Covert action failure and fiasco construction: William Hague’s 2011 Libyan venture

Abstract

In 2011 William Hague, then British Foreign Secretary, authorized a Special Forces team to enter Libya and attempt to contact rebels opposed to Muammar Gaddafi in the unfolding civil war. However, its members were detained by the rebels, questioned and ejected from the country. This article puts the literature on public policy failures into dialogue with that on covert action as a tool of foreign policy. It asks: why did this not develop into a fully-fledged policy fiasco when journalists and politicians alike judged it to have been a major error of judgement on Hague's part? Using narrative analysis of the contemporary reporting of this incident, we argue that the government -possessing the advantage of information asymmetry accruing from operational secrecy -was ultimately able to win the battle of narratives in a frame contestation process. The study of information asymmetry can enhance the recently revivified research into foreign policy failures.

Covert Action: Perils and Advantages

“…As the covert action turns sour, it puts pressure on and tarnishes the credibility of the president on an international scale with a full-blown fiasco. 54 In that perspective, such perils outweighed the advantages of covert action in the BGFIEND/Operation Valuable as it was 'overly ambitious and too big to be secure' 55 and deliver a blow to the agency's prestige.…”

From secrecy to accountability: The politics of exposure in the Belgrano affair

“…As Table 1 illustrates, this means asking different types of question, not so much about what went wrong as ‘how something comes to be seen as a “failure” regardless of whether this policy is really a failure or not’ (Kruck et al, 2018a: 6) and how stakeholders framed and counter-framed core issues such as salience, magnitude and blame attribution (Bovens and ‘t Hart, 1996: 11–14). In searching for answers, language, narrative (see Jones and McBeth, 2010; Shanahan et al, 2018) and representation are put in the spotlight and used to tell a story about the ways in which policy failures are ‘identified, labelled and constructed through various forms of political and discursive contestation’ (Cormac and Daddow, 2018: 693).…”

“…In what is now a sizable body of research, we develop in particular the work on: first, the means by which ‘actors use framing mechanisms to allocate or deflect blame’ (Brändström and Kuipers, 2003: 282. See Hood, 2002, 2016); second, how governing elites use message management to evade culpability in a foreign policy crisis (Cormac and Daddow, 2018), and third, the politics at work in narrative contestations over foreign policy issues (see Oppermann and Spencer, 2018). A key novelty and wider significance of our article is that we develop our theoretical framework by plugging the policy evaluation literature more tightly into research from the field of intelligence studies into secrecy in the exercise of state power (Carson, 2016, 2018; Carson and Yarhi-Milo, 2017; Cormac and Aldrich, 2018).…”