ISSUES RELATED TO COLLECTION AND COVERT ACTION
Many ethical and moral issues arise from collection and covert action. As with the broad moral issues. there are many questions and little consensus on answers.
HUMINT. HUMINT collection involves the manipulation of other human beings as potential sources of information. The skills required to be a successful HUMINT collector are acquired over time with training and experience. They basically involve psychological techniques to gain trust, including empathy, flattery, and sympathy. The more direct methods of gaining cooperation include bribery, blackmail, and sex. (National Clandestine Service offices note that they do not use blackmail or sex as a means of recruiting spies, if for no other reasons than that these spies are not reliable.)
Two issues predominate. The first is the morality of the manipulation itself. One might argue that psychological techniques are used on someone who is already susceptible to manipulation. An unwilling subject will likely terminate the relationship. (Walk-ins are different by virtue of the fact that they volunteer their services.) Are these legitimate activities to be undertaken by a government against the citizens of another country, whether an enemy or not?
The second issue is the responsibility of the government doing the recruiting to the source.
• How far does the government’s responsibility go?
• How deep an obligation, if any, does the government incur in the recruitment?
• If the HUMINT asset is compromised, how far should the recruiter go to maintain the asset’s safety? Does this obligation extend to his or her family as well?
• What if the asset has not been productive for some time? For how long a period is the government obliged to protect the asset once the relationship ended its usefulness?
• What if the asset proves to be unproductive? Perhaps the asset has misrepresented his or her access and capabilities. Is there still an obligation?
One of the most compelling arguments in favor of strong and continued responsibility for recruited sources has little to do with morality and ethics. It is the more practical concern that recruitment of new sources becomes more difficult if word gets out that current or former sources are not given the support and protection they need. In other words, failing to protect a source is bad for business.
Another issue tends to be specific to certain areas, such as terrorism and narcotics, that depend heavily on HUMINT for good intelligence. To collect that intelligence, U.S. officials must develop contacts with—and usually pay money to—members of terrorist or narcotics-trafficking organizations. These people have the needed intelligence. Such a case arose in 1995, when the press reported that a CIA-paid asset was instrumental in the arrest of the terrorist known as Carlos. The asset was also a terrorist, a member of Carlos’s group. (Carlos, the “Jackal,” was an international terrorist during the 1970s and 1980s, usually working closely with radical Arab groups. Carlos was captured in Sudan in 1994 and was sentenced to life imprisonment in France.) Penetration of a terrorist group may require the agent to prove him- or herself by taking part in a terrorist activity. This probably approaches a line that many would find impossible to cross. Thus, for understandable reasons, reviewing the assumptions about the efficacy of HUMINT against terrorism is necessary.
Some people find it morally objectionable that relationships are forged with those who may have engaged in activities directed against U.S. interests. Policy and intelligence officials must make a difficult choice between access to useful information that cannot be obtained through other means and the distasteful prospect of paying money to a terrorist or narcotics trafficker.
COLLECTION. Beyond the recruiting of human assets, intelligence officials use a number of techniques to collect intelligence, including the theft of material and various types of eavesdropping, which are deemed unlawful in everyday life. What legitimizes these activities as intelligence operations of the state? Within the United States, intelligence and law enforcement officials had been required to have court orders for eavesdropping and other techniques, and procedures are in place to prevent intelligence collections from including information about U.S. citizens, a category that includes legally resident aliens. The debate about reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) touched on these safeguards versus the need to adjust collection techniques in response to changing technology.
The same issues arise in counterintelligence when a potential suspect has been identified. In the United States, unlike many other countries, the law requires intelligence officials to obtain a court order before performing collection activities against a possible spy.
Collection also raises the moral question of responsibility for the knowledge that has been gained. Do intelligence officials or policy makers incur any obligations by discovering some piece of intelligence? For example, during World War II, British and U.S. intelligence became aware, via signals intelligence, of the mass killing of the Jews by the Germans. The Allies did not carry out military action (bombing rail lines and camps) for two reasons. One was the belief that attacking purely military targets would end the war sooner and thus save more people in the concentration camps than would direct attacks on the camps. Another reason was concern over safeguarding the sources and methods by which the Allies had learned about the camps. What are the ethical and moral implications of the decision to desist?
In 2004, a former minister in the British government alleged that Britain and the United States had conducted espionage at the United Nations in the period prior to the 2003 Security Council vote on Iraq WMI). By international treaty the UN is supposed to be inviolate from any espionage activities, although it is widely known that many states ignored this agreement. For example, for years U.S. officials assumed that Soviet members of the UN secretariat engaged in espionage for their home country even though they were supposed to be international civil servants. In 1978, Arkady Shevchenko, a UN undersecretary, defected to the United States after having passed information to the CIA for several years. Shevchenko confirmed that the Soviet Union used the UN to gather intelligence. Separate allegations also were made that the United States had conducted intelligence collection against the International Agency for Atomic Energy (IAEA), arising from concerns over Iran’s nuclear program. The IAEA, like the UN, is supposed to be inviolate from members’ intelligence activities. The attraction of the UN, or other international bodies, as an intelligence collection target for any nation is obvious. Almost every nation in the world has a diplomatic presence at the UN, affording a breadth of access that is likely unavailable in many other capitals. The arrangement may be especially important for collecting against nations with whom a state does not have diplomatic relations or whose diplomatic presence worldwide is limited.
One could argue that the treaty status of the UN is no different than the sovereignty of any nation. After all, no nation permits hostile intelligence collection in its territory. This is another instance in which the
raison d’etat
takes precedence over treaty obligations.
COVERT ACTION. Covert actions are interventions by one state in the affairs of another. The basic ethical issue is the legitimacy of such operations. Concepts of national interest, national security, and national defense are most commonly used to support covert operations. But, taken to the extreme, every nation could be both a perpetrator and a target, creating Hobbesian anarchy. In reality, many states do not have the capability, the need, or the will to carry out covert actions against other states. But those states that do have the need and the ability believe their covert actions to be legitimate.
Covert actions also may conflict with personal goals or beliefs. Across the range of covert actions, from purely political (electoral aid, propaganda) to economic subversion and coups, innocent citizens in the targeted state can be affected and perhaps put in jeopardy. Military attacks on civilians in wartime have long been accepted as a legitimate activity, such as the large-scale bombings of cities. Are peacetime covert actions different?
Propaganda operations raise concern in the United States over blowback—the danger that a false story planted in the foreign press by U.S. intelligence might be picked up by U.S. media outlets (see chap. 8). If U.S. intelligence informs these outlets of the true nature of the story, it runs the risk of a leak, thus undoing the entire operation. How serious a concern should blowback be? Is it a major threat to the independence of the press?
What are the moral limits of operations? During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, some Soviet troops, dispirited by the interminable war, succumbed to the ready availability of narcotics, as had U.S. troops in Vietnam. The United States supplied arms to the anti-Soviet Mujaheddin, including sophisticated Stinger missiles. Would it have been legitimate and acceptable to take steps to increase drug use by the Soviet troops as a means of undermining their military efforts?
Paramilitary operations—the waging of war via surrogate forces, placing them somewhat beyond the norms of accepted international law—raise a number of ethical and moral issues. Are they legitimate? They raise the prospect of innocent civilians being put in jeopardy. Are there limits to paramilitary operations? For example, does the nature of the regime that is being fought matter? Are such operations legitimate against oppressive, undemocratic regimes but illegitimate against those with more acceptable forms of government? If there are differences, who determines which governments are legitimate targets and which are not?
As with HUMINT, paramilitary operations raise questions about the sponsoring power’s obligations to the combatants. This is a problem particularly for operations that are unsuccessful or appear to be inconclusive. In the case of a failed operation, does the supporting power have an obligation to help extricate its surrogate combatants and move them to a safe haven? In the case of an inconclusive operation, the choices are even more difficult. The supporting state may be able to continue the paramilitary operations indefinitely, perhaps knowing that there is little chance of success, but also little prospect of defeat. Should the supporting power continue the operation despite its near pointlessness? Or does it have a responsibility to terminate the operation? If it decides to terminate, does it have an obligation to extricate the fighters it has supported?
Even a successful operation can raise ethical and moral issues. In the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, one faction, the Taliban, eventually took over much of the country. The Taliban imposed a strict Muslim regime on Afghanistan, much at odds with Western notions of civil liberties and the rights of women. Did the United States and its anti-Soviet partners in Afghanistan (China, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia) bear some responsibility to attempt to moderate the rule imposed by the Taliban? Eventually, the Taliban played host to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, raising further questions about the results of the earlier policy.
ASSASSINATION. Most people would, and official U.S. policy does, draw a distinction between casualties inflicted as a result of military operations and the targeted assassination of a specific individual. (See chap. 8 for further discussion of assassination and the U.S. ban on it.) At the same time and even before the 2001 terrorist attacks, the formerly broad support for the assassination ban had eroded among the general public and to some extent in the press. The change in attitude perhaps reflected some of the difficulties the United States has encountered in imposing its will since the end of the cold war.
Even if the ban were to be lifted selectively, it is difficult to imagine how useful criteria for implementing assassination could be drawn up. What level of crime or hostile activity would make someone a legitimate target? As with Britain’s interest in assassinating Adolf Hitler, it is not easy to identify a potential target at the right time. Also, some possible targets are former partners. Saddam Hussein, for example, received U.S. backing in his war with Iran (1980-1988), which was then seen as the bigger problem. His behavior became problematic only after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
In the case of Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders, the debate over assassination became irrelevant. The United States recognized the attacks of 2001 as an act of war, making these individuals legitimate military targets.
Assassination is also a remarkably sloppy tool. Without absolute assurances about who will follow the victim into power and how the successor will behave, assassination provides no guarantee of solving the problem at hand. The political unrest in Lebanon following the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 is instructive. It is widely assumed that Hariri was killed by Syria as he opposed Syria’s continued military presence in Lebanon. The result of Hariri’s death was widespread protests in Lebanon and international condemnation of Syria, resulting in the beginning of the long-delayed Syrian withdrawal of military forces and intelligence officers.
The leaders who would be considered targets are not in democracies; they are in states where the mechanisms for political succession are ill defined or subject to contest. One thug could replace another. Thus the gain would be little, while the risk to international reputation would be great.