The Coordination Tradeoff: Interagency Participation and the Success of US Covert Operations

Covert regime-change operations played a central role in US foreign policy during the Cold War; however, they consistently failed to achieve their stated objectives. Existing explanations for such high failure rates point to political constraints, intelligence limitations, and the challenges of working with proxy actors. Though helpful for certain operations, these accounts do not fully explain persistent failure across such diverse operational contexts. This thesis argues that the organizational structure of interagency planning plays a key role in determining operational outcomes. Drawing on bureaucratic politics and organizational theory, it demonstrates that interagency participation has a non-linear relationship with success. While additional agencies initially improve planning by pooling expertise, excessive participation introduces coordination costs that undermine effectiveness. The analysis of this paper combines regression models using original coding of interagency involvement across 66 covert regime-change operations with case studies of Operation Mongoose and Operation Blue Bat. The findings reveal a significant inverted-U or goldilocks relationship, with operations featuring a moderate number of agencies performing best. The results highlight the value of organizational design in covert action and contribute to broader debates on coordination in national security policymaking.