CdT-ch03-strategy

Chapter 3 The Strategy of the Coup d’État Dean Acheson used to tell a story about Chief Justice Taft relating a conversation he had just had with an eminent man about the “machinery of government.” “And you know”—Taft said with wonder in his voice—“he really did believe that it is machinery.” —Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation Under totalitarian conditions knowledge of the labyrinth of transmission belts [of the machinery of government] equals supreme power. —Hannah Arendt (wrong, as usual), in The Origins of Totalitarianism Overthrowing governments is not easy. The government will not only be protected by the professional defenses of the state—the armed forces, the police, and the security services—but it will also be supported by a whole range of political forces. In a sophisticated and democratic society, these forces will include political parties, sectional interests, and regional, ethnic, and religious groupings. Their interaction—and mutual opposition—results in a particular balance of forces that the government in some way represents.a In less sophisticated societies, there may be a narrower range of such forces, but there will almost always be some political groups that support the status quo and, therefore, the government. If those who carry out the coup appear to shatter such a powerful structure merely by seizing a few buildings and arresting some political figures, it is because their crucial achievement passes unnoticed. This is the dangerous and elaborate process by which the armed forces and the other means of coercion are neutralized before the coup, and the political forces are temporarily forced into passivity. If we were revolutionaries seeking to change the structure of society, our aim would be to destroy the power of some of the political forces; the long and often bloody process of revolutionary attrition can achieve this. Our purpose, however, is quite different: we want to seize power within the present system, and we shall only stay in power if we embody some new status quo supported by those very forces that a revolution may seek to destroy. Should we want to achieve fundamental social change, we can do so after we have become the government. This is perhaps a more efficient method (and certainly a less painful one) than that of classic revolution. Though we will try to avoid all conflict with the “political” forces, some of them will almost certainly oppose a coup. But this opposition will largely subside when we have substituted our new status quo for the old one and can enforce it by our control of the state bureaucracy and security forces. A period of transition such as this, which comes after we have emerged into the open and before we are vested with the authority of the state, is the most critical phase of the coup. We shall then be carrying out the dual task of imposing our control on the machinery of state, while simultaneously using it to impose our control on the country at large. Any resistance to the coup in the one will stimulate further resistance in the other; if a chain reaction develops, the coup could be defeated. Our strategy, therefore, must be guided by two principal considerations: the need for maximum speed in the transitional phase, and the need to fully neutralize the opposition both before and immediately after the coup. If, in the operational phase of the coup, we are at any stage delayed, then our essential weakness will emerge: we will likely acquire a political coloration, and this, in turn, will lead to a concentration of those forces that oppose the tendency we represent (or are thought to represent). As long as the execution of the coup is rapid, and we are cloaked in anonymity, no particular political faction will have a motive or an opportunity to oppose us. After all, we could be their potential allies. In any case, a delay will cost us our principal advantage: the voluntary neutrality of the “wait and see” elements, and the involuntary neutrality of those forces that require time to concentrate and deploy for action. The need for maximum speed means that the many separate operations of the coup must be carried out almost simultaneously—necessarily requiring the efforts of a large number of people. Therefore, assuming that we start the planning of the coup with only a small group of political associates, most of the personnel we will need must be recruited. Furthermore, our recruits must have the training and equipment that will enable them to take swift and determined action. There will usually be only one source of such recruits: the armed forces of the state itself. Because ethnic minorities are often both antigovernment and warlike some may believe that they are ideal recruits for a coup. That has been true of the Alawites and Druzes of Syria, the Kurds of Iraq, and the Shans of Burma. But in most cases, a coup identi fied with minorities is likely to arouse nationalist reactions on the part of the majority peoples. Since the centers of government are usually located in the majority areas, their opposition would be a further important obstacle for us. Another possible substitute for the subversion of the forces of the state is the organization of a party militia. When there is a combination of political freedom with an ineffectual maintenance of law and order, such militias are sometimes formed in order to “protect” party activities. In Weimar Germany, for example, apart from the Nazi Sturmabteilung (assault detachments, or “Brownshirts”), there were party militias of the Social Democrats, Communists, and the right- wing nationalist parties. Similar organizations—Blackshirts, Greenshirts, Redshirts, and, in the Middle East, Silvershirts—spread in many countries in the wake of Fascist and Nazi successes. In spite of their military bearing, uniforms, and often extensive weaponry, in almost every instance of confrontation between such militias and the forces of the state, the former were defeated. Thus, when the Nazis tried to use the embryonic Brownshirts in the 1923 Munich coup attempt, they were easily overpowered by the police and Hitler was himself arrested. His subsequent rise to power was achieved by political means, not by the efforts of the Brownshirts. In any case, in order to organize and equip a party militia, two scarce resources are needed: money and the freedom to do so. Recruiting forces from those maintained by the state requires neither. Therefore, while a whole range of forces will need to be neutralized, a distinctive approach must be used with the means of coercion of the state. In dealing with the armed forces, the police, and the security services, we will have to subvert some forces while neutralizing the rest; by contrast, in the case of the political forces, the objective will be limited to their neutralization. Because of their capacity for direct intervention, the armed forces and the other means of coercion of the state must be fully neutralized before the actual coup starts; the political forces usually can be dealt with immediately after the coup. In some situations, however, the political forces may have an immediate impact on the course of events and must, therefore, be dealt with prior to the coup. In Russia, during the period of instability that followed the first bourgeois Februaryb 1917 revolution, the railwaymen’s union emerged as a major source of direct power. Vikzhel (the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Union of Railroad Employees) played a decisive role in the defeat of General Kornilov’s putsch by simply refusing to work the railways that were to carry his soldiers to Petrograd. Later, when Alexander Kerensky, the Russian Provisional Government’s minister-chairman, fled the city following Lenin’s October coup and took refuge with Commander Pyoter Krasnov’s army contingent, Vikzhel threatened to call a general strike (i.e., to leave Krasnov’s troops stranded) unless Kerensky negotiated peacefully with the Bolsheviks. Since the Bolsheviks had no intention of negotiating seriously, this amounted to a request for unconditional surrender. In the peculiar conditions of Russia in 1917, the railways and those who controlled them were of crucial importance to the military and to the planners of any coup—unless their forces were already in Petrograd, still then Russia’s capital city. Elsewhere, other political forces have the power to exert similar pressures: in poor countries, where the majority of city dwellers can only buy food on a day-to-day basis, well-organized shopkeepers can bring great pressure to bear on the government by refusing to open their shops. Where there is a strong trade union movement, strikes can impede the vital process of establishing the authority of the new government immediately after the coup. Religious and ethnic leaders for their part can use the structures of their communities to organize mass demonstrations against the new regime. Therefore, we must identify and evaluate such political forces and, if necessary, their leading personalities and coordinating bodies must be neutralized before the coup.c Other political forces lacking such direct power will also have to be dealt with, but this will be part of the process of conciliation and accommodation that follows the coup. Neutralizing the Defenses of the State One of the outstanding features of modern states is their extensive and diversified security system. This is a consequence of the general breakdown in external security and internal stability experienced in many areas of the world in the last two or three generations. Every state maintains armed forces, a police force, and some form of intelligence organization at the very least. Many states find it necessary to have paramilitary gendarmeries in addition to several police forces, duplicate security services, and other variations on the theme. In the pre-1914 world, states were not noticeably less aggressive than they are in present-day international society, but the lack of off-rail transport and a residual attachment to diplomatic convention resulted in a certain span of time between hostility and hostilities. The modern pattern of military operations—the surprise attack and undeclared war—has as a natural consequence the “military” peace. Instead of small professional armies acting as cadres for wartime expansion, many states attempt to maintain permanent armies capable of immediate defense—and therefore offense. In countries with Muslim populations, local or immigrant, the rise of Islamist insurgent and terrorist movements has led to an expansion of internal security forces; paramilitary and undercover police outfits have become common in many states, including democratic ones. In the 1930s, the United States had fewer than 300,000 troops in its armed forces; the only significant intelligence operation was a small (and supremely efficient) US Navy code-breaking outfit, while internal security forces were limited to the Treasury’s Secret Service that was mostly active against currency forgers, though it supplied the presidential bodyguard and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), whose high ambitions were constrained by small budgets. In 2015, the US Marine Corps alone has some 184,000 men and women in uniform, while the entire uniformed military establishment has a population of some 1.4 million even after many large reductions, thereby still outnumbering 1. the total population of some seventy UN member states. Moreover, while the armed forces have greatly diminished in numbers since the end of the Cold War, notwithstanding all subsequent intervention wars, the intelligence community has grown enormously into a many-headed bureaucratic monster, largely because each intelligence failure caused by gross errors induces Congress to give even more money to those who fail, instead of the opposite. I am old enough to have heard Secretary of State Dean Acheson deplore the State Department’s failure to retain the intelligence function within its purview in the formative years of 1945 to 1947, when the abolition of the wartime stand- alone Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was followed by the formation of the very small and improvised Central Intelligence Group with some OSS people as a temporary expedient. At that point, the State Department could have easily absorbed that orphan entity, but the career Foreign Service Officers of those days disliked its ex-OSS “émigré” (read Jewish) intellectuals and assorted tough guys and, therefore, allowed the rise of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as an entirely independent agency—which over the years has gained ever greater funding (regardless of its abysmal performance) and has become a powerful competitor in the policymaking process. Worse still, the CIA itself failed to live up to its name from the start because the army, navy, and the air force retained their own separate intelligence organizations. The subsequent merging of those organizations beginning in the mid-1960s did not ensure centralization either because its instrument, the Defense Intelligence Agency, did not include the code-breakers—a handful of talents pre-1941, in the thousands by 1945, and later embodied into the immense National Security Agency (NSA), whose ambition to intercept any and every electromagnetic transmission, including the idle chatter of infants with cell phones, was merely dented by the revelations of Edward Snowden, the most patriotic of traitors. But the hydra has many more heads, 19 of them at the last count, though there may be more: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) 2. 3. —an additional bureaucratic and would-be analytical echelon established after the 9/11 Intelligence debacle, and given the impossible task of coordinating the work of the remaining 18 entities and the even more impossible task of “fusing” their intelligence into a coherent whole. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whose thousands of employees include very few people who know any foreign languages other than Spanish perhaps, even fewer people who know any useful language, and very few undercover operators (the so-called NOCS, “non-official cover”) as opposed to general-purpose “analysts,” and an infinity of managers, very few of whom have any field experience other than service in foreign “stations,” i.e., offices within US embassies abroad. The overall result is that CIA operatives do not emulate their British and Israeli counterparts by infiltrating terrorist organizations; indeed they have so little field experience of any kind that most of the CIA employees killed overseas were the victims of their own inexperience or those of their managers safely at home. The frequency of its drastic “reorganizations” (the 2015 version is labeled “from the ground up”) shows that the CIA’s leaders are aware of its incompetence, but to gain quality by cutting it down to a small number of truly expert experts and truly operational operatives goes against the bureaucratic logic of unceasing growth. The very much larger NSA, with the world’s largest gathering of computers and an ever-growing number of linguists who can translate an ever-shrinking proportion of all communications intercepted. (It also intercepts and analyzes missile telemetry, radar emissions, etc.) 4. 5, 6, 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. analyzes missile telemetry, radar emissions, etc.) The Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (OICI) of the US Department of Energy, responsible for all nuclear- related information, with a major role in monitoring the nuclear activities of Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan. This role, however, is impeded by the CIA’s inability to insert its own agents even in the proximity of installations, let alone inside them, very understandably in the case of fully closed North Korea, not so in the other cases. The separate intelligence organizations under the colossal US Department of Homeland Security, hurriedly established after the 9/11 attacks by merging very diverse agencies, which include the US Secret Service (to repress counterfeiting as well as for presidential protection), the intelligence units of the border and customs services, the US Coast Guard Intelligence, the office of Homeland Security Investigations, and so on. The Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) of the US Department of State, the smallest, cheapest, and most useful of the lot. The Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence of the US Treasury Department. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the US Department of Defense. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which operates satellites. The US (military) Cyber Command, a “Specified” Command. The US Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. The US Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency (ISR). The National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC). The US Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). The National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), part of the US Army, yet “National.” The US Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (MCIA). The US Navy Department’s Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Finally, under the Department of Justice: The FBI’s National Security Branch. The Office of National Security Intelligence (ONSI) of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The nominally highest-ranking ODNI was established under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 in the futile hope of coordinating all these separate intelligence organizations and fusing the knowledge scattered in a huge number of separate brains sitting in separate buildings. The much more economical alternative of unifying them instead was not even considered because to cut down and consolidate went against the post-disaster mood of doing more rather than less. That more is less when it comes to intelligence will no doubt be recognized one day. One peculiarity is that the US Congress specifically legislated a strong suggestion that the director should be an active-duty military officer (“it is desirable that either the Director or the Prin cipal Deputy Director of National Intelligence [not both] should be an active-duty commissioned officer in the armed forces”). That, no doubt, was meant to stop presidents from appointing their unqualified friends and campaign contributors to the job, regardless of qualifications, as they do with ambassadors. Another peculiarity is that the DNI may not serve concurrently as director of the CIA, a position theoretically greatly diminished by the very existence of the DNI; so far, however, it is the CIA director who continues to visit the White House most often—even though the President’s Daily Brief has been produced by a joint group, and not just the CIA, since February 15, 2014. In any case, the greatest limitation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is the Defense Department’s continuing control of the three intelligence organizations that have by far the largest budgets—the NSA, the NRO, and the NGA—and of all military intelligence activities, except for US Coast Guard Intelligence, which comes under the US Department of Homeland Security. • • • Nothing can remedy the confusions, gaps, and disjunctions caused by the fragmentation of information flows into so many different organizations, certainly not the ever-growing new bureaucracy of the Director of National Intelligence. Indeed, its six “centers” and fifteen “offices” (so far) are further fragmenting knowledge so that more data equals less intelligence—i.e., knowledge both useful and timely. Contrary to popular legend, and contrary to the 2015 US Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report, the CIA has never been an excessively independent, let alone a rogue entity, and excessive independence is not the problem of any other US intelligence organization, either. The problem, rather, is their persistent failu