The US, Covert Operations, and Coups Adam Leong Kok Wey

The failed coup d’etat in Turkey (15 July 2016) had resulted in its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accusing the United States’s (US) complicity in covertly assisting the coup and may had even been directly involved in staging the coup. A few days later on 20 July 2016, shock waves reverberated closer at home in Malaysia when the US Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch declared that the US Department of Justice are initiating action in recovering funds from a number of business enterprises in the US suspected to have been siphoned out from Malaysia illegally. There was rife speculations that another ‘coup’ was being attempted by some Malaysians in cohorts with the US to bring down the Prime Minister of Malaysia.

This article will not speculate on whether there is any truth behind these accusations about the US’s roles in these two recent events above but throws some light on the main question of interest here: Why is the US (and its intelligence arm, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)) has always been popularly suspected to be involved in coups or attempted overthrows of foreign governments by covert means?  This article will highlight the reasons why the US is continuously perceived to have ‘hidden hands’ in any coup attempts in the world today by learning from the history of US covert operations.

But first, let’s have a quick lesson about the shadowy world of covert operations. The US, since the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, had conducted numerous covert operations via its intelligence agencies notably the CIA.  Covert operation (sometimes known as covert action), as it name implies, are conducted secretly by both states and non-state actors to influence and manipulate events.  The main attributes of a covert operation are secrecy and deniability.  Covert operations are usually conducted by intelligence agencies in the most clandestine and non-attributable ways - if things go wrong it can be plausibly denied.  If things worked out right, its secrecy usually precludes any attribution of the covert operations’ role in its success. 

Covert operations can be conducted by various means - from radio broadcasts of propaganda; information warfare via social media today; financial aid to interested parties; to more violent forms of operations such as providing secret military training, arms and even conducting assassinations.  Covert operations work with various organizations in targeted states including legitimate political parties, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and even illegal rebel movements (including terrorist organizations) to overthrow a government either through legal and proper channels such as in a democratic election or through violent means such as launching terrorist attacks and armed insurgencies. 

Covert operation is a useful option between using military force and diplomatic tools to achieve a country’s policy end.  A covert operation bridges these two ways of conducting statecraft - it allows a country to conduct some forms of coercive measures and it is also both secret and deniable.  It can be economical, as it usually uses a few operatives with a smaller budget as opposed to using large scale military forces, and if successful, yields handsome strategic results.  If the covert operatives were caught, a state can deny it knew of their actions and can blame it on independent individual action that have nothing to do with the state. 

Among some of the well-known covert actions conducted by the US during the Cold War which will be discussed here are the successful coups in Iran and Guatemala, and the famous failed coup attempts in Indonesia and Cuba. The US government had even run a covert operation inside its own country against its political opponent, which resulted in the Watergate scandal, which will be examined in this article also.

In 1951, Mohammad Mossaddegh was democratically elected as Iran’s prime minister and one of his first moves was to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.  This angered the British which swiftly slapped Iran with an economic embargo.  When this embargo worked too slow the British intelligence agency MI6 together with the US’s CIA plotted to remove Mossaddegh from power.  Both CIA and MI6 bribed senior Iranian military officers, politicians and government officials as well as running an anti-Mossaddegh propaganda campaign. This resulted in widespread unrest in Iran.  CIA-paid demonstrators continued to plague the streets with protests, sometimes ending in violence.  By 1953, Mossadegh’s hold on power had been precarious, and one final push by the CIA via Operation Ajax resulted in the Iranian army launching a coup d’etat which successfully removed Mossadegh from power on 19 August 1953.  The US-backed Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was reinstated in power (He too, would be finally removed from power in another hostile overthrow during the 1979 Iranian Revolution).

The CIA fresh from its success in Iran repeated its feat in Guatemala the following year (1954).  Democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz had attempted to reform his country’s agriculture sector which included granting land to millions of Guatemalan peasants.  This would be detrimental to the US’s major business entity in Guatemala - the United Fruit Company (UFC) - which later persuaded the US government to intervene.  The US was also worried that Arbenz may be sympathetic towards communism. The CIA organized, trained and armed a ‘national liberation’ army of guerrillas to violently attack Guatemalan government interests.  The CIA had also conducted a propaganda campaign discrediting Arbenz.  Finally, the CIA-supported Guatemalan military refused to take action against the ‘rebels’ resulting in Arbenz resigning.  A military junta which was propped up by the US took over power and ruled Guatemala.

Nonetheless, these early coup successes by the US were later met with an embarrassing failure.  In 1958, the CIA had attempted to overthrow Indonesian President Sukarno as he was deemed to be too friendly towards Indonesian communists and the US feared that Indonesia will soon fall into the sphere of communism. This resulted in an attempt to remove Sukarno from power.  The CIA launched an operation with the support of segments of the Indonesian military to topple Sukarno but the operation failed dismally.  Similarly in 1961, the CIA attempted to remove communist Fidel Castro from power in Cuba.  A paramilitary force trained and armed by the CIA was landed at the Bay of Pigs on 17 April 1961 with the objective to invade and liberate Cuba.  The ill-equipped small force was defeated by Castro’s security forces and the US’s participation in this embarrassing event sealed Cuba’s destiny – allying even more closely with the Soviet Union for her security.

The US government had even used covert operations domestically. This covert operation was discovered when five burglars were arrested for breaking into the Democrat National Committee headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington, DC on 16 June 1972.  Journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein initially covering what they thought was a normal burglary would later, in their investigation, uncover the shocking details of a covert ‘black ops’.  In the infamous Watergate scandal, the White House, under President Richard Nixon (Republican Party) had run a covert operation utilizing the CIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Inland Revenue Service (IRS) against its main political opponent, the Democrat Party.  A ‘black ops’ campaign was launched to conduct political sabotage against Democratic Party candidates which included wire-tapping their telephones, bugging their offices and homes, theft of documents, false press leaks, planting spies, and distributing fake letters on Democratic letterheads. The Watergate burglary (intended to repair wire-taps planted there earlier) was later found to have been approved by the US Attorney General John Mitchell.  A Senate Select Committee was formed to investigate the scandal. President Nixon facing impeachment subsequently resigned from his presidency.  A large number of officials in his administration were also charged for the Watergate scandal and 48 were later found guilty including the US Attorney General Mitchell, who spent 19 months in jail.  

The US’s mixed bag of successful and failed covert operations in conducting coups in many countries (there are also many more cases of US covert operations conducted during the Cold War such as in Tibet, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Lebanon, Poland and Afghanistan) had left an enduring image of the US as a progenitor of intervention by covert action in other countries to advance its own national interests. 

It must be noted, however, that the reasons why such US operations had been widely known was due to the declassification and transparent records of the US intelligence activities, something which most other states lack (Covert operations had also been suspected to have been conducted by numerous other states too). For example, John Prados’s Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II Through the Persian Gulf War is a good book to start with on the history of US covert operations.  The large number of publications about coups and foreign intervention operations conducted or supported by the US had resulted in the popular perception and suspicions that the US is actively involved in today’s many coup attempts.