Few U.S. government activities are as controversial as covert action.
Americans may disagree about the specifics of trade policy or defense
spending, but covert action is controversial to the core. Many covert
operations, if carried out by different persons and under other
circumstances, would be plainly and seriously criminal. The process
for reviewing and approving such operations tests the limits of
democracy. It is not surprising, therefore, that while some officials
and pundits are firmly of the opinion that we need to maintain covert
action as an option, others insist that the United States has no
business carrying out such operations in any circumstances.

Because the United States and the Soviet Union are no longer
competing in Third World proxy wars, the rationale for most
traditional covert action has disappeared. However, new threats such
as terrorism and proliferation may sometimes require the United
States to consider going down that road. This is especially true in
the Information Age. On the one hand, hostile parties will likely
target our communications systems, computers, and data bases; and on
the other, the United States will have the opportunity to enhance its
security by using these technologies to its own advantage, possibly
covertly.

Unfortunately, there are many indications that the United States is
not adequately prepared to perform in this new context for covert
action. Specifically:

- Most of the public, and many officials, apparently do not
understand what covert action really is. As a result, they do not
understand when it is effective, when it is not, and the costs that
acting covertly imposes.

- Recent covert action failures suggest that as far as understanding
the usefulness and limitations of covert action, ignorance extends to
many U.S. officials.

- The effectiveness of U.S. intelligence oversight institutions
within the legislative branch is questionable.

The Concept Defined

Should the United States be prepared to carry out covert action? Is
it ever necessary, or can we dispense with it completely?

During the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy officials often turned to
covert action as a "middle option." Diplomatic pressure against an
uncooperative, hostile power such as the Soviet Union was deemed
ineffective. Military action, especially when the Soviets had
overwhelming forces in Europe and (after 1949) the atomic bomb, was
too risky. By default, then, covert action emerged as a prudent
alternative to doing nothing. In the early years of the Cold War,
too, U.S. leaders tended to think about covert action in terms of
their World War II experience. The CIA's predecessor, the Office of
Strategic Services, had run extensive commando raids and
psychological operations during the war. While there were skeptics,
many U.S. leaders thought that the OSS had been effective. As well as
this precedent, after the war U.S. leaders became increasingly
concerned about the Soviet Union's own covert operations, and most
reasoned that the United States needed similar capabilities.

Unfortunately for the cause of conceptual clarity, "covert action"
quickly became synonymous with the kinds of operations the United
States carried out under this label during the Cold War--paramilitary
operations, propaganda, political action, and the like. This has
confused discussions about covert action ever since, because,
essentially, covert action properly understood has less to do with
the operations themselves than with how they are carried out.

Covert action is, plain and simple, any activity in which the United
States conceals its responsibility. Because so many writers, pundits,
and commentators fail to understand this, they never address the
single most important question pertaining to the subject: When should
an action be conducted covertly? Or to put it slightly differently,
when and why should the United States act in a deniable fashion?

To underline this point, note that most of the operations that have
been carried out as covert action in the past have also been carried
out overtly in other situations. For example:

* Paramilitary operations. In the early 1960s the CIA covertly
supported the anti-communist Hmong in Laos. In the 1980s the United
States provided intermittent overt support to the Nicaraguan Contras.

* Propaganda. From their founding in the early 1950s through 1971,
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were covertly funded by the CIA.
Voice of America, which has a roughly similar function and has
usually carried the same message, has always been overtly sponsored
by the U.S. government.

* Exerting political and economic influence. In 1948 the CIA provided
covert assistance to the Christian Democratic Party in the Italian
national election. Today the National Endowment for Democracy
provides overt U.S. assistance to pro-democracy organizations abroad.

* Assassination. The United States tried to kill Fidel Castro in the
1960s, with the CIA using mafia figures as surrogates. In 1986 the
United States carried out an air strike against Libya in retaliation
for a terrorist attack, specifically targeting the tent in which
Muammar Qaddafi was known to sleep, and taking no great pains to hide
the fact.

* Coups. In 1953 the CIA covertly fomented public demonstrations
against the Mossadeq regime in Iran to assist the Shah to reclaim his
throne. In 1986 the United States openly supported Corazon Aquino's
"People Power" demonstrations against the regime of Ferdinand Marcos
in the Philippines.

In each of these examples the operations were similar, but some were
conducted covertly and others not. The point is this: Americans may
question whether the U.S. government should support coups, meddle in
foreign elections, or kill foreign leaders, but the nature of these
activities is a separate issue from whether the United States should
carry them out covertly. Understanding that deniability is the single
distinguishing feature of covert action is absolutely necessary if
there is to be useful discussion of this topic. In its turn,
deniability raises two crucial issues. First, when is covertness
essential for the success of an operation? Second, what are the
implications of deniable policies for a democratic government?

Why Deniability?

During the Cold War and even today, U.S. officials have often paid
more attention to the advantages of covertness than to its costs.
Covertness seems to add flexibility because officials do not need to
explain their policy to the public or to allies. It also entails
review by fewer members of Congress and thus seems more expedient.

There is, however, a price to be paid for such benefits. There is
always a cost when other governments and the public ultimately find
out that they have been left out of the loop. They may voice approval
of an operation after the fact, but whether they admit it or not,
those who were misled or not informed will trust the U.S. government
less from then on. Sometimes the benefits outweigh the loss of trust,
but no one should fool himself into thinking that this cost is zero.
It never is.

There are other costs. Many of the benefits of the Information
Revolution are a result of our ability to use fluid, networked, open
organizations. Networks allow people to exchange ideas and
information more easily. This increases creativity. Networks also
improve the opportunity for scrutiny by outsiders, and are better at
drawing on new talent and ideas as needed. Covert action has the
opposite effect. By its very nature, covert action limits the number
of people and organizations who can contribute to an operation, or
participate in a sanity check with regard to it.

There are only two legitimate reasons for carrying out an operation
covertly rather than overtly. One is when open knowledge of U.S.
responsibility would make an operation infeasible. For example, if
Italian voters had known that the CIA was financing the Christian
Democratic Party in 1948, the Communists would have successfully
painted the Christian Democrats as U.S. lackeys, and CIA support
would have backfired. If an operation is at all feasible without such
deniability, the argument for covertness is much harder--and often
impossible--to make.

The other valid reason for carrying out an operation covertly is to
avoid retaliation or to control the potential for escalation. The
fact that such covertness is sometimes no more than a fig leaf does
not necessarily alter the fact that it is a useful fig leaf. In the
late 1940s, for example, the Soviet government knew that the CIA was
supporting resistance fighters in the Ukraine, since Soviet
intelligence had penetrated most of the groups. Similarly, the Soviet
leadership knew that the United States was supporting the Afghan
mujaheddin in the 1980s. If U.S. leaders had admitted responsibility,
Soviet leaders would have felt it necessary to retaliate, as was the
case when President Eisenhower owned up to U-2 overflights in 1960,
with the result that Khrushchev felt compelled to cancel the Paris
summit meeting. Also in the case of Afghanistan, the Soviet Union
could have struck at U.S. allies, perhaps with military action.
Pakistan provided a base for the U.S. covert action in Afghanistan.
Arab countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia provided arms and
materiel. All of these countries wanted to avoid a direct
confrontation with the Soviet Union, and covertness helped persuade
them that they could do so.

The goal of averting retaliation is important when deciding whether
to carry out an operation covertly. If covertness will not avert
retaliation (or if openness will not attract it), much of the
rationale for covert action disappears.

A Matter of Accountability

Many controversial activities that have been undertaken as "covert
action"--assassination attempts (currently illegal), attempts at
influencing democratic elections abroad, support for corrupt
dictators as lesser evils--would have been controversial even had
they been carried out overtly. It was not the covertness of the
actions that was at issue but the actions themselves. The special
problem that covert action presents, rather, has to do with
accountability: How can one carry out covert action and still ensure
that officials are held responsible for their decisions?

The main formal control that exists today is undertaken through
Congress, and this has turned out to be a problem. Congress itself
deserves much of the blame for the breakdown in the accountability of
covert action. This, in essence, is what happened: Following lengthy
and detailed investigations of the intelligence community in the
1970s, Congress demanded a greater role in the review of covert
action. These provisions were eventually embodied in the Intelligence
Oversight Act of 1980, the current statute under which Congress
monitors the intelligence community. Under the act, which is still in
force, the U.S. government can still hide responsibility for a covert
action from the public-at-large, but to do so the president must
notify in a secret "finding" the relevant intelligence oversight
committees--namely the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence--whenever he approves such an operation.

Many critics have objected to this process, claiming that limiting
oversight to a small group of representatives that works in secret is
undemocratic. But the oversight process for covert action is wholly
consistent with other departures from pure democratic rule that most
people accept. After all, many institutions limit participation in
the American democratic system, including the Supreme Court and the
committee system in Congress. The government also operates in secret,
for example, when shield laws prohibit the disclosure of certain
witnesses or defendants in court proceedings. Congress also routinely
reviews spending for classified weapons systems secretly.

Clearly, government could not function if everyone took part in every
decision, and it could not function without some secrets. The real
questions are whether officials are, at some point, held accountable
for their decisions (if not for specific actions, then for general
policy); whether there is sufficient rotation among officials, so
that covert action policies are not decided by a static elite group;
and whether the process ensures timely accountability for extreme
abuses, so that policies can be re-examined before something really
awful happens. The Intelligence Oversight Act and the House and
Senate intelligence committees, as structured, meet all these
criteria. The problem is that the act was weakened by the Iran-Contra
affair and was never fixed. As the effects are with us still, it is
worth reviewing what happened on that occasion in some detail.

Most Americans recall the basics of the Iran-Contra fiasco and the
controversy that followed. Late in 1985, National Security Council
staff officials, with the assistance of CIA officers and the support
of Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Casey, developed a
plan to trade weapons for U.S. hostages held by Iranian-backed
terrorists in Lebanon. These officials did not tell Congress about
the plan. The operation careened along until November 1986, when a
Beirut newspaper disclosed the arms-for-hostages scheme. The House
and Senate appointed a joint committee to investigate. But instead of
exposing the project as the hare-brained lunacy it was, the
proceedings had exactly the opposite effect, turning quickly into a
public relations disaster for Congress and leading much of the public
to doubt whether that institution had the capability to oversee
covert action. Then matters got worse.

In 1991, after the Iran-Contra hearings concluded, the intelligence
oversight committees drafted new legislation aimed at preventing
future administrations from hiding covert action from Congress.
Unfortunately, the committees allowed themselves to get sidetracked.
The key issues were whether the president needed to notify Congress,
and whom in Congress he needed to notify. Instead of addressing these
issues, the oversight committees became preoccupied with a secondary
question: How long and under what conditions could the president
delay notification?

How did this happen? When, back in 1986, President Reagan and his
advisers decided not to notify Congress, Casey had asked the CIA's
General Counsel Stanley Sporkin (now a federal judge) to provide a
rationale. In response, Sporkin cited a provision in the 1980
oversight act that allowed the president to defer notification. The
provision was originally intended to deal with fast-breaking, urgent
situations, not to protect especially delicate but non-time sensitive
operations. Besides, the Intelligence Oversight Act--duly passed by
Congress and signed into law by President Carter--had a specific
mechanism for dealing with sensitive situations. If the president
believed that an operation was too sensitive to share with the
thirty-odd members of the two oversight committees, he could consult
with the so-called "Gang of Eight"--that is, the two party leaders of
each house, and the chairmen and vice-chairmen of the House and
Senate committees.

Until Iran-Contra, no one had ever presumed that the president could
delay notifying Congress because a covert action was too sensitive.
When executive branch officials originally made the Sporkin argument
that they could defer notification to protect sensitive operations,
Congress should have simply told them that the loophole was bogus.
Instead, the committees effectively bought Sporkin's basic argument
and began bargaining with the White House over the details during the
next several years. The committees wanted a 48-hour deadline for
notification, and in 1991 Congress included the necessary language in
the annual intelligence authorization bill. President Bush vetoed the
bill and Congress backed down. In effect, then, Congress conceded
that there was no limit to how long the president could defer
notification. And because Congress implicitly accepted the Sporkin
argument, the president was no longer obliged to use the "Gang of
Eight" mechanism, either.

If the oversight committees had been serious about enforcing the
Intelligence Oversight Act, they could have simply refused to
authorize all covert action. Alternatively, they could have
eliminated the CIA's special contingency fund for covert operations,
requested the appropriations committee to cut intelligence spending,
or deferred indefinitely the appointment of any intelligence official
requiring Senate confirmation. Instead, the combination of Sporkin's
brief and Congress' mishandling of the issue gutted the legal basis
for oversight of covert action.

 Every DCI appointed since Iran-Contra has promised the oversight
committees that he would promptly notify Congress of covert actions.
Of course, the DCI also promises to serve the president faithfully.
Do we really want to wait to see which of these conflicting
commitments proves strongest in a crunch? That is precisely the
nature of the potential train wreck that lies ahead.

Covert Action and Strategy

Despite The potential costs of such a debacle, the larger problem for
covert action during the Clinton administration has not been
notification and control. Rather, it has been bad strategic thinking.

In a memorable New Yorker cartoon, two scientists are standing in
front of a blackboard, the left third of which is covered with
complicated equations and formulae. The right third is filled with
similar hieroglyphics. The middle third, however, shows a giant arrow
running left to right, explaining the process with the annotation,
"then a miracle occurs." One scientist is saying to the other, "I
have some reservations about your methodology."

Recent covert operations suggest that U.S. officials are using a
similar methodology. They seem to conceive of covert action as a
quick fix that can magically solve problems when all else fails. In
reality, covert action works like any other foreign policy activity,
and poorly conceived operations fail whether they are covert or not.
Like all other policies, covert action requires a clear set of
objectives, an accurate understanding of the prevailing conditions,
and clear logic on how the operation will achieve goals. In terms of
the Clinton administration's failure, the CIA's recent overt
operation in Iraq is Exhibit A.

According to various press reports, the CIA ran a Cold War-style
operation against the Iraqi Ba'ath regime in various forms from 1992
to 1996. The goal was to eliminate Saddam Hussein by encouraging a
military coup, in part by reducing drastically Saddam's control over
Iraq's outlying regions--in particular, Iraqi Kurdistan.

Kurdish nationalists in northern Iraq rebelled at the end of Desert
Storm in early March 1991, when Saddam's hold on power seemed to be
weakening. Surviving Iraqi army units rallied to quash the rebellion.
Kurds fled their cities for the mountains. With a potential refugee
disaster looming, the United Nations imposed a "no fly zone" in the
northern third of Iraq and provided food and supplies to the Kurds.
As a result, beginning in March 1991 the Iraqi Kurds gained
substantial autonomy. It was also in 1991, during the Bush
administration, that the United States began its covert effort to
eliminate Saddam. At the time, U.S. officials, believing that Saddam
was weak and that his opponents would soon succeed in removing him,
saw no need to move quickly. Press reports suggest that this plan was
gradually expanded during the year before Bill Clinton took office.
The strategy was to isolate, marginalize, and weaken Saddam by
increasing the autonomy the Kurds enjoyed in the UN-protected areas.

Saddam was indeed weakened, but not enough to bring him down.
Reflecting frustration that Saddam still endured--and that he could
still cause plenty of trouble, as with his chilling October 1994
military feint toward Kuwait--the character of the operation was
changed in 1995-96 to achieve faster results. Sources report that
President Clinton signed an order to provide arms and other
assistance to Iraqi groups seeking to overthrow Saddam. Other sources
add that some members of Congress also wanted the CIA to take
stronger action to that end. The CIA reportedly supported two kinds
of anti-Saddam initiatives during this period. One was an effort to
broadcast propaganda from Jordan into Iraq by expatriate opposition
organizations. The other was a more aggressive campaign involving the
use of force. This second effort embraced Iraqi military officers
opposed to Saddam, and two Kurdish nationalist groups: the Kurdish
Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

These CIA initiatives began to unravel in June 1996. Saddam had
penetrated the cabal of military officers plotting against him early
on and quickly foiled their plans. Then in late August, the operation
fell victim to internal Kurd rivalry. The KDP leader, Masoud Barzani,
turned against the PUK, inviting the Iraqi government to send its
forces into the Kurdish territories, where they crushed the
opposition. The CIA operation was routed. Iraqi authorities captured
dozens of agents who had been working for the CIA, as well as
computers and communications equipment that the United States had
supplied them.

Few Americans paid much attention to the collapse of the operation
and it was soon drowned out in the media by the 1996 presidential
elections. Not many U.S. personnel were involved, and as there was
little television footage available, the media quickly moved on to
new topics. But there should be no mistake--the covert operation in
Northern Iraq was a huge disaster, possibly the greatest covert
action debacle since Vietnam. All that was missing were helicopters
evacuating U.S. agents and allies from rooftops. According to the
press, more than one hundred Iraqi dissidents and military officers
cooperating with the United States were executed when Iraqi
intelligence forces rolled up the operation. Saddam also gained
invaluable information on U.S. intelligence tradecraft and the
organization of his opposition.

The United States suffered an enormous political setback. Having
relied on covert action because it was unwilling to confront Iraq
overtly, America appeared weak as well as naive in the wake of the
operation's failure. This failure doubtlessly contributed to the
subsequent decisions by Saudi Arabia and other states in the region
to distance themselves from Washington and to hedge in their
relations with Iraq. It may also explain in part Saudi Arabia's
reluctance to confront Iran over the June 1996 bombing of the Khobar
Towers in Dharan, which left nineteen Americans dead. As for Saddam,
having sized up his opponents and weakened its coalition, it was
reasonable for him to raise the stakes. The covert action fiasco was
probably a major factor in Saddam's decision to confront the United
States and its allies in late October and November 1997, when Iraq
demanded the ouster of the Americans among the UN weapons inspectors
and an end to economic sanctions.

Most important of all, the CIA's disastrous Iraq operation suggests
how poorly U.S. officials understand the problems entailed in covert
action and how to use such actions effectively. The U.S. effort in
Iraqi Kurdistan, as planned and executed after 1993, was a textbook
example of bad strategy and bad policy. It is hard to think of how a
program could have been more poorly conceived. It failed on at least
three different counts:

Failure #1: Poor strategic concept. The objective of the program was
to remove Saddam as a threat, yet all of the dynamics of the
situation favored Saddam. The United States was inherently limited in
the amount of support it could provide the Kurds. There are few
locales more remote from the United States than Kurdistan. The region
is virtually surrounded by Iran, Syria, and Iraq--all sworn enemies
of the United States. The only access is through Turkey, which, as we
shall see momentarily, presents its own problems. By 1996, the
coalition that had liberated Kuwait five years earlier had frayed
badly, and it had been difficult even to maintain support for
continuing UN economic sanctions on Iraq. Even more important, the
Kurds themselves were known to be badly split. The KDP and PUK were
rivals. Each was susceptible to an offer that would allow it to
prevail over its ostensible partner; the only question was the price
and timing of such an offer.

These factors ensured Iraq the dominant position as events unfolded.
As one opportunity after another presented itself, Iraq could
progressively ratchet the two Kurdish factions apart. Supporters of
the operation claim that the United States, with just a little more
money, might have held the Kurdish resistance together in the summer
of 1996. Maybe, maybe not. In any case Saddam would only have needed
to wait for another opportunity to peel off one of the factions, and
such an opportunity would have inevitably occurred.

Failure #2: Geopolitical simple-mindedness. Even if the Kurdish
operation had succeeded, it would have been inimical to other U.S.
interests in the region. The plan to increase the autonomy of the
Kurds, creating a de facto Kurdish state, was inconsistent with
broader U.S. policy toward Turkey, which strenuously opposes the
creation of an independent Kurdish state along its borders.

Moreover, if the covert operation had succeeded, its net result would
have been a permanently weaker Iraq. But most experts agree that
Iran, not Iraq, is the greater long-term concern in the region. This
is precisely why the United States limited the objectives of Desert
Storm to liberating Kuwait; U.S. leaders believed that a viable
united Iraq was necessary to counterbalance Iran. If a Kurdish
rebellion had succeeded in weakening the regime in Baghdad, we would
have also created a power vacuum in the region, and dealing with Iran
would have been more difficult than ever.

Failure #3: Deniability never made sense. The United States was never
able to keep the Iraq operation deniable. The program was thoroughly
compromised from the start. Kurdish leaders talked freely to the
press. More significantly, though, it is not even clear why
deniability was necessary.

The objective of the operation was to eliminate Saddam, and U.S.
officials acknowledged that there was a good probability that Saddam
would be killed in the process. The only reason for keeping the
operation covert would have been to preclude Iraq from striking back
at the United States or its allies. But after the Gulf War Saddam was
already determined to strike, no matter what the United States did.
Iraq continues to develop weapons of mass destruction, intimidate its
neighbors, and support terrorism (including a 1993 assassination
attempt against former President Bush). In short, whether Saddam had
evidence of U.S. involvement in a coup was essentially irrelevant.
Covertness offered few advantages.

With so many flaws, how was such a poorly conceived plan able to
proceed? Some critics claim that electoral politics played a part,
arguing that several administration officials wanted to get rid of
Saddam before the 1996 presidential election. These claims are
difficult to prove. One thing is clear, however: No one in the
approval chain--especially in 1995-96--had the experience, stature,
or inclination to recognize a hopelessly misconceived policy and kill
the program before it was too late.

It is ironic. Iran-Contra was a half-baked scheme that captured
America's attention for almost a year, and dominated discussions over
U.S. intelligence policy for several years after that. However, no
one was killed in the Iran-Contra operation, it had little long-term
effect on U.S.-Iranian relations, and had even less effect on the
balance of power in the Persian Gulf. In contrast, according to
reports, the program to support the Iraqi Kurds resulted in more than
a hundred deaths, undercut U.S. credibility in a critical region, and
cost about $100 million. And yet, apparently, no one responsible for
the program has had to account for the consequences of this disaster.

Into the Information Age

The failure of the administration's covert operations in Iraq is
troubling. U.S. leaders need to understand how to evaluate proposals
for covert action and, when necessary, carry out such operations
effectively. For while paramilitary operations and coups are probably
relics of the Cold War, the issue of covert action may soon become
more important than ever.

During the mid-1990s, a new buzz phrase entered national security
conversations: "information warfare." Information warfare (in the
inevitable acronym of the national security community, "IW") refers
to the use of, or attacks on, information systems--computers,
communications networks, or databases--for military or political
advantage. Because information systems are critical to both military
operations and the civilian economy, they are prime targets for
disruption and destruction. IW is the dark side of the Information
Age.

U.S. officials are reluctant to discuss the use of information
warfare by the United States. They are, however, willing to talk
freely about the IW threat against the United States. Some examples
of the scenarios they describe include the following:

* The United States buys many of the electronic components for its
weapons systems from foreign countries. Since some of these countries
would prefer that the United States stay out of their regions and
refrain from criticizing their human rights records, it follows that
they could build "bugs" into the components they sell so that, in the
event of war, U.S. smart weapons would suddenly become dumb and
unable to find or hit their targets.

* A U.S. software company is about to release a new product that
could give it a major competitive advantage. A foreign intelligence
service, hoping to protect the market share of software companies in
its own country, plants sophisticated disinformation on Internet
"chat groups" and web sites, suggesting that early versions of the
new U.S. product are unreliable and can fail with catastrophic
effects.

* Modern infrastructure--rail, electric power, hospitals, and air
traffic control--are all controlled by computer systems. Unfriendly
forces create chaos and destruction by penetrating these systems. In
wartime, they cripple the deployment of U.S. forces that depend on
the commercial infrastructure.

Other scenarios easily come to mind. IW strikes can be tactical (e.g., jamming a specific communications link or impersonating a particular terrorist group) or strategic (e.g., planting disinformation to lead hostile researchers down a technological cul-de-sac).

Although U.S. officials usually discuss such operations in terms of the threat they present to the United States, it does not take a genius to figure out that we could easily do the same to others. Indeed, the United States has a large potential advantage in information warfare. American-based companies dominate the computer, software, communications, and broadcast industries. We have the access and the expertise. If anyone is in a position to use IW to its advantage, it is the U.S. military and intelligence community.

IW is likely to be most effective when the target does not know the identity of the attacker - the disguised hacker, the unannounced penetrator, the anonymous source of bogus information. In other words, much information warfare will be covert action. So at the very moment when Cold War-style covert operations are becoming discredited and passe, a new potential form has appeared. And this is why the mishandling of covert operations in Iraq and elsewhere is so disturbing. If U.S. leaders were so inept with the old covert options, how can we expect them to understand both the potential and the limitations of exotic new ones?

This is also why the reluctance of U.S. officials to discuss policy and planning for offensive information warfare is worrisome. Without public debate, we cannot develop a national consensus or policy on major issues. Consider, finally, these questions:

* What are the capabilities that U.S. military forces and intelligence organizations must develop in order to use IW effectively and, when necessary, covertly? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these capabilities? Can they reduce the need for conventional military forces and military operations? Under what conditions?

* Can the United States develop these capabilities without exposing itself and its allies to the threat of retaliation?

* Which, if any, potential IW targets should be off limits?

* The private sector's role in communications, computers, the media, and technology development is larger than that of the government, and growing more so. How can government organizations work with industry to maintain the U.S. edge in IW?

* Do U.S. defense and intelligence officials have an adequate understanding of strategy and tactics for information warfare?

* Do we have the laws, expertise, and institutions necessary to oversee this new potential form of covert action?

This discussion needs to be carried out in public. Although we need to protect the details of our plans and capabilities, we can and must discuss general principles in the open. If we do not, we are bound to repeat the mistakes in oversight, accountability, and effectiveness that have plagued covert action in the past.

Bruce D. Berkowitz is an author and consultant based in Alexandria, Virginia. Allan E. Goodman is executive dean of the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Both served in the Central Intelligence Agency.