Governments secrecy

Keeping the Adversary’s Secrets Secret

In a series of memos written in late 1951 and early 1952, in the midst of the Korean War, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that a “de facto air war exists over North Korea between the UN and the USSR.” As many as 30,000 Russians were “physically involved in the Korean War,” the CIA reported, piloting more than 150 aircraft in daily combat missions. Within a decade of the beginning of the Cold War, direct combat was already under way between the two superpowers. Yet both the United States and the Soviet Union kept it secret.

Why did the Soviet Union intervene covertly in the Korean War, despite having good reason to assume that the United States would detect its intervention? More puzzling, why did the U.S. government, after it had detected the presence of Russian pilots, play along—preserving the Soviets’ secret until the declassification of a wave of U.S. intelligence documents a half-century later? Why would adversarial states ever collude to keep each other’s secrets?

The answer to these puzzles, argues Austin Carson in his excellent new book, “Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics,” lies in states’ desire for escalation control. The need to prevent limited confrontations from turning into all-out wars can drive states to intervene covertly and encourage other major powers to refrain from blowing the whistle.