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

ABSTRACT

In 2011 William Hague, then British Foreign Secretary, authorized Special Forces to enter Libya and contact rebels opposed to Muammar Gaddafi in the unfolding civil war. However, its members were detained by the rebels 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 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 able to win the battle of narratives in a frame contestation process. The article reflects on how the study of information asymmetry can enhance the recently revivified research into foreign policy failures.

KEYWORDS:

• British foreign policy
• covert action
• policy failure
• fiasco
• information asymmetry
• narrative analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jon Moran, Kai Oppermann, Kelly Smith, as well as the four anonymous journal reviewers, whose comments greatly helped sharpen up the final piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We are grateful to one of the journal reviewers for drawing our attention to the interplay between domestic and international politics as a source of novelty.

2 The hostage rescue was a secret military operation not a covert action, and it is debatable whether the Iran-Contra affair, often labelled a scandal, constitutes a fiasco (the latter hinges on interpretations of programmatic success). The differences between them lie beyond the scope of this article, but are referred to here as they are relevant to the core theme of secrecy.

3 The newspaper source data and references used in the narrative analysis are found in the online appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/M006662/1].

Notes on contributors

Rory Cormac

Rory Cormac is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Oliver Daddow

Oliver Daddow is an Assistant Professor of British Politics and Security at the University of Nottingham, UK.