blowback

Unplanned, harmful consequences of intelligence activity for the security of the state that carried it out.

The CIA glossary defines blowback as the unintended negative consequences of an action that harm US national security. The term applies above all to covert action, whose effects can come back to haunt the state that ordered it, often years later.¹

A short-term example: according to the State Department's Office of the Historian, the shooting down of a U-2 on 1 May 1960, and the revelation that the story of a weather-research flight was a cover, wrecked the Paris summit: Khrushchev demanded an apology and a promise to end the flights, Eisenhower refused, and the Soviet delegation left Paris just before the talks were due to begin.²

Fear of such consequences is one of the reasons for oversight of covert action; in the United States the President must approve it in a written finding and notify the congressional intelligence committees (50 U.S.C. § 3093).³