Plausible deniability is the ability of a person or organization to deny a connection (knowledge, responsibility, or involvement) to a controversial action in a manner that cannot be conclusively disproved. In politics and espionage, the term traditionally refers to the concealment or withholding of acknowledgement, of a sponsor's role in a covert operation, so that the sponsoring government can disclaim responsibility if the operation comes to light. In the study of language and communication, indirect speech and insinuation are analysed as ways for a speaker to preserve deniability about the intended meaning of an utterance.
The political concept is closely associated with the United States during the early Cold War. National Security Council directive NSC 10/2 of 1948 defined covert operations as activities planned and executed so that any US government responsibility for them "is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them".Office of the Historian, Department of State. National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects (NSC 10/2), Washington, June 18, 1948. The expression gained public prominence in the mid-1970s, when the Church Committee of the US Senate concluded that the doctrine, originally intended to protect the United States from the consequences of disclosure, had been expanded to shield presidents and their senior staff from accountability for controversial decisions.Church Committee Reports United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Senate, Nov. 20, 1975, II. Section B Covert Action as a Vehicle for Foreign Policy Implementation. p. 11
Scholars have questioned if plausible deniability can be practically achieved. Many covert operations have their sponsorship apparent although officially unacknowledged, and states have sometimes derived value from such "implausibly deniable" action, for example by signalling resolve to an adversary while limiting pressure to escalate. In pragmatics, researchers have examined how even thinly veiled innuendo retains a degree of deniability, and why denials of an insinuated message can succeed even when the message was understood by everyone involved.
Overview Arguably, the key concept of plausible deniability is plausibility. It is relatively easy for a government official to issue a blanket denial of an action, and it is possible to destroy or cover up evidence after the fact, that might be sufficient to avoid a criminal prosecution, for instance. However, the public might well disbelieve the denial, particularly if there is strong circumstantial evidence or if the action is believed to be so unlikely that the only logical explanation is that the denial is false.
The concept is even more important in espionage. Intelligence may come from many sources, including human sources. The exposure of information to which only a few people are privileged may directly implicate some of the people in the disclosure. An example is if an official is traveling secretly, and only one aide knows the specific travel plans. If that official is assassinated during his travels, and the circumstances of the assassination strongly suggest that the assassin had foreknowledge of the official's travel plans, the probable conclusion is that his aide has betrayed the official. There may be no direct evidence linking the aide to the assassin, but collaboration can be inferred from the facts alone, thus making the aide's denial implausible.
History
The term's roots go back to US President Harry Truman's National Security Council Paper 10/2 of June 18, 1948, which defined "covert operations" as "all activities (except as noted herein) which are conducted or sponsored by this Government against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups but which are so planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them."Office of the Historian, Department of State. National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects (NSC 10/2), Washington, June 18, 1948. During the Eisenhower administration, NSC 10/2 was incorporated into the more-specific NSC 5412/2 "Covert Operations."Office of the Historian, Department of State. Covert Operations (NSC 5412/2), Washington, undated. NSC 5412 was declassified in 1977 and is located at the National Archives.Records of the National Security Council (NSC), Record Group 273.
The expression "plausibly deniable" was first used publicly by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Allen Dulles. The idea, however, is considerably older. For example, in the 19th century, Charles Babbage described the importance of having "a few simply honest men" on a committee who could be temporarily removed from the deliberations when "a peculiarly delicate question arises" so that one of them could "declare truly, if necessary, that he never was present at any meeting at which even a questionable course had been proposed."
Church Committee The Church Committee of the U.S. Senate conducted an investigation of the intelligence agencies in 1974–1975. In the course of the investigation, it was revealed that the CIA, going back to the Kennedy administration, had plotted the assassination of a number of foreign leaders, including Cuba's Fidel Castro, but the president himself, who clearly supported such actions, was not to be directly involved so that he could deny knowledge of it. That was given the term "plausible denial."
Plausible denial involves the creation of power structures and chains of command loose and informal enough to be denied if necessary. The idea was that the CIA and later other bodies could be given controversial instructions by powerful figures, including the president himself, but that the existence and true source of those instructions could be denied if necessary if, for example, an operation went disastrously wrong and it was necessary for the administration to disclaim responsibility.
Later legislative barriers The Hughes–Ryan Act of 1974 sought to put an end to plausible denial by requiring a presidential finding for each operation to be important to national security, and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 required for Congress to be notified of all covert operations. Both laws, however, are full of enough vague terms and escape hatches to allow the executive branch to thwart their authors' intentions, as was shown by the Iran–Contra affair. Indeed, the members of Congress are in a dilemma since when they are informed, they are in no position to stop the action, unless they leak its existence and thereby foreclose the option of covertness.New York Times Under Cover, or Out of Control? November 29, 1987 Section 7; p. 3, Column 1 (Book Review of 2 books: The Perfect Failure and Covert Action)
Media reports
Iran–Contra affair In his testimony to the congressional committee studying the Iran–Contra affair, Vice Admiral John Poindexter stated: "I made a deliberate decision not to ask the President, so that I could insulate him from the decision and provide some future deniability for the President if it ever leaked out."
Declassified government documents A telegram from the Ambassador in Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., to Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy on US options with respect to a possible coup, mentions plausible denial. CIA and White House documents on covert political intervention in the 1964 Chilean election have been declassified. The CIA's Chief of Western Hemisphere Division, J.C. King, recommended for funds for the campaign to "be provided in a fashion causing (Eduardo Frei Montalva president of Chile) to infer United States origin of funds and yet permitting plausible denial." Training files of the CIA's covert "Operation PBSuccess" for the 1954 coup in Guatemala describe plausible deniability. According to the National Security Archive: "Among the documents found in the training files of Operation PBSuccess and declassified by the Agency is a CIA document titled 'A Study of Assassination.' A how-to guide book in the art of political killing, the 19-page manual offers detailed descriptions of the procedures, instruments, and implementation of assassination." The manual states that to provide plausible denial, "no assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded."
Soviet operations In the 1980s, the Soviet KGB ran OPERATION INFEKTION (also called "OPERATION DENVER"), which utilised the East German Stasi and Soviet-affiliated press to spread the idea that HIV/AIDS was an engineered bioweapon. The Stasi acquired plausible deniability on the operation by covertly supporting biologist Jakob Segal, whose stories were picked up by international press, including "numerous bourgeois newspapers" such as the Sunday Express. Publications in third-party countries were then cited as the originators of the claims. Meanwhile, Soviet intelligence obtained plausible deniability by utilising the German Stasi in the disinformation operation.
Little green men and Wagner Group In 2014, "Little green men"—troops without insignia carrying modern Russian military equipment—emerged at the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which The Moscow Times described as a tactic of plausible deniability.
The Wagner Group, a Russian private military company, has been described as an attempt at plausible deniability for Kremlin-backed interventions in Ukraine, Syria, and in various interventions in Africa.
Flaws It is an open door to the abuse of authority by requiring that the parties in question to be said to be able to have acted independently, which, in the end, is tantamount to giving them license to act independently.Church Committee II. Section B Page 11; IV. Findings and Conclusions Section C Subsection 1 Page 261: An additional possibility is that the President may, in fact, not be fully and accurately informed about a sensitive operation because he failed to receive the "circumlocutious" message.... The Committee finds that the system of Executive command and control was so inherently ambiguous that it is difficult to be certain at what level assassination activity was known and authorized. This creates the disturbing prospect that assassination activity might have been undertaken by officials of the United States Government without its having been incontrovertibly clear that there was explicit authorization from the President of the United States. The denials are sometimes seen as plausible but sometimes seen through by both the media and the populace.Church Committee IV. Findings and Conclusions Section C Subsection 5 Page 277: It was naive for policymakers to assume that sponsorship of actions as big as the [Bay of Pigs] invasion could be concealed. The Committee's investigation of assassination and the public disclosures which preceded the inquiry demonstrate that when the United States resorted to cloak-and-dagger tactics, its hand was ultimately exposed. Plausible deniability increases the risk of misunderstanding between senior officials and their employees.Church Committee IV. Section C Subsection 5 Page 277: "Plausible denial" increases the risk of misunderstanding. Subordinate officials should describe their proposals in clear, precise, and brutally frank language; superiors are entitled to, and should demand, no less
Other examples
Council on Foreign Relations
Use in computer networks In computer networks, plausible deniability often refers to a situation in which people can deny transmitting a file, even when it is proven to come from their computer.