Near the end of his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, CIA director nominee William Burns was asked by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., if he agreed that too often American presidents had relied on covert action as a “substitute,” rather than a supplement, to actual strategic policy. Burns said he did.

“I think that it’s one of the big dangers,” Burns said, noting that he hadn’t yet been briefed on active covert action programs. “Your point about connecting covert action programs… to coherent policy is absolutely crucial. It cannot be a substitute for sound policy choices.”

Burns, a career diplomat, said covert action should only be “one tool” in a broader strategy.

Covert action, according to U.S. law, refers to basically any proactive, secret operation by the U.S. government, beyond intelligence-gathering, designed to “influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.” (Historical examples of covert action include clandestine support for foreign coups, attempted assassinations, reportedly cyberattacks on adversary nations, and, depending on your point of view, the drone program.)

Burns’ warning about the use of covert action is not new. In fact, inside the CIA it reaches back at least 50 years, to the heart of the Cold War.

“More often than not, our covert operations are seen as a way to accomplish a policy objective (if there is one) on the cheap, to cope with a problem where no one has any idea how to obtain public support for a solution to the problem, or to use covert action as a short-term tactic to fend off a problem or disaster — a tactic to be repeated or expanded upon in the absence of ingenuity, will, or money to come up with a viable long-term overt option,” future CIA Director Robert M. Gates wrote in a memo back in 1981 [PDF], citing his agreement with another memo on the subject that had been written 13 years prior to that.

At the time Gates was a senior CIA official in the Office of Policy and Planning, and just a month later would be named as the National Intelligence Officer for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

“As this country looks increasingly to covert action as an instrument of foreign policy in an era of ‘no war, no peace,’ we are likely to be asked to do more and more things covertly because of the political difficulties here of going forward with them in a more public manner,” Gates writes.

Gates’ 1981 memo is partially redacted, but the portions that survive list four hard truths about covert action:

• Covert action operations can rarely achieve an important objective alone.

• Covert operations are best suited to tactical situations where success will bring immediate short-term gain.

• Large operations cannot be kept secret.

• CIA should concentrate on doing the special clandestine things that it is expected to be especially competent at accomplishing

Gates said that “in an ideal world” every covert action proposal would also come with a policy paper from the Department of State or the White House National Security Council “which would identify the larger policy context of a covert action and identify an overt program which would be approved simultaneously…” Short of that, Gates suggested the CIA provide its own “analytical judgment” about what overt programs might work best with whatever proposed secret action.

At the time Gates was laying out his advice, and concerns, about how the CIA might be used in the 1980s, following very public disasters in the world of covert action earlier in the Cold War.

Perhaps the advice was both too little and too late, and not even followed by Gates himself. Two months after Gates sent the memo to the CIA’s senior officials, the agency was tasked by then-President Ronald Reagan to begin arming militant groups in Central America — what would spiral into one of the agency’s most high-profile controversies later known as the Iran-Contra affair. Gates later wrote about his own failures at the time, but said that the CIA was “dealt a lousy hand by the president and Congress” and “played it amazingly stupidly.”

PRIMARY SOURCE: William Burns’ Confirmation Hearing (YouTube.com)

PRIMARY SOURCE: Robert Gates’ 1981 Memo (PDF, CIA.gov)

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