Plausible deniability

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Plausible deniability is the term given to the creation of loose and informal chains of command in government which allow controversial instructions given by high-ranking officials to be denied if they become public.

A 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 rulers, 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.1

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.2

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.

Contents

Flaws in plausible denial

The doctrine had three major flaws:

  • First, 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. 9
  • Second, it rarely worked when invoked; the denials made were rarely plausible and were generally seen through by both the media and the populace. 10
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.
  • Third, "plausible denial" only increases the risk of misunderstanding between senior officials and CIA employees.11

Legislative barriers to plausible denial 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, highlighted ...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.8

Quotes from the New York Times, Newsweek

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.3
CIA officials deliberately used Aesopian 4 language in talking to the President and others outside the agency. Mr. 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" 5 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." 6
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"12 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." 7

Other examples of plausible denial

Plausible deniability has also come to be used more generally to describe a situation in which a party actively avoids gaining certain, or confirmable, knowledge of facts it suspects to exist because it benefits the party to "not know."

As an example, an unscrupulous 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.

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.

Popular Culture

The term was used in the 1996 movie Independence Day when the President asks one of his aides, a former CIA head, why he had not been told about the existence of Area 51.

Resources

Footnotes

  • Note 1: {{{Author|}}}{{|{{{3}}}}}}|show1| (1991)}}{{{{{Year|}}}}}}|show1|.}} {{|{{{3}}}}}}|show1|[{{{URL}}}}} Declarations of Independence: Cross Examining American Ideology{{|{{{3}}}}}}|show1|]}}{{|{{{3}}}}}}|show1|, {{{Pages}}}}}{{|{{{3}}}}}}|Show1|, Perennial}}. {{{ID|}}}, pg 16
  • Note 2: 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
  • Note 4: 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).
  • Note 5: Definition: The use of unnecessarily wordy and indirect language, Evasion in speech or writing, An indirect way of expressing something
  • Note 6: New York Times How Fantasies Became Policy, Out of Control, The Honorable, Murderous Gentlemen of A Secret World, November 23, 1975, page 199
  • Note 8: 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)
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.
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.
"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
  • Note 12: 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."

Further Reading

  • Treverton, Gregory F.; Covert Action: The CIA and the Limits of American Intervention in the Postwar World. 1988 ISBN: 1850430896 8


External Links

External links showing the use of "plausible denial" in declassified government documents

  • National Security Archive January to September 1964 documents 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"
  • National Security Archive Training files of the CIA's covert "Operation PBSUCCESS," the infamous 1954 coup in Guatemala "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 also notes that to provide plausible denial, "no assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded."

See also

Involves flying terror suspects abroad to countries where it is likely that they will be tortured. This is done to avoid the illegality of ordering their torture or carrying it out on US soil. By having another government order it, the intention to torture the suspect can be plausibly denied.
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