covert action. She suggests that President John F. Kennedy’s concern about “getting caught” in a US effort to taint Cuban sugar that was bound for the Soviet Union represented, in a way, a moral concern about US reputational standing in the world. That would have been a good ethical argument for the president to have made, but my sense is that he worried mostly about the reputation of his own administration. Despite the fact that I personally liked the Kennedy family, and that Kennedy’s stirring rhetoric turned me away from medical school and toward political science, I reached this conclusion based upon my reading of declassified National Security Council (NSC) documents. Kennedy’s personal concerns were even more visible in the Vietnamese case of poisoning rice paddies. In this instance, though, he approved the operations despite his misgivings about whether, if revealed, this would stain his administration’s reputation—which it certainly would have.
Elias makes a good additional point about my “shifting sands” metaphor. It certainly was not my intention to succumb to an “orientalist metaphor.” I shall be on guard against this impression in the future—now that I know what it is. I appreciate her sensitive reading of the book and the inspiration to give the moral aspects of this topic deeper thought in subsequent research.[58]
David Hadley writes with first-rate insights into one of my favorite subjects: the relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA or Agency) and the American press.[59] With respect to The Third Option, he highlights my focus on the legal framework for covert action by the United States, along with the role of Congress in conducting its accountability over the Intelligence Community. Along with my musing on morality, his review captures my primary focal points in this book.
I wish I had made the chronology clearer in the Chilean case study, because Hadley is correct: Chilean General René Schneider was gunned down in 1970 and President Salvador Allende committed suicide three years later in 1973. These were two quite separate events. I was aware of this sequence, having been involved (as Senator Frank Church’s aide) in the Senate investigation into this plan, inspired by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile. In this book, though, I should have made this timing clearer. The connection between the two events is a wide array of CIA covert actions. Early in the coup attempts, the Agency had supported the insurrectionists who killed Schneider, along with others who eventually pushed Allende into taking his own life.
And, yes, the CIA’s “stay-behind” capabilities were based in Western Europe; it was their potential targets that were located in Eastern Europe. On the “demise” of famed counterinsurgent Lt. Col. Edward G. Lansdale, this again involves poor wording on my behalf. I meant his political demise in Washington circles after his lack of success in Operation Mongoose in Cuba during the Kennedy years. He tried hard to reclaim his stature during the Vietnam War years, but never succeeded. As Hadley notes, he died of natural causes in 1987. Finally, what I had in mind with the mention of the Department of Defense (DOD, 171) was its lineage stretching back to 1787, when the Founders created the War Department—the DOD’s precursor—as the nation’s second Cabinet department (a few months after the State Department). This venerability gives DOD and the Secretary of Defense (SecDef) a certain cachet in government circles, though its huge funding successes stem most significantly from the Department’s skill over the years in cultivating ties on Capitol Hill. Clearly important, too, in establishing the SecDef as an 800-pound gorilla in the D.C. bureaucracy is the special nature of the DOD mission to protect the nation through the bravery of Americans in uniform. I was also delighted to read the quotation from Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Bill Colby, which I had not run across. I appreciate Hadley’s many good observations.
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones notes that: “Ethics are important for Johnson.” Then later he states that I am “less concerned with moral or philosophical distinctions than…with rules and regulations.” I think those two statements are correct and compatible. After all, aren’t a society’s rules and regulations a reflection of its underlying moral and philosophical beliefs? I would enjoy having a further friendly debate over this in person.
Jeffreys-Jones’s comment on my copyediting was bang on. I was furious. I no doubt made mistakes of my own, but it is the worst copyediting I have experienced. And Oxford University Press’s copyediting team was based in the United Kingdom, where they actually speak proper English. I thank all of the reviewers for their tolerance on what was probably an above average number of typos.
Jeffreys-Jones mentions Kathryn S. Olmsted’s research. I disagree with Olmstead’s analysis of the Church Committee: namely, that the panel failed to challenge the secret government. The members of the secret government clearly felt challenged by the Committee.[60] The laws and new regulations that now govern the Intelligence Community all have their roots in the Church Committee inquiry, which Beverly Gage and Paul Light have both referred to as a model congressional investigation.[61] Jeffreys-Jones says that I “fight shy of an explicit assessment of her work.” That is true in this book, but see elsewhere my detailed critique of Olmstead’s Church Committee assessment.[62] As for Senator Patrick Moynihan, I don’t mention him in this particular book either, but he is featured in some other studies of mine.[63] I think that Moynihan was wrongminded to suggest that the CIA’s doors should be permanently shut, and incorrect in his view that the Agency had failed to closely track the decline of the Soviet Union from 1989–1991.[64] The professor-turned-senator was a brilliant individual, though, with whom I had the privilege of serving with on the Democratic Party Platform Committee during the 1976 presidential election. I will always have the highest regard for his public service and his scholarly achievements. On Iran and Guatemala, I agree. I think I do point out what long-range disasters these covert interventions were; but I was trying to make the point that, at the time, the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the CIA, and many others believed these were significant covert action victories and a model for future US foreign policy successes. The Bay of Pigs debacle threw cold water on that idea, although the illusion continued to exist in some quarters (one thinks of DCI William “Wild Bill” Casey during the Reagan years).
Yes, the CIA contributed strongly to global anti-Americanism during the 1960s (a thought captured in a drawing on page 58). As I write in the book, though, I do think that on balance some operations have made sense, as in Laos—although this covert action also had its share of dubious features, such as the fate of the Hmong. Shifting to the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, had I been in charge of that operation, the orders to the Navy Seal team would have been to capture him alive. This would have allowed the al-Qaeda leader to have a fair trial, ideally by way of an International Criminal Tribunal in the manner of the brutal Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, whose trial lasted from 2002 until his death in 2006.[65]
Jeffreys-Jones’s books and articles have had a deep and positive influence on my research and writing.[66] Words of thanks on this page are inadequate to convey how much his insights have meant to me over the years, including in this review.
Jennifer Kibbe is another researcher whose work (on congressional oversight of intelligence) has shaped my own thinking in many ways.[67] In her review of The Third Option, I like the notion of providing more detail on the reasons why the conduct of intelligence oversight is so difficult for lawmakers. I should have addressed that core topic more fully. The initial list presented in her review provides a solid perspective on this vital subject. I tackle the matter a bit more in my Spy Watching book, but I should have provided additional material in this covert action study as well—and I would have relied significantly on the Kibbe’s findings.[68]
I ranked the Iran-Contra scandal as more immoral than some of the other cases because it was such a comprehensive assault on constitutional government in America. It tore deeply into the fabric of the nation’s democracy. Moreover, the Contra side of this affair supported paramilitary operations in Nicaragua that killed many innocent men, women, and children.[69] The poisoned rice paddies in Vietnam, and the savage murder of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba, were (among other examples) horrifying, too, and were disgraceful episodes in American foreign policy. These excessive covert actions bunch together as something more akin to what a dictator like Russian president Vladimir Putin would order than an American president. Yet Iran-Contra is in a class by itself. Nevertheless, Kibbe’s comments have prodded me into further thinking on these important moral dimensions of the third option. As Jeffreys-Jones put it in his review, my book “offers a framework for debate,” and the moral differentiations I offer could certainly afford (like the rungs on my Escalation Ladder) ongoing scrubbing.
I also really like Kibbe’s idea of a greater concentration on the “aftereffects” of covert actions. That should be an important part of any ethical schema for evaluating the morality of this secret approach to foreign policy. And that is another good point about the people of Nicaragua. If they should have been allowed to decide their own fate (as I propose), why not other people around the globe? In some instances, though, the odds are too heavily weighed against a fair fight. In such cases, where democracy and freedom are on the line, perhaps there is a role for creating a more favorable opportunity for advocates of democracy to take their stand—say, to take a current example, by “secretly” supplying weaponry and intelligence to the Ukrainian fighting forces. In this manner, locals in a country may be able eventually to decide on the degree of freedom in their future—without being bulldozed in advance by a neighboring superpower. This argument can be a slippery slope, I acknowledge, and it warrants more evaluation.
Yes, on the whole, I do end up with a negative assessment of US covert actions, though one that is less critical than that of my mentor Frank Church. He was right, though, that a more discriminating foreign policy would be in order, including a more reserved reliance on secret interventions overseas. I thank Kibbe for her comments.
Stephen Kinzer has kept us well informed for a long time about the inner workings of the US foreign policy establishment—especially the machinations that have led to some of America’s most well-known covert interventions abroad. One of my favorite books, among several of his, is Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.[70]
I respectfully disagree, though, with his notion that “Congressional restrictions have not substantially changed CIA culture.” I think the Church Committee, followed by the daily work of the intelligence oversight panels that the Committee helped to create, have had a profound effect on behavior at the CIA and its companion spy agencies. True, the system of accountability inspired by the Church panel inquiry failed miserably in preventing the Iran-Contra affair. The existence of the New Oversight, though, allowed lawmakers to straighten out these excesses once they became known through a media leak in the Middle East. Moreover, Iran-Contra taught overseers a lesson: be less trustworthy of powerholders when they claim to be innocent, as did National Security Advisers Robert C. McFarlane and Admiral John M. Poindexter, plus their top aide Lt. Col. Oliver L. North. When rumors first arose in Washington about these violations of the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 and the Boland Amendments prohibiting aggressive covert actions in Nicaragua, they adamantly denied these uses of covert action.
It is true, also, that the Senate and House oversight committees have not always operated well, but when one panel has faltered (for example, the House Committee under the slack leadership of Representative Devin Nunes), its counterpart has usually filled the gap—and vice versa. Just as flying in an airplane with two engines is wiser than reliance on just one engine, so too is a set of oversight panels, with one in each chamber of Congress. DCI Richard Helms and others fiercely, but unsuccessfully, opposed this plan on grounds of efficiency. They wanted a single Joint Committee on Intelligence, since one panel would be easier to co-opt than two.
The system of intelligence accountability inspired by the Church Committee is hardly perfect, but it is—by leaps and bounds—an improvement over the pre-1975 situation. The Hughes-Ryan briefings to Congress on presidentially-endorsed covert actions are serious gatherings and bring a semblance of democracy inside the covert action process—a degree of democracy unseen before in any other country, now or in the past. Further, the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 and 1991 are positively amazing, compared to what is found in any other open society now or in the past. Again, there is no perfect system here. Accountability—across the board in the United States’ government—remains a work in progress. Intelligence accountability has been lacking in some ways, but headed in the right direction. A next major step would be to amend the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004, so that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has a chance to succeed in integrating the collection-and-analysis—and accountability—of all eighteen agencies in today’s Intelligence Community.
As for some reliance on the people (the voters), that is what democracy is all about. The nation’s influencers—the media, writers, academics, interest group leaders, local public figures and citizen activists—do need to make their views known to the sitting government and political candidates about the importance of government accountability, not only in intelligence matters but also for all of America’s public policy endeavors. Actor Ed Helms’s new podcast, SNAFU, which focuses on government lapses and what might be done about them, is a constructive step in that direction.[71] So too are Kinzer’s outstanding books.
On omissions, Kinzer thinks that the covert action operative Edward Lansdale warranted more than a one-page mention in the book. Lansdale is indeed a fascinating figure. So is CIA Associate Deputy Director for Operations Ted “The Ghost” Shackley, and CIA Chief of Counterintelligence Jim Angleton, both of whom were leading influencers on covert action over the years. The treatment of them is limited here, too. I had to avoid the temptation of including lengthy biographies of key figures since that would have resulted in a different kind of book. On Lansdale, I would note that (in my view) he had early notable covert action successes in the Philippines and Vietnam (prior to America’s major military escalation there after 1965), but he was far less effective when the US warfighting in Indochina really took flight. Nor had he succeeded earlier in Operation Mongoose against President Fidel Castro in Cuba. Since there are entire books written about him, I thought that a paragraph was about right in this broad survey of covert actions.[72]
On the error front, unbelievably, I did know that Eisenhower was elected in 1952. I regret the “1951” misprint, as I do the notion of a fifteen-year exile for Iranian Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini in Paris. He did have a fifteen-year absence from Iran, but in three different countries: Turkey (briefly), Iraq (mostly), and France—with only about a year in Paris preceding his victorious return to Iran in 1979. On another matter, I had the nature of the court that tried Iraq’s president Saddam Hussein incorrect; it was indeed an Iraqi tribunal (although its degree of independence from the US military remains an interesting question). On “liberation theology,” the Catholic Church faction oriented toward aiding the poor in Guatemala and elsewhere and was indeed more aligned with a Marxist approach to world politics—quite the opposite from the anti-communist Weltanschauung of the Dulles brothers. So I should have said something like: “…preached a gospel of anti-liberation theology, anti-communism, and rollback for Eastern Europe…” And, yes, Secretary of State John Foster and DCI Allen Dulles were both law partners at Cromwell & Sullivan. I was aware of that from Kinzer’s own books, but failed here to use that more powerful description of their backgrounds.[73] I thank him for catching these mistakes.
While Kibbe found my assessment of covert action “rather negative,” Kinzer concludes that my views are “notably mild.” He points to—and disagrees with—my statement that the CIA-military joint offensive against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan immediately following the 9/11 tragedy represented a “shining example” of their ability of the two to operate well together in a major paramilitary operation. I still think that this is correct in terms of that fast-moving initial victory over the Taliban that drove its members from Kabul. Obviously, though, the overall outcome of America’s presence in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 was, as he notes, a “disaster,” with an astonishingly bumbling evacuation from that country in 2021.
Finally, as Kinzer observes, sometimes the third option seems more like the first option in the minds of some Washington policymakers. That is why we need serious critiques of covert action, in hopes of educating future leaders about the limitations of this approach. This is exactly what the participants in this book discussion have been offering so well during the course of their professional lives. I thank the reviewers one and all. Their reviews have been enlightening. I wish they had been my co-authors; it would have been a better book.
[1] Executive Order 10/2, 18 June 1948, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d292.
[2] Executive Order 10/2, 18 June 1948.
[3] James H. Doolittle, et al, “Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency,” 30 September 1954, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86B00269R000100040001-5.pdf.
[4] Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1976).
[5] Loch Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985).
[6] Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
[7] Jennifer Kibbe, “Conducting Shadow Wars,” Journal of National Security Law and Policy 5:2 (2012): 373-392.
[8] Barbara Elias, Why Allies Rebel: Defiant Local Partners in Counterinsurgency Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
[9] David Hadley, Rising Clamor: The American Press, The Central Intelligence Agency, and the Cold War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019).
[10] Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (New York: Doubleday, 1982).
[11] Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt, 2019).
[12] Kinzer cites James Srodes, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999), 451.
[13] A fragment of CIA’s briefing of the House Armed Services CIA subcommittee in advance of Bay of Pigs has been partially declassified for years. See David M. Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2005), 440-445. A memo about the Agency’s briefing of Cannon’s subcommittee on Bay of Pigs seems never to have been declassified, but is cited in passing in a footnote in an unpublished Agency internal history. See Jack Pfeiffer, Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, Vol. 3, 372, n. 34, https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-10301-10004.pdf. For an egregious example of keeping Cannon’s oversight secret into the twenty-first century, see the long memorandum, “DCI briefing of subcommittee…”, 6 November 1963, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP82R00025R000300180001-3.pdf.
[14] For an example of a work on US covert action in Latin America that goes into more depth on some of these topics, see Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic (New York: Picador, 2006). For more on Guatemala specifically, see Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
[15] For example, James Bond is hardly creating propaganda posters in print or on screen. Perhaps the most famous early Cold War propaganda-adjacent fictional work is The Manchurian Candidate, which relies on “brain washing” rather than typical overt or covert propaganda messaging. Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate New York: McGraw Hill, 1959); John Frankenheimer, dir., The Manchurian Candidate (Los Angeles: United Artists, 1962); Johnathan Demme, dir., The Manchurian Candidate (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 2004).
[16] Influence operations encompass a variety of actions all designed to influence a particular target. This can include disseminating propaganda to support your view, demoralize or divide the enemy, or otherwise use information to achieve your goal. See for example Pascal Bragnetto and Matthijs A. Veenendaal, “Influence Cyber Operations: The Use of Cyberattacks in Support of Influence Operations,” in Nikolaos Pissanidis, Henry Rõigas, and Matthijs Veenendaal, eds., Cyber Power: 2016 8th International Conference on Cyber Conflict (CyCon) (Tallinn, Estonia, 2016), 113-126. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/7524181/proceeding
[17] Loch Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985).
[18] Some studies have examined case studies and others have suggested possible directives for future US action. See “Case Study: Countering ISIS Propaganda in Conflict Theatres” in Louk Faesen, Tim Sweijs, Alexander Klimburg, Conor McNamara and Michael Mazarr, From Blurred Lines to Red Lines: How Counter Measures and Norms Shape Hybrid Conflict (Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, 2020), https://hcss.nl/report/from-blurred-lines-to-red-lines-how-countermeasures-and-norms-shape-hybrid-conflict/; Joe Cheravitch, “From Leaflets to ‘Likes’” in Samuel Bendett, Stephen Blank, Joe Cheravitch, Michael B. Petersen and Andreas Turunen, Improvisation and Adaptability in the Russian Military (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2020), https://www.csis.org/analysis/improvisation-and-adaptability-russian-military; Kara Frederick, “The New War of Ideas: Counterterrorism Lessons for the Digital Disinformation Fight,” (Center for a New American Security, 2019).
[19] Loch Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), and Johnson, National Security Intelligence: Secret Operations in Defense of the Democracies (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012)
[20] Johnson, “Drawing a Bright Line for Covert Operations,” American Journal of International Law 86 (April 1992): 284-309; and Johnson, Secret Agencies: US Intelligence in a Hostile World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
[21] Gregory Treverton, Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
[22] William Daugherty, Executive Secrets: Covert Action and the Presidency (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004).
[23] The views expressed within are those of the author and do not represent the policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the US Government.
[24] For example, David Hadley, The Rising Clamor: The Central Intelligence Agency, the American Press, and the Cold War (University Press of Kentucky, 2019).
[25] The role of James Bond in particular, both as a shaper and a reflection of attitudes regarding intelligence, is something of an interesting subfield. For two notable examples see Jeremy Black, “The Geopolitics of James Bond,” Intelligence and National Security 19:2, 2004, 290-303; Trevor McCrisken and Christopher Moran, “James Bond, Ian Fleming and Intelligence: Breaking Down the Boundary Between the ‘Real’ and the ‘Imagined,’” Intelligence and National Security 33:6 (2018), 804-821.
[26] Some examples of activities that might fall under such a category can be found in Vince Houghton, Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Plots Left on the Drawing Board (New York: Penguin, 2019).
[27] As past and present operations in Italy were revealed in the 1970s, for example, one US Ambassador lamented “the Soviet Union, and the [Italian Communist Party] …could not have worked up a propaganda campaign that would be even fractionally as helpful to them as the one we are giving them for nothing.” See Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume E-15, Part 2, Western Europe, 1973-76, ed. Kathleen B. Rasmussen (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2021), Document 362.
[28] Loch Johnson, Secret Agencies: US Intelligence in a Hostile World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
[29] William Colby, interview by George Lardner, 20 June 1975, 14, George Lardner Papers, Box 18, Folder 3: CIA–Chile, undated, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, quoted in Hadley, Rising Clamor, 1.
[30] Similar minor errors recur throughout the work, mainly concentrated in the historical overview. For example, Johnson also identifies “stay-behind” operations as taking place in Eastern Europe rather than Western Europe (35); claims the famous counterinsurgent Lt. Col. Edward G. Lansdale, who died of natural causes in 1987, “met his demise” during Operation Mongoose (72); and identifies the Department of Defense, founded as the National Military Establishment in 1947 and given its current name in 1949, as “part of the government since 1789,” (171).
[31] While Oxford University Press did produce an attractively packaged book, their copyediting was not up to the standard that their author deserves. To give a few examples, on page 95, “apprehend” should be “apprehended;” the CIA headquarters is in Langley, Virginia, not “Langley, Langley” (233); “conservations” should be “conversations” (332, note 47); and the index entry for Ho Chi Minh has him at page(s) “104-104.”
[32] The scale of escalation is a concept that appears in two works, the first referred to several times in The Third Option, the second not at all: David Omand and Mark Phythian, Principles Spying: The Ethics of Secret Intelligence (Washington, D.C: Georgetown University Press, 2018), and Ross Bellaby, The Ethics of Intelligence: A New Framework (Abington: Routledge, 2014). For the famous observation about the litigious nature of Americans, see J.H. St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986 [1783]), 166-168.
[33] Bellaby, Ethics of Intelligence.
[34] Barrett argued that Congress’s role in overseeing the early CIA has been underrated, in part because congressional oversight subcommittees cooperated with the agency in protecting secrecy with the result that the development of oversight remained an unseen and untold story: David M. Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 4, 458-463. Johnson credits Barrett with having unearthed new evidence, and with being a “master at searching through dusty governmental archives” (326, n.17).
[35] Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1996), 9.
[36] Diary entry by Ambassador Moynihan, 6 August 1974, quoted in Paul M. McGarr, “’Do We Need the CIA?’ Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Central Intelligence Agency and US Foreign Policy,” History, 100:2 (April 2015), 276; Senator Moynihan remarks promoting S. 126, the Abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency Act, Congressional Record, Senate, 104 Cong., 2 sess., vol. 141, S376-377.
[37] Blair was no abolitionist. His tenure coincided with US President Barack Obama’s first year in the White House. It was a time when, in the words of one authority, the CIA “undertook more lethal drone strikes than it had in the previous eight years of the Bush administration”: Christopher J. Fuller, See It/Shoot It: The Secret History of the CIA’s Lethal Drone Program (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 213.
[38] Malcolm Muggeridge, “Books,” Esquire 68 (September 1967), 12.
[39] Thomas B. Morgan, the future New York radio and TV mogul, toured the world in the 1960s and concluded that CIA interventions were the prime reason for hatred of the United States: Morgan, The Anti-Americans (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 9–10.
[40] Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The American Left: Its Impact on Politics and Society Since 1900 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 11-12.
[41] See the comments by two CIA veterans: David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 35, and William E. Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 127-128.
[42] Loch Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985).
[43] For example, Johnson, National Security Intelligence: Secret Operations in Defense of the Democracies (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012) and Johnson, Secret Agencies: US Intelligence in a Hostile World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
[44] Johnson, “On Drawing a Bright Line for Covert Operations,” American Journal of International Law 86:2 (April 1992): 284-309; and Johnson, Secret Agencies: US Intelligence in a Hostile World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
[45] Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1999).
[46] John Nutter, The CIA’s Black Ops: Covert Action, Foreign Policy, and Democracy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000).
[47] Johnson, The Threat on the Horizon: An Inside Account of America’s Search for Security after the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
[48] William Daugherty, Executive Secrets: Covert Action and The Presidency (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004).
[49] See, for example, Jennifer D. Kibbe, “Congressional Oversight of Intelligence: Is the Solution Part of the Problem?” Intelligence and National Security 25:1 (2010): 24-49; Amy B. Zegart, Eyes on Spies: Congress and the United States Intelligence Community (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2011); Johnson, Spy Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
[50] For example, Loch Johnson, National Security Intelligence: Secret Operations in Defense of the Democracies (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012) and Johnson, Secret Agencies: US Intelligence in a Hostile World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
[51] Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018).
[52] Johnson was a special assistant to the chair of the Senate Select Committee House Subcommittee on Intelligence (the Church Committee) from 1975 to 1976. See Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985).
[53] James Srodes, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999), 451.
[54] See Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (New York: Time Books, 2013).
[55] See, for example, Frank Sobchak and Matthew Zais, “The Army Needs to Understand the Afghanistan Disaster,” Wall Street Journal, 8 September 2021; https://www.wsj.com/articles/army-disaster-war-on-terror-in-afghanistan-investigation-report-iraq-11631133825, and “The Tragedy of Afghanistan,” New York Times, 15 August 2021; https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/opinion/afghanistan-taliban.html.
[56] See, for instance, W. Michael Reisman and James E. Baker, Regulating Covert Action (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); and Gregory F. Treverton, Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
[57] See, also, Katy Doll, “Propaganda,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Military History, ed. Roy Kaushik (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199791279/obo-9780199791279-0194.xml; and her review of Mervyn Edwin Roberts III, The Psychological War for Vietnam, 1960-1968 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018) in Journal of Military History 83:1 (January 2019): 290-291.
[58] See, also, Barbara Elias, “Why the Taliban Won’t Quit al Qaeda: Don’t Expect the Taliban to Compromise their Terrorist Allies,” Foreign Policy 21 September 2021; and her Why Allies Rebel: Defiant Local Partners in Counterinsurgency Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
[59] David Hadley, The Rising Clamor: The Central Intelligence Agency, the American Press, and the Cold War (University Press of Kentucky, 2019). For my own modest musings on this topic, see Loch K. Johnson, America’s Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 182-206.
[60] See, for example, CIA Director at the time William E. Colby, “After Investigating U.S. Intelligence,” New York Times 26 February 1976: A30.
[61] Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (New York: Viking, 2022), 729; Paul C. Light, Government by Investigation: Congress, the President, and the Search for Answers (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2014), 193.
[62] Johnson, Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, and Thugs: Intelligence and America’s Quest for Security (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 205-208.
[63] Johnson, Secret Agencies: US Intelligence in a Hostile World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 164, 187; and Johnson, Spy Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 286.
[64] On the question of the CIA’s competence in tracking this decline, see Johnson, Secret Agencies, 187-193.
[65] Timothy William Waters, The Milosevic Trial (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[66] See, for instance, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA & American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); and his Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[67] See, for example, Jennifer D. Kibbe, “The Rise of the Shadow Warriors,” Foreign Affairs 83:2 (2004): 102-115.
[68] See, for instance, Kibbe, “Congressional Oversight of Intelligence: Is the Solution Part of the Problem?” Intelligence and National Security 25:1 (2010), 24-49.
[69] See the moving documentary on this ill-fated covert action, narrated by journalist Bill Moyers, “The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis,” WNET and WETA Public Television (1987).
[70] Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt, 2019).
[71] Ed Helms, “SNAFU,” https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-snafu-with-ed-helms-102539700/
[72] Most recently: Max Boot, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (New York: Norton, 2018).
[73] Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (New York: Time Books, 2013).