Last December, writing here about unrest in Iran, I had to be careful. We must resist the temptation to treat capability as conspiracy, I wrote, while also resisting the delusion that absence of evidence means absence of action. That caution was owed to readers, because I could point to a history and a capability but not to an operation.

That caution is no longer necessary. In the first week of August, American newspapers reported that the Central Intelligence Agency has established a dedicated Cuba task force—case officers, analysts, cyber operators, specialists in covert influence—whose reported mandate is to create fissures among the Cuban political elite, in the hope of pressuring the replacement of officials deemed anti-American with leaders more agreeable to the president's demands. Cuba has been elevated to "Priority 1" in the intelligence community's collection framework, alongside China, Iran, and Russia. Satellites are being re-tasked. The Agency declined to comment.

We are told there are limits: no organized Cuban partners, no authority for lethal operations. We are also told, in the same breath, that the president may modify those authorities at any time.

What is remarkable here is not the operation. Lindsey A. O'Rourke's Covert Regime Change documents 64 covert American attempts to change foreign governments between 1947 and 1989, against six overt ones—a ratio of 10 to one. Only 25 succeeded even by the undemanding measure that an American-backed client took power. Her most damning finding is the one least quoted: States targeted for regime change—especially those that survived the attempt—were more likely to experience civil war or mass killing in the years that followed.

Covert action undertaken to alter the composition or constitutional order of a foreign government should be forbidden.

What is remarkable is that nothing in American law stands in the way—and that the reason has nothing to do with secrecy.

A Statute That Ends Things, and a Statute That Only Reports Them

The War Powers Resolution is not, at bottom, a reporting statute. It is a termination statute. It gives the president 48 hours to report and 60 days to finish, after which he shall terminate the use of the forces concerned unless Congress affirmatively says otherwise. Congressional silence ends the operation. That default is the whole of its design.

Covert action runs under an entirely different law, 50 U.S.C. §3093. There must be a written presidential finding. The intelligence committees must be kept "fully and currently informed." These are real constraints, born of real scandals, and it would be wrong to say Congress is blind.

But §3093 contains no clock, no expiry, and no vote—ever. A finding, once signed and reported, may run indefinitely. Silence continues it. And where a war powers report enters a public record on which any member may act, a finding goes to two committees behind closed doors, sometimes to eight members alone. Those outside may not be told; those inside may not speak. The floor vote that the War Powers Resolution treats as the ordinary constitutional remedy becomes structurally impossible, because a legislature cannot vote on what its members are forbidden to describe.

Then there is the definitional gap, which is the loophole properly so called. The resolution regulates the introduction of "United States Armed Forces" into hostilities. Case officers are not Armed Forces. Identical objective, identical target, identical effect—but a different statute, depending on which badge the operator carries.

I have argued in these pages that economic warfare capable of collapsing a foreign economy should be subject to reporting and time limits comparable to those governing armed force. I still believe it. But I have to report that it would not close this gap. The War Powers Resolution regulates a category of actor. An economic amendment would regulate a category of instrument. Any scheme built on categories will leak, because the executive may always choose the category nobody regulates. Only a rule keyed to effects will hold.

Consent That No One Can Authenticate

In January I argued here that Washington's claims of Venezuelan "cooperation" were null and void, because consent extracted under coercion is not consent. Covert action........

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