Covert Action

National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention

Magda Long, Rory Cormac, Genevieve Lester, Mark Stout, Damien Van Puyvelde

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781647126292, 9781647126285
• eBook ISBN: 9781647126308
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A comparative international perspective challenges conventional narratives about unacknowledged intervention

"Covert action" is generally understood as politically motivated and plausibly deniable interference by one state in the affairs of another state. It includes propaganda, political or economic subversion, paramilitary action, and assassinations. Covert action is the most consequential and controversial form of secret statecraft, and it has become a ubiquitous feature of international politics. However, it is often sensationalized or seen through a narrow, US-centric lens.

Covert Action challenges this conventional narrative and redefines secret statecraft by offering a groundbreaking comparative international perspective that explores the practice of unacknowledged intervention across twenty countries and a range of eras. Bringing together leading scholars from around the world, this volume moves beyond the American, and wider, anglosphere perspectives to examine covert action practices across states, regime types, and time.

This book will be important reading for historians, political scientists, and policymakers, and it provides a foundational study of the hidden mechanisms of international power. It takes a global perspective and thus transforms the understanding of how nations truly interact behind the scenes, revealing covert action as a complex form of international statecraft.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Broadening the Study of Covert Action
• 1. Ancient Greece: Covert Political Action in the Peloponnesian War
• 2. The United States: Covert Action from the Nineteenth Century to the War on Terrorism
• 3. Canada’s Conception of Covert Action: Almost Nothing
• 4. Australian Covert Action: Limited, Precise, Resurgent
• 5. West Germany: Limited Sovereignty and a Complicated Past
• 6. United Kingdom: Smoke and Mirrors to Mask Decline?
• 7. Palestine, 1917–48: Assassination and Information Operations
• 8. Israel’s Mossad and Covert Action: Immigration, Counter-Proliferation, and Assassination
• 9. India: Secret Wars and the Lure of Localism
• 10. France: “Actions Clandestines”
• 11. Lebanon: Political and Media “Intervention Operations”
• 12. Brazil: Tropical Spies and Covert Action
• 13. Turkish Covert Operations: A Useful Tool for Politicians?
• 14. South African Apartheid’s Hydra: Covert Action and the Counterrevolutionary State, 1965–94
• 15. Nigeria’s Covert Activities: Upholding National Security
• 16. Russia: Moscow’s Use of Covert Action From Lenin to Putin
• 17. Bulgaria’s Approaches to Covert Action: Imitation, Specialization, and Innovation
• 18. Czechoslovakia: Covert Measures in Peace and War
• 19. North Korea: Covert or Overt Operations?
• 20. Chinese Influence Operations as Protracted War: Covert Action in the Grand Strategy of the People’s Republic of China
• Conclusion
• Index
• About the Contributors