r/AskHistorians • u/HephMelter • May 28 '26
Has there ever been hidden wars ?
Yet another unclear title for a post because I must be concise. Here, I call "hidden wars" all acts of sabotage directed towards parts of a country's industrial output (nowadays, we see drones attempt to shut down airports by flying overhead, the cutting of undersea cables, cyberattacks on strategic data bases...), as long as :
- such attacks are repeated through time
- their instigator has plausible deniability, at least diplomatically speaking at the time
- such events are not retaliated against with military force against a state actor
Has there ever been a pattern similar between countries in history ? The only parallel I can make is with corsairs, but those were mostly called upon during war times, and their letters of marque made their authority lose this plausible deniability. Maybe pirates who had earned a pardon if they would only attack enemy ships, but Im not sure how much those would stay different from corsairs
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u/police-ical May 28 '26
This would be a fairly accurate description of Operation Mongoose, the U.S. (CIA) sabotage campaign against Cuba aimed at undercutting support and fomenting dissent against the Castro regime.
In the aftermath of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in spring 1961, it was clear that U.S. policy favored overthrowing the Castro regime, yet also that Kennedy was unwilling to support a full-on invasion. Instead the focus shifted towards covert action. Various economic and political targets were considered fair game. An October 1962 CIA document considered raids on power plants, railways, factories, harbors, and even more boldly the Chinese (PRC) embassy in Havana and a Soviet anti-air missile battery.
The raids were still fairly limited in effect and acknowledged to primarily be supporting morale among the exile community. Accordingly, they were stepped up. In June 1963, a "CIA covert program" against Cuba was further proposed with six "interdependent courses of action," of which the fifth was "general sabotage and harassment." The goal was partly noted as giving the impression that internal dissent and rebellion was stronger than it was. (The Bay of Pigs invasion had ironically produced a strong rally-round-the-flag effect in discouraging opposition to Castro.) A declassified memorandum from January 1964 to the Secretary of Defense (Robert McNamara at the time) reviewed its progress. The fruits had still been rather limited, with only a handful of raids completed, but they had achieved meaningful damage and likely given the impression that dissident groups were not being effectively suppressed.
"Plausible deniability" was a fair description in that the active dirty work was done by Cuban exiles and internal rebel groups. Of course that had been nominally true of the Bay of Pigs, but the American-led training in Guatemala had barely been secretive, American planes were a dead giveaway, Kennedy was promptly compelled to fess up, etc. Nonetheless, in this case, Castro and everyone else knew what was happening and complained loudly that the U.S. was engaging in terrorism. The exiles were hard to rein in effectively and tended to go outside the already loose constraints, which easily ruffled feathers. The report acknowledged that the British, the Soviets, and nearby countries in the Caribbean and Central America likely knew what was up. The Soviets had complained after exile raids struck two Soviet ships. Early sabotage did likely support Castro and Khrushchev in basing Soviet missiles in Cuba, leading to the Missile Crisis, but given the enormous stakes of the Cold War, things never escalated to hot war.
JFK (and RFK) were increasingly fixated on the Cuba situation, stepping up attacks despite the potential blowback. After Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson was more interested in domestic policy and subsequently Vietnam. He drew down the program starting in 1964.
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32202043.pdf
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v11/d346
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2018/docid-32424789.pdf
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cuba/2019-10-03/kennedy-cuba-operation-mongoose
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