A Word the Agency Invented About Itself

The word blowback does not come from the agency's critics. It comes from the agency.

It appears in the CIA's own classified history of the 1953 Iran operation, written the following year by Donald Wilber, where it names the unintended consequences of covert action that return to the country that took it. The history warns that the possibility should always be in the back of officers' minds. It entered ordinary English through the political scientist Chalmers Johnson in 2000, and by then it had loosened considerably.

The loosening is the problem, and it needs saying before the concept is any use.

Almost any later event can be presented as blowback from an earlier one, because countries are continuous and something is always happening in them. The claim only carries weight when a mechanism is supplied: specific people, specific weapons, specific institutions, a specific grievance with a traceable route from the first event to the second. Without that, blowback is a way of observing that two things occurred in the same country several decades apart and asserting a relationship between them.

Apply the test to the case the word was coined about.

Between the restoration of the Shah in 1953 and the revolution that removed him in 1979 lie twenty-six years. There is a genuine argument that the American role in 1953 shaped Iranian politics for a generation, discredited the constitutional opposition, and gave the revolution its anti-American character. There is a serious counter-argument that the Shah's fall had abundant domestic causes that needed no help from 1953, and that Iranian nationalism would have found its grievances regardless.

Serious historians hold both positions. That is where the honest reader should sit too.

But notice what does not depend on resolving it, because this is the part of the idea that survives every objection.

The 1953 decision was priced against the alternative available in 1953. The cost of the operation was a few hundred thousand dollars and a few weeks of risk; the benefit was a government in Tehran that would sign the agreements Washington and London wanted. Nothing in that calculation extended to 1979, because no institution was responsible for a twenty-six year horizon and nobody who authorised the operation expected to be in post for it.

That is the strongest version of the blowback argument, and it is not a claim about hatred. It is a claim about accounting.

Covert action is attractive precisely because it is cheap, fast and deniable, which means it is chosen by comparison with a short-term alternative. Its costs are slow, diffuse, and land on institutions that did not authorise it. A system that systematically compares the near cost of acting with the near cost of not acting will systematically overinvest in action, and it will do so without anybody in it making an error in their own terms.

That failure is structural rather than moral, which is what makes it interesting. It also makes it fixable in principle, which almost nothing else in this book is. The fix is unglamorous, institutional and boring: somebody whose job it is to price the long horizon, with standing to be heard in the room where the short one is being priced. It has been recommended after most of the inquiries in this book, and it is the recommendation that survives least well.