Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

An irony of the end of the Cold War was confirmation that it was, in fact, never cold in the first place. In the early 1990s, interviews with Soviet veterans and newly opened archives verified that Soviet pilots covertly participated in air-to-air combat with American pilots during the Korean War for two years. About a decade later, declassification of 1,300 American intelligence documents confirmed an even more striking fact: US intelligence agencies knew about the operation. One intelligence review from July 1952, a full year before the end of the war, estimated that 25,000–30,000 Soviet military personnel were "physically involved in the Korean War" and concluded that "a de facto air war exists over North Korea between the UN and the USSR." In short, the Cold War started hot. Yet neither Moscow nor Washington gave any public indication that direct combat was taking place.

This episode is a dramatic example of the two related phenomena this book seeks to understand. The Soviet entry in the Korean War is a case of covert military intervention, in which an external power secretly provides military assistance during a war. The American decision to stay silent after detecting Russian pilots is a case of collusion, in which one government detects but does not publicize or confirm the secret intervention of another government. The episode raises two related but distinct questions. First, why use a covert form of intervention, especially if it will be detected by an adversary? Second, why would an adversary play along?

The conspiracy of silence that emerged in the Korean War is but one example of a broader phenomenon. In political campaigns, rival candidates may uncover evidence of secret legal or ethical violations by their opponents. While going public with such information is tempting, exposure could force the rival candidate to respond in kind and lead to a rash of attack ads and inflammatory accusations. Such mudslinging could depress turnout and open the door for other candidates, creating good reason for mutual restraint regarding secrets. Childhood family dynamics also feature reciprocal secret keeping. Two siblings often know about one another's secrets, be it hidden Halloween candy, forged homework, or a clandestine romantic relationship. Exposing the other's secret to teachers or parents, while tempting, might prompt a reaction that neither sibling wants. If this scenario looms, then a sustainable conspiracy of silence could emerge. Finally, firms may find evidence that their competitor uses offshore bank accounts to evade taxes. The detecting firm may be tempted to expose and undermine its competitor's advantage. Yet doing so risks provoking regulators to more closely scrutinize the industry as a whole. One reasonable response would be mutual restraint in keeping secret such tax evasion.

In each example, a mutually unacceptable outcome influences both the initial act of secrecy and the response by one who finds the secret. The central insight is that mutual silence may result if individuals, firms, or governments can act secretly, observe one another doing so, and share fear of a mutually damaging outcome. Cooperative secrecy of this sort is not so surprising for siblings that live together or firms that might price fix or collude in other ways. However, such behavior is quite surprising in world politics, especially during war. That collusive secrecy would emerge among rivals under anarchy is especially unexpected.

This book analyzes the politics of secrecy in war and puzzling features like tacit collusion among adversaries. Secrecy has long been a hallmark of international politics where "incentives to misrepresent" can be powerful for governments that must fend for themselves. Seeing states act covertly is not surprising per se. After all, secrecy can be essential for protecting military forces in the field and for operational surprise. Hence the adages that "loose lips sink ships" and "tittle tattle lost the battle." Yet secrecy in the Korean War example appears to be serving different ends. Covert activity was observable to the rival. Rather than being in the dark, Moscow's adversary had a unique window into its covert behavior. Moreover, secrecy in this case seems to have been mutually beneficial. Both the American and the Soviet leaders appeared to derive value from keeping the public and other governments in the dark.

This book links such decisions to limited war dynamics and the desire for escalation control. Large-scale conflict escalation is a mutually damaging outcome that is influenced by exposure decisions. I develop a theory in which initial covertness and reactive secrecy are driven by the need to control escalation and avoid large-scale conflict. When escalation risks are significant, adversaries will tend to share an interest in prioritizing control. External military involvement in a local war raises the prospect of expansion in scope and scale. Intervening covertly, however, allows both the intervener and its rivals to better control what scenario unfolds following the intervention. Keeping an intervention covert — that is, acting on the "backstage" rather than the "frontstage" — has two limited-war benefits: easing constraints from a domestic audience and improving communication about interest in limited war. Covertness minimizes domestic hawkish pressures and expresses a mix of resolve and restraint that supports limited war. In the Korean War, covertness regarding the Soviet role allowed each side to operate with fewer constraints, to save face as it limited war, and to have confidence that its adversary valued limiting the conflict. This happened because of, rather than in spite of, detection by the other side. A central finding of the book is that this is not one-of-a-kind. Rather, covertness and collusion are an important part of wars ranging from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to the American occupation of Iraq in the 2000s.

Beyond developing a novel logic for secrecy in war, this book also offers new insights into the very nature of modern war. In the wake of two devastating world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, how did great powers avoid a third? Nuclear weapons, democracy, and bipolarity are typical answers. This book provides a different take on this question. As O'Brien notes, wars still erupted after 1945 despite these larger changes but were "guided by the principle that the conflict should be geographically limited to the immediate overt belligerents." I show that leaders learned over time to use covertness and collusion to avoid domestic constraints and miscommunication that might otherwise lead to large-scale escalation. This book underscores that overtness is an important qualification and identifies how it came to be. Conflicts like the Korean and Vietnam Wars featured direct casualties among the major powers on the backstage. Moreover, understanding these historical links between limited war and secrecy offers practical lessons for policymakers responding to tragic and potentially explosive civil wars in places like Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen.

Secret Wars also holds broader theoretical implications for scholars of International Relations (IR) beyond the study of secrecy itself. For example, the secret side of war I analyze yields new insights about domestic politics and statecraft. Subsequent chapters feature infamous personalist dictators like Adolf Hitler cautiously navigating the dangers of conflict escalation via covertness and collusion. These otherwise unobservable policy decisions showcase caution on the part of leaders and regime types better known for reckless aggression. Regarding democracies, the book shows that democratic leaders often detect but stay silent about covert activity by other governments. This is an under-recognized way in which presidents and prime ministers can deceive and manipulate domestic elites and public opinion which raises questions about accountability and transparency in democracy. The book also provides new insight into how states under anarchy communicate. Covert intervention takes place in a distinct communicative venue during war. This backstage is visible to other major powers and can allow governments to send and receive messages, including regarding escalation and limited war. This metaphor of a theater provides a heuristic use for the study of war more generally. Rather than conceptualizing war as simply a bargaining process dividing up finite spoils, the book suggests the promise of conceptualizing war as a kind of performance. Later chapters show how major powers move between visible and hard-to-observe spaces to manage the image and meaning of their clashes. Doing so protects the performance of limited war and produces collaborative patterns like collusion that are otherwise hard to explain.

The Topic

This book addresses two questions. First, why do states intervene covertly rather than overtly? Second, when covert interventions take place, why do detecting states collude rather than expose? Secrecy, defined as intentional concealment of information from one or more audiences, is simply one way of making decisions and behaving in the world. Secrecy can be used regarding state deliberations, government decisions, communications among heads of state, or externally oriented policy activity. Secrecy, moreover, requires effort. Especially for complex organizations like states, effectively concealing decisions and actions requires information control in the form of physical infrastructure, rules, penalties, and organizational habits. A term closely related to secrecy, which I use when discussing military intervention specifically, is "covert." Covertness is defined as government-managed activity conducted with the intention of concealing the sponsor's role and avoiding acknowledgment of it. It has a narrower scope than the term "secrecy" because it is specific to a state's externally oriented behavior rather than discrete decisions, refers to the sponsor's identity rather than operational details or outcomes, and explicitly incorporates the concept of non-acknowledgment.

I specifically assess secrecy regarding external military interventions. An intervention is combat-related aid given by an outside state to a combatant in a local civil or interstate conflict that includes some role for personnel. An overt intervention involves weaponry and personnel sent to a war zone without restrictions on visibility and with behavioral and verbal expressions of official acknowledgment. A covert intervention, in contrast, features an external power providing such aid in a way that conceals its role and does not feature official acknowledgment. Covert intervention is a specific form of covert operation, distinct from covert surveillance, regime change, or other operation that does not aim to alter battlefield dynamics. States can covertly intervene by providing weaponry that lacks military labeling or appears to originate from a different source; they may send military personnel in unmarked civilian uniforms, as "volunteers," or as "military advisors." Much existing research has focused on why states intervene and on intervention's effect on war duration and other outcomes. I focus on the how of intervention, specifically, covert compared to overt forms. Such a focus is both theoretically important and timely. Just in the last ten years, the list of countries that have reportedly featured covert external involvement by major powers includes Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen.

Covert interventions raise a second-order question regarding secrecy: If detected, will others keep the secret too? This question is especially germane for other major powers that are most likely to detect a given covert intervention. Providing military aid beyond one's borders for months or years is a significant undertaking, no matter the scope. Doing so without partial exposure is difficult enough. In addition, major powers tend to invest significant resources in intelligence bureaucracies. To be clear, detectors often remain in the dark about many details. However, the sponsor of a covert intervention is often discernible. Any detector has two basic options: collude or expose. Exposure involves publicly revealing evidence that a covert intervention is underway and/or publicly validating allegations by others. Collusion, in contrast, involves staying silent. There is an informational component of collusion; the detector must keep evidence of a covert intervention private rather than share it widely. There is also an acknowledgment component: a colluder must publicly deny or stay silent about allegations of a covert intervention made by others such as the media.

Two Puzzles

The study of secrecy, deception, and related aspects of informational misrepresentation are at last getting their due in IR. In the past ten years, new research has been published on secrecy in diplomacy and deal-making, prewar crisis bargaining, military operations, elite decision-making, alliances, and international institutions. This has been joined by related work on covert operations, deception and lying, intelligence, and declassification. Two predominant logics for the appeal of secrecy provide initial intuition about the book's two specific research questions. The most prevalent view is that information misrepresentation helps insecure states protect their security under anarchy. Here secrecy is directed at adversaries. Especially during war, effective concealment of new weapons, troop locations, or an operational naval vulnerability can be essential to avoiding losses and harnessing the power of surprise. A second strand of research emphasizes secrecy's link to domestic politics. For research on security and conflict, the dominant emphasis is on democratic leaders avoiding dovish, antiwar constraints. Leaders might circumvent public constraints to initiate war against a threatening foe or change the regime of a fellow democracy.

To be clear, each of these perspectives sheds light on covert aspects of war. Yet some shortcomings suggest there is more to the story, presenting two empirical puzzles. First, existing research provides little reason to expect adversaries to collude. The operational security logic sees information manipulation as part of the broader pursuit of security at the expense of rivals, whereas the domestic dove logic focuses on domestic concerns that are not directly related to an adversary's interests. If anything, these logics would expect a rival that detects a covert intervention to expose it, either to neutralize any operational advantage or to trigger domestic dovish constraints in the intervener. And yet we have historical documentation of cases in which rival powers did allow detection of covert operations and did collude in this way. Examples include Chinese and Soviet border clashes before 1969, aerial clashes from covert American surveillance flights over Soviet territory, and the covert dimension of Iran-Israel rivalry today.

A second puzzle also underscores the need for a fresh approach. Whether or not major powers collude, covert intervention can be widely exposed by non-state actors like media organizations. This can be due to enterprising journalism on the ground or simple bureaucratic leaks. Recent examples include the Russian covert role in eastern Ukraine and the American covert aid program in the Syrian Civil War. Widely exposed covert interventions become a kind of open secret. Such a scenario would obviate secrecy's value as a device to address dovish critiques (domestic dove logic) or deceive an adversary (operational security logic). A puzzle therefore arises when covert interveners maintain a covert posture despite open secrecy. This is possible because covert activity can remain officially unacknowledged even if is widely visible. Examples of exposed-but-unacknowledged state behavior include Israel's nuclear weapons arsenal, the American drone strike program in Pakistan, and Russia's "little green men" in Eastern Ukraine. If the pretense of covertness is valuable even after wide exposure, then we must look beyond existing work for insights into a more complex story.

The Argument

I argue that escalation control and a shared desire to limit war can motivate covert intervention up front, collusion by major powers that detect it, and official non-acknowledgment if it is widely exposed. Since World War I, large-scale escalation of war has become unacceptably costly, yet leader control of the escalation process has been simultaneously weakened. While a range of factors influence the escalation potential for war, my theory focuses on two specific escalation-control problems: constraints created by domestic hawks and misunderstandings among adversaries about the value of limited war. My theory claims that backstaging military intervention allows rival leaders to insulate themselves and one another from domestic hawkish constraints. In addition, embracing the backstage communicates shared interest in keeping war limited. This basic relationship provides a unifying logic for the initial decision to intervene covertly, a detector's decision to collude after detection, and an intervener's continuing non-acknowledgment of a widely exposed intervention.

---

Excerpted from "Secret Wars"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Princeton University Press.
Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---