How To Stage A Coup E-Book

Rory Cormac

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

'A compelling history of the dark arts of statecraft... Fascinating' Jonathan Rugman 'Rich in anecdote and detail.' The Times Today's world is in flux. Competition between the great powers is back on the agenda and governments around the world are turning to secret statecraft and the hidden hand to navigate these uncertain waters. From poisonings to electoral interference, subversion to cyber sabotage, states increasingly operate in the shadows, while social media has created new avenues for disinformation on a mass scale. This is covert action: perhaps the most sensitive - and controversial - of all state activity. However, for all its supposed secrecy, it has become surprisingly prominent - and it is something that has the power to affect all of us. In an enthralling and urgent narrative packed with real-world examples, Rory Cormac reveals how such activity is shaping the world and argues that understanding why and how states wield these dark arts has never been more important.

Leseprobe

HOW TOSTAGEA COUP

Also by Rory Cormac

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces and theSecret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy

Confronting the Colonies: British Intelligenceand Counterinsurgency

Also by Rory Cormac & Richard J. Aldrich

The Secret Royals: Spying and the Crown,from Victoria to Diana

The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence andBritish Prime Ministers

Spying on the World: The Declassified Documentsof the Joint Intelligence Committee, 1936–2013(with Michael S. Goodman)

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Rory Cormac, 2022

The moral right of Rory Cormac to be identified as the author of thiswork has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by anymeans, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and theabove publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders.The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectifyany mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from theBritish Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-83895-561-8

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-83895-562-5

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-563-2

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For Finlay and Genevieve,true masters of the dark arts

CONTENTS

Prologue

Introduction: Grey zones and covert action

1.   How to assassinate your enemies

2.   How to get away with murder

3.   How to influence others

4.   How to subvert governments and underminedemocracy

5.   How to rig an election

6.   How to stage a coup

7.   How to wage a secret war

8.   How to pick your rebels

9.   How to sabotage

10.   How to cyberattack

11.   How to wield the hidden hand

Conclusion: Defence against the dark arts

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

PROLOGUE

‘America is back,’ President Biden confidently declared in February 2021. Bruised, bloodied and more than a bit broken after four years of disinformation and democratic decay, America, Biden insisted, had returned to the world stage. And had no time to waste.

Democracies across the world are under siege. Hostile forces use propaganda and subversion to sow division, and to promote their own brands of illiberal authoritarianism. The distribution of power across the world is changing. After decades tied down fighting terrorists, the US is no longer the dominant power it once was. China is assertive and on the rise; Russia is intent on maintaining not only dominance over its backyard but also its self-perceived great power status. It wilfully wields disruption and wreaks havoc to do so. The Biden presidency wasted little time promising to compete in this ‘gray zone’.1

‘I made it clear to President Putin,’ Biden insisted during an early speech at the State Department, ‘in a manner very different from my predecessor, that the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions – interfering with our elections, cyberattacks, poisoning its citizens – are over.’2

Just weeks later, the American intelligence community warned of China’s push for global power, and of yet more provocative actions by the usual suspects of Russia, Iran and North Korea. Russia, US intelligence predicted, would continue dividing western countries for the foreseeable future. It had already meddled in successive American presidential elections, developed dangerous cyber capabilities able to sabotage targets and conducted assassinations overseas. Meanwhile, US intelligence accused Iran of sabotaging Israeli water facilities during a hot summer in 2020, and, in the same year, of trying to undermine confidence in American democracy.3 China did not attempt to interfere in the election but did spend much of 2020 pumping out propaganda designed to undercut the west’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

That same spring, across the Atlantic, Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a similar declaration. We are living in a more competitive age, he wrote, and we must change our approach to adapt to the uncertain new world emerging around us. The UK, Johnson promised, would defend against disinformation, cyberattacks, electoral interference and attempted assassinations on the streets of Britain.4 It would do so, in part, using the hidden hand of secret statecraft: intelligence agencies and discreet forces capable of special operations. The UK would thrive in the grey zone.

Afterwards, the head of MI5 issued a sombre warning: ordinary members of the British public were not immune from the ‘tentacles’ of foreign states. This is not some game played out by spies in the shadows, he insisted; subversion, sabotage and subterfuge affect all of us.5

Much mythologized and heavily romanticized, covert action is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the grey zone within international politics. Few fictional figures have created more confusion than James Bond. ‘Britain’s real life 007s have licence to kill renewed after 60 year gap,’ declared the Daily Mirror, confidently but entirely wrongly, in summer 2020.6 It was certainly not alone in illustrating any story about subversion and sabotage, indeed any aspect of secret intelligence, with reference to the irrepressible James Bond. The following spring, the head of GCHQ, Britain’s signals intelligence agency, publicly committed to recruiting more women. It was, he said, ‘mission critical’ to increase diversity in the service. The Mail Online covered this story with a photograph of Bond caressing the naked back of Strawberry Fields, a glamorous fellow intelligence officer featured in Quantum of Solace, the 2008 outing of the franchise.7 Wrong service; fictional officers; and hardly reflecting the diversity requirements highlighted by the GCHQ chief.

The UK is not alone here. In an example of British cultural influence, 007 features prominently in American headlines too. The image is clear: suave men, dashing around the world despatching baddies, driving expensive cars and sleeping with beautiful women. More cocktail party than covert action. Legislative oversight be damned.

In May 2021, the CIA launched a diversity drive of its own. Its campaign featured a cisgender millennial Latina officer with generalized anxiety disorder. Republican senator Ted Cruz was quick to criticize on Twitter: ‘If you’re a Chinese communist, or an Iranian Mullah, or Kim Jong Un… would this scare you? We’ve come a long way from Jason Bourne.’ Played by the actor Matt Damon in the eponymous films, Bourne is of course another fictional character not entirely dissimilar to Bond.

This book navigates the fact and fiction to cut through the romance of the secret world. It makes three arguments designed to demystify, elucidate and provoke. First, poisonings, disinformation and electoral meddling are all pieces of the same puzzle of covert competition as states try to gain the upper hand on each other without resorting to war. These tactics are not new and can only be understood alongside recent history. The timbre may now be brasher, the tempo faster, the volume louder, but the notes remain the same. Covert action is not new. The internet era has not revolutionized the very nature of subversion and sabotage; neither has it created an entirely new type of covert action.

Second, it is harder than ever before to control global events; covert action is therefore more about disruption. Hidden hands divide, discredit and chip away at authority. Whether secret war or cyberattacks, it often comes back to the same thing: exploiting weaknesses and crippling the adversary. It is the slow drip of steady subversion, of persistent disruption. This can be subtle, to the point of being untraceable; or it can be deliberately ambiguous.

It can also be decidedly bold and far less dependent on secrecy than people realize. Many operations are performative, using sabotage and assassination, as well as propaganda, to send a message to friend and foe alike. Covert action is about so much more than leaders using intelligence agencies to influence events without anyone knowing. It can be a spectacle in which leaders’ refusal to acknowledge their operations becomes more important than hiding them. Presidents and prime ministers use covert action for a wide range of reasons, including influencing, disrupting and communicating when they cannot act openly.

Although the promise is seductive, these leaders face significant constraints when wielding the hidden hand. They face trade-offs between secrecy, scale, directness and control. The more deniable, the less impactful; the more control, the less secrecy; the more indirect, the more secrecy, but the less control, and so on. You cannot have it all. Covert action is about carefully calibrating secrecy, scale and signals. Neither can you use covert action in isolation as a magical silver bullet. It forms one part of a policy response, carefully calibrated to the end goal.

Covert action will continue, even increase, in our era of implausible deniability. As secrecy breaks down, exposing covert action will not be sufficient to counter it. Clinging to an enlightenment ideal that laying bare a pure, unmediated truth will cut through and discredit adversaries is outdated. There is too much noise; exposure is not enough. Covert action is becoming messier, the subject of competing cross-cutting claims and counterclaims.

Third, to understand this, it is important to recognize how covert action works and how it is reported. Ambiguity is everything. Covert action is all about illusions and collusion, myths as much as meddling, often viewed through the prism of Bond and Bourne. When states seek to subvert reality, stories and narratives become just as important as the events they represent. These narratives become significant in themselves, breathing life into otherwise moribund operations and shaping policy responses. Fear of Russian meddling can end up more consequential than the meddling in the first place.

Given the subterfuge, secrecy and half-truths involved, covert action is less about objective accounts of events and more about how we interpret them. The grey zone is not some blurred line between war and peace; such a thing has always existed. The real grey zone is epistemic: blurred lines between what we know, what we do not know, and what we think we know. The novelty in all of this comes from the fluctuating space between covert action and public knowledge, the decline of state secrecy and the rise of multiple competing narratives churned out across a kaleidoscopic media landscape.8

Perception and paranoia become paramount. Is a hack aggressive sabotage or run-of-the-mill espionage? Is it offensive or defensive? Is a death an assassination or a targeted killing? Did the state even sponsor the assassination at all? Is a coup a legitimate expression of internal dissatisfaction with a brutal regime or illegitimate interference by a hidden hand? Can it be both? Is the state sending weapons to terrorists or rebels? Did covert action succeed or fail? None of these are foregone conclusions. Given the classified sources, potential for manipulation and the grey nature of covert action, how we answer these questions is key in wielding and defending against secret statecraft.

INTRODUCTION:GREY ZONES AND COVERT ACTION

We live in uniquely uncertain and complex times. Wars are changing. They can be won and lost without a single shot being fired, without war even being declared. Threats come from multiple directions: from old foes like Russia and new competitors like China; from regional powers equipped with burgeoning cyber capabilities and from the familiar balaclava-clad gun-toting convoy of terrorists and insurgents. Demagogues and rabble-rousers are rife. The liberal international order, defined by rule of law, respect for human rights and cooperation, is eroding before our eyes. More worrying still, it is not collapsing with a bang, something clear and obvious against which we can rally. Instead, this decline is gradual and pervasive, marked by a dissolving of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. It is being silently overwhelmed. The damage is done before we can understand exactly what is happening.

We live in such uncertain and complex times, they require a bewildering bonanza of ill-defined buzzwords to make sense of it all: grey zones, hybrid warfare, ambiguous, sub-threshold, non-linear, liminal warfare… The list goes on.

Except we do not live in uniquely uncertain and complex times. Wars still exist, whilst talk of strategic and persistent competition, of states using proxies to do their bidding discreetly and deniably, and of dissolving lines between war and peace is nothing new. The supposed liberal international order, a romanticized phrase regularly embraced by President Obama, reflects a nostalgia for the recent past which struggles under scrutiny.1

In the post-truth world, people interpret facts through the prism of their own ideologies and beliefs. They prize emotion over authority. Myth and reality mix freely as new technology helps disinformation flow with mellifluous ease. The 2020s? Perhaps. But this characterization equally applies to England under the Stuarts in the seventeenth century, a world away from Twitter and Trump. It was a time when the printing press enabled the proliferation of pamphlets to spread rumours about papal plots. Conspiracy was rife and people clung to their own perceptions and prejudices: their personalized truths.

More recently, journalists covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland complained about being ‘overwhelmed by a blizzard of facts and atrocities, lies and propaganda, from all sides’. The swirling information made it ‘simply impossible to tell truth from fantasy, fact from fiction’.2 This complaint could have equally applied to the post-truth Trump presidency.

And what of secret statecraft beyond propaganda? In the nineteenth century, US president Thomas Jefferson, a venerated founding father, bribed foreign politicians, toppled a government and provided discreet assistance to insurgent fighters.3 This all feels remarkably modern. The CIA certainly has been no stranger to such activity; and neither have the Russians.

We live in an era in which states operate ambiguously between war and peace. It is difficult for adversaries to draw a line between the acceptable and unacceptable – and to respond accordingly. The Kremlin in particular sponsors operations which are ‘sufficient to keep the wound bleeding but insufficient, thus far, to warrant massive retaliation’.4 This observation, made by historian Jonathan Haslam, related not to so-called hybrid warfare in Ukraine prior to February 2022, but to Soviet operations against Poland almost a century earlier.

The same goes for election meddling. Amid growing international tension, a Russian intelligence officer looked ahead to forthcoming US presidential elections. Behind closed doors, he briefed his audience of spies about increasing divisions in American society, including what he called the race problem, social issues, unemployment and crime. He urged better understanding of each in order to ‘find effective opportunities [to] attack’ the election. The year was not 2016, but 1983. The intelligence officer worked for the powerful KGB, Soviet intelligence, and was addressing the East German Stasi.5 This all feels remarkably familiar, perhaps unsurprisingly given Vladimir Putin’s famous quip that there is no such thing as a former KGB officer. Today’s relentless use of secret intelligence to achieve foreign policy goals resonates with Cold War spymasters.6

So much of the excitable neophilia dominating global politics today was prevalent in the Cold War. ‘Positive action’ was needed to disrupt Russia, according to British Foreign Office documents way back in 1951; ‘covert action’, diplomats suggested, could ‘bring about changes’ inside Russia by identifying sources of tension inside the Soviet Union and then secretly exploiting them to spread division. A senior British diplomat in the 1950s, pointing out that subversion was cheaper than invasion, wondered why countries spent so much money on deterrence when they could just bribe foreign leaders instead. The following decade, British planners concluded that wars were no longer declared or winnable. States therefore turned to the hidden hand instead.7

Talk of defending forward is all the rage in the US: a proactive approach to intelligence, engaging enemies on their own turf, bravely working with allies in perilous places and disrupting threats at source. And yet Marc Polymeropoulos, a veteran of CIA operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, insightfully points out that the CIA has been doing exactly this since its inception in 1947. Deployed overseas, moving from country to country, its intelligence officers have recruited agents, led dangerous expeditions and supported allies.8 We have been here before.

That is not to downplay current events, but rather to keep them in perspective. Neither is it to embrace the seductively nostalgic caress of the past and recast the 2020s as Cold War version 2.0. There are important differences, not least higher levels of global interdependence, even if, in the words of one academic, Hong Kong does have an air of Berlin about it.9 The Cold War was fluid and played out differently across the globe. It was sometimes incredibly dangerous – the world stood on the brink of nuclear war on more than one occasion – while very real violence broke out from southeast Asia to Latin America.

Our construction of history is equally fluid. We project our own prejudices onto the past and so the Cold War meant something different in 2010 compared to, say, 2016 once Russian subversion and meddling had become mainstream.10 History may be about the past, but it is also about the present. It reflects our own reality as much as anyone else’s.

Although not new, persistent competition, information operations and subversion are clearly prominent features of statecraft today. The loose references to grey zones and hybrid warfare – the Israelis talk of a ‘campaign between the wars’ – reflect a disorienting range of activities. Most involve the pervasive deployment of multiple, often covert, instruments of influence – from saboteurs to assassins, from political meddlers to peddlers of lies.11 Our confusion and lack of clarity turns on the ill-defined role of secrecy, exposure, deniability and acknowledgement. We cannot understand what is going on in the world – the manipulation, the subversion and subterfuge – without considering covert action.

What does an internet troll factory on the outskirts of St Petersburg staffed by poorly trained twenty-somethings have in common with high-end assassins using lethal poison to despatch problematic leaders? Both are covert actions, unacknowledged interference in the affairs of others.

Covert action evokes many images: dashing James Bond types whizzing around the world in supercars dramatically exercising their supposed licence to kill; adventurous CIA officers carrying suitcases stuffed full of money across the desert to arrange a Middle Eastern coup; mysterious Russians slipping poison into a cup of tea in a fancy hotel restaurant; Israeli assassins hunting down terrorists in the shadows; and thousands of the Chinese diaspora working discreetly to promote the Communist Party’s interest. Covert action is highly mythologized – and often misunderstood.

Plots and rumours of plots are all around us. A daily diet of disinformation feeds conspiracy theories and a broader climate of paranoia. Trust is in decline, and hesitancy and cynicism are on the rise. Yet there is a big difference between conspiracy theory – with all the nonsense about abominable monolithic groups operating omnipotently from the shadows – and conspiratorial politics.12 Real conspiracies do exist. According to one former CIA official, ‘Conspiracy is hard, and it takes a lot of time to do it right.’13 And while the CIA has had a lot of practice over the years, it is in good company. The rap sheet covering the last few years alone is long, varied and global. It spans Chinese propaganda trying to justify Beijing’s authoritarian response to COVID-19; Russian and Israeli sabotage of arms warehouses and nuclear sites respectively; Pakistani sponsorship of terrorism; and British disruption of ISIS communication networks.

Subterranean activity – supported, but not controlled, by a hidden hand – ranges from subtle influence work all the way up to assassination and secret wars. It brings together a disparate cast of great powers, regional rivals, rebel fighters, mercenaries and hackers. Competition for power, for influence, for health security, and even competition over the nature of the global (dis) order itself, loom large. Covert action is neither inherently bad nor immoral. It can be a vital tool in the state’s policy toolbox, and, like any other, its outcomes depend on how and why it is used. Some states are more reckless than others, some more responsible. It is, however, inherently controversial.

Covert action is generally understood as plausibly deniable interference in the affairs of others designed to bring about political change. For all the cultural ubiquity of James Bond, the US definition of covert action is the most prominent and provides a prism through which we (mis)understand this shadowy form of international statecraft more widely. After all, the US has long been a dominant power, is relatively transparent and, unlike the UK, actually commits definitions of secret work to paper.

The US formally defines covert action as ‘an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly’. This explicitly does not include espionage, traditional military or diplomatic activity, and law enforcement; neither does it include manipulation of domestic audiences. Covert action is generally conducted by the CIA, although it constitutes only a small portion of the agency’s activity, with espionage and analysis forming the core mission. It is legally distinct from the Pentagon’s special operations, although the line between them blurs in practice and close cooperation between the two is a hallmark of twenty-first-century lethal counterterrorism operations.14

Covert action is authorized by the president, usually after copious discussions between layers of policymakers, intelligence officers and lawyers. Lots of lawyers. The idea of the CIA as a rogue elephant running amok around the world is a myth. Operations have formally required presidential approval and congressional oversight since 1974. This might not be particularly romantic or exciting – especially to those well versed in freewheeling spy films – but it is the humdrum, and essential, reality.15

The US has turned to covert action since its very founding and the revolutionary war against Britain. George Washington, its first president, was a famously keen practitioner, planning and executing a veritable cornucopia of operations against the crown: kidnappings, including one outlandish plot to kidnap none other than the king’s son; at least one operation directed at acquiring a fourteenth colony in Quebec; sabotage of British dockyards; and the creation of newspapers for propaganda purposes.16

In the two and a half centuries since, successive presidents have used covert action to protect American power: to see off threats and to maintain the status quo, reaping political, military and economic benefits in the process.17 Between 1951 and 1975, the US conducted over nine hundred covert actions.18

Covert action, technically speaking, is an American legal and bureaucratic term for a specific type of activity with specific authorization procedures. However, these unacknowledged interventions are a global story, playing out on a global stage. Many states attempt to influence political developments while masking their own conspiratorial role. Different countries have different approaches to secret statecraft. Some hands are more hidden than others; some are bounded by bureaucracy, others contorted, even deformed, to meet the norms of liberal democracy; some are aggressive, unrestrained. Some hands are unchained.

The Russians long talked of aktivnye meropriyatiya or active measures to cover a range of political influence and subversion operations, from influencing foreign governments to undermining confidence in western institutions.19 Interestingly, the word ‘disinformation’, one such active measure and a term widely used today, comes from the Russian dezinformatsiya and only entered the English lexicon in the late 1970s.20 Sharp measures – or ostrye meropriyatii – covered a more particular subset of skills: assassination, sabotage and kidnap. This included use of explosives; surprise mines; ‘devices for soundless, mechanical shooting of needles containing fast-acting poisons’; and ‘strong toxins’, as one document recently uncovered in Bulgarian archives matter-of-factly put it.21

Russia adopts a broader and more holistic approach in its active measures than US covert action, greying lines between peace and war.22 Much of this is carried out by Russian intelligence services. The powerful FSB, successor to the KGB and once headed by Putin himself, is domestic-focused but increasingly engages in international operations; the SVR is the foreign intelligence service; and the GRU is military intelligence. All have wide freedom of action, are aggressive, entrepreneurial and, according to Russia expert Mark Galeotti, competitive ‘to the point of cannibalism’. The GRU is particularly willing to take risks and evinces an audacious mindset more redolent of special forces than intelligence.23

For a supposedly top-secret organization, GRU Unit 29155 is remarkably conspicuous. As we shall see, its brazen – to the point of sloppy – operations allegedly include the poisoning of a Bulgarian arms manufacturer, blowing up a Czech munitions warehouse, orchestrating a failed coup in Montenegro, and the poisoning of a dissident and his daughter in the UK. If that was not enough, its operatives have also been linked to the failed Catalan bid for independence from Spain in 2017 and to accounts of Russians offering bounties to the Taliban to kill Americans in Afghanistan. Their cover stories are sometimes paper thin and they have used the same aliases for multiple operations, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for online sleuths to uncover more and more of their work. Russia, and especially its GRU, is willing to embrace implausible deniability.24 According to the chief of MI6, such unabashed activity ‘is on an upward trend’.25

Although active measures are nothing new and their roots can be traced back to the tsarist secret police of the late nineteenth century, the Russians are becoming more active and less measured, according to Thomas Rid, an expert in Russian disinformation.26 Confrontation with the west – even warfare in some Russians’ eyes – began a long time ago.27 Facing a mismatch between ambition and assets, President Putin, with his conspiratorial and paranoid worldview, uses these tactics to divide and distract the west, hoping to render it unable or unwilling to prevent his claim to Russia’s great power status.28

Despite what the headlines and history books suggest, covert competition and secret statecraft are about more than Russia and the US. China, like Russia, blends the overt and covert, the political and military.29 Unlike Russia, China is on the rise. It is less constrained by a chronic mismatch between ambition and assets, and so is better able to use economic and development programmes to influence others. Unacknowledged, semi-secret, activity complements this where necessary. Its whole of society approach includes propaganda; discreet political donations; subverting academic freedom; and mobilizing broad coalitions of people, from private companies to Chinese diaspora, to promote the interests of the Chinese Communist Party and shape international debate.30 The latter is known as united front activity and can be traced back to Mao’s era; if anything, it has only become more potent since.31 All of this grey activity combines with what China calls the ‘three warfares’ – public opinion, psychological and legal – to discreetly shape events.32

Influence work is conducted by the party’s propaganda department and United Front Work Department among others. Meanwhile, China’s formidable intelligence agencies have a broad remit. The Ministry of State Security is responsible for domestic and overseas operations, and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducts military intelligence. Little is known about the internal workings of either, but the PLA also engages in united front work, political warfare and offensive cyber. It implements the three warfares.33 China is a global power with a wide reach. That said, almost half of its covert actions target Taiwan, with many more aimed at Hong Kong.34

This is about strengthening political power. China’s leaders fear that western forces are actively trying to subvert their sphere of influence by sowing divisions and encouraging revolutions. These perceived threats, especially since the advent of the internet, have become an almost existential struggle for the Chinese Communist Party.35 The party therefore seeks first and foremost to preserve itself and then to transform the international order in its own image – without a shot being fired.36

Smaller powers wield the hidden hand too. We tend to associate western covert action with the CIA, but the British have been doing this since before the CIA existed. In fact, the British have been doing this since before the United States existed, and before even the United Kingdom existed. As early as the mid-sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I sanctioned what were then called ‘covert meanes’ to undermine King Philip of Spain, including discreetly sending money to Protestant rebels waging an insurrection against Catholic rule.37 By the mid-twentieth century, Britain had developed a formidable reputation among friend and foe alike for meddling, manipulating and blowing things up. It is not for nothing that Iranians refer to the UK as the old fox.

London favours a flexible and informal approach, compensating for its own ever-widening gap between ambition and assets. Successive prime ministers and foreign secretaries have turned to covert action as a cost-effective means to mask decline and project influence on the cheap.

Unlike the US, Whitehall has no official definition. Over the years, it has used a range of phrases to denote different activities including special political action, disavowable action, special operations, propaganda and counterpropaganda, and covert action itself. Whitehall now talks of intelligence effects: the exploitation of intelligence to effect real-world change. Effects can be broad in scope and tactical in scale, including things like neutralizing a cache of terrorist explosives or merely preventing a terrorist suspect from boarding a boat.

Effects operations are undertaken by whichever government agency is most appropriate. MI6 has traditionally taken the lead, but GCHQ has more recently found a role as the internet created opportunities to influence, disrupt and sabotage – what is now called offensive cyber. GCHQ defines effects as ‘doing things in cyberspace to make something happen’. And MI6’s definition? That remains unknown. Special forces activity also constitutes covert action; unlike the US, the UK does not make a sharp distinction between this and special military operations. Nimbleness is the order of the day.38

Across the Channel, French practitioners talk about action clandestine. The Directorate-General for External Security, France’s overseas intelligence agency, has a dedicated unit known as Service Action that specializes in paramilitary operations.39 It has a well-earned reputation for taking a crude and muscular approach, giving French covert action a more aggressive feel than British special political actions. Much French paramilitary activity, especially that conducted in post-imperial Africa, made the CIA look like a nunnery in comparison. As we shall see, back in the 1950s, the French conducted sabotage and assassination operations targeting arms dealers and Algerian nationalists in West Germany.40 Paramilitary covert action then spanned Cameroon, Chad, the Comoros, Mozambique, Nigeria, Zaire and elsewhere. The French plotted to assassinate Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi. Twice.41

One head of intelligence at the end of the Cold War acknowledged the secret services’ droit de mort, or right of death. It was far from a daily occurrence, and he insisted it was used parsimoniously, but the threat of assassination hung over the heads of targets.42 More recently in 2016, the French press reported that Service Action was working alongside military special forces to disrupt and neutralize ISIS in Libya.43 The president supposedly had a kill list; it was, according to one journalist, ‘ultra-secrète’.44

Israel is another country with a muscular – to put it mildly – reputation when it comes to covert actions, perhaps having assassinated more people than any other in the western world. Its particularly aggressive approach derives from the revolutionary roots of the Zionist movement, the trauma of the Holocaust and the perpetual menace of Arab terrorism.45 Mossad, one of the most famous – indeed legendary – intelligence agencies in the world, takes the lead.

Despite its reputation, there is more to Israeli secret statecraft than targeted assassinations. It includes the rescuing of Jewish people from foreign countries.46 One wonderful example that surfaced recently is instructive: back in the early 1980s, Mossad helped create a holiday resort on the Sudanese shores of the Red Sea. To all the world it looked like the perfect place to dive among beautiful exotic fish, but the resort served another purpose in secretly facilitating the evacuation of thousands of Ethiopian Jews from Sudanese refugee camps.47

The Israeli approach also seems to cover other, more indirect, means of deniably influencing international affairs. On one occasion, Mossad created a fake company to buy French missile boats and contravene an arms embargo. Just twenty-four hours after the Israelis sailed them away, battling unstable weather conditions in the process, the French realized that they had been played.48

Israel is currently engaged in a shadow war with Iran, another notable practitioner of secret statecraft. Mysterious sabotage of ships in the Persian Gulf is not uncommon. Pursued by the Revolutionary Guards and Ministry of Intelligence and Security, Iranian activity traditionally prioritizes secretly getting hold of weapons, supporting terrorism and assassinating dissidents abroad.49 As such, it has generally acted regionally, although, according to US intelligence, Iran attempted to sow division in the US and undercut President Trump’s re-election campaign in 2020. This went all the way up to the Iranian supreme leader himself.50

Across the border, Turkey has also long turned to the hidden hand. A regional power with great foreign policy ambitions, Ankara uses covert action to influence areas removed from Turkish control by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. Successive leaders, perhaps with heads in the past but wallets in the present, sought to recover their influence without triggering a bigger military conflict.51 And Turkey is not alone; as we shall see, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and others in the region all engage in subversion and subterfuge. Intrigue abounds.

Historically, Egypt has boasted an incredibly ambitious – if unsuccessful – covert action programme subverting and destabilizing Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Libya. Its post-war operations all followed a similar pattern: lower public confidence in the target regime, boost the opposition and force the creation of a new friendly government. Egyptian intelligence used the entire gamut of covert tactics, from black propaganda – material with a falsified origin – to assassination, from sponsoring bombings to cultivating agents of influence inside the targets’ armies, and from sabotage to creating pro-Egypt student and labour movements.52

Moving further east, Pakistan and India are regular performers on the covert stage. Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), often portrayed as a thuggish behemoth beyond democratic control, has a Covert Action Division.53 Unsurprisingly, India’s foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), has maintained its own covert action capabilities since its creation back in the late 1960s.54 Covert actions undertaken by both sides are comparatively local. Pakistan has long assisted Islamist militants in northeast India and channelled aid to extremist fighters in Afghanistan.55 Most dramatically, plenty of circumstantial evidence points to Pakistani complicity in the devastating terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008. At least 160 people died when gunmen assaulted two luxury hotels, a train station and other high-profile targets.56

ISI’s bitter rival, RAW, played a significant role in the creation of Bangladesh from East Pakistan; trained and armed Sri Lankan terrorists in the 1970s; and, more recently, stands accused of covertly influencing the 2015 Sri Lankan election after the government became worryingly close to China.57 India also has the capabilities to target Pakistan – and probably China – with cyber sabotage.58 Secret warfare and subterfuge constitute an essential dimension of the fraught geopolitics of south Asia.

Nefarious Russian meddling dominates headlines, and CIA-sponsored coups dominate the history books, but they are not alone. This is a global game. Although not all countries practise such secret statecraft, enough meddle and manipulate, subvert and sabotage, to make it a serious activity worthy of our attention. Although states have different approaches to secret statecraft, much of what we are talking about boils down to a single – if broad – activity: unacknowledged interference to create political change; to subvert, pressure, cripple and undermine adversaries. This is international politics at its most discreet and devious, but also its most creative and ingenious. When states choose to use covert action is shaped by three overlapping factors: insufficient clout to get away with intervening openly; mismatch between ambition and assets; and reputation and risk management.

Covert action is a policy tool, complementing others from the state’s toolbox. It nestles, often glistening seductively, alongside the more expensive, risky or protracted options of economic sanctions, diplomatic negotiations and military force. Covert action is not espionage; rather, as the name suggests, it is active: going out and shaping events; it is influence not information. By contrast, espionage is more passive: silently watching, reading and listening. They do often go hand in hand, though, in so far as intelligence agencies conduct many covert actions, covert action exploits intelligence, covert action can generate intelligence, and, as we shall see, it can be difficult to tell espionage from action in the cyber age. This is problematic because, as a former MI6 director of intelligence and operations put it, the blurring of espionage and action dissolves ‘already weak distinctions between war and peace and favours the approach of states which believe, like Thucydides, that peace is merely an armistice in a war that is always ongoing’.59

Covert action is hard to pin down; it evades understanding. How do we know what we know about it? Where does our knowledge of these operations come from? And this uncertainty – this mental grey zone – is partly what makes it so intriguing and, at times, so frustrating to study. It is secretive, operating in the shadows, and many cases remain classified. Understanding a significant feature of global politics in which most examples are off limits is particularly challenging, albeit a challenge to which intrepid (or foolhardy) scholars are increasingly rising.

The CIA’s chief historian says that the fifty or so US operations that have been officially declassified offer a representative sample of the broader universe of US covert action – but, to paraphrase the famous quip of Mandy Rice-Davies, ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ At least the US does declassify historical activities. The UK is notoriously parsimonious and is only getting worse, as the government clamps down on freedom of information requests. Australia is worse still. France, meanwhile, seems intent on gagging its ghosts by going further and reclassifying various historical documents.

Historians rely on snippets and fragments like jumbled pieces of a puzzle with no picture and no box. Covert action is that which we cannot see: brief shadows burned into the pages of the thousands of mundane diplomatic papers released annually into historical archives.

Those covert actions we do know about, those shadows we have gathered, might create a sample bias and skew our understanding of the broader activity. Paramilitary operations and secret wars are inevitably harder to keep secret, while their dramatic bombs and bangs generate more news stories and Hollywood films than, say, low-key influence work. Accordingly, paramilitary operations take on a disproportionately prominent place in the public imagination even though they constitute only a tiny percentage of covert actions.

Similarly, we are more likely to know about covert actions which went wrong, especially if they attracted criticism in parliaments and the press. Foreign Secretary William Hague fumbling at the despatch box in 2011 is a case in point. A secret mission to make contact with Libyan rebels had gone disastrously wrong, with the team ending up handcuffed in a Benghazi farmyard. Hague squirmed nervously as the press invoked the usual Bond tropes and questioned whether the foreign secretary had ‘lost his mojo’.

Covert actions are even more likely to attract widespread attention if their failure or extravagance results in government inquiries. The most famous example is the investigations of the US Senate select committee chaired by Frank Church, the Democratic senator for Idaho, back in the 1970s. Church and his colleagues rummaged through recent CIA history, publicly airing its dirty laundry, including alleged assassination attempts. Successes remain hidden for longer than failure, propaganda longer than paramilitary, thereby skewing our understanding of covert action and whether it works and what types are best.

Surprisingly, secrecy and eye-wateringly high levels of classification are not the main factors making covert action difficult to pin down. More than secretive, it is inherently elusive. Like the wind, visible in the movement of branches on trees, you can only feel its effects. Covert actions rarely have obvious beginnings or ends. They might start literally years before a coup overthrows a government and continue long afterwards through funding certain political parties. They exist alongside larger open instruments of policy, such as economic pressure or a military threat, making it difficult to isolate covert from overt, especially when assessing impact.60

Covert action exists in relation to other actors. It nudges along internal forces in the target state – dissidents, revolutionaries and opposition parties – sometimes with a deft fleeting touch, sometimes with a shove. It is incredibly difficult for observers, even those with full access to classified material, to isolate the impact of the hidden hand. How do we separate covert action from events that would have happened anyway? How do we know it was Russia that made all the difference in the 2016 election and not disaffected Americans? Covert action lives through others, shaping what it encounters. Most of the wind, to borrow from the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, happens where there are trees.61

It is difficult to pin down because it operates in the grey zone between war and peace, between militaries and civilians, and between the acceptable and unacceptable. It is unbounded by geography, with much taking place in cyberspace. Information defines and shapes what is known, yet covert action is all about the interplay between appearance and reality. It is a cognitive grey zone. It involves performance. As we shall see, states use covert action to send messages; they collude in the fiction of secrecy, and even in the fiction of potency. Covert actions are told through stories or myths, which can then become as important as the actual events they represent. In the ‘covert sphere’, as one professor of English literature calls it, stories and the public imagination, fantasies about secret statecraft, can end up shaping policy.62

Covert action is difficult to pin down because our knowledge of it is constructed through so many different filters. It is less a wilderness of mirrors, a phrase often used to describe secret intelligence, and more a funfair world of mirrors, warped and distorted. It is confected; reflected through Bond and Bourne, through memoirs and selected declassifications of once top-secret documents.

This evasiveness leaves a rather daunting question: where to start on our journey around the dark corners of secret statecraft. Methods of manipulation are limited only by meddlers’ imaginations: from cyberattacks to social media bots, bribing politicians to subverting academia, sponsoring rap and graffiti artists to arming rebel fighters. Assassination, slipping poison into a cup of tea, lies at the extreme end of the scale, while slipping a factually accurate article into a friendly newspaper lies at the more mundane other. Assassination is far less common than low-key influence work and yet dominates the headlines owing to its macabre gadgetry, 007 connotations, or sheer lethal brazenness. Given its prominence in the public imagination, and a worrying rise in recent cases, it is from here where we will embark. Crucially, however, low-key influence work forms the cornerstone of secret statecraft, and is by far the most pervasive of these ‘most unusual measures’ (as one British diplomat once euphemistically put it). We will, therefore, travel from killing to propaganda before climbing back up the ladder of escalation, through subversion, electoral rigging, coups, secret warfare and sabotage.

Covert action is a global game. Mythologized and misunderstood, this secret statecraft is not new, but paradoxically it has featured prominently in global politics over the last decade. This is a guidebook to the grey zone for the armchair éminence grise. It draws on intriguing international tales, past and present, to offer key insights into this murky subterranean world. What goes on beneath the surface; how states lie, subvert and sabotage; and what works. Let us begin with the most dramatic and controversial measure of all: assassination.

1

HOW TO ASSASSINATE YOUR ENEMIES

In the early hours of 3 January 2020, the powerful Iranian general Qassem Soleimani landed at an airport outside Baghdad. As his convoy of two cars set off through the dark to meet the Iraqi prime minister, a US drone hovered above, closely watching his every move before launching Hellfire missiles. Both cars exploded. Soleimani was killed.

The following August, the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny became violently ill on a flight. After doctors placed him in an induced coma, it soon became apparent that someone had poisoned him with a deadly nerve agent, Novichok, the very same substance used in earlier attempts to assassinate other Russian dissidents and defectors. Navalny survived, and, in a remarkable twist, later posed as a senior Russian official and telephoned one of the assassins to demand why the poisoning had failed. Through subterfuge of his own, he learnt that they had applied the poison to his underpants in a hotel room, but that it had failed to penetrate his skin as planned.

In November, just three months later, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was ambushed, shot and killed outside Tehran. This was no ordinary murder. Fakhrizadeh was Iran’s top military nuclear scientist, and, rather mysteriously, the gunmen were nowhere to be seen. His heavily armed bodyguards could only haplessly shoot back into thin air. The murder weapon – a robotic machine gun – was equipped with artificial intelligence and controlled by satellite to target Fakhrizadeh, and only Fakhrizadeh. His wife, sitting centimetres away from him in the car, escaped unharmed. A stray dog wandered into the line of fire; the bullets missed. The attack was remarkably precise, leaving no collateral damage. Iran quickly accused Israel of assassination. These three high-profile attacks – two of which succeeded – spanned the year 2020. Each was conducted by a different state using different methods. Whether they constituted assassinations or targeted killings is debatable, but one thing is clear: state killing of high-profile targets remains a feature of international politics today.

Remote-control machine guns may offer a glimpse of the future, but the history of assassinations is littered with equally ingenious – and often more gruesomely outrageous – stories. The Soviets euphemistically called it ‘wet work’ – a crass reference to the spilling of blood – and, in one particularly shocking example, dissident communist Leon Trotsky met his end in Mexico when a Soviet agent smashed in his skull with an ice pickaxe. Many remember the umbrella modified to carry poison which the Soviets used to kill a Bulgarian dissident on Waterloo Bridge in 1978. The KGB developed a range of lethal gadgetry, much of which would have been at home in a Bond film. Alongside the umbrella sat an equally devious lipstick gun, giving new meaning to the kiss of death, and a gun disguised as a packet of cigarettes.

Over the years, the Americans have turned to poisoned toothpaste, poison-lined scuba diving suits and, most famously of all, exploding cigars. Meanwhile, the Israelis have launched over two thousand assassination operations. Methods include snipers, car bombs, parcel bombs, explosives hidden in a phone, and poison.1 They were not always successful. On one infamous occasion, back in 1997, Mossad operatives travelled to Jordan on a mission to assassinate the leader of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group. The top-secret plan was to insert poison into his ear, but it went spectacularly wrong. The perpetrators were caught and, as the target fell dangerously ill, Israel had to provide the antidote as a diplomatic row broke out.

There may be a thousand ways to die, but there are only really two ways for states to kill: directly or indirectly. States can use their own forces – usually paramilitary, intelligence or special forces – to take out the target. In the examples cited above, the US, Russia and Israel did just that. Soleimani was killed by a US drone; Russian intelligence poisoned Navalny; and Israeli intelligence organized the assassination outside Tehran, smuggling ground-breaking technology into the country. In fact, Russia passed a law in 2006 permitting its military and special services to conduct just such extrajudicial killings abroad, targeting those accused of ‘extremism’ and ‘hooliganism’.2

A direct strike has the benefit of greater control over the operation and a higher chance of success. State assets are well trained, equipped and funded. But there is a catch. Greater control comes at the cost of decreased plausible deniability. Direct involvement, getting hands dirty, will more often than not leave the state’s fingerprints all over the operation, making it much more difficult to deny. Who else other than Israel could have set up a remote-control semi-autonomous gun amid the villas of an upmarket district outside Tehran? It hardly looked like an accident or the work of a random run-of-the-mill terrorist. Given the risks of exposure, states are more likely to kill directly if they deem it legal, if they are not too concerned about secrecy, or, as we shall see, if they think the benefits outweigh the negatives.

Presidents and prime ministers contemplating a lethal strike grapple with this macabre trade-off between directness and deniability.3 Drones and special forces sit at one end. Next, a spymaster might recruit an agent to carry out the assassination, thereby giving some deniability. In 2013, a young Turk living in France shot dead three Kurdish activists in Paris. One was Sakine Cansız, a political refugee and co-founder of the PKK terrorist group, established to fight for Kurdish independence from Turkey. Press reports strongly suggested that Turkish intelligence had recruited the assassin, but it was difficult to prove.4

The agents could even be unwitting. In 2017, North Korea assassinated the dictator’s half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, in a bizarre operation. Jong-nam had arrived at Kuala Lumpur airport, travelling under a fake name, on his way back from a picturesque tourist island off Malaysia’s west coast. He was a wanted man, having become a critic of the regime – and a reported CIA source. Indeed, he may have been travelling back from meeting an American intelligence officer. Kim waited in the busy terminal for a flight on to Macau when, all of a sudden, a woman swooped in behind him thrusting a wet cloth into his face. His eyes burned; he felt dizzy. The liquid was a deadly nerve agent and Kim died shortly afterwards.

A twist followed. When arrested, the woman and her accomplice claimed that they had no idea what they were doing, instead believing it was a prank for a hidden-camera television show. They had earlier been seen performing similar pranks in a nearby mall. The supposed TV producers who had recruited them quietly fled the country.

Moving further down the macabre scale of directness and deniability, an intelligence agency sometimes supplies a rebel group with weapons – but issue no orders and ask no questions. The CIA has a track record here. Back in the 1950s, it covertly supplied pistols, ammunition and grenades to dissidents seeking to overthrow Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Trujillo was a thug of a dictator, amassing a personal fortune while unleashing terrorism and massacre at home and abroad. Rumour has it he fed the bodies of his dead opponents to sharks. His cult of personality – visible through a superabundance of statues and even the renaming of the highest mountain in the country after himself – made him a perfect target for assassination. If he fell, so too would the entire regime.

Armed with weapons and ammunition from the CIA, but without explicit American instruction, conspirators ambushed Trujillo’s car along a dark highway in May 1961. A vicious gun battle left the dictator sprawled dead on the road. The US did not technically order the assassination, but some in Washington knew it was coming and fully approved.5

Twenty years later, with assassination now illegal under US law, the CIA covertly supported rebels in Nicaragua seeking to overthrow the leftist government. As part of the operation, the CIA famously prepared a training manual which highlighted what it obliquely called the benefits of selective violence for propaganda purposes. In other words, assassination. Critics decried it as a murder manual. At around the same time, CIA officers covertly supporting the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet invasion sent sniper rifles and other lethal weapons to the rebels – but asked no questions about how they would be used.6

If special forces and drones lie at one end, then collusion lies at the other end of our directness/deniability scale. This might even be as passive as simply turning a blind eye to terrorist activity or not investigating crimes properly. Collusion is particularly associated with UK activity in Northern Ireland; however, it extends well beyond this arena. Loyalists and collaborators played an important role in the rise and fall of the British Empire, from surrogates in nineteenth-century India killing on behalf of the crown, to collusion with friendly local forces during dirty end-of-empire counter-insurgencies in places like Palestine, Cyprus and Kenya.

As part of the covert operation to overthrow the Iranian prime minister in 1953, MI6 used propaganda to smear Iran’s chief of police and whip opposition forces into a fervour. He was kidnapped (as part of the plan to provide a morale boost for the opposition) but ended up tortured and murdered. Two years later, MI6 tried to start a row within the Hanoi politburo intended to spark a chain of events leading to the assassination of the North Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh. No order had to be given; the death would not be traced back to Britain. In 1960, Britain ran a covert campaign to destabilize the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. It included propaganda, bribery, smears and even use of stink bombs. Alongside the CIA, MI6 conspired to create a situation whereby the death of Lumumba was practically inevitable.7

Collusion in Northern Ireland led to the deaths of numerous republicans. Most notoriously, in 1989, loyalist terrorists burst into the home of a thirty-nine-year-old nationalist solicitor, Pat Finucane, and shot him dead in front of his wife and children. The most recent government inquiry into the attack is damning: ‘a series of positive actions by employees of the State actively furthered and facilitated his murder’. And Finucane was not a one-off. While there was no central policy of collusion stemming from Downing Street, various security policies and use of propaganda to discredit certain targets enabled it.8

Colluding with rebel and terrorist groups is the most indirect way a state can kill. Collusion has a clear benefit: it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to prove the hand of the state. No orders are given and neither is collusion a policy which can be uncovered, rather a witting – or even unwitting – consequence of a wider culture or approach to a particular conflict. As ever, though, it comes with significant legal and practical problems: the state’s intelligence services will have little influence or control over the deaths. Violence could spiral; innocent people could end up dead. Whether going direct or indirect, or indeed any point on the scale between them, assassinations, like all covert actions, create tough choices. Leaders cannot have it all. An increase in secrecy creates a decrease in control and impact.

Even when working directly, it is crucial to remember one thing: the real James Bonds do not have a licence to kill. Any use of lethal force would need to be signed off by the foreign secretary or prime minister. The 1994 Intelligence Services Act does allow MI6 to engage in ‘other tasks’ beyond gathering intelligence, while a particularly sensitive section, often referred to as the James Bond clause in the press, gives the foreign secretary power to authorize criminality overseas. At the time, Number 10 worried that excitable journalists might interpret it as a licence to kill and so Prime Minister John Major annotated the draft text with a single word, ‘Hitler’, offering the classic Whitehall analogy of when lethal force would be considered.9

Even if MI6 officers could kill people (and they cannot) – it hardly amounts to a licence given the amount of ministerial oversight required. And besides, MI6 does not have paramilitary capabilities. If ministers did authorize lethal force, intelligence officers would rely on their close relationship with special forces to carry it out.

In summer 2021, The Sun breathlessly hyped the existence of ‘the real 007s… a unit of real-life James Bonds so secret [the] government won’t admit they exist’: the elite E Squadron, which works at the disposal of MI6 and the director of special forces. It is a very real unit, staffed by brave personnel and doing important, dangerous work. The journalist quoted one operative: ‘Is it a licence to kill? It is certainly not carte blanche. But the nature of soldiering means it’s sometimes necessary to take life. Everyone is trained in deadly force.’10 The article – and plenty of others like it – is a classic example of constructing specialness, peddling myth and misperceptions about the licence to kill. Suggestive photographs of Princess Diana (whom MI6 did not assassinate) and interviews with special forces ‘legends’ describing their ‘mad ops’ provided plenty of innuendo. It is little wonder that myths emerge.