The Devilish Doctrine of Deniability

By Otto Friedrich

"We know perfectly well how things will turn out," the knight explained, his armor probably still smeared with the blood of Archbishop Thomas a Becket. "King Henry--God bless him--will have to say, for reasons of state, that he never meant this to happen; and there is going to be an awful row ..."

So said Sir William de Tracy when he stepped forward at the end of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral to tell why he and three other loyal servants of Britain's King Henry II had just carried out the poisonous wish implicit in the King's angry question, "Will nobody rid me of this turbulent priest?"

Eliot intended for us to despise the knights' oily justifications for the butchery, but history has been somewhat kinder to the King, who may or may not have wanted his wish thus fulfilled. As soon as Henry learned that the knights who overheard his question had hastily departed from his court, he guessed their mission and sent a messenger to summon them back. And when he heard that his onetime friend Becket had indeed been murdered, according to the contemporary chronicle of Arnulf of Lisieux, "the King burst into loud cries of grief ... At times he seemed stupefied with suffering, but then he would begin groaning again and calling out more loudly and bitterly than before."

Well, what did the King know, as we phrase these matters nowadays, and when did he know it? More important and more interest ing, how can a King (or President) order some action that he perhaps should not order, or that he would not want widely known as his order?

Even the best-intentioned men, once they enter the jungle of power politics, have to confront the necessity of directing actions that they would, in normal circumstances, be in clined to call immoral. The high-minded Abraham Lincoln, for example, was provoked by antiwar agitation into suspending the right of habeas corpus and arresting a number of peaceable citizens who had generally committed no crime worse than being Democrats.

Foreign affairs seem particularly apt to bring out a presidential capacity for hypocrisy. Kindly William McKinley, who used U.S. troops to suppress the fledgling Philippine republic in 1898, said he had prayerfully searched his soul before deciding it was his duty to "civilize and Christianize" the Filipinos. Theodore Roosevelt, who encouraged an insurrection in the Colombian province of Panama so that he could build a canal through it, liked to consult with Attorney General Philander Knox about the legality of his various aggressions, but Knox was not the sternest of critics. "Ah, Mr. President," he asked on one occasion, "Why have such a beautiful action marred by any taint of legality?" When Roosevelt yearned to seize the Hawaiian Islands, Admiral Alfred Mahan was equally encouraging: "Do nothing unrighteous, but take the islands first and solve afterward."

Some of the worst presidential misjudgments, like Franklin Roosevelt's decision to imprison some 110,000 unoffending Japanese-Americans in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, came from the pressures of wartime. But ever since World War II, the state of semiwar has inspired Presidents to take actions that might be justified by the demands of war but conflict with the usual claims to peaceful purpose. Hence the system of deniability, a.k.a. "plausible deniability," whereby a President's lieutenants arrange things so that he can always deny knowing what they have done on his behalf.

One eminent practitioner--and victim--of that system was Dwight Eisenhower, who had been assured by the CIA that the new U-2 surveillance plane could fly over the Soviet Union at such altitudes that the Soviets could not even detect it, much less intercept it. When a U-2 disappeared shortly before an East-West summit conference in 1960, NASA asserted that one of its weather planes in Turkey might have strayed off course. When the Soviets then announced that they had shot down the spy plane deep in central Russia, Washington said some low-level official might have exceeded his authority. When the Soviets finally produced Pilot Francis Gary Powers and proved that he had been on a CIA mission, official Washington wondered what new lie might work. But when Eisenhower decided to come clean and admit that he knew about the spy flight, the summit conference collapsed in acrimony.

Will nobody rid me of this turbulent priest? might have served as Jack Kennedy's question about Fidel Castro. And so the best and brightest of his knights, surrounding themselves in secrecy and deception, launched the disastrous invasion of the Bay of Pigs. When that dismally failed, the CIA became even more stealthy and tried to organize the assassination of Castro, a violation of just about every law of civilized international relations. Whether Kennedy knew or approved of the assassination plots remains disputed to this day.

Jimmy Carter tried to impose a new standard by subjecting all covert activities to the inspection of a "consumer's committee" of top Cabinet officials. "It personalizes the responsibility so that they can't deny it," said Vice President Walter Mondale. "What I think we've done is repeal the doctrine of plausible deniability." Stansfield Turner, who headed the CIA during the Carter years, says, "We live in a different society than back when [deniability] was an ac ceptable practice. The leaders of Government are expected to be in charge--the consequences are too great in a nuclear age."

But Government leaders also know that since the laws of the jungle never got repealed, they risk being denounced as naive if they fail to act as aggressively and ruthlessly as anyone else. Hence the attractions of secrecy, of White House hints rather than official orders, and of deniability as long as anybody will believe the denials. Perhaps only the congressional investigators will discover exactly how the tangled Iran-contra scheme started rolling, or perhaps only the historians of the next generation will answer all the current riddles. In the absence of proven fact, Columnist Jimmy Breslin asked Lieut. Colonel Oliver North's defense attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, how he thought the mess had begun. "I have to think that this happened the same way as the Nixon thing," Williams told Breslin last week. "I figure [Reagan] called in everybody and said, 'I want to do it, and I want you to find a way of doing it and then go out and do it and don't tell me what you're doing. I don't want to know anything. Just do it.' So you give guys a blanket order like that, gee, I guess plenty of things can happen."

Plenty of things indeed. Some of which can be denied, and some of which don't really need to be denied. We still don't know whether King Henry wanted his knights to commit murder on his behalf, but we do know that the four knights who served him escaped punishment, and several lived to a ripe old age.