Plausible deniability

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Plausible deniability is the term given to the creation of loose and informal chains of command in governments and other large organizations. In the case that assassinations, false flag or black ops or any other illegal or otherwise disreputable and unpopular activities become public, high-ranking officials may deny any connection to or awareness of such act, or the agents used to carry out such act.

In politics and espionage, deniability refers to the ability of a "powerful player" or actor to avoid "blowback" by secretly arranging for an action to be taken on their behalf by a third party - ostensibly unconnected with the major player.

More generally, "plausible deniability" can also apply to any act which leaves little or no evidence of wrongdoing or abuse. Examples of this are the use of electricity or pain-compliance holds as a means of torture or punishment, leaving little or no tangible signs that the abuse ever took place.

Contents

[edit] History of Plausible deniability

Plausible deniability began under Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Allen Dulles.[1]

[edit] Church Committee

A U.S. Senate committee, the Church Committee, in 1974-1975 conducted an investigation of the intelligence agencies. In the course of the investigation, it was revealed that the CIA, going back to the Kennedy administration, had plotted the assassination of a number of foreign leaders, including Cuba's Fidel Castro. But the president himself, who clearly was in favor of such actions, was not to be directly involved, so that he could deny knowledge of it. This was given the term plausible denial.[2]

“ Non-attribution to the United States for covert operations was the original and principal purpose of the so-called doctrine of "plausible denial." Evidence before the Committee clearly demonstrates that this concept, designed to protect the United States and its operatives from the consequences of disclosures, has been expanded to mask decisions of the president and his senior staff members.”

Church Committee[3]

Plausible denial involves the creation of power structures and chains of command loose and informal enough to be denied if necessary. The idea was that the CIA (and, later, other bodies) could be given controversial instructions by powerful figures—up to and including the President himself—but that the existence and true source of those instructions could be denied if necessary; if, for example, an operation went disastrously wrong and it was necessary for the administration to disclaim responsibility.

[edit] Legislative barriers after the Church Committee

The Hughes-Ryan Act of 1974 put an end to plausible denial by requiring a Presidential finding that each operation is important to national security, and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 required that Congress be notified of all covert operations. But both laws are full of enough vague terms and escape hatches to allow the executive branch to thwart their authors' intentions, as the Iran-contra affair has shown. Indeed, the members of Congress are in a dilemma: when they are informed, they are in no position to stop the action, unless they leak its existence and thereby foreclose the option of covertness.[4]

[edit] Media reports on the Church Committee and plausible deniability

“ The (Church Committee) conceded that to provide the United States with "plausible denial" in the event that the anti-Castro plots were discovered, Presidential authorization might have been subsequently "obscured". (The Church Committee) also declared that, whatever the extent of the knowledge, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson should bear the "ultimate responsibility" for the actions of their subordinates.[5] ”
“ CIA officials deliberately used Aesopian[6] language in talking to the President and others outside the agency. (Richard Helms) testified that he did not want to "embarrass a President" or sit around an official table talking about "killing or murdering." The report found this "circumlocution"[7] reprehensible, saying: "Failing to call dirty business by its rightful name may have increased the risk of dirty business being done." The committee also suggested that the system of command and control may have been deliberately ambiguous, to give Presidents a chance for "plausible denial."[8] ”
“ What made the responsibility difficult to pin down in retrospect was a sophisticated system of institutionalized vagueness and circumlocution whereby no official - and particularly a President - had to officially endorse questionable activities. Unsavory orders were rarely committed to paper and what record the committee found was shot through with references to "removal," "the magic button"[9] and "the resort beyond the last resort." Thus the agency might at times have misread instructions from a high, but it seemed more often to be easing the burden of Presidents who knew there were things they didn't want to know. As former CIA director Richard Helms told the committee: "The difficulty with this kind of thing, as you gentlemen are all painfully aware, is that nobody wants to embarrass a President of the United States."[10] ”

[edit] Iran Contra Affair

In his testimony to the congressional committee studying Iran-Contra Affair, Vice Admiral John Poindexter stated: "I made a deliberate decision not to ask the President, so that I could insulate him from the decision and provide some future deniability for the President if it ever leaked out.""[11]

[edit] Declassified government documents

  • Pentagon papers October 25, 1963 Telegram from the Ambassador in Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. to Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy on US Options with Respect to a Possible Coup, mentioning the term plausible denial Alternative link (See Telegram 216)
  • CIA and White House documents on covert political intervention in the 1964 Chilean election declassified. The CIA's Chief of Western Hemisphere Division, J.C. King, recommended that funds for the campaign "be provided in a fashion causing (Eduardo Frei Montalva president of Chile) to infer United States origin of funds and yet permitting plausible denial"[12]
  • Training files of the CIA's covert "Operation PBSUCCESS," for the 1954 coup in Guatemala. According to the National Security Archive: "Among the documents found in the training files of Operation PBSUCCESS and declassified by the Agency is a CIA document titled 'A Study of Assassination.' A how-to guide book in the art of political killing, the 19-page manual offers detailed descriptions of the procedures, instruments, and implementation of assassination." The manual states that to provide plausible denial, "no assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded."[13]

[edit] Flaws in plausible denial

The doctrine had six major flaws:

  • It was an open door to the abuse of authority; it required that the bodies in question could be said to have acted independently, which in the end was tantamount to giving them license to act independently.[14]
  • It rarely worked when invoked; the denials made were rarely plausible and were generally seen through by both the media and the populace.[15]
One aspect of the Watergate crisis is the repeated failure of the doctrine of plausible deniability, which the administration repeatedly attempted to use to stop the scandal affecting President Richard Nixon and his aides.
  • "Plausible denial" only increases the risk of misunderstanding between senior officials and their employees.[16]
  • It only shifts blame, and generally, constructs rather little.
  • If the claim fails, it seriously discredits the political figure invoking it as a defense.
  • If it succeeds, it creates the impression that the government is not in control of the state.

[edit] Other examples of plausible denial

Another example of plausible deniability is someone who actively avoids gaining certain knowledge of facts because it benefits that person not to know.

As an example, an attorney may suspect that facts exist which would hurt his case, but decide not to investigate the issue because if the attorney had actual knowledge, the rules of ethics might require him to reveal those facts to the opposing side. Thus his failure to investigate maintains plausible deniability.

[edit] Council on Foreign Relations

"...the U.S. government may at times require a certain deniability. Private activities can provide that deniability." --Council on Foreign Relations, an American foreign policy think tank, in the 2003 report, "Finding America’s Voice: A Strategy for Reinvigorating U.S. Public Diplomacy"

[edit] Murder in the Cathedral

King Henry II of England is credited with the stating quite publicly, "who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" This saying resulted in the assassination of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket, although the king denied that his plea was to be taken in such a way.

[edit] Freenet file sharing

The Freenet file sharing network is another application of the idea. It obfuscates data sources and flows in order to protect operators and users of the network by preventing them (and, by extension, observers such as censors) from knowing where data comes from and where it is stored.

[edit] Use in computer networks

In computer networks, deniability often refers to a situation where a person can deny transmitting a file, even when it is proven to come from his computer.

Normally, this is done by setting the computer to relay certain types of broadcasts automatically, in such a way that the original transmitter of a file is indistinguishable from those who are merely relaying it. In this way, the person who first transmitted the file can claim that his computer had merely relayed it from elsewhere, and this claim cannot be disproven without a complete decrypted log of all network connections to and from that person's computer.

[edit] Use in cryptography

In cryptography, deniable encryption may be used to describe steganographic techniques, where the very existence of an encrypted file or message is deniable in the sense that an adversary cannot prove that an encrypted message exists.

Some systems take this further, such as MaruTukku and (to a lesser extent) FreeOTFE/TrueCrypt which nest encrypted data. The owner of the encrypted data may reveal one or more keys to decrypt certain information from it, and then deny that more keys exist, a statement which cannot be disproven without knowledge of all encryption keys involved. The existence of "hidden" data within the overtly encrypted data is then deniable in the sense that it cannot be proven to exist.

[edit] Deniability in fiction

Deniability is a popular concept in suspense fiction and thrillers:

  • The Mission: Impossible team was deniable, as "Should you or any of your IM force be caught or killed...the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions."
  • In Clear and Present Danger, military orders are concealed in such a way as to let each commander in turn deny that they ordered a particular mission.
  • A series of novels has been written by Andy McNab about the fictional operative Nick Stone, a deniable "K" operator for British Intelligence.
  • The term was used in the 1996 movie Independence Day when the President asks the Secretary of Defense why he had not been told about the existence of Area 51.
  • The film Tremors 3: Back to Perfection has the main character Burt Gummer mention the concept of plausible deniability regarding the secrecy of the subterranean worms threatening the area.
  • In episode 200 (Stargate SG-1) Carter uses the term to justify the importance her team's participation in augmenting the developement of the fictional TV drama Wormhole X-Treme!. The campy but not totally inaccurate drama could be used as a ploy by the Stargate Program's participating governments in the event of unforseen disclosures of their real activity.

[edit] Resources

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Carlisle, Rodney P (2003). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Spies and Espionage. Alpha Books. ISBN 0-02-864418-2.  p. 213
  2. ^ Zinn, Howard (1991). Declarations of Independence: Cross Examining American Ideology. Perennial. ISBN 0-06-092108-0. , pg 16
  3. ^ Church Committee Reports United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Senate, Nov. 20, 1975, II. Section B Covert Action as a Vehicle for Foreign Policy Implementation Page 11
  4. ^ New York Times Under Cover, or Out of Control? November 29, 1987 Section 7; Page 3, Column 1 (Book Review of 2 books: The Perfect Failure and Covert Action)
  5. ^ New York Times Castro Study Plot finds No Role by White House, November 21, 1975, page 52
  6. ^ Definition: Using or having ambiguous or allegorical meanings, especially to elude political censorship: “They could express their views only in a diluted form, resorting to Aesopian hints and allusions” (Isaac Deutscher).
  7. ^ Definition: The use of unnecessarily wordy and indirect language, Evasion in speech or writing, An indirect way of expressing something
  8. ^ New York Times How Fantasies Became Policy, Out of Control, The Honorable, Murderous Gentlemen of A Secret World, November 23, 1975, page 199.
  9. ^ Definition of the "Magic Button" from the Los Angeles Times Article: The Search for a 'Magic Button' In American Foreign Policy; October 18, 1987; (Review by David Aaron of the book Covert Action) I recall during my days as a Senate investigator finding a piece of yellow note pad with jottings from a meeting with White House officials during the Kennedy Administration that discussed an "Executive Action" or, in plain English, an assassination capability. The notes referred to it as the "magic button."
  10. ^ Newsweek The CIA'S Hit List, December 1, 1975, page 28
  11. ^ Jamieson, Kathleen Hall (1993). Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy. Oxford University Press US. ISBN 0-19-508553-1. p. 86
  12. ^ Chile 1964: CIA covert support in Frei election detailed; operational and policy records released for first time. National Security Archive. Retrieved on July 8, 2006.
  13. ^ CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents. National Security Archive. Retrieved on July 8, 2006.
  14. ^ Church Committee II. Section B Page 11; IV. Findings and Conclusions Section C Subsection 1 Page 261:
    An additional possibility is that the President may, in fact, not be fully and accurately informed about a sensitive operation because he failed to receive the “circumlocutious” message...The Committee finds that the system of Executive command and control was so inherently ambiguous that it is difficult to be certain at what level assassination activity was known and authorized. This creates the disturbing prospect that assassination activity might have been undertaken by officials of the United States Government without its having been incontrovertibly clear that there was explicit authorization from the President of the United States.
  15. ^ Church Committee IV. Findings and Conclusions Section C Subsection 5 Page 277:
    It was naive for policymakers to assume that sponsorship of actions as big as the [Bay of Pigs] invasion could be concealed. The Committee’s investigation of assassination and the public disclosures which preceded the inquiry demonstrate that when the United States resorted to cloak-and-dagger tactics, its hand was ultimately exposed.
  16. ^ Church Committee IV. Section C Subsection 5 Page 277:
    "Plausible denial" increases the risk of misunderstanding. Subordinate officials should describe their proposals in clear, precise, and brutally frank language; superiors are entitled to, and should demand, no less

[edit] Further reading

  • Treverton, Gregory F. (1988). Covert Action: The CIA and the Limits of American Intervention in the Postwar World. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-85043-089-6. [4]
  • Campbell, Bruce B. (2000). Death Squads in Global Perspective : Murder With Deniability. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-312-21365-4. 
  • Shulsky, Abram N; Gary James Schmitt (2002). Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence. ISBN 1-57488-345-3.  p. 93-94, 130-132

[edit] External links

[edit] Church Committee links

[edit] See also

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