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Covert Action and Diplomacy

Covert action and diplomacy have had a long and checkered career together for more than two millennia. From the earliest organized governments, when functions were not yet sufficiently differentiated, clandestine operations were standard practice in international relations. Beginning with the Achaemenid Persians between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C., the organization of intelligence as part of government was developed to a very high degree, and copied by Arabs, Turks, Afghans, Mongols, and Hindus over the following centuries. Activities that are now considered covert action—assassination, co-opting the King’s councilor (or mistress), paramilitary support for insurgencies, and propaganda—were common. Little or no distinction was made between ‘‘intelligence’’ and ‘‘covert action’’ until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That developed in the West as a result of the evolution of Westphalian Diplomacy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.