Early stages in the evolution of covert action governance in the United States,1951

Abstract

The U.S. government started to establish a formalised covert action capability only in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in response to the perceived Soviet threat. The difficult process of establishing the first inter-agency management organisation for this new activity, the Psychological Strategy Board, and its successor, the Operational Coordination Board, serves to highlight the peculiar characteristics of covert action and its management. Very little current scholarship deals with inter-agency bodies in the U.S. context, and this article aims to fill this void. The article concludes that while covert action itself remains in the shadows, policy coordination for it must be well-managed at the very centre of government to account for strong policy interests in this activity from other agencies, particularly the Departments of State and Defense. This task is complicated by the nature of U.S. national security architecture and U.S. government culture overall, which poses high structural obstacles to inter-agency cooperation.

Keywords

accountability administration and democracy administrative organization and structures central administration control decision making planning policy making public management strategy

Writing in 1951, the CIA noted that ‘the covert operational field is so shrouded in cloak and dagger atmosphere and American experience is so limited that certain half truths and false assumptions have become accepted as fact’(CIA, 1951a). The conduct of secret or clandestine intelligence (“spying”) by states has become an accepted and “normal” part of statecraft – see, for instance, the Butler Inquiry of the UK government (Her Majesty’s Government, 2004) – but the more sensationalised aspect of the duties of agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency are its covert actions. Little tonic for the Hollywood version of covert action exists, for outside of the narrow field of intelligence studies, research on how covert action and its management are accommodated in the public administration of states is rare. As a result, covert action as a function of government remains shrouded in that same “cloak and dagger” atmosphere of half truths and assumptions that existed more than a half-century ago.

Martin Smith (2010) has argued in this journal that intelligence as a function that informs government by means of information gathering and analysis is a key function of the core executive, though scholars of government and public policy do not always recognise this in their analysis. Given that Gill and Phythian (2006), Dover (2007), Smith (2010) and Davies (2010) have argued that intelligence, overt and covert alike, is a core state function, it seems reasonable to examine the degree to which the same case might be made for covert action. This article therefore will examine the birth of an organisation called the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), formed in 1951 to better coordinate U.S. “psychological” activities, a term which encompasses overt foreign information and covert action (Mitrovich, 2000), and its successor agency, the Operations Coordination Board (OCB). This examination can tell us much about both the place of intelligence agencies and their covert actions in government, and about the characteristics of covert action itself, because the PSB was the first attempt at a covert action management system as a routine function of the U.S. government. In the internal policy debates about the proper process for determining covert policy, many of the important factors were up for discovery and discussion. From the very beginnings of covert action in the U.S. government, there was a quest to link covert action to policy and to ensure that it was coordinated across government. The formulation ultimately found was to place covert action policy determination at high level within the NSC; this reflected the need to marry covert action to policy determination within the core-executive, and to separate it as much as possible from individual departments. The fact that the place of the short-lived PSB has been filled by a number of organisations since demonstrates simultaneously the need for cross-department, secure coordination of covert action, and the difficulty of achieving it. That covert action – ‘an essential factor in the achievement of national aims’ (State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, 1946) – needed management across government to ensure compliance with national policies and to ensure departmental cooperation was clear; that this needed to be done by a small cadre of senior people to keep secure was clear; how to build a system that would achieve this took a number of tries over a decade to get working. In a case study of the PSB and OCB we see some insights into what is required to make covert action work: a difficult balance between secrecy and coordination with overt national foreign policy goals and between a number of different departments. The wrangling about the PSB shows the in-built U.S. bureaucratic difficulty with inter-agency coordination. More specifically, it shows that the management of covert action is not the stuff of cloak and dagger; rather, it requires that hard-to-achieve processes of inter-agency coordination and central control as any other core function of government.

In microcosm the life and death of the PSB supports the arguments made by Derthick that ‘the institutions of American government function in ways that are not conducive to good administration’. This, she argues, is a function not only of structural factors such as federalism and complex democratic institutions, but also because each department wants the ‘bureaucracy to behave in its own image, [framing] policy instruction in a distinctive way, expecting conformance’ but interfering when it does not (Derthick, 1990: 4). Derthick wrote with regards to the Social Security Administration in the U.S., and did not write specifically about inter-agency bodies, a point better covered by Amy Zegart. Zegart’s thesis is that trajectory of national security agencies in the U.S. is a function of ‘the structural choices made at an agency's birth’ and ‘the ongoing interests of bureaucrats, presidents, and to a lesser degree legislators’ (Zegart, 1999: 42). Rather than national interest, ‘it is the rational self-interest of political players that determine which particular course the agency will follow’ (p. 7). Zegart convincingly argues that the creation of a new agency in the U.S. system is an attempt to solve a problem created by conflicting departmental interests, without sacrificing those departmental interests: the result is an unhappy compromise which is difficult to fix once built. She makes a strong case that the U.S. has over time attempted to coordinate intelligence centrally but has only actually added new voices to ‘the intelligence cacophony’ (p. 190). Both Zegart’s and Derthick’s arguments provide elaboration on Graham Allison’s “bureaucratic politics” model, noting that foreign policy is not always a benefit-maximising rational function of the state, but the result of bargaining between departments and individual players within government (Allison and Halperin, 1972).

Yet, neither Derthick nor Zegart deals adequately with the great lacuna of American bureaucratic theory: inter-agency coordination. Much focus has been put on the CIA’s role in covert action execution, and there has been a significant amount of writing on intelligence coordination (including Zegart), but few writers have dealt with the bodies that coordinate rather than the active agencies themselves. Davies (2012) has examined the inter-agency management of intelligence in both the UK and U.S. in close detail, but his coverage of the development of covert action processes is more cursory. Therefore, the following discussion contributes to filling a gap in inter-agency coordination of covert action. This article does not concern itself directly with the agency that conducts covert action – the CIA – but the bodies created in an inter-agency environment to coordinate it. What we see is that the processes which managed covert action did change: the PSB was the first, failed, organisation, but it was immediately replaced by another organisation, the OCB, and others afterwards. Covert action needed centralised control and management like other core functions of government, but its particular characteristics demanded that this control happen with a particularly small core of officials at a higher level of government than other functions of state: only then could the multiplicity of departmental interests in covert action be brought into concord. The painful process of developing covert action management mechanisms would only be solved once control over covert action policy determination and management was stripped from the departmental zone of control to a neutral body within the top of the core executive.

What is covert action?

Covert action is a term which is now current in American practice but which has in the past also been called “special activities” or “active measures” (the preferred Russian term), and in the UK it has evolved from “special operations” to “special political action” to “disruptive action” (Davies, 2000). Most basically, covert action involves the deliberate and planned involvement in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, seeking to influence (or less often, coerce) a change of state policy (Daugherty, 2004, p. 18). In 1978, the Carter administration referred to these activities as those foreign policy activities that ‘are planned and executed so that the role of the United States Government is not apparent or acknowledged publicly, [as well as] functions in support of such activities, but not including diplomatic activity or the collection and production of intelligence or related support functions’ (NSC, 1978). Notable in this definition is that it is not necessarily the action that is secret, but the sponsor of that action. A more widely used definition is held in the 1980 Intelligence Accountability Act, which states that covert actions are those ‘operations in foreign countries, other than activities intended solely for obtaining necessary intelligence’ (NSC, 1980). We must separate “covert” from “clandestine” in American definitions, in that the former conceals the sponsor but not the action, while the latter hopes to conceal both (National Security Action Memorandum, 1962).

Even outside of these American legislative usages, the term “covert action” and its variants encompass a very wide range of operational types and forms, but which we might break into three classes: propaganda, political covert action, and paramilitary activity (Johnson, 1992). Others sometimes include covert intelligence support and economic warfare (Godson, 2007, p. 33). These activities may be viewed on a spectrum from propaganda at one end and paramilitary action on the more extreme end, with political and economic covert action (funding an opposition party, causing a run on a bank) sitting somewhere in the middle (Treverton, 1987: 13). The important point to note is that covert actions of all classes cross agency boundaries. Because covert action is the execution of state policy, it is of direct interest to the State Department. As it often entails the use of force or violence, and may be in a real or impending theatre of conflict it is of interest to the Department of Defense. Because it depends on intelligence to plan clandestine activities and to build capabilities, it is of interest to the CIA (Godson, 2007, p. 40). Its complicated legal issues – covert actions almost by definition break the law of foreign states, and so risk embarrassment or even war if discovered – make covert action demand the attentions of the Office of the Attorney General. It may cross into the realm of agencies such as the Department of Energy or Department of Commerce, or others, depending on the target or the method of action proposed, increasing the number of interested participants and possible lines of conflict.

The establishment of the PSB

As the 1940s rolled into the 1950s, there was an existential crisis seizing the centre of the U.S. government. They were in a position, globally, for which they had neither experience nor mechanisms in government with which to cope. They were faced with an opponent who was – as reported by a surprisingly convincing diplomat, George Kennan – implacable and bent on their destruction (Kennan, 1947). What the U.S. government perceived was that in the struggle against the Soviet Union it was outclassed (U.S. State Department, 1948). The natural way to counter these kinds of psychological threats was not with arms but with psychological means in turn. Yet the natural organisation to have conducted these operations, the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), had been disbanded at war’s end by President Truman. Not until the 1947 National Security Act did the U.S. re-establish an intelligence agency, the CIA, to assist in the battles of the nascent Cold War, but even then its initial function was restricted to intelligence assessment (Rudgers, 2000). This lacuna was soon problematic. The State Department noted that the ‘Kremlin has a special group which devotes all of its efforts to maximize the strength of the USSR to fractionate and weaken that of the United States’ and the U.S. needed a means to do the same back (CIA, 1951c). Kennan specifically encouraged propaganda and other covert actions, provided strict controls were maintained, and these activities attracted increasing attention and funding through the late 1940s (Gaddis, 2005: 62). This was a conscious change for the U.S., which had traditionally eschewed Old World skulduggery, and this was reflected in the reluctant tone of NSC 10/2, issued on 18 June 1948: ‘The [NSC], taking cognizance of the vicious covert activities of the USSR, its satellite countries and Communist groups to discredit and defeat the aims and activities of the United States and other Western powers, has determined that, in the interests of world peace and U.S. national security, the overt foreign activities of the U.S. Government must be supplemented by covert operations’ (U.S. State Department, 1948). An early success of the CIA in preventing the Communists from taking over the government of Italy in 1948 showed this was a game the Americans could play as well as the Soviets (Treverton, 1987: 20).

This same directive went on to establish within the CIA an “office of special projects”, which would soon become the CIA’s covert action wing, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). But the establishment of the OPC was fraught, and itself showed the deep compromises that had to be made to get it established, causing problems for the effectiveness of the organisation down the line, as Zegart suggested it might. The problem was that the State Department wanted to have control over foreign policy execution according to their charter, but did not want to house them, as they might discredit U.S. overt foreign policy and its diplomats (Treverton, 1987: 35). They noted that while State ‘should take no responsibility’ for CIA operations, they should keep ‘a firm guiding hand’ (U.S. State Department, 1991: doc 305). This have-your-cake-and-eat-it attitude towards covert action prompted frustration from DCI Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who wrote in an internal memorandum that since State clearly did not want the CIA operating political warfare ‘in any sane or sound manner’, the CIA should abandon the capability, ‘let State run it and let it have no connection at all with us’ as ‘this is the only thing that will satisfy State in any way’ (U.S. State Department, 1991: doc 287). The threat seems to have worked; the State Department relented, as the OPC was the best arrangement they could get at the time. Kennan nonetheless wrote that he did not think that this would meet the more important needs of the U.S. government for the conduct of political warfare because ‘it is too remote from the conduct of foreign policy’(U.S. State Department, 1991: doc 289). By noting its remoteness, Kennan was effectively saying that the State Department would lose a modicum of control over what it felt was its jurisdiction.

While the OPC was soon established, this did not stop wrangling over its duties. In 1949 the Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson wrote to DCI Roscoe Hillenkoetter that he recognized the importance of covert foreign operations but that he was concerned about ‘the proper location of administrative responsibility for these operations’ and argued that this may not be the CIA (U.S. State Department, 1991: doc 312). Noting that it was important that the President and the Secretaries of State and Defense should be not be publicly linked with the CIA/OPCs actions, it was conversely a general rule that the CIA covert operations ‘should not be inconsistent with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and United States military policies, and should not be undertaken if specifically disapproved by the Department of Defense’ (U.S. State Department, 1991: doc 312). The Secretary of Defense wrote to Dean Acheson, making arrangements for the oversight of the OPC’s actions by appointing General John Magruder as a representative to join George Kennan in advising the OPC, the two of them in concert being able to guide these activities in a mutually desirable direction, and likewise to seek ‘agreement respecting an appropriate organizational setting for the activities comprised in NSC 10/2’ (U.S. State Department, 1991: doc 313). In short: how to control covert action in a structured way and under their control. This panel of State and Defence officials would come be known as the “OPC Consultants” or the “10/2 Panel” (U.S. State Department, 1996: doc 26). Effectively, neither State nor Defence wanted to take responsibility for covert actions, neither wanted to let the other run it, and they did not want to pay for it, but they were happy to have whoever ran it do what they wanted without restriction. The OPC was thus established as a CIA body but not under CIA control – rather, it reported to the 10/2 Consultants from State and Defense. The OPC was lodged in one agency but directed by two others. This strange result of bureaucratic bargaining is Zegart’s hypothesis of security organisation compromise in real life.

The struggle for control of covert actions might have simmered on for years had it not been for the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. The Defense Department called for an immediate increase in CIA/OPC support for their conduct of the war, effectively mobilising the CIA entirely in support of the war. The coordination between Defense and CIA was terrible, covert operations being blown because CIA and military intelligence units were operating against each other (CIA, 1954: 41). A single controlling organisation was needed. Writing in August of 1950, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), General Omar Bradley, tried to extend the military’s control over covert action by creating a new sub-committee of the JCS to ‘provide continuous direction and guidance’ over ‘those functions of CIA relating to covert operations in theaters of military operations’, including intelligence gathering (CIA, 1950a). The DCI closed this down immediately, asserting that while he had a clear and well-understood duty to keep the JCS and the theatre commander informed of Agency activity, this would be done through the NSC. Their main institutional duty was of a national character and ‘should not in any way be subject to control by the Joint Chiefs’ (CIA, 1950b). The NSC did not accept the alteration. The Joint Chiefs had a view of the world focused on potential war with the Soviet Union (which the Korean War was thought by some to presage), and wanted to couple the CIA to this view. This is very much Derthick’s descriptions of departments ‘wanting the bureaucracy to behave in its own image’ (Derthick, 1990: 4).

The State Department tried to create within its own lines the National Psychological Strategy Board, to try to ensure that its own predominant interests in overt psychological strategy (what it called “foreign information”) were supported by psychological/political warfare (the terms evolve through this period), insisting that its views should be considered as policy by the CIA/OPC (CIA, 1951d). As was noted even a year after the war had begun, there was a substantial lack of coordination in relation to psychological operations in Korea, with actions ‘being undertaken by State, Army, Air Force, and CIA’ (U.S. State Department, 1996: doc 49). The NSC noted ‘that there were a number of [psychological/political warfare] programs going in this field [of] which [the NSC] were not aware’ (U.S. State Department, 1996: doc 45). Something needed to be done to coordinate efforts, but as Derthick (1990: 4) wrote, the ‘structural features of American government [posed] obstacles to good administration’. The strong departments would not abandon their own departmental interests for an overriding purpose. Since the function of coordination was not being done from the centre, but relied on voluntary cooperation from the three major concerned departments, it simply was not done.

The tug-of-war continued, and the result was a run-away increase in the amount of covert action that the OPC was undertaking, and over which the DCI, Walter Bedell Smith as of October 1950, had little control. While he acknowledged that guidance from State and Defense ‘was essential for the success of these operations’, from that point onwards the OPC would act solely under the authority and subject to the control of the DCI (U.S. State Department, 1996: doc 29). General Smith hammered out, seemingly unilaterally but really in accordance with CIA statutory responsibilities heretofore not exercised, the authorities and responsibilities of covert action: ‘the Director of Central Intelligence shall be responsible for the planning, preparation and execution of covert operations and clandestine intelligence activities in peace or in war and for insuring that such operations are planned and conducted in a manner consistent with and in support of U.S. foreign and military policies and with overt activities’ (U.S. State Department, 1996: doc 38). This unilateral move made sense from the CIA’s point of view but still left the two other interested departments with a lack of control that they felt was appropriate: it said that the CIA would coordinate its programmes with their policy, but not how it would do so. But in light of their failure to agree on what the CIA was meant to do (a lack of agreement, argues Corke [2007], arising from the Truman’s failure to determine or enforce any overall foreign policy strategy on the government as a whole), how should structures be arranged to make sure both State and Defense had their input on policy without paralysing the CIA? The answer to this question was offered by the first DCI, Admiral Sidney Souers, who was by January 1951 working in the NSC as an advisor to the president. He made the suggestion for a Cabinet-level board reporting to the NSC to control psychological operations across government. As the State Department described,

when the parties concerned were unable to resolve their differences over who should supervise psychological strategy now and in event of war, the question was referred to the NSC … The Admiral [Souers] came up with what he considered a compromise plan. This was a plan for a board as proposed by the Defense Department, consisting of one representative each from State, Defense, Joint Chiefs and CIA, plus an ‘independent’ chairman …[reporting] to the National Security Council – not to the President as recommended by Defense. (U.S. State Department, 1996: doc 49)

The ongoing to-and-fro about who managed covert action clearly indicated the need for some sort of statutory committee. All of this argument raised a fundamental question about covert action – where it should exist. In part, the CIA’s desire for a committee to manage covert action arose from the fact that covert action was not an intelligence task. The CIA was created to gather and analyse intelligence (some of which might have been collected by other departments with legitimate needs for their own intelligence gathering). Intelligence gathering and analysis is not executive, rather it informs the decisions of policy makers. Covert action, on the other hand, was executive, it meant enacting foreign policy decisions abroad. They were not naturally allied functions, and this was noted by the other departments, leaving room for argument about who should control them (U.S. State Department, 1948).

While the State Department had no strong desire to conduct covert actions of its own outside, the Defense Department did. From their point of view covert action (along the model of the Second World War OSS) was in the form of guerrilla warfare as a useful adjunct to conventional warfare (Haas, 2000: 184). Through the Korean War they pressed the CIA for increased paramilitary support operations, clandestine armed operations that could support battle. While they supported propaganda activities, they were much less concerned about psychological or political warfare that under their control ‘lapsed into almost complete sterility’ (PSB, 1952a). Most importantly, they were focused on war, while the interests of the U.S. extended through peacetime and in parts of the world where there was no war, real or impending. The demand for paramilitary support operations (PMSOs) by the military on the CIA through Korea was viewed by many as distraction from the CIA’s more important tasks. Speaking of the CIA’s actions in Korea, the DCI said,

the responsibilities which are being placed upon us under our Charter and under NSC directives, particularly in the field of planning and execution of guerrilla warfare activities, go beyond our current capabilities and indeed embrace operations of such magnitude that they threaten to absorb the resources of this Agency to a point which might be detrimental to its other responsibilities. (U.S. State Department, 1996: doc 54)

They needed guidance to ensure that their primary mission was not eclipsed by the demands of the Defense Department, was responsive to the needs of State, and all in line with approved national policy. But as the DCI pithily summarised the political situation between State and Defence in relation to Korea, ‘you do not have in government a basic approved strategy for this kind of war…. We run into this problem of the State Department wanting to control all of a large organization if it is set up, and the Defense Department reluctant to turn it all over to State’ (CIA, 1951e). This is what Amy Zegart has called the “hold-up problem”. In short, she asserts that ‘in foreign policy, government agencies must constantly contend with the possibility that another agency may be working against them’ (Zegart, 1999: 37). This particular hold-up was distorting the implementation of covert action at a time of serious international tension.

The life and death of the PSB

The struggle between State and Defense left the U.S. in a position of having nowhere to put covert action except in the CIA, a place where it did not necessarily fit. It went to them by default. Years later the CIA seemed to acknowledge the fact that ‘we have accepted these responsibilities as agents for the major departments concerned and for the projects approved by the Psychological Strategy Board’ but these ‘are not functions essential to the performance by CIA of its intelligence responsibilities’ and ‘were placed in this Agency because there was no other department or agency of the government which could undertake them at that time’ (CIA, 1952a). This point of origin speaks to the uniqueness of covert action within government: it is a contested function that no one actually wants to own but all recognise they need. This therefore demanded some form of higher bureaucratic mechanism to offer guidance to the CIA while accommodating the interests of the departments. To produce a coordinated worldwide effort would require ‘detailed planning, guidance, and control, participated in by the three Armed services, the Department of State…as well as the Central Intelligence Agency’. The CIA welcomed some ‘staff or syndicate competent to give such guidance and control’ (U.S. State Department, 1996: doc 54). They suggested that the State Department’s National Psychological Strategy Board be removed from them and made an independent group in the NSC (Lilly, 1968: 362). An NSC report from September 1950 said that the CIA was hampered as ‘in this atmosphere the attitude of all concerned has become negative and defensive which in turn has prohibited positive and constructive action in the national interest….Effective coordination of the total intelligence effort cannot be achieved’ (Corke, 2007: 115). This echoed the Hoover Commission report of 1949, which stated that operational coordination between departments was a major weakness of American foreign policy (Hoover, 1949: 21). By early 1951, the President saw the problems surrounding the CIA and covert action by the OPC as being serious enough to warrant action from the Oval Office. Seizing on the proposal from Admiral Souers, and the CIA’s recommendations, on 4 April 1951 he bypassed the NSC and issued a Presidential directive establishing the Psychological Strategy Board for ‘more effective planning coordination and conduct, within the framework of national policies, of psychological operations’ (PSB, 1951).

The Board was composed of the Undersecretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, and the Director of Central Intelligence, ‘or, in their absence, their appropriate designees’ and people from other departments or agencies as may ‘from time to time, be determined by the board’ (PSB, 1951). A representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should sit with the board as its principal military adviser. No neutral chair was to be appointed: rather, the board was to ‘designate one of its members as chairman’, with DCI Walter Smith chosen as the first. There would however be established ‘under the Board a Director who shall be designated by the President’. This position was designed to be, effectively, the head of the permanent secretariat or staff that would serve the Board, responsible for preparing ‘programs, policies and reports’, to organise ‘its business and for expediting the reaching of decisions’ and their ultimate promulgation. Perhaps controversially, the director was to ‘ascertain the manner in which agreed upon objectives, policies and programs of the Board are being implemented and coordinated among the departments and agencies concerned’ and to report this progress back to the board. The participating departments were directed ‘to afford to the Director and the staff such assistance and access to information as may be specifically requested by the Director’. The Board was not to conduct any ‘psychological operations’ of its own (PSB, 1951). Its position in relation to the NSC was ambiguous. While it was to ‘report to the NSC’, each of the member agencies ‘had conflicting concepts of the board’s role’ and it was never made explicit (Bureau of Budget, 1952). The first Director of the Board was former Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray, a recognised, but my no means institutionally powerful, individual. The structure of the PSB was clearly designed to provide coordination without overtly threatening the two key departments of Defense and State. They seemed to underestimate the difficulty of the task at hand: an early conversation between the involved agencies said that ‘it will probably not meet very much but will still be able to give valuable and needed guidance’ (CIA, 1951b).

Truman's decision to create the PSB probably mirrored his desire to create a unified Defense Department. The increasing demands on the President's time made him seek structures which made his military more potent, more cost-effective, and ‘more responsive to the needs of the commander in chief’ (Zegart, 1999: 70). The President did not have time to referee inter-service rivalry, leaving that to his new Defense Department (Zegart, 1999). The CIA for its part saw the PSB as an important tool to limit the amount of covert action it was to undertake, and to make sure that those actions were a singular effort, coordinated to a coherent national policy; a process, in effect, of centralising the process of foreign policy decision making in the core executive, represented by the President and his NSC. Driven by the Korean war, the DCI felt the covert program of the CIA was ‘fast expanding beyond the horizons seen at the time of its creation’ because of the lack of a single guidance on what it was supposed to do (PSB, 1952b). The PSB was supposed to be the mechanism to provide the correct interpretation of national objectives, to dictate what was the national programme to achieve them, and to determine how large a covert action could get without revealing the hand of the U.S. government. The CIA not only wanted to know how individual covert action programmes would link to overall national policy, and if it made sense to conduct it, but also if the other departments would actually provide the support the CIA would require to run programmes it was suggesting (CIA, 1952b). Ultimately, the CIA and DoD supported the formation of the PSB because it was a tool to ‘force more action out of State’ (Lilly, 1960: 43). Without cooperation from all the departments covert action would be ineffective.

To a good degree, at least initially, the PSB accomplished its goals. One of the first tasks asked of it by the CIA was a major rationalisation of the covert action programme, prompted by a memorandum from the DCI titled “The Scope and Pace of Covert Operations”, but often called “the Magnitude Paper” (Mitrovich, 2000: 64). The DCI hoped it would result in the elimination of a considerable number of projects, leaving a single programme for each country where previously many tenuously connected plans had existed in parallel (CIA, 1952c). The DCI was worried about ‘uncontrolled activity in the psychological field’ and used the PSB to help keep it in check by means of coordination and a single overall strategy (CIA, 1951f). Some success was achieved with unified plans for psychological warfare and covert action in France and Italy for the 1951 elections (PSB, 1952c). Other plans were produced, and at least partly implemented, for areas and issues in the Soviet orbit and around the world, including Japan, Western Europe, China and Korea (PSB, 1953). But still, the CIA complained, little was accomplished because representatives would ‘voice only the departmental position and to refuse to yield on points departing from that position’ (CIA, 1951f: XX). Simply, State and Defense were still chasing their own interests, now through the mechanism of the PSB rather than the 10/5 Consultants group. There were also security problems: the staff’s work was hampered by the fact that its personnel, its organisation, even its telephone directories and scrap paper were classified (Prados, 1991). And with more than 200 staff at its peak (Lilly, 1968), it was too large to trust everyone with the most sensitive information on all of its programmes. In order to fully review secret covert action policies, the board had to create smaller panels of security-cleared personnel, and this led to a different problem – that the delegates from State and Defence were ‘not sufficiently high-level’. The PSB ‘tended to bog down in the details of operations…thus rendering ineffectual its attempts to render effective policy guidance’ (CIA, 1953a) despite agreement years earlier that it ‘should not get into overly detailed planning’ (CIA, 1951b). A major failure arose on the death of Stalin in October 1952: despite being prompted to produce something, there existed no plan for psychological actions to capitalise on his passing and the ensuing power struggles, and work on a plan was still ongoing in 1953, months after a plan would have been most useful (PSB, 1953). What was needed, felt the DCI, was a smaller group consisting of one empowered or senior representative from State, Defense and CIA, along with a neutral chair (CIA, 1952d).

By 1953 the wind had turned against the PSB, which was called ‘incompetent and its work irrelevant’ by the DCI (Corke, 2007: 112). It was requested that the PSB be eliminated ‘though many of its functions should continue preferably under the NSC’, (CIA, 1953b) this taking on a new importance when one realises that the PSB was by this time the largest component of the NSC, with more staff and with a budget nearly twice as large (Prados, 1991: 54). Force majeure appeared in the form of the President Eisenhower, who took office in January of 1953, called Truman’s NSC ‘moribund’, and moved swiftly to reform aspects of the national security system, especially the NSC (Prados, 1991: 61). Eisenhower said that ‘the Administration in power has failed to bring into line its criss-crossing and overlapping and jealous departments’ (Reston, 1952: 53). Days after taking the oath of office, Eisenhower appointed the President's Committee on International Information Activities, called the Jackson Committee, which began several months of deliberation to see how the NSC should be reformed (Mitrovich, 2000). The CIA message to the committee was that some form of PSB be reconstituted in the NSC for purposes of coordination (CIA, 1953b). The Jackson Committee largely agreed, and with an executive order in September 1953, Eisenhower wound up the PSB and established the Operations Coordination Board (OCB) (CIA, 1953c). The OCB was to focus primarily on coordination, leaving policy formulation to the State Department. The NSC 10/5 Group, those officials who oversaw covert action, transferred from the PSB to the OCB directly. The OCB was identified as ‘the normal channel for coordinating support for covert operations’ (Brown, 2004: 23). Existing PSB files were transferred directly to the OCB, with dozens of moribund plans dropped (CIA, 1953d).

A key organisational factor that kept the PSB from functioning was the main compromise that Truman accepted to establish the PSB in the first instance – that it reported to the NSC, and was not part of it. What Truman desired was to bring coordination to the critical psychological programmes of the U.S. government, to convince or force some agreement between departments that were following different paths. But the mechanism he created to do this was simply not close enough to the only organ powerful enough to encourage coordination – the Presidency and the NSC – in part because Truman did not himself envision the NSC as the powerful central executive organ it has now become (Prados, 1991). The twin tensions of secrecy and departmental self-interest effectively blocked the development of any systematic process to approve covert action policies. This follows Zegart’s assertions that ‘the price of initial structural choices appears to be high’ (Zegart, 1999: 52). Slightly at odds with Zegart, however, it also demonstrates how the relatively small size of covert action’s bureaucratic requirements, and the fact that no department of government actually wanted sole control over the function, allowed hold-ups to be bypassed by executive fiat. Zegart is right that once formed, institutions are hard to change, but with the case of the PSB we see inter-agency coordinating bodies are far from permanent, and can be reformed by changing their composition or mandate.

Since the OCB was meant to be a coordinating body and not a policy-formulating body, with the demise of the PSB there was in Washington no statutory, permanent organisation for the review and approval of covert action, only its lower-level coordination. This clearly left the CIA and covert action back to where it was years before: ongoing but not brought into line with overt national policies by a formal process. The next step in managing covert action came with NSC-5412, a directive issued by Eisenhower in March 1954, with the intent of replacing the still dysfunctional 10/5 Panel (a leftover from the PSB, it sat irregularly and was marred by the same inter-departmental squabbles) and imposing process and discipline on the process of approving and monitoring covert actions (Daugherty, 2004: 134). The directive reaffirmed that the CIA was solely responsible for covert action abroad and required the DCI to coordinate with the Departments of State and Defense to make sure covert actions were not in conflict with U.S. policy. For the same security reasons as produced the 10/5 Panel within the PSB, Eisenhower created the Planning Coordination Group within the OCB. Like the panels within the PSB, however, it suffered from being only composed of un-empowered mid-level officers. Eisenhower was simply repeating the same problems which plagued the PSB. He corrected the error with a revision of his first directive: NSC 5412/2, “National Security Council Directive on Covert Operations”, was issued in December 1955 (Mitrovich, 2000: 168). This created a committee (the 5412 Committee or 5412 Special Group) that was composed of senior officials (specifically, those just below Cabinet level) including the DCI, was in the NSC and had the National Security Advisor as a member, and was designated by the President to approve covert action programmes. It would meet irregularly until a weekly schedule was followed from 1958 onwards. Written in 1968, the Dillon Report argued that while ‘policy controls over covert political action were for a time informal and ad hoc…procedures for policy control have steadily improved over the years, and the group believes that such procedures for the initiation and continuation of covert operations are now both effective and flexible’ (CIA, 1968). Though known by a succession of names, this same committee would continue the task of approving covert actions within the NSC until the Clinton administration and onwards in modified form (Snider, 2008). In the 1970s, a more activist Congress would assert its power over the president in the wake of the 1975 Church Committee, which examined U.S. counter-intelligence operations on U.S. soil and covert operations abroad, triggered in part by speculation and reporting on the U.S. role in the fall of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 (Gustafson, 2007). As a result of this report, presidents would subsequently have to produce written findings to authorise covert actions and present them to the appropriate congressional committee within a tight timeline (Treverton, 1987). The system continues to evolve to the present day, with the most recent controversy being the authority of the Department of Defense to launch its own covert actions separate from the CIA (Kibbe, 2012), showing that old controversies die hard.

Observations on managing covert action

SJ Corke makes the argument that part of the reason the PSB failed in its task was that Truman had promulgated no strategy for the Cold War: in absence of a coherent strategy to bind each department to a single path, their individual institutional desires were un-restrained and coordination was rendered nearly impossible. This particular argument is a sub-set of a much more general problem: the difficulty of getting inter-agency coordination at all in American government. Agencies and departments are jealous of their prerogatives, and will cause hold-ups when they perceive threats to these. The U.S. government is generally poor at inter-departmental coordination. The formation of the Department of Homeland Security evidences this well (Cohen et al., 2006). As we see in the Hurricane Katrina report, while the ‘Secretary of Homeland Security, [was] the President’s principal Federal official for domestic incident management…[he] had difficulty coordinating the disparate activities of Federal departments and agencies’ (Townsend, 2006: 15). Even in overt crisis with clear and uncontroversial requirements for action, the U.S. government was structurally resistant to inter-departmental coordination.

The PSB was a first attempt to construct a coordinating body to allow a pursuit of shared interests – covert action – to proceed unencumbered by departmental jealousies. It failed for the lack of the right authorities and location, unable to move past the inter-departmental conflicts it was meant to avoid, but the principle of the joint policy body was sound, and by the early 1960s was an established institution with a history of effectiveness. Narratives such as that of the PSB and OCB help construct a ‘more general understanding of intelligence institutions as part of the wider functioning of overt processes and mechanisms of government’ (Davies, 2010: 30). That covert action is highly secret does not make it insensitive to poor bureaucracy or lack of coordinated management; indeed, perhaps the opposite. Further research may see over the longer-term some models for more effective inter-departmental coordination in a bureaucratic environment where this has hitherto been uncommon.

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Early stages in the evolution of covert action governance in the United States,1951–1961

Abstract

Keywords

What is covert action?

The establishment of the PSB

The life and death of the PSB

Observations on managing covert action

References