Blowback is the
espionage term for the violent,
unintended consequences of a
covert operation that are suffered by the civil population of the aggressor government. To the civilians suffering it, the blowback typically manifests itself as “random” acts of political violence without a discernible, direct cause; because the public—in whose name the
intelligence agency acted—are ignorant of the effected secret attacks that
provoked revenge (counter-attack) against them. Specifically,
blowback denotes the resultant, violent consequences — reported as
news fact, by domestic and international mass communications media, when the actor intelligence agency hides its responsibility via
media manipulation. Generally,
blowback loosely denotes every consequence of every aspect of a secret attack operation, thus, it is synonymous with
consequence—the attacked victims’ revenge against the civil populace of the aggressor country, because the responsible politico-military leaders are invulnerable.
Originally, blowback was
CIA internal coinage denoting the unintended, harmful consequences—to friendly populations and military forces—when a given weapon is carelessly used. Examples include anti-Western religious fanatics who, in due course, attack foe
and sponsor; right-wing counter-revolutionaries who sell drugs to their sponsor’s civil populace; and
banana republic juntas who kill American reporters.
In formal, print usage, the term blowback first appeared in the
Clandestine Service History—Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran—November 1952–August 1953, the CIA internal history of the US’s
1953 Iranian coup d'état. Alleged examples of blowback include the CIA’s financing and support for Afghan insurgents to fight an anti-Communist proxy guerrilla war against the
USSR in
Afghanistan; it is claimed that some of the beneficiaries of this CIA support joined
al-Qaeda's terrorist campaign against the United States.
In the 1980s, blowback was a central theme in the legal and political debates about the efficacy of the
Reagan Doctrine, which advocated public
and secret support of anti-Communist counter-revolutionaries (usually the losers of civil wars). For example, by secretly funding the secret war of the militarily-defeated, right-wing
Contras against the left-wing
Sandinista government of
Nicaragua, which led to the
Iran-Contra Affair, wherein the Reagan Administration sold American weapons to US enemy Iran to arm the Contras with Warsaw Pact weapons, and their consequent drug-dealing in American cities. Moreover, in the case of
Nicaragua v. United States, the
International Court of Justice ruled against the United States’ secret military attacks against Sandinista Nicaragua, because the countries were not formally at war.
Critics of the Reagan Doctrine note that blowback is inevitable and that such unilateral intervention causes
Third World civil wars to expand beyond their borders and risks the long-term safety of Americans who may be killed in the resulting violence. Reagan Doctrine advocates, principally the
Heritage Foundation, replied that support for anti-Communists would topple Communist régimes without retaliatory consequences to the United States and help win the global
Cold War.
See also
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