At first glance, intelligence and strategic communication seem to be irreconcilable. After all, the activities of intelligence services are considered fundamentally secret, while communication requires at least a certain degree of openness and visibility to be understood by its audience. In fact, intelligence services have begun to lift the ”veil of secrecy” somewhat in the 21st century in favor of strategic communication. For example, they hold press conferences, organize open days, and post videos on social media. This public communication serves primarily to strengthen the legitimacy and acceptance of intelligence agencies among increasingly critical domestic publics. In addition to this form of open communication, however, intelligence services sometimes also send strategic messages directly through covert action.
In recent years, intelligence scholars have begun to acknowledge this potential of covert action. Austin Carson and Keren Yarhi-Milo published a pioneering study on covert action as a signaling tool to external actors, whether allies or rivals. Based on case studies from the Cold War, they developed a theoretical framework that explains why various forms of secret political actions, including covert aid programs and secret military strikes, are devised as meaningful symbols of their originators’ resolve and why state actors “find covert communication both intelligible (the basic intended message is understood by perceivers) and credible (the message is believable).” Signaling in secret is possible, Carson and Yarhi-Milo argue, because covert action rarely ever takes place in absolute secrecy. Rather than merely see this partial observability as an inconvenience that must be minimized, state actors can exploit it as a signaling opportunity.
Expanding Carson’s and Yarhi-Milo’s framework, I introduced a first general model on signaling through covert action that distinguishes three forms of messages: internal signaling, peer signaling, and public signaling. These three distinct forms correspond to three types of audiences: Internal signaling is directed towards members of the own intelligence community or the country’s political leaders. A typical case are the assassinations of Soviet intelligence defectors by the KGB during the Cold War. This lethal violence had motivational elements of hate and revenge, and at times was aimed to prevent a defector from doing damage by betraying secrets. However, the primary objective of these operations, at least since the 1960s, was to maintain a credible deterrence against further defections from the own ranks by sending a warning to potential future turncoats in the Soviet intelligence and security services that “traitors” will be punished. “A traitor is his own murderer,” was the message addressed to the members of the intelligence services, aiming to deter further defections by spreading fear.
In turn, the audience of peer signaling is a group of strategic allies or rivals. Such an audience was targeted by the Mossad’s assassination operations against Palestinian terrorist leaders. Mossad counterterrorism chief Shimshon Yitzhaki explained this rationale after his service had poisoned Wadi Haddad, the mastermind of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Operations Group, leading his slow and agonizing death in East Berlin’s Charité hospital in early 1978: “These stories of suffering have an effect of their own. They spread out and reach the ears of other terrorists, get into their minds, cause them awe and terror, disrupt their judgement, change their behavior, make them make mistakes.” Peer signaling is also often directed towards rival or allied intelligence services.
Public signaling finally targets a wider public audience. Examples are, arguably, the (attempted) “theatrical murders” of FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko and former double agent Sergei Skripal by Russian intelligence services in 2006 and 2018, respectively. Another illustrative case are the Mossad’s assassination operations against Nazi war criminals between 1960 and 1989. As part of the decade-long hunt, the Israeli intelligence service shot and killed the Latvian Nazi aide Herberts Cukurs in Uruguay in 1965. The Mossad commando mistreated the body of the “Butcher of Riga”, who was responsible for the death of more than 30’000 Jews in Riga, and left documents about his crimes as well as a letter of confession in the form of a verdict, signed by “Those Who Will Never Forget”. The case of Cukurs also shows that an intelligence assassination can signal to more than one target audience. While butchering the “Butcher of Riga”, the Mossad not only sent a message to Holocaust survivors and the global public but also engaged in peer signaling to the Nazi war criminals still on the run.
Adrian Hänni
Dr., Senior Researcher
Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ)
Munich-Berlin
Germany
haenni@ifz-muenchen.de
Back to Table of Contents