Black Operations
Classified missions or operations. In some cases, the missions are “clandestine,” which means that they are kept secret to protect Americans and allied forces that are involved in an operation – i.e. capturing a Taliban leader. Afterwards, the mission is no longer secret; it is often reported on in the media, featuring interviews with some of the people who carried out the mission. In contrast, some of the black operations are “covert,” which means that U.S. government can deny that they are involved in these operations and therefore these operations must remain secret even after they have been completed.
Special Operations can be covert, but, according to a Special Operations Field Manual, these missions require a declaration of war or a specific finding that has been approved by the President or Secretary of Defense. In recent years, the military has apparently undertaken covert operations in Pakistan in an effort to capture or kill Taliban militants and Al Qaeda leaders; since these missions are covert, the U.S. government, and the Pakistani government, can later claim that they were not involved in them.
Some officials, such as Brig. Gen. John Mulholland Jr., served as the head of Special Operations Command Central, believe that journalists exaggerate the importance of distinction between black and white operations, since on many occasions these operations meld together. “It's almost a false analogy,” he told a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, who wrote about these operations in a July 2, 2007, article entitled “Combat Strategy Includes Hearts.” “It's not one or the other. It’s how you blend all of our nation's capabilities to achieve a certain effect on the battlefield. The discussion is much more nuanced than people like to make it.”
In other words, as Benjamin Abel, a former public affairs officer at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, told me. “There’s black and white – and there’s grey. The army does a lot of grey.”
Some terrorism analysts are more skeptical about the definitions of black operations. “They say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Black operations.’ It means – ‘I’m hot shit,’” Marc Sageman, the author of Understanding Terror Networks, told me. “This whole system is geared to make outrageous claims.”
Learn more terms about U.S. Special Operations. Tara McKelvey is a Carnegie National Security fellow at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The author of
Monstering: Inside America’s Policy on Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War (Basic Books), she is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review. For more on the project, visit the
About page.
