International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   Covert action is the aspect of intelligence about which most has been written and yet, somewhat counterintuitively, it remains the least well understood. The main reason for this disjuncture is that covert action includes operations such as assassinations and overthrowing other governments, which are both the “sexiest” as well as the most controversial and morally questionable parts of the intelligence enterprise. Consequently, the covert action literature in general has historically been distorted by the focus on these types of operations, although this characteristic has been increasingly remedied over the last 15–20 years as the field has become more sophisticated. This problem has also meant that many of the complexities involved in covert action have only been conveyed in the more recent literature, leading to a somewhat uneven body of work for the topic as a whole. Another imbalance in the field is that it has been dominated by material about the US, a result of the combination of Washington's avid use of covert operations during the Cold War and its (relatively) more accessible information regarding such operations. While this imbalance is necessarily reflected in this review of the literature, there have been a number of quality studies about several other states' operations as well, which are discussed below. This review begins by exploring the ... log in or subscribe to read full text