Secret Wars: Covert Conflicts in International Politics by Austin Carson (review)

This interesting, original, study describes how covert (and not so covert) war signals national intentions, if it can be communicated effectively and if an adversary can read such coded communications. Although based in the field of international relations, this book will appeal to historians as well as political scientists. Carson sets up international politics as a theater with the stage visible to all; backstage, hidden from view, is where the actors prepare for their roles. Carson is interested in how this unseen (or partially visible) world is related to the overall theater of international politics. By looking at what states conceal behind the curtain, Carson sheds light on the production of the cohesive front-stage performance.

This book senses the tension between what is presented and what is hidden in international relations through an analysis of four key historical episodes of covert conflict and diplomacy that test his theory about the power of war behind the scenes: the Spanish Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan (and America's covert war there under President Reagan). The idea is that the mishandled escalation of July 1914 that tipped Europe into World War I resulted in the great powers looking for other ways of managing conflicts after 1918 in an attempt to bypass dangerous appeals to their (often hawkish) domestic populace. Carson points to "newness" after World War I with regard to how states handled conflicts directly and indirectly, though recognizing that piracy, say, in the early modern period fulfilled a similar function between warring European states.

Carson's intriguing conclusion is that covert action, paradoxically, usually limited war, helpfully managed escalation, and stymied hawkish domestic lobbies. Secret actions and communication channels blocked those who wanted to escalate war as much as they deceived anti-war protestors. President Nixon resorted to secrecy to minimize anti-Vietnam war protests; President Lyndon Johnson before him also resorted to secrecy but in his case to keep the war localized in Vietnam. The empirical case studies build on useful new primary research (as well as treading on more well-worn history) to show how covert action shades into "visible covert" before becoming entirely overt. Adversaries with knowledge of opponents' domestic politics can and will treat covert wars as "open secrets." This book is about the non-acknowledgement of an opponent's strategy while also wanting that opponent to know that you are not in the dark. In short, it creates a puzzle of enemies colluding over open secrets, some of which are so open that they are known to the general public. Carson challenges the idea that "secrecy is a plague on peace" (309), leading to unnecessary wars and feeding escalation. Instead, curtailment of public knowledge can serve to control dangerous escalation. Public knowledge fuels escalation, whereas covertness and collusion help adversaries reach a better understanding, "in part because it is observable to the adversary" (13). Put simply, secret wars limit bigger wars. The book argues that authoritarian leaders from Adolf Hitler to Joseph Stalin exercised a surprising degree of cautious statecraft through the covert sphere. For democratic states, covert action is a problem for domestic accountability, as the Pentagon Papers proved.

New technologies after World War I, such as aircraft and submarines, prompted states that already tended toward covert action to limit escalatory urges. Airpower and submarines could hide the national origins of the personnel involved in covert operations. Secrecy and nonacknowledgment were key in keeping the Spanish civil war confined to Spain. President Truman, anxious to get public support for the war in Korea without succumbing to hawkish demands for an early attack on China or the Soviet Union, launched an air war over Korea that, according to Carson, was a major unacknowledged confrontation between U.S. and Soviet pilots. The communists knew what Truman was doing, proving that knowledge of the enemy's domestic-politic space was crucial for effective communication and crisis management. In Carson's...