How To Stage A Coup: And Ten Other Lessons from the World of Secret Statecraft (Cormac, Rory)

Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.

Cormac, Rory. How To Stage A Coup: And Ten Other Lessons from the World of Secret Statecraft. Atlantic Books, 2022.

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These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!

This is a frank and entertaining book on Cloak and Dagger foreign policy, with chapters on How to get away with murder, or How to pick your rebels. It provides multiple examples in which reality makes Tom Clancy’s plots seem like reports of bureaucratic accounting meetings, and emphasizes the centrality of confusion, not secrecy, in most covert operations. A warning: Russia is just bad weather; China is climate change.

Prologue

Much mythologized and heavily romanticized, covert action is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the grey zone within international politics.

 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.

 how covert action works and how it is reported. Ambiguity is everything.

Introduction: Grey zones and covert action

 They prize emotion over authority.

 excitable neophilia dominating global politics

 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 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. 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’,

 GRU Unit 29155 is remarkably conspicuous. As we shall see, its brazen–to the point of sloppy–operations

 Unacknowledged, semi-secret, activity complements this where necessary. Its whole of society approach

 united front activity and can be traced back to Mao’s era;

 China calls the ‘three warfares’–public opinion, psychological and legal–to discreetly shape events.

 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.

 giving French covert action a more aggressive feel than British special political actions.

 Paramilitary covert action then spanned Cameroon, Chad, the Comoros, Mozambique, Nigeria, Zaire and elsewhere. The French plotted to assassinate Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi. Twice.

 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,

 2016, the French press reported that Service Action was working alongside military special forces to disrupt and neutralize ISIS in Libya. The president supposedly had a kill list; it was, according to one journalist, ‘ultra-secrète’.

 Israel is another country with a muscular–to put it mildly–reputation

 Israel is currently engaged in a shadow war with Iran, another notable practitioner of secret statecraft.

Turkey has also long turned to the hidden hand.

 Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and others in the region

 Egypt has boasted an incredibly ambitious–if unsuccessful–covert action programme subverting and destabilizing Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Libya.

 Pakistan and India

 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.

 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.

1. How to assassinate your enemies

 the early hours of 3 January 2020, the powerful Iranian general Qassem Soleimani landed at an airport outside Baghdad.

The following August, the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny became violently ill on a flight.

 Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was ambushed, shot and killed outside Tehran.

 Presidents and prime ministers contemplating a lethal strike grapple with this macabre trade-off between directness and deniability.

 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.

 If special forces and drones lie at one end, then collusion lies at the other end of our directness/ deniability scale.

Collusion is particularly associated with UK activity in Northern Ireland;

 Any use of lethal force would need to be signed off by the foreign secretary or prime minister.

 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.

 1995, senior members of the Sudanese government conspired to assassinate President Mubarak of Egypt.

 The KGB infiltrated the kitchen staff of the Afghan leader, Hafizullah Amin, and managed to poison his food. Doctors frantically saved his life but, as he lay in bed recuperating, a handful of Soviet special forces stormed the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and assassinated him.

 The second example comes from Syria in 1982. A bomb, planted by a Syrian agent, killed Bashir Gemayel, the president-elect of Lebanon.

 Presidents Bush and Obama saw targeted killings as a pragmatic option to disrupt and remove the terrorist threat.

 a leading thinker on ethics and war, Michael Walzer, put it: targeted killing ‘is clearly better than untargeted killings’.

 In 2018, an elderly man and his daughter were found slumped on a park bench in Salisbury. They slipped in and out of consciousness. He was Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer who had betrayed the Kremlin and become an agent for MI6.

 Novichok, could easily be traced back to Russia

 Exposure was necessary to send a message to other defectors and would-be defectors.

 Kim Jong-nam in 2017

 Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist, entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and never came back out.

 Assassination is political theatre, often with pantomime secrecy.

 French assassination operations back in the 1950s as an example. As revolutionary war raged in Algeria,

 The number of terrorist attacks increased following the deaths of al-Qaeda leaders such as Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki,

 Apartheid-era South Africa

 Assassination is illegal, difficult and dangerous.

2. How to get away with murder

 Because of this, the operation was a legal fudge. It was a covert action partly for diplomatic reasons because, if it had been a military operation, it could have constituted an act of war. Who knows how Pakistan would have responded?

 On other occasions, though, the target is neither so infamous nor reviled, and so the state must work that little bit harder to justify extrajudicial killing.

Assassination is illegal; targeted killings are not.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist leader, was one of the most high-profile examples.

 Israel has long conducted targeted killings. In 2006, its approach received unanimous legal backing from its Supreme Court.

Obama leapt on the concept of imminence,

Soleimani was the commander of the Quds Force, roughly equivalent to the CIA and US special forces combined, an elite unit within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

 For the first time, the US expanded its targeted killing to a state official. Justifications of self-defence and imminent threat seemed stretched to breaking point.

while targeted killing and assassination are legally distinct, they exist in a slippery grey zone conceptually.

 On the questions of imminence, threat and legality, states get away with lethal strikes by controlling the narrative.

 ‘We never talk about intelligence matters… except when we want to, obviously.’

 used leaks and unattributable briefings to ensure friendly press coverage and gradually legitimize the covert killings.

 mockery lowered the level of discussion and made a serious message accessible, memorable and well suited to social media. Flooding the internet with competing stories ensured nothing made sense; people shrugged and wondered if anything was real anymore.

Clearly there is a stark and significant difference between American use of quasi-secrecy to normalize the targeted killing policy and Russian contradictory spamming or Saudi lies deployed to cover up attempted assassinations. All three cases do, however, emphasize the importance of the narrative to avoiding criticism.

Things changed overnight. After September 2001, the US stopped criticizing and instead turned to Israel for inspiration as Washington ramped up a targeted killing programme of its own.

 Like the US, France drew up a terrorist kill list and has been particularly active in hunting down jihadists in Syria and in the Sahel region of Africa.

 The CIA trained Lebanese teams, one of which went on to launch a car bomb that killed eighty civilians in an ill-fated attempt to take out a terrorist suspect.

 The taboo erodes further with each high-profile killing. The more democracies kill people, the more non-democracies deploy whataboutism–however unfairly–whenever criticized for killing people.

 ‘We should,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘but we can’t afford to… so we won’t.’

How do states get away with killing? By controlling, or muddying, the narrative, by hampering oversight, by finding safety in numbers, and by being too economically powerful to be held to account.

3. How to influence others

 China, the propaganda insisted, had it all under control. The campaign was crude: many of the thousands of accounts lacked profile pictures or biographies; they recycled the same names repeatedly.

 When China could no longer hide the magnitude of what was going on, the message changed tack. Accounts began to praise China’s authoritarian response to the outbreak instead.

 In March, as cases spread across Europe, Chinese propaganda challenged the idea that Beijing had delayed telling the world about the virus. Instead, it insisted that the government had acted quickly, transparently and successfully.

 As cases rose, propaganda became more sophisticated and began to criticize other countries’ weak responses.

 By mid-March, the foreign ministry’s information spokesman began peddling conspiracies about the US origins of the virus.

implicitly, that only authoritarian responses could control

 More than eighty countries, from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, have sponsored covert influence campaigns over the last couple of years. Most of these countries use propaganda to manipulate their own citizens.

 Russia’s ‘firehose of falsehoods’ remains unusual,

 Saudi propaganda has become increasingly sophisticated. The kingdom has built an electronic army–known as an Army of Flies–

 Disinformation for hire is a booming growth industry.

 The US and the UK spread plenty of unattributable material during the Cold War.

 The more recent Soviet AIDS campaign, Operation Denver, is the most infamous example. In 1983, the Soviets planted a story in the Indian newspaper Patriot blaming the US for creating the virus which, by then, was spreading fast.

 Moscow and East Germany then slowly and patiently spread the story to Africa, South America and Europe by using front organizations and journalists to amplify the investigations of an East German biologist who supposedly verified the link.

 A century later, the UK now apparently has a secret team, housed within GCHQ, specializing in discrediting targets as well as doing a whole host of other ‘Ds’: promoting distrust, dissuading, deceiving, disrupting, delaying, denying, degrading and–in theory–deterring. Leaked documents suggest that this team engaged in propaganda (or, in British jargon, offensive cyber effects operations) targeting Argentina.

 far more effective to work through groups that are perceived to have an authentic voice than it is delivering messages stamped with government branding.

 British propagandists spread rumours that the gelignite was particularly volatile at that temperature. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) quickly disposed of what it thought were suspect stocks.

 false rumours in Uganda that President Idi Amin faced a coup and even an assassination threat if he left the country to travel to a Commonwealth meeting in London.

 entirely fake organization, the Freedom for Africa Movement. Supposedly a neutral francophone group, it became the vehicle of choice to attack nationalist leaders and Soviet imperialism in Africa.

 same propagandists forged Muslim Brotherhood pamphlets, using aggressive religious language to attack nationalist leaders in the Middle East.

 corpse dumped on the trail. It had been drained of blood, with two bite marks in the neck. It must have been the Aswang, they concluded, a mythical monster similar to a vampire in local folklore. The fighters fled.

 Operation Elimination by Illumination. Intelligence officers would spread propaganda via Cuban media and leaflet drops predicting that the second coming of Jesus Christ–an arch anti-communist–was imminent and that this spelled the end for Fidel Castro.

 In the early 1970s, British intelligence faked a satanic altar in Northern Ireland.

 Propaganda is not limited to newspapers, the media and social media. The ways to influence people’s thinking are limited only by the scale of our imagination.

 influence work rarely exists as an end in itself. Instead, it complements diplomacy

4. How to subvert governments and undermine democracy

 In a bizarre twist, the allegation was true. Kossipé did not exist. He was indeed a persona used by the French. France and Russia had spent the best part of a year covertly trying to influence Facebook users in the Central African Republic.

truth becomes the first casualty. When reality is subverted, how do we know what is true anymore? How do we know who to believe? What to trust? The second casualty is democracy.

 Based in St Petersburg and allegedly financed by a close ally of Putin, the Internet Research Agency was the most notorious example of industrialized low-grade propaganda.

 On the one hand, the Trump campaign deftly exploited big data on US voters; on the other hand, Russia used targeted political propaganda

 One campaign was aimed at specific individuals in Pennsylvania with the words ‘coal miner’ in their job title, reminding them that Trump would end Obama’s supposed war on coal. 14 They also tried to use knowledge of their audience to tailor messages: infographics worked better on liberals; conservatives were more active early in the morning.

 Russia used personal data, probably harvested from social media accounts, to intimidate Ukrainian soldiers at the height of the war between the two countries in 2014.

 Cambridge Analytica, used data harvested from Facebook to help the Trump campaign micro-target its political messaging.

 somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every individual.’

 Voltaire’s famous maxim that ‘those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’,

 are witnessing the rise of propaganda as paralysis.

 Taiwan has become an unfortunate testing ground for China’s so-called three warfares. The first, public opinion warfare, The second, psychological warfare, The third, legal warfare,

 Russia is just bad weather; China is climate change.

5. How to rig an election

 three overlapping ways: through propaganda; through funding a particular party; or through directly altering votes.

 ‘hack and leak’.

nefarious Internet Research Agency, now renamed Lakhta Internet Research,

 China was notable by its absence from the 2020 election. Beijing knew that either winner would be bad for China given the bipartisan consensus in Washington. It considered influence operations but ultimately decided against it.

 Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela have spent at least $ 300 million between them discreetly funding political parties since 2010.

alarmed Ukrainian intelligence officers discovered a worrying intrusion which would have caused its central election commission to display inaccurate results. Russia had secretly planned to put a forged bar chart on the commission’s website–just in time for the primetime news broadcasts.

 Two years later, Russian hackers targeted US voter registration systems before the 2016 presidential election. They quietly probed websites in twenty-one states and successfully breached a few voter registration databases. Hackers even managed to install malware on the network of a company that made software for managing voter rolls.

The last known CIA operation was to meddle in Serbian elections to keep Slobodan Milošević from power in 2000

National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy warned: ‘I think it is unproven that CIA knows how to manipulate an election in British Guiana without a backfire.’

Recent statistical analysis makes for grim reading. US covert regime change attempts–whether by electoral interference or other means–increased the likelihood of armed conflict

6. How to stage a coup

Qaboos had been put on the throne with British help some fifty years earlier in a remarkably successful covert action.

 Few knew that the coup was actually organized by the sultan’s British defence secretary with the support of the Foreign Office.

 1965, British officials had helped to remove the leader of Sharjah, a small emirate in the Persian Gulf.

A year later, the leader of Abu Dhabi met a similar fate, despite the Labour foreign secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, needing a lot of persuading to sanction what he called a ‘James Bond scheme’.

 Edward Luttwak, who wrote the classic book on coups, argues that ripe states have an apathetic population, or one which actively distrusts the government.

 CIA secretly sponsored at least thirteen coups during the Cold War,

 include Iran in 1953 and Guatemala the following year.

 The success in Guatemala, hot on the heels of Iran, became legendary. It set the tone for CIA operations for the next decade.

 French were particularly busy in sub-Saharan Africa,

 attempt by mercenaries to remove the pro-Soviet leader in Benin on the west African coast. Known as Operation Shrimp,

 Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, cautiously approved a coup in the Comoros,

1979, the French fomented another coup, this time targeting the Central African Republic.

 History tells us that, to be successful, plotters require a few key ingredients:

• First, the target government must have a structure that lends itself to takeover by a small team.

• Second, a credible candidate willing to receive covert support is equally vital, yet not easy to find given the risk of being labelled a stooge if exposed.

• Third, and linked to this, plotters need to acquire the support of key groups,

• Fourth, and alongside this, a coup requires the acquiescence–if not support–of the wider population, which can also be softened in advance.

• Fifth, as the coup unfolds, plotters will have to move quickly and with great precision, taking key public buildings, controlling road links and arresting politicians.

In April 2021, news broke of another apparent, if murkier, coup attempt, this time in Jordan–

Russia allegedly had a hand in a 2010 coup in Kyrgyzstan by encouraging opposition forces to destabilize the president.

 2017, China seemingly attempted something similar in Zimbabwe.

7. How to wage a secret war

 For nearly half a decade, the CIA had been running one of its largest covert operations since the 1980s: secretely funding, arming, and training rebels fighting the brutal regime in Syria. The US covert operation was one of many in what had become an anarchic playground of proxies. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Jordan, the UK and France all covertly intervened to different degrees.

 In Libya, the UK and others had supported rebel groups fighting another brutal dictator,

 He suggested dropping used Libyan banknotes worth $ 1 billion into the country,

 E Squadron is a small elite unit of special forces operatives working with MI6, the successor to what was known as the Increment.

 confused flurry of covert units joined the subterranean fray. Special forces and intelligence teams from France, Italy, Egypt, Qatar and the UAE

 so-called little green men, took over and annexed the Crimean peninsula.

 This is the world of risk management, covert action as a coping mechanism.

 decision-making process leading up to the Syrian covert action,

 French intelligence sent paramilitary advisers and recruited mercenaries to support the Biafran secessionists in the break-up of Nigeria.

 Iran has a well-deserved reputation for being a sponsor of violence.

 Only two examples exist of the CIA successfully overthrowing a government by sponsoring rebels alone: in Afghanistan and Chad.

 Reagan baulked at the expansionist ambitions of Chad’s neighbour Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi soon became his bête noire.

 Regime change only works if you are willing to cede secrecy.

 The Russians seemingly had little idea of the end game when they began sponsoring rebels in eastern Ukraine in 2014. It was all rather improvised and opportunistic.

 The objective is not always–or indeed is rarely–regime change. More often than not, it is about subversion: using rebels to weaken the target state’s authority.

 India is a huge country, too large and diverse for strong central rule throughout, allowing Pakistan to exploit the remoteness of certain regions, as well as the cultural diversity. Just as India exploited the distance and difference between East and West Pakistan before the creation of Bangladesh.  

Libyan uprising in March 2011, Benghazi. A British special forces team dressed in black and led by a young MI6 Middle East specialist disembarked

 admitted authorizing what he called a small ‘diplomatic team’ to build on ‘initial contacts and to assess the scope for closer diplomatic dialogue’.

 The most famous example is the CIA’s covert support of Afghan rebels in the 1980s.

 Covert action–or the grey zone as he called it–risked misperception, miscalculation and misunderstanding. History, he claimed, teaches us that this is a very dangerous and unstable business. It could unleash uncontrollable forces easily leading to all-out war. This is a common misassumption.

 This raises an intriguing question. How can states wage a secret war, which is not really all that secret, but which does not escalate to an open military conflict? The answer lies in non-acknowledgement.

 The covert action became utterly implausibly deniable. And yet it is widely considered successful. How can that be so? It was all about sending secret–unacknowledged–messages to various audiences.

 The twilight world of quasi-secrecy brings a second advantage or opportunity beyond covert communication: exploitable ambiguity,

8. How to pick your rebels

 Egypt unsurprisingly turned to covert action. With no rebels to support, it used propaganda to foment rebellion among the disaffected Muslim population of Eritrea, which had recently been federated into Ethiopia.

 In doing so, it cultivated a rebel group which it could then sponsor to undermine Ethiopian authority and distract its government from Nile-related projects. A thirty-year war of Eritrean independence followed.

 fine line can separate moderate rebel fighters from terrorists. Much of this is about presentation or perception;

 ‘Nobody really understands the Syrian war, and most of us are in no position to assess who are the goodies and who are the baddies’. Duncan used the same simplistic–almost infantile–terms to describe the Libyan conflict,

 contact with ‘former’ members of two Libyan terrorist groups: the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and 17 February Martyrs’ Brigade. The head of Britain’s armed forces accepted that cooperation with such terrorists was ‘a grey area’ and a weakness. ‘The need for speed to prevent Benghazi falling,’ he maintained, ‘meant that we were committed to conflict in an imperfect world.’

CIA sponsorship of rebels becomes significantly less likely during periods of divided government.  

Syria was a mess. It is impossible to understand the covert action without understanding the goals and preferences of the rebel groups–on top of all the other states involved.

•  History offers two pieces of advice for those considering sponsoring a rebel group. First, it is important not to  dictate from Langley, London or Moscow but to generate objectives which suit both sides; words of Kermit Roosevelt, who led the CIA’s efforts in the Iranian coup back in 1953, are timeless: ‘If you don’t want something that the [indigenous] people and the army want,’ he warned, ‘don’t give it to clandestine operations, give it to the marines.’

• Second, presidents and prime ministers would be wise to pick a single group rather than hedging and supporting a bunch of different rebels.

is not just the cessation of state funding that ends covert relationships. Sometimes, the rebels’ growth and autonomy can do it instead.

Hezbollah outgrew its proxy status. It has morphed into a large political and military force in its own right;

another option: mercenaries.

 The most emblematic was Bob Denard, the dapper, self-proclaimed pirate of the republic. Denard was involved in a string of coups, including in the Comoros and Benin,

 The Wagner group is perhaps the best-known example, up to ten thousand people having undertaken at least one short-term contract over the last few years. Emanating from over fifteen different countries, although most are Russian,

 2020, a dusty tablet computer with a cracked screen belonging to a Wagner operative was recovered from a Libyan battlefield.

 There is probably no official company called Wagner; instead the name refers to a network of overlapping businesses, groups and interests.

 increases deniability, or, at the very least, increases confusion

 sponsoring rebels is too difficult, states sometimes raise mercenary forces instead. This also comes with significant risk of reputational damage. Control is the key variable here.

9. How to sabotage

 Rainbow Warrior,

 Iranian nuclear scientists could not work out why their centrifuges, integral to the enrichment of uranium, kept failing. To make matters worse, their computers kept mysteriously crashing and rebooting as well. It was not a coincidence. American and Israeli intelligence had successfully unleashed malware, known as Stuxnet,

 GCHQ had launched an offensive cyber-sabotage operation targeting terrorists’ laptops and mobile phones. It disrupted, degraded and spread distrust within ISIS.

 breathlessly inserting the cyber prefix on any and all twenty-first-century activities does not make them revolutionary.

 In June 2021, the biggest ship in the Iranian navy sank after an unexplained fire in its engine room.

 Cold War operation which supposedly caused the largest non-nuclear explosion in history. In 1982, the CIA manipulated a Soviet supply line by inserting faulty software which seemingly ended up triggering a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline.

 It used FAREWELL to modify products which would then disrupt and sabotage Soviet designs.

 In the late 1990s, the CIA targeted Slobodan Milošević, the Yugoslav president charged with war crimes for his role in the horrors inflicted during the Balkan wars. It was part of a multipronged approach to undermine Milošević and then prevent him from winning the next election in Serbia. As we have seen, it formed one of the last known cases of US covert electoral interference.

 CIA allegedly pushed for an operation to empty the bank accounts of Mexican drug cartels. Intelligence officers thought that financial sabotage would disrupt the drugs trade, but the Treasury ultimately convinced the White House to veto the plan: it would damage confidence in the global banking system.

 The French have used offensive cyber operations to disrupt terrorists in the Sahel and Sahara.

 France turned to sabotage, known as Arma operations in French intelligence jargon, during its murky war against Algeria in the 1950s.

 French denied and instead blamed on a mysterious vigilante counterterrorism group called La Main Rouge (the Red Hand)

 The French foreign ministry repeatedly told Bonn to stop facilitating arms. At one point the French even warned their West German counterparts that they might resort to ‘illegal measures’. When these diplomatic interventions resulted in little effect, French intelligence turned to sabotage to get their attention.

 states using sabotage to disrupt enemy activity and also to send a stark message. They reveal mixed results.

 boron carbide powder supplied by MI6. A small amount of this chemical, noted for its hard properties and now used in abrasives and bullet-proof vests, ruined a lot of fuel. They also disguised boron carbide as charcoal and passed it to Afghans who worked inside Soviet bases and would insert it into fuel tanks. The chemical caused engines to overheat, generating spectacular results when targeting helicopters. Their engines seized up; aircraft simply dropped out of the sky.

 success of the D-Day landings in June 1944 came down not only to the famous deception operation which hoodwinked Hitler into thinking the invasion would take place at Calais rather than Normandy, but also because of preparatory sabotage by the equally famous Special Operations Executive (SOE). The Nazis had planned to push the Allies back towards the sea, but SOE saboteurs destroyed the rail transport system, blew up bridges, knocked down trees and mined roads. The 450-mile journey to Normandy should have taken the German army three days; as a result of the sabotage, it took seventeen.

Sabotage attacks economic and commercial targets.  As Lawrence of Arabia said, the minerals not the military.

Some interesting insights from History: 

• First, it is important not to obsess over the novelty of cyber; it works hand in hand with the physical, human domain.

• Second, sabotage cannot annihilate the enemy.

• Third, sabotage and propaganda are two sides of the same coin. The psychological impact is crucial; the paranoia it can induce; the morale it can sap.

10. How to cyberattack

 spring 2007 when distributed denial-of-service attacks practically shut down the Estonian government’s online services.

 The attack was large, disruptive, confusing and, crucially, below the level of warfare.

summer of 2021 saw an epidemic of ransomware activity targeting the US.

 The over-hyped ‘cyber 9/ 11’ or ‘cyber Pearl Harbor’ analogy is flawed for three reasons.

•  First, any such devastating sabotage would not be a single out-of-the-blue attack. There is no big red cyber button

•  Second, governments have little incentive to advertise the lethal effects of such attacks.

•  Third, the probability of a successful attack against a target big enough to cause a cyber 9/ 11 or Pearl Harbor is quite low.

 attribution, especially in private, is not as difficult as many assume, partly because of serious protective measures in place, and partly because of the consequences of clever deception operations designed to mislead and unsettle the attacker.

 They make us underestimate the real purpose and danger of cyberattacks: persistent subversion.

Chinese approaches similarly blur espionage and attack. Its military emphasizes the importance of secret reconnaissance to access, monitor and identify weaknesses in enemy systems.

spring 2020, thousands of US companies and federal agencies updated their computer software. This was routine; they had done so many times before. They had no idea that Russian intelligence had inserted malicious code into the update in a successful attempt to access American systems. Discovered towards the end of the year, the so-called SolarWinds intrusion was one of the largest known breaches in history

 Complicating matters further, the simultaneous Russian ‘hack and leak’ did constitute a covert influence operation, and debates about how to respond involved discussion of whether Russia would retaliate against other US targets, for example through electoral interference.

 First off, the novelty and mystique of cyber exaggerates this sense of uncertainty. Indeed, according to one former senior GCHQ officer, states have been able to confidently identify perpetrators of attacks for some time.

 Second, in many ways this ambiguity between espionage and sabotage existed in classic covert actions of the twentieth century.

 Dar’s undercover agents slept for three years. Then, in the summer of 1954, they heard a codeword broadcast across an army radio channel and awoke, posting letter bombs to various addresses in the cities of Alexandria and Cairo. Shortly afterwards, small explosions rang out at American cultural centres, including libraries and cinemas. Israel hoped to blame the attacks on the Muslim Brotherhood, local communists or nationalists and ultimately to prevent British withdrawal from the Suez Canal zone.

 From 1970, American and West German intelligence owned and controlled a Swiss encryption company, Crypto AG. The company sold encryption equipment to over 120 countries worldwide, including Egypt, India, Pakistan, Libya and Argentina.

 The Germans sold their shares to the CIA in the 1990s, but the Americans seemed to continue the massive operation well into the twenty-first century. It was only exposed in 2020;

 In December 2015, Russia successfully caused a power outage in western Ukraine by remotely disconnecting around thirty power substations and then inundating support centres with phone calls to disrupt attempts to fix them.

 The best-known North Korean example came in 2014. Sony Pictures made a controversial comedy film, The Interview,

 North Koreans successfully hacked Sony Pictures and released confidential emails including executives’ salaries and details of forthcoming films.

 The sabotage of Iran’s nuclear weapons programme offers an instructive example. In many ways it was successful: it hit the target and made an impact. But this is not the full story–and outsiders still do not know all the details. Critics insist that the operation failed to delay the programme in any meaningful sense and that, worse, it may have deepened mutual suspicion between the US and Iran, thereby making diplomacy more difficult. It may have turbocharged Iran’s own offensive cyber capabilities; empowered extreme elements within the regime to exploit the climate of fear and anger; and hardened Iranian resolve to gain nuclear weapons and reduce cooperation with inspectors.

11. How to wield the hidden hand

 British intelligence officers and Whitehall mandarins have used a ridiculous–if somewhat endearing–range of euphemisms for various forms of covert action over the years. Personal highlights include nocturnal activity, quietism, discreet operations, direct action, pinpricks, peculiar illegal activities, and even Machiavellian schemes.

 Covert action, as a foster-child of impotence and ambition (or frustration), then becomes alluring. 7

 The Kremlin recognizes degrees of secrecy and acknowledgement; covert methods overlap with their overt counterparts, making them difficult to conceptualize and counter. 11

Russian denials of various covert operations, especially the Salisbury poisonings, were almost comical, turning the secret theatre into a farce of Shakespearean proportions

few weeks later, ten Russians were detained in northern Chad, in a remote location where the Chadian army just happened to be battling a rebel invasion from Libya. Bizarrely, they insisted that they were mere tourists visiting the Sahara Desert:

 nuanced approach to secrecy,

 Covert action should be synchronized with other parts of statecraft.

 The vacuum and rise of violent Islamism was not a failure of the CIA, but of politicians to consider what came after.

 Bizarrely, at one point the Foreign Office created a planning committee simply as a harmless forum in which the military could vent their frustrations, while diplomats took the real decisions in secret elsewhere.

 ensuring that operations do not get strangled by red tape, but could lead to tactics and capabilities driving strategy;

 Coordination ensures that states use covert action because they should; not because they can.

 Lack of congressional support for CIA operations in Nicaragua in the 1980s caused the Reagan administration to bypass Congress and break the law. It also deprived the CIA of adequate resources, thereby necessitating the illegal arms sales to Iran to raise money for the rebels.

 covert actions decline during periods of divided government in the US.

 Russia seeks to seamlessly meld disinformation, subversion, offensive cyber operations and conventional military force.

 ‘You do not bring bad news to the tsar’s table.’

 The question, as one scholar of non-proliferation aptly put it, is thus ‘whether and how covert action can contribute to policy outcomes, not whether they achieve these outcomes alone’. Looking at the success of covert action in isolation is meaningless and entirely misses the point.

 nimble networks extend beyond single governments and, to complicate things further, often have an alliance dimension.

 The Americans were keen to work with the British on Afghanistan in the 1980s because of Britain’s longer-standing expertise and agent networks in the country and because congressional scrutiny of the CIA was particularly tight post-Watergate. In the words of one CIA official involved in the programme, the UK took care of the ‘how to kill people department’. More recently, and as we have seen, David Cameron supported covert action in Syria in part because he wanted to look tough to his US and Gulf allies–to look like he was doing something, anything, after parliament refused to sanction the use of military force against the Assad regime in 2013.

 Spy chiefs around the world know that it is difficult to meet a partner’s expectations while protecting your own methods and sources.

 NATO acts as more of a hub of expertise, supporting individual states. Its members are reluctant to share political warfare capabilities or special forces with others because this sensitive information is effectively shared to the most open country’s rules.

 shadowy networks existed beyond the boundaries of governments.

 A particularly shadowy group was Le Cercle. Founded as a Franco-German endeavour back in the 1950s, it expanded to include representatives from Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, the UK, the US and, later, South Africa. It consisted of right-wingers, cold warriors

 Le Cercle still exists today.

 When it comes to propaganda, exploiting existing schisms and polarizing existing debates is key.

 Sputnik, the Russian state-owned news agency, gives a platform to a wide and seemingly incoherent range of guests including conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers and anti-NATO/ EU activists. At first glance, it appears utterly confused but they all have something in common: they harden pre-existing anti-establishment attitudes.

 Success is more than achieving some foreign policy objective. States must get away with it.

covert action must pass what is sometimes known as the Washington Post or New York Times test, as set out by William Webster. For Webster, a successful covert action meets three criteria.

• First, it has to be legal and constitutional:

• Second, according to Webster, to be successful covert action must align with US values.

• Third, covert action must be sufficiently popular so that if exposed it would not cause so much political controversy that any achievements would be wiped out by domestic criticism.

 The dramatic killing of Osama bin Laden formed part of a wider open policy; so too did, say, French paramilitary activity in post-Gaddafi Libya or British sabotage of ISIS communications.

 In short, if a covert action appeared on the front page of the Washington Post tomorrow, would the president be able to look the people in the eye and defend it? This test is all the more important in the twenty-first century given the likely exposure of covert operations if not tomorrow then sometime soon.

 2020, when the National Cyber Force emerged from the shadows, that it operates ‘in a legal, ethical and proportionate way to help defend the nation and counter the full range of national security threats’.

 No blueprint for covert action success exists. Activities are too varied, ranging from propaganda to assassination, and too dependent on individual circumstances. Claims of success and failure are far too subjective in the first place and often wielded as a political weapon.

 Presidents and prime ministers need to know what they are talking about in the first place, have clear objectives which align with the resources, and then calibrate secrecy accordingly.

 weigh up the relationship between secrecy, impact and control.

Conclusion: Defence against the dark arts

 Many western countries are calling out plots with ever more verve and vigour. Many, but not all: France is an exception. Its leaders are not as keen on exposure as the US and other NATO allies, instead preferring forthright conversations behind closed doors or, as one commentator put it, preferring ‘red phones over the megaphone’.

 Exposing individual operations or even individual pieces of propaganda is akin to the fable about the frog slowly being boiled alive. On their own they might appear inconsequential;

 Western leaders’ reliance on a modernist assumption that truth can be exposed and speak for itself is flawed. Clinging to this outdated idea will not defend against today’s covert action when the adversary will just strike back with denials, obfuscation and a blitz of other narratives.

became much more difficult. How leaders publicly use intelligence creates a second risk beyond sources and methods.

Declassifying selective intelligence to bolster a preconceived policy is fraught with problems.

 Leaders must calibrate their exposure carefully. A significant covert attack might warrant an authoritative public condemnation, whereas less serious threats might warrant something more discreet. As a US practitioner recently recommended, the state might reveal multiple operations at once, and so diffuse the attention given to each individual one.

warned against ‘bigging up’ Russian successes.

 Egyptian operations targeting audiences in Somalia, Yemen and Tunisia.

 The Kremlin specifically conducts ‘nudge propaganda’ designed to strengthen the target’s pre-existing grievances.

Defending aginst covert action is a lengthy and difficult process. Three things are essential.

• First, exposure must be done thoughtfully, in line with objectives, and in full consideration of the trade-offs. It is not enough on its own.

• Second, states should manage the narrative carefully.

• Third, and addressing the dilemma, defence requires a proactive and well-coordinated response bringing together multiple governments, public broadcasting, industry, civil society and universities.

Epilogue

covert action operates within a fog of confusion not secrecy.