Corporatization of Covert Infrastructure: Public-Private Partnerships in Covert Action

In the years following WWII, the CIA adopted a new model of covert infrastructure with which to carry out covert intervention — the corporatized model. Covert infrastructure refers to the logistical, human, and material support needed for covert action missions. This can include safehouses, letter drop locations, relationships with political dissidents, intelligence sources, weapons caches, and transportation. Under more traditional approaches, this infrastructure was painstakingly built and maintained over months and years at great financial cost and political risk. Under the corporatized model, intelligence services leverage the strengths of private contractors, front companies, organized crime syndicates, smugglers, and mercenaries to replicate this covert infrastructure in a way that provides intelligence services with plausible deniability, lower costs, and greater flexibility. In this thesis, by examining several case studies, I set out to answer the questions of why a state would choose to adopt this corporatized model — what its strengths are — and how widespread this practice is. I examine one case study very closely: the US, French, and Belgian intervention in Congo in the early 1960s, and show that all three states employed some variation of this model. I then briefly examine several other case studies on the surface level to show that this was not isolated to a single event. I then conclude by illustrating that it appears these same strategies are being employed by a variety of states today still and call for greater research into how corporatization is employed in covert intervention strategies today.