Plausible deniability

Plausible deniability is the ability of people, typically senior officials in a formal or informal chain of command, to deny knowledge and/or responsibility for actions committed by or on behalf of members of their organizational hierarchy.

The term typically implies forethought, such as intentionally setting up the conditions for the plausible avoidance of responsibility for one's future actions or knowledge.

In political campaigns, plausible deniability enables candidates to stay clean and denounce third-party advertisements that use unethical approaches or potentially libelous innuendo.

It is relatively easy for a government official to issue a blanket denial of an action, and it is possible to destroy or cover up evidence after the fact, that might be sufficient to avoid a criminal prosecution, for instance.

In the course of the investigation, it was revealed that the CIA, going back to the Kennedy administration, had plotted the assassination of a number of foreign leaders, including Cuba's Fidel Castro, but the president himself, who clearly supported such actions, was not to be directly involved so that he could deny knowledge of it.

"[7] Non-attribution to the United States for covert operations was the original and principal purpose of the so-called doctrine of "plausible denial."

Evidence before the Committee clearly demonstrates that this concept, designed to protect the United States and its operatives from the consequences of disclosures, has been expanded to mask decisions of the president and his senior staff members.Plausible denial involves the creation of power structures and chains of command loose and informal enough to be denied if necessary.

Both laws, however, are full of enough vague terms and escape hatches to allow the executive branch to thwart their authors' intentions, as was shown by the Iran–Contra affair.

Indeed, the members of Congress are in a dilemma since when they are informed, they are in no position to stop the action, unless they leak its existence and thereby foreclose the option of covertness.

[9] The (Church Committee) conceded that to provide the United States with "plausible denial" in the event that the anti-Castro plots were discovered, Presidential authorization might have been subsequently "obscured".

The committee also suggested that the system of command and control may have been deliberately ambiguous, to give Presidents a chance for "plausible denial.

As former CIA director Richard Helms told the committee: "The difficulty with this kind of thing, as you gentlemen are all painfully aware, is that nobody wants to embarrass a President of the United States.

The Stasi acquired plausible deniability on the operation by covertly supporting biologist Jakob Segal, whose stories were picked up by international press, including "numerous bourgeois newspapers" such as the Sunday Express.

[21] In 2014, "Little green men"—troops without insignia carrying modern Russian military equipment—emerged at the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which The Moscow Times described as a tactic of plausible deniability.