No Better Option: States’ Use of Criminals in Covert Action

States frequently conduct covert action, such as attempting to subvert or overthrow their rivals. When doing so, intervening states may deploy their own operatives or cooperate with proxy actors, including criminal organizations. Under what conditions do interveners use criminals for covert action? Existing works have highlighted the potential benefits to interveners of working with criminal organizations but do not explain why states use them in some cases and not in others. We theorize that interveners are more likely to employ criminals in covert action when (1) criminal organizations have unique access to the target—meaning criminals have the will and wherewithal to carry out an operation undetected, whereas interveners’ other proxies do not—and (2) when a criminal organization calculates that the material benefits of cooperation with the intervener outweighs the risks. To probe the importance of these factors, we examine two contrasting cases: the US’ use of the Italian-American mafia in an attempt to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Libya’s 1986 negotiations with the Chicago-based El Rukn gang to conduct a terrorist attack in the US. We pair each of these core cases with a similar case in which interveners possessed other avenues for accessing the target, namely the US-backed overthrow of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and a Libyan-sponsored bombing in West Berlin. By highlighting the significance of unique access to the target and criminal organizations’ own calculations regarding cooperation, this article introduces a dynamic theory accounting for states’ use of criminal organizations in covert action.