the.com/blowback
When your covert plan works so well it detonates in your own hands later.
means Unintended, harmful consequences that come back to hurt the person or group who set the original action in motion.
from Literally a term from firearms and chimneys — the backward rush of gas, smoke, or flame when something that's supposed to go forward escapes out the way it came in. Mid-20th-century intelligence and military jargon borrowed the image for a covert operation whose fallout drifts back onto the people who launched it, and from there it spread into everyday talk for any scheme that recoils on its schemer.
- origin
- CIA term for unintended consequences of secret ops
- literal sense
- gas recoil hitting the shooter, not the target
- timeline
- the cost arrives disguised as someone else's problem
- classic case
- arming allies who become tomorrow's enemies