Magda Long et. al., "Covert Action: National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention (Georgetown UP, 2025)

Summary

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New Books Network: "Covert Action: National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention"

Episode Date: December 9, 2025
Guests: Magda Long, Rory Cormac, Mark Stout
Host: Luca Trenta

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Episode Overview

This episode features a conversation with Magda Long, Rory Cormac, and Mark Stout—three of the editors behind Covert Action: National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention (Georgetown UP, 2025). The book assembles global experts to examine how different nations conceive, structure, and execute covert action, moving away from US-centric frameworks to highlight diverse historical and contemporary approaches. The authors explore the evolution of covert operations, the impact of legal and cultural norms, and how these shadowy tools are wielded in both state-centric and transnational contexts.

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1. Genesis of the Project

How the Book Came Together

• The idea sprang up simultaneously and independently among respected intelligence scholars (~04:52).
• Mark Stout recounts his inspiration for a global comparative volume during the pandemic, only to discover Rory Cormac and Damien Van Peeveld were already planning something similar. Soon after, Magda Long and Genevieve Lester were approached by Georgetown UP to do a similar project. The teams merged to pool expertise and avoid "competing with each other stupidly."
  • “Rather than compete with each other stupidly, we thought we'd, you know, join up. And that's how you end up with five editors, four outstanding ones, and me.” (Mark Stout, 06:21)
• The field was clearly ready for a broad comparative work on covert action, as shown by so many experts converging on the topic.

Memorable Moment:

• Rory Cormac jokes about Mark Stout's Bond-villain-like appearance on the call:
  • “Mark is sitting there with a cat on his lap, like a Bond villain…” (Rory Cormac, 06:56)

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2. Defining "Covert Action" and Conceptual Challenges

Key Definitions and Debates

• Covert action is described as attempts by states to influence events in an unacknowledged or plausibly deniable manner, but the editors struggled to pin down universal definitions due to differing national practices and terminologies.
  • “It became quite existential…What on earth is covert action in the first place? …What do we mean by unacknowledged, by does it matter who's doing it within the state?” (Rory Cormac, 08:10)
• The term "intervention" vs "interference" was hotly debated; both terms are problematic.
• Not all countries distinguish sharply between covert (hidden sponsor) and clandestine (hidden action) operations, complicating cross-national comparisons.
  • “We all know what the difference between covert and clandestine is, but that's not always clear in these operations that states undertake…Nigeria, for instance, doesn’t necessarily conceptualize it that way.” (Magda Long, 12:11)
• The American tradition tends to treat covert action as an overseas tool, but many other states use it domestically as well.

Notable Quote:

• “One of the really cool things about the book…we are trying to move away from this conception, which…has been rooted in American scholarship for a long time…to break free from some of those chains and question them…” (Rory Cormac, 12:57)

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3. Evolution and Historical Patterns of Covert Action

Longstanding Practices Transcending Time and Borders

• Covert action is not a modern American innovation but a recurring pattern in international relations, evidenced in ancient Greece, apartheid South Africa, Palestine, and beyond.
  • “States have long tried to influence and manipulate others in an unacknowledged or deniable manner, [which] transcends time and space.” (Rory Cormac, 16:28)
• Moving from 'naive' covert action in pre-bureaucratic eras to highly institutionalized, legally constrained forms in the post-World War II period, especially in the US.
  • “Early on…the country was doing what you might call naive covert action…without even having intelligence agencies.” (Mark Stout, 15:25)
• Non-state actors have grown increasingly prominent as both targets of, and participants in, covert action.

Contemporary and Multinational Examples

• Renditions, for example, are conducted by the US, Turkey, Nigeria, North Korea, often without calling them that across time/space.
  • “They're kidnapping people and bringing them back. We didn’t call it ‘renditions’, but essentially that’s exactly what they were doing.” (Magda Long, 20:20)
• Non-state actors are increasingly central, blurring lines between domestic and foreign covert action.
  • “Non-state actor...becoming key players in international relations...the pot is much bigger and we need to be a little bit more open-minded about this.” (Magda Long, 20:50)

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4. Impact of World War II and the Cold War

Institutionalization, Professionalization, and Transnational Learning

• WWII and the Cold War codified, professionalized, and globalized covert action practices.
  • “World War II…it codified and bureaucratized, institutionalized a lot of these practices. You see states learning from each other, working together, competing...sharing doctrine, training each other.” (Rory Cormac, 22:10)
• States like France, Germany, Canada, and Australia adopted or adapted methods according to their histories, geopolitical pressures, and transfer of practices from allies or occupiers.
  • “Germany's sovereignty was very much constrained...it would be very difficult for the Germans to conduct unilateral covert actions without the United States knowing.” (Mark Stout, 25:11)
  • “Turkey was playing both sides and trying to please both...covert action as a way to navigate diplomatically, not just to influence, but navigate their own politics...” (Magda Long, 29:09)
• Not all states followed the same course; some, like Canada and Australia, demobilized or shelved covert capabilities after WWII, only to revive them much later.

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5. Agency of Smaller States and the Move Beyond Great Power Narratives

Agency, Adaptation, and Local Innovation

• The book demonstrates that smaller or less-studied states are not simply copying superpowers but use covert action to serve their own ends, sometimes learning, sometimes resisting outside “models”.
  • “Lots of different countries…have their own agency, and they were doing their own thing, and they were playing states off against each other. It's a much more nuanced picture.” (Rory Cormac, 30:00)
• The editors stress a need to move away from both Anglophone and great-power-centric perspectives.

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6. Factors Shaping Covert Action: Culture, Public Opinion, Political Structure

Intelligence/Strategic Culture and Risk Appetite

• National and intelligence culture shapes a country’s willingness to engage in covert operations, as do historical memories and the shadow of past scandals.
  • “Defensive, minimalist, shaped by domestic scandals…Brazil is ashamed of its past when it comes to intelligence…they want to ban intelligence, let alone covert action.” (Magda Long, 31:42)
• Political system/autocracy vs. democracy, threat perception, historical experience, and public opinion play distinct roles.

Role of Public Opinion

• For liberal democracies, public opinion may constrain or shape covert activity, especially in the aftermath of failure or exposure.
  • “Public opinion is more important in the aftermath than it is prior to the operation. If there is a blowback, then public opinion matters.” (Magda Long, 34:21)
• In autocracies or hybrid regimes, public opinion is often less significant at the planning stage.
• Cormac notes public perceptions of national identity can drive as well as restrain covert action.
  • “Weirdly, that self-perception of being a nice guy, unlike the Canadians or the Australians, actually drove Britain in a weird way towards covert action…” (Rory Cormac, 39:40)

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7. Law, Oversight, and Bureaucratic Control

Legalization: Discipline or Empowerment?

• The US legal framework for covert action was developed for discipline, control, democratic legitimacy, and to respond to scandal (e.g., Watergate and Church Committee).
  • “It's about discipline, it's about control, it's about oversight and who does what... But also the disadvantage of it was that it made it rigid, bureaucratically complicated, and there's more hurdles to jump through.” (Magda Long, 42:30)
• In Canada, legal authorities were created to encourage (rare) covert action, not just to constrain it—a strikingly different mindset.
  • “They created the laws not to constrain what was being done, but to encourage, at least to some minimal degree, encourage it to be done.” (Mark Stout, 44:07)
• Legalization can paradoxically increase confidence and use of covert tools (noted for the UK), but doesn’t guarantee democratic oversight, especially in hybrid or autocratic regimes.

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8. The Seduction and Pitfalls of Covert Action

Universal Seductiveness and Strategic Limits

• Covert action appeals to leaders as a quick, deniable, low-cost tool—often “seductive,” as the book and historians describe.
  • “I think I am persuaded…the seduction of it…I think leaders from many different regime types…see this as a useful tool when there is a problem which cannot be solved easily…” (Rory Cormac, 49:59)
• It is described variously as a “slow acting toxin,” a way to manage decline or a “coping mechanism” for states facing constraints (Palestine/British Mandate example).
  • “I would call it a slow acting toxin, frankly, that kind of seeps into institutions, norms, proxies. …You get addicted to it…” (Magda Long, 51:41)
• Its track record for delivering quick, untraceable results is unimpressive; it is most effective when aligned with clear policy objectives and coordinated with overt methods. Overreliance often leads to blowback, policy distortion, and long-term harm.

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9. Lessons and Avenues for Future Research

Broadening the Field

• The book’s global approach reveals covert action is not the sole province of superpowers or intelligence “usual suspects.” Countries like Bulgaria, Turkey, Nigeria, and Brazil deploy covert action, driven by distinct national goals and constraints.
  • “Bulgaria put its intelligence services…to acquiring…medieval Bulgarian history [artifacts] from around the world…and at the same time discredit[ed] historians outside of Bulgaria…this whole notion of reshaping centuries-long history…as a function of an intelligence service…just struck me as really odd and remarkable.” (Mark Stout, 54:35)
• Covert action should be recognized as a fundamental element of international relations, not just a byproduct of US or Russian policy.
  • “We cannot understand international relations without understanding covert action.” (Rory Cormac, 56:13)
• Smaller and global south states are agents in their own right, using covert action to balance, navigate diplomacy, or manage domestic/external threats.

Future Directions

• Scholars are called to break out of intelligence studies “silos” and integrate covert action into mainstream international relations (IR) theory and history, engaging a broader scholarly audience.
• New trends: Growing use of covert action for “domestic” problems transposed abroad (renditions, targeted killings, etc.) and the complex intersection of domestic security and international law.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On merging projects:
  “It just made sense that we all pool our resources and develop this further.” (Magda Long, 08:22)
• On definitional struggle:
  “What do we mean by influence events? What do we mean by unacknowledged?... It became quite existential.” (Rory Cormac, 08:10)
• On cultural baggage:
  “We are trying to move away from this conception…rooted in American scholarship for a long time…try to work out how much of this is just an American legal and bureaucratic term which we are wrongly using when writing about Brazil or something…” (Rory Cormac, 12:57)
• On law and culture:
  “It's a weird kind of counterintuitive outcome…that putting something on a legal framework can actually increase its usage.” (Rory Cormac, 45:38)
• On Britain’s paradox:
  “Weirdly that self perception…of being a nice guy…actually drove Britain in a weird way towards covert action…” (Rory Cormac, 39:40)
• On integrating covert action into IR:
  “…we shouldn’t just talk to each other. We should be talking to all the IR theorists and all the international historians, because this stuff is important.” (Rory Cormac, 57:08)

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Key Segment Timestamps

• Genesis of the book: 04:52–08:33
• Defining covert action: 08:48–14:08
• Historical evolution: 14:59–22:47
• Impact of WWII/Cold War: 22:47–30:00
• National culture/public opinion: 31:38–41:52
• Legal frameworks: 42:30–49:28
• Seductiveness/downsides: 49:52–53:10
• Findings/future directions: 53:32–61:02

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Final Takeaway

Covert Action is a landmark contribution, offering scholars and practitioners a truly global and comparative view of how states wield the most shadowy instruments of power. Its core message: Covert operations are neither solely American nor universally similar, but are shaped by each nation’s history, culture, legal systems, and strategic circumstances. To understand the real world of international politics, we must take the hidden and unacknowledged as seriously as the overt.

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Transcript

[Magda Long]

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[Mark Stout]

Home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see.

[Rory Cormac]

The flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew.

[Magda Long]

I got to sit in the driver's seat.

[Mark Stout]

I grew up in an aviation family.

[Rory Cormac]

And seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.

[Magda Long]

That's Andrew, a real United pilot.

[Rory Cormac]

These small interactions can shape a kid's future.

[Magda Long]

It felt like I was the captain.

[Rory Cormac]

Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.

[Mark Stout]

That's how good leads the way.

[Rory Cormac]

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[Luca Trenta]

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[Mark Stout]

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[Rory Cormac]

The New Books Network.

[Luca Trenta]

Welcome to New Books in National Security as part of the New Books Network. My name is Luca Trenta. I'm an Associate professor in International Relations at Swansea University in uk. I'm very excited to welcome three guests in this episode. They're here to discuss the book Covert National Approaches to Unacknowledged interference, published this year, 2025 by Georgetown University Press. Actually, I should have said unacknowledged intervention. That's a great start. The book is edited by Magdalong, Rory Cormac, Genevieve Lester, Mark Stout, and Damien Bampuy Veld. Rory Cormack, Magdalong and Mark Stout are here with me today. Let me tell you a little bit about them before we start with the episode. Rory Cormac is Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He is a leading expert on covert action and the author of five books on intelligence history, including Disrupt and Deny, the definitive account of British covert action. His research has shaped major television and radio documentaries, and it has informed policymakers at 10 Downing street, the Pentagon, and the US State Department. He's published extensively in top academic journals and regularly advises governments on intelligence and security. He holds a PhD in War Studies from King's College London. Magda Long is a specialist in intelligence, covert action, and hybrid threats with over two decades of combined professional and academic experience in international security. She's a consultant and visiting research fellow at leading academic institutions in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Previously, Magda served as Defense and Security Analyst at RAND Europe and worked in senior risk and open source intelligence roles at Deloitte in the United States. Magda holds a PhD in War Studies from King's College London as well. And finally, Mark Stout spent over two decades in the US national security community serving in the State Department, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the CIA, and the Institute for Defense Analysis. He later directored the Johns Hopkins University's MA in Global Security Studies and its post baccalaureate Certificate in Intelligence. He's a former historian and curator at the International Spy Museum, and he was also the founding president of the North American Society for Intelligence History. Mark is a contributing editor to War on the Rocks and co editor of Georgetown University Press's Studies in Intelligence History series. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Leeds and has authored and edited multiple books on intelligence and security. Rory, Magda, and Mark, thanks for being here and thanks again for writing this book.

[Mark Stout]

Thanks for having us.

[Magda Long]

Thank you for having us.

[Luca Trenta]

Excellent. So the book really is a who's who of intelligent studies with experts from all across the world, and it's always interesting to know the backstory of how the project came about. So how did this book come about? What was the main idea here?

[Mark Stout]

Well, I can answer that from my perspective, at any rate, but I should first say I'm a former contributing editor to War on the Rocks. But yeah, no, to answer your question, gosh, I've kind of lost track of time here. I want to say maybe three years ago, Magda, Rory corrects me if I'm wrong here, but about four. Oh my Lord, four years ago. All right, so during the pandemic, I'd been long interested in comparative intelligence, and the thought occurred to me at one point, there's been such great scholarship recently about COVID action that was really, really advancing the field rapidly. And the thought occurred to me that the time would be right to produce an edited volume on how covert action was conceived of and done around the world. So I emailed Rory, who of course has done a lot of work on British covert action and also on conceptualizing covert action and implausible deniability and some of these thorny questions, and I said, hey, how about we do an edited volume like this and he emailed me back after a few days saying, that's a terrific idea. Which is exactly why Damian Van Peevold and I have already started working on this just recently. Do you want to join the team? So I said, yeah, sure. Great. That'd be awesome. And then I don't recall exactly, but the three of us had been working for, I don't know, a month, six weeks, something like that, when we discovered that Magda Long and Jen Lester had independently had exactly the same idea. And we're very early in their projects and we're all friendly with each other. In fact, I would say, broadly, the intelligence studies and intel history community is pretty friendly. And so rather than compete with each other stupidly, we thought we'd, you know, join up. And that's how you end up with. With five editors, four outstanding ones, and me. But I think this really speaks to how the time was right here. This was. This was on, you know, everybody's minds more or less simultaneously. So I feel like if we hadn't jumped on and done it, somebody probably would have maybe following, I don't know, a year or 18 months behind us. So we feel very fortunate to. To been able to do this project, I think.

[Rory Cormac]

And for the benefit of people who can't see the. Who can't see the pictures, Mark is sitting there with a. With a cat on his lap, like a Bond villain. And if you can hear them meowing in the background. And it's quite magnificent.

[Mark Stout]

Yeah, sorry about that. Boudicca gets. My cat gets jealous when I'm talking to anyone else. So.

[Magda Long]

Love it. Love it.

[Luca Trenta]

I think this is a difficult case of exposure or something that should have stayed covert or secret.

[Rory Cormac]

Probably too late for that, but from our perspective, I found it. Well, it became really difficult because we thought we had this great idea, let's do comparative covert action. And then I remember being on the phone to Mark. I remember it well, it was dark and wet in Nottingham, and I was talking to Mark, and we were kind of talking each other into the idea, this is going to be a great idea. But also, Mark kept asking me all these really, really hard questions. And then we kind of realized, actually, what. What on earth is covert action in the first place? And then I remember Mark saying to me, but is covert action even a thing in international relations? And it all got very existential. And so we thought, you know what? Let's find out. And then. Yeah. And then Magda and Jen came in and it got much better.

[Magda Long]

Oh, that's very sweet of you. We had Georgetown University Press reached out to me and Jen and asked us if we would consider writing a book on this. So it all kind of came together.

As we connected with the trifecta already working on this. It just made sense that we all pool our resources and develop this further.

[Luca Trenta]

Together as a team, without necessarily going particularly existential. The book is called Covert Action, and the subheading has to do with national approaches to unannowledged intervention. So what is Covert Action and how does it work?

[Rory Cormac]

Well, I suppose you'd like to take that one, given that Mark's already set me up as the person who was doing some of the conceptual work on that. And I really like Luca, how the subtitle you read out was not the one that we thought it was going to be. And I'll tell you why I like it. Because we couldn't actually decide interference intervention. And it was something that we debated long and hard. And actually, to be perfectly honest, if I was doing it again, I would push for interference. So I think your error is actually spot on. So what we're talking about, we're talking about attempts where states try to influence events in a manner which is unacknowledged or plausibly deniable, essentially, which then raids all these. Which sounds quite simple on the surface, but then once we started digging into it, raised all these horrible questions about, okay, well, what do we mean by influence events? What do we mean by unacknowledged? What do we mean by does it matter who's doing it within the state? And the thorniest one was this idea of overseas, because we all kind of come from a. We're laden with American historiographical baggage where this stuff happens overseas, and yet most other countries might not necessarily have that distinction. Does it have to be against something overseas? What about a dissident who is happening to be living overseas when you assassinate said dissident? But it's actually about domestic political countering, about countering threats to the regime. And it became, sorry, Luke, I'm existential again.

It became quite existential. But in a nutshell, the book is about when states attempt to influence and interfere in the affairs of others in an unacknowledged or plausibly deniable manner.

[Luca Trenta]

All happy with the definition.

[Mark Stout]

Sure, yeah. We did debate all of this a.

[Luca Trenta]

Lot.

[Mark Stout]

I would say. I mean, we tried to steer the authors towards thinking about intervention in other states. But it's interesting to me, when we look at the body of essays, that we actually ended up with, a lot of them nonetheless, talk either in part or basically in whole, about what you might call domestic covert action.

And you even have one interesting case that of Canada, which doesn't divide its intelligence community conceptually between foreign and domestic intelligence, as basically the US and the UK for instance, do they have this notion of security intelligence. They have foreign intelligence, which is basically only done by their SIGINT agency. And they have this notion of security intelligence, which is intelligence about threats to Canada, whether they are domestic or foreign, but has certain, you know, has fences around. It has to be about things like subversion or espionage or sabotage, that sort of thing. Not, say, military analysis or gathering political intelligence. So, yeah, just gets back to this, you know, what are we talking about? Question. And it gets very fuzzy. And the American norm of thinking about this as something that happens abroad does not necessarily hold at all.

[Magda Long]

I think one of the biggest challenges that I've noticed also struggle with is this. You know, we all know what Covid is, and we all know what the difference between Covid and clandestine is, but that's not always clear in these operations that states undertake. You know, one the countries that I'm thinking of is Nigeria, for instance. They don't necessarily conceptualize, oh, Covid is hiding the sponsor and clandestine is hiding the operation. That's not how they think about it conceptually. So coming up with a definition that covered all of the operations and activities that Mark and Rory mentioned, it took us a while to get there, but.

[Rory Cormac]

That'S what I think is. One of the really cool things about the book that I'm personally quite proud of is that I think we are trying to move away from this conception, which, for better or worse, has been rooted in American scholarship for a long time. And that's created the parameters and the frameworks which we then understand or use reference points to write about Russian covert action, or Chinese covert action, or Nigerian covert action or whatever it may be. And one of the things that we set about to do, and I'm quite proud of, is try to break free from some of those chains and question them and try to work out how much of this is just an American legal and bureaucratic term which we are wrongly using when writing about Brazil or something because of the way that the scholarship has evolved over the last 40 years. And that's not to criticize the American scholarship at all. It's pioneering agenda setting stuff. But we're at a point now where we can start to challenge some of that and see what is transferable and frankly, what isn't.

[Luca Trenta]

Yeah, I mean, you already touched upon this one of the things that is very impressive about the book, and for those who've not read it, each chapter treats a different state, looking either at contemporary issues or historical ones. One of the very impressive things is the sort of global reach of the book. Having worked on editing a book on a similar topic, this is particularly impressive and particularly difficult to achieve. And the fact that there are some historical chapters going back to ancient Greece or Palestine in the early 1900s or apartheid South Africa, but also more contemporary ones. So how do you think across this time covert action has evolved? Has there been any particular change in recent times that you have seen by looking at all these cases?

[Mark Stout]

Well, I'll offer in the case of the United States, since I wrote the first 150 years of the United States chapter, and Magda wrote the exciting.

50 or 70 after that, in the case of the United States, it's something that we are, Magda and I off of. The US Chapter is something that we argue basically goes back to the very earliest days of the American Republic.

But it wasn't until basically World War II era that it started getting bureaucratized. And really, the foundations of those legal.

You know, structures around it started being laid with the national security Act of 1947, and then, you know, very much expanded in the 1970s. But early on in, you know, US history, the country was doing what you might call naive covert action. Right? They were. They were doing covert action without realizing they were doing covert action without even having the term for the first 80 years or so, without even having intelligence agencies, which gets us back, I think, to some of these definitional questions of what the heck are we even talking about here. So certainly there's been a lot of change from naive covert action to highly lawyered up covert action in the United States today. I mean, that's. That's a, that's a partial answer to the question. But that's just the one country, which Rory argues, and we, we all completely agree, like, we need to get away from the unique focus on the United States. So.

[Rory Cormac]

And that's why I really like the chapter that Jeff Robb did on, on ancient Greece that you referenced there, Luca, because the ancient Greeks obviously weren't talking about COVID action. And there's an argument that could be made that we are being anachronistic by referring to covert action when describing what the ancient Greeks were up to. But what I think is quite powerful about Geoff's chapter is that it shows the fundamental points. Forget the lawyering, forget the bureaucracies, forget the terminology. The fundamental Point around States have long tried to influence and manipulate others in a unacknowledged or a deniable manner transcends time and space. And that's one of the core findings because that kind of activity, just at its most fundamental level was present in ancient Greece, just as it is now present in contemporary so called gray zone, whatever other words we're using these days to describe the environment that we currently live in. And this, this fundamental unacknowledged competition, intervention, interference, that is a part of international relations and that is something we wanted to. It's not exceptional. And that's something we wanted to, I think, try to interrogate and get across a little bit in the book Limu Emu and Doug. Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds of. With Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

[Magda Long]

Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

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[Magda Long]

Yeah, I think one of the things that came across for me was we have this terminology to describe paramilitary operations, kinetic operations, political action, all of these terms that countries have been using or conducting these activities for decades, for centuries. And they didn't really necessarily need to call it what it is. One of the things that came up for me was because I study more contemporary operations is the use of renditions, right? So in the U.S. renditions were a hot spot after 9, 11, and everybody was talking about renditions and even before 9 11, frankly, renditions were taking place in the U.S. but then when I went through these chapters that I was reviewing, you know, you notice that Turkey's doing renditions. I mean Nigeria is doing renditions, North Korea was doing renditions. They're kidnapping people and bringing them back. And so all of these, we didn't call it renditions, but essentially that's exactly what they were doing.

And the second thing that I found very interesting in terms of how things were developing and changing and evolving was how.

Prominent non state actors were becoming. So when we think about COVID action and we think about state influencing other state, you see this kind of non state actor, whether they were violent or armed or not, becoming key players.

In international relations. And they are becoming your terrorists. They're becoming targets of COVID influence operations and interference. So I think you can see progression. And as things change, Covid activities or Covid measures are adjusting to the new reality, frankly. And we're just very slow to accept that it's not just state versus state anymore. There's so much more, the pot is much bigger and we need to be a little bit more open minded about this.

[Luca Trenta]

You mentioned there Magdale, sort of a turning point of 9 11. But it did struck me that for many of the states discussed in the volume World War II and to a certain extent the Cold War were kind of fundamental in shaping how these countries did covert operations, where they learned to conduct covert operations. Can you tell us a bit about how these two phases influenced the covert operation experience of various countries? For example, some that come to mind are the uk, Israel, France, Canada, of course the United States. But if we don't want to particularly cover the United States, we can look at the others.

[Mark Stout]

Or you want to talk about the uk, then I might make a comment or two about France, which was written by Damien, who's not here today.

[Rory Cormac]

Yeah. And I think this point applies to quite a few places, is that the Second World War in particular, it codified, and bureaucratized, institutionalized a lot of these practices. You know, it turbocharged a lot of what was going on. And you see states learning from each other, working together, competing as well as cooperating, sharing doctrine, sharing, sharing ideas, training each other. So some of these ideas start to get passed on.

From country to country and then into the Cold War again. It's this era of professionalization of a lot of these things. This is, this is, and it's quite funny to think of because we often think when we think about Cape Action intelligence, we think of it as a very institutional bureaucracy, heavy.

Paradigm, but that only really in the UK case, only really started in, is 100 years old, tops. So what we see in the Cold War, in World War II is this professionalized, institutionalized approach where ideas, doctrine is. Is being transferred, formalized. And so you start to see practice being copied. And Stephen Wagner wrote a great chapter with a book about Palestine Mandate and some of the violence around the creation of the state of Israel. And you can start to see ideas transferring between the different groups and the Brits learning from each other, copying each other. There are great chapters in the book about the Eastern Bloc and how some ideas started to transfer from the. So from the Russians across to some of the other Soviet and Allied states, but not in toto. You know, there were other national cultures as well. So one of the things I find fascinating is during Second World War and Cold War, this idea of transfer and of learning. And I think. I think France followed a similar pattern, didn't they, Mark?

[Mark Stout]

Yeah. So our co editor, Damien Van Peeveld, in his chapter on France, which is really terrific by the way, you know, he makes the argument that the. The generalized violence of the French colonial era and then of World War II set the French intelligence system, I mean, basically the Foreign Intelligence Service, the dgsc, as it's now called, on a path where it very much emphasizes paramilitary action. And he tells us that there's about 7,000 employees today of the French Foreign Intelligence service of the DGSE, of whom approximately 1,000 are in the Action Service, which is their paramilitary arm, which is just remarkable. A couple other quick, interesting examples.

The odious nature of the Nazi regime and then the outcome of World War II very much shaped West German covert action as well. Right. There was no heroic narrative about, you know, Nazi spies that people in the era of the Federal Republic of Germany wanted to draw on. And Germany's sovereignty was very much constrained for a number of years. And the American services, first the army and then the CIA, worked very, very closely and had deep insights into what the Galen organization and then its successor, the Modus Nachrichtendins, the Federal Intelligence Service did, to the point where not only did they operate closely together on a lot of things, but also it would be very difficult for the Germans to conduct unilateral covert actions without the United States knowing. One quick example, other example, going completely different direction. And then I'll pass it to Magda for her wisdom. So we've talked now about a number of states whose experience in doing covert action is influenced.

By what happened In World War II, Canada was engaged in covert action, or at least Canadians engaged in covert action, perhaps primarily as part of the British Special Operations Executive during World War II. But after World War II, Canada gave it up until in a very anemic form, Very, very anemic form, the last decade or so. So unsurprisingly, I suppose, in a way, World War II was a really significant event in the, you know, the development around the world of COVID action, but in a wide variety of ways.

[Rory Cormac]

And just on that as well. Australia followed a similar pattern, didn't it, to Canada working closely with the Brits during the Second World War, and then because of fewer obvious geopolitical pressures in the early Cold War, indeed, for most of the Cold War.

Didn'T develop a strong culture until much more recently. Sorry, Magda.

[Magda Long]

No, no, that's okay. I was just thinking about that as well. And I was actually thinking about the former Soviet Union satellite countries and republics and how at first, you know.

They took notice of practices in the Soviet Union, but you can kind of see them rebelling.

A little bit later towards the Cold War, where they kind of putting their own practices ahead of the interests of the Soviet Union and what the Soviet Union wanted them to do. So I thought that was interesting how you kind of see, you know, they take, you know, they set it up the way that the Soviet Union wanted to send to set it up, like Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, for instance, but then they kind of move away from what the Soviet Union essentially wanted them to do and how they wanted them to conduct their sharp measures and.

Active measures or shock measures. Right. But then if we go back and look at some of the. Outside of the Soviet Union and the US Influence of France, for instance, I was well impressed with the Turkish chapter, which I mentioned earlier, because it kind of also shows that, for instance, in the 20s, when they started practicing Covid activities, they were learning from the. The Young Turks organization, was learning from the.

From a Macedonian organization, I think it was called Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, which I thought was. Was interesting. So kind of looking at what kind of activities they were doing and they were trying to emulate what. What they were doing. And then obviously we see, you know, past the Cold War and, and past. Sorry, yeah, Second World War and Cold War, you see how other countries are or other states are, the way that they cooperate with, whether it's the Soviet Union or the US Or France, their internal practices also develop that way. Again, Turkish chapter shows once the United States or during the Cold War, Turkey was playing both sides and trying to please both. And during the Second World War, Turkey was also trying to please both sides and not to anger the Germans versus the US So you can kind of see how they're learning. And they're using covert action as a way to navigate diplomatically, not just to influence, but navigate their own politics and international relations and try to not get into trouble.

[Rory Cormac]

Frankly, I like that point because one of the things I think works quite well is that the book starts to challenge assumptions around blocks, all copying each other and doing the same thing. You have the Western bloc and the Eastern block, and actually in line with a lot of more recent Cold War scholarship, you start to get a sense that lots of different countries from the global north and the global south have their own agency, and they were doing their own thing, and they were playing states off against each other. And it wasn't just the Soviets directing Bulgarian, whoever else, and the Americans directing Western states. It's a much more nuanced picture. I think that's one of the contributions that the book makes by not just moving away from the American intellectual historiographical baggage, but also the great power baggage. I think that's. That's quite cool.

[Luca Trenta]

I mean, I think it's quite a good. Follow on to my next question, because I think the book does an excellent job at discussing the rationale for covert operations. So why do certain states engage in it? But there are also different issues or features that tend to put constraints or enable, I guess, the willingness of a certain state to take risks or the intensity of covert operations. And I think two tend to come out from the book. One is intelligence culture, and the other one is the role of public opinion. So what is the role of these two in informing or shaping or constraining the extent to which states engage in covert operations?

[Mark Stout]

Magda, any thoughts there? I have a few, but you go first.

[Magda Long]

Well, I think one of the things that we notice here is obviously the national culture and then strategic culture are key to risk appetite that these states had. You know, for instance, if we look at shared norms and practices about intelligence that these organizations have, you can see them acting in a particular way. For Canada is probably one of the examples that comes to mind. You know, defensive, minimalist, shaped by domestic scandals. You know, another one, for instance for me was Brazil. Right. You know, Brazil is ashamed of its past when it comes to intelligence. They don't. They don't want to talk about. They want to ban intelligence. They don't want to let alone covert action. So.

It'S not just the intelligence Culture, the shape, the way that the state was acting and.

Their propensity for risk. But it's also this threat perception and.

Domestic political.

Situation. Historical memory and scandals go a long way to influence how a country may set up its intelligence system and whether they going to use Covid action to begin with. Obviously regime types, your autocracies or hybrid regimes, countries in transitions, they behave differently than your liberal democracies do. But also this geopolitics and threat perception have an influence. So yes, these are all the intelligence culture does have a great influence on how a country, whether a country is risk averse. But also there's other factors that play into it. It's not necessarily just the culture of a particular type or regime. There's all these other things that come into play that we often don't think about when we study covert action. And I think this is what the book does really well to show what are some of these other factors that play into the decision. And you know, and just briefly before I give it over to Mark, I think when it comes to the public opinion role, frankly, I feel like it's more important. Public opinion is more important in the aftermath than it is prior to the operation. In other words, if there is a blowback, then public opinion matters. But necessarily I don't think that they, you know, it's considered in the planning stages.

By all the states at the same level. So you know, you'll see countries that, or states that talk about public opinion, domestic public opinion or international law and how they perceive. But in reality, if there is a policy objective that they need to pursue.

I think public opinion will not necessarily be the key thing that's going to be considered in the planning stages. It's going to probably be more about how to mitigate the risk of a blowback in terms of that aspect rather than.

Shaping it before the operation. At least that's what I got out of it.

[Mark Stout]

I actually am going to slightly disagree with that.

Yeah, I mean, I look, I mean as Magda states it, I think that's right.

That said, I do think public opinion.

Very much influences helps to constitute both strategic and intelligence cultures in countries. And to return just briefly to Marco Mounier's wonderful chapter on Canada, he has this sentence that I really love, which is covert activities are simply not the Canadian way of doing intelligence. Right. He doesn't use this expression. But you know, the Canadians have this perception of themselves as being the nice North Americans. Right. And so, you know, culture of course is, you know, all the things that we don't that we do or that influence our thinking that we don't explicitly consider. And I think that is particularly where the role of public opinion plays in. And I'll throw back to a point I threw out earlier in a different context in the West Germany chapter written by Jens Wegener and Jan Lester. Right. I mean, they talked about how one of the things that shaped how the very modest extent that West Germany did covert action, particularly in the first half of the Cold War, was.

The memory of this, a very unpleasant Nazi regime. Right. That just, you know, takes a lot of things right off the table before the question of, well, if we did this Operation X, what would be the possibility for blowback? I also want to toss out a slight variation on the public opinion question with regard to the chapter about Lebanon, which was written, which I had the pleasure of editing, written by Philip Bonader. And he talks about how basically Lebanon doesn't really do, has no particular history in doing foreign covert action. And he throws out some hypotheses as why. But up until the civil war in Lebanon, which started in 1975, there's a pretty robust tradition of doing domestic covert action to maintain the stability of the regime, so against political parties or newspapers or banks or whatever it happened to be. But these days, he says, as far as the sources tell us, there's this. There's. There appears to be none of that. And he thinks the reason is because all of these political parties and banks and media outlets and all that are associated with one or other of the factions which have this very finely tuned and delicate sort of sharing of power agreement that makes Lebanon work, without which there is the danger of falling back into that chaos of the civil war. And so basically, it's kind of a multilateral, you know, mutual deterrence kind of thing, like, you know, the Lebanese world will end if anybody goes this way, so let's not do it. Which I thought was a really interesting dynamic that I've not seen in other countries I'm aware of.

[Magda Long]

Well, I think in my defense, I think I was thinking more about autocratic regimes more than anything else. Right. So in liberal democracies, obviously, you know, public opinion goes a long way. Of course it does. Right. But if we're thinking about hybrid regime, so if we take, you know, if I'm thinking Russia, if I'm thinking North Korea, if I'm thinking China, you know, there's public opinion whether, you know, you're going to pursue Covid operations or not is not necessarily at the high level, at the high you know, level of concern for the regime. So I think again, maybe this discussion kind of make, you know, makes it clear that we can't observe every country or every state in a particular way and put it in a particular straitjacket, if you will. I think we need to be a little bit more cognizant of these different types and factors that influence how state behaves in international relations.

[Mark Stout]

Yeah, I completely agree with all of that.

[Rory Cormac]

I was going to be the adjudicator in the fights.

One of the things that as Mango is talking, it just sprung to my mind was even within liberal democracies it can kind of work both ways. This idea of self perception, self identity and whether it's a driver or a constraint.

Of COVID action. Because Mark rightly says that the Canadians don't have a big tradition of this partly because of self identity, of seeing themselves as the nice North Americans, to put it that way. Same with Australia and I was thinking about the Brits and there's an assumption there that a self perception amongst British policymakers that they are gentlemen, they're nice guys. There was a line from Prime Minister Harold Wilson back in the 60s where he said that the Brits were a nation of gentlemen in the world of players and they were the Brits, the good guys. And yet. So you following the logic of Canada or Australia, but going on, on strategic identity, self perception and identity, you'd assume that they would shy away from COVID action. But weirdly that self perception of being the nice guys actually in some ways drove them towards covert action because it was a sneakier way of doing stuff that they didn't want to do overtly because it would look bad. So they couldn't go and overtly meddle in newly independent post imperial territor. They did to an extent, but they couldn't go too hard because it was politically toxic to go and be neo colonial. They couldn't go and do regime change because they're nice guys. And so weirdly that self perception of being a nice guy, unlike the Canadians or the Australians, actually drove Britain in a weird way towards cable taxation. So it can work both ways. And that's why the other variables around threat global interests, threat assumptions, geopolitics, work alongside the public opinion and the self perception. We try to untangle how those variables interact in a way, but it's hard, isn't it?

[Mark Stout]

Indeed. And I'll just throw in that the chapter on the Federal Republic of Germany makes much the same point as you just outlined for the uk, sort of in the second half of the Cold War and the post Cold War when. When that Germany started actually doing, to some degree, some of these kinds of operations.

[Luca Trenta]

You've already made clear that the book covers all sorts of regimes. Basically democracies, hybrid regimes, authoritarian regimes, and so on. In a sense, all do covert action. But if there is one difference is that certain states decide to put covert action on a legal footing, either in the aftermath of scandal surrounding intelligence or just because they think it's a good idea. So why do certain states put their covert operations on a legal footing? And what are the implications of doing so or not doing so, as some states are still doing?

[Magda Long]

I'll take a first tab here because obviously the US is your kind of first example of this. It's about discipline, it's about control, it's about oversight and who does what. So everybody has an assigned role. And I think the US in that particular respect wanted to have accountability, clear accountability, who's responsible for what and stronger democratic legitimacy. But also the disadvantage of it was that it made it rigid, bureaucratically complicated, and there's more hurdles to jump through.

And.

There'S this whole kind of.

Complication about who has what power, where. So you constantly have the military fighting with the civilian agencies and who's doing special operations, who's in Covid action. So there's this complicated kind of set of procedures and reasons why it led to the U.S.

Legitimizing Covid action. But generally, if there's a public scandal like we had in the 1970s, right, in the US and for liberal democracies, they have to respond to it. And I think in Canada, again, that was a good example, Mark, maybe RCMP scandals, right, that led to CSIS threat reduction mandate, if I remember correctly.

[Mark Stout]

Not quite. I'm glad you mentioned Canada here, because in the United States, as Magda was just saying, much of what we've done legally is to sort of bring things under control. It is true that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was created in response to scandals of unpleasant things, particularly domestic, what you might call domestic covert action by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It was created in 85, if I recall correctly, but it didn't have anything at all that had any hint of, you know, covert action authorities in the law. And they don't seem to have done such things. And it was only in 2015, if I recall correctly, that sort of the Canadian national security and legislative community decided we need to have authorities, we need to actually be able to do this sort of stuff. So they created the laws not to constrain what was being done, but to encourage, at least to some minimal degree, encourage it to be done. So it's really quite the, quite precisely the opposite story from the United States, which I think is just fascinating. And then they did something similar in 2019 with the communication Security Establishment of Canada, the Canadian SIGINT and Cyber agency to create authorities to do what you might call cyber covert operations. And Marco Meunier tells us in this chapter that even still, even with the creation of these authorities, they appear, as far as one can tell, to be used extremely rarely.

[Rory Cormac]

It's a weird kind of counterintuitive outcome, isn't it, that putting something on a legal framework can actually increase its usage. And I remember similar argument was made about the UK and that actually one belatedly, they get the legal authority to do some of this stuff. It actually gives those doing it and those authorizing it a little bit more confidence to be able to do it. But do you think it also comes down to that kind of political culture angle again as well as it's intertwined with regime type, isn't it? But I always think of the Americans, why they were so with the United States, why they were so.

Agenda setting in terms of their own legal frameworks and writing this stuff down and defining it in a way that no other country did. And my little hypothesis was always it's a kind of political cultural thing where the Americans write stuff down. You know, the Americans write down their constitution, they have a separation of powers, they codify this stuff in a way that lots of other countries, even other liberal democracies and you know, closely allied states don't. And I mean, America's born of.

I don't know, distrust of government from the revolution, all that kind of stuff. And so does that play into it, Mark?

[Mark Stout]

Oh, I completely agree. And I'll really defer to Magda here, who's the expert on how things have worked in the last several decades in the United States. And I'm not, but I completely agree. Yeah, the United States system is based very much on distrust of government.

And yeah, if you've got a parliamentary system, some of the fundamental checks and balances kinds of things that you can do in the United States and that until recently we took for granted in the United States. I mean, that's, they don't exist. It's not a, it's not a possibility. Right. Those aren't, those, the, the legislative and executive aren't really divided in anything like the same way they are in the United States. But, but as I say, Magda is the expert here.

[Magda Long]

I think I agree with both of you. I think, you know, if you look at the United States and how the pendulum swims from, you know, Covid action is the best thing ever to. Oh, my God, the CIA is, you know, out to get everybody. And they're running, you know, they're doing all of this. Let's get rid of the. The CIA. So kind of the pendulum swings both. It kind of goes from one end to another, and the CIA is always kind of caught in between the parties that are trying to, you know, to negotiate. Who gets control over this. I mean, if you think of it, it's an extremely potent tool, right? Very powerful weapon that we're talking about here. And, you know, if you think we're talking in the US it's like it depends who's on power and how they use it and how. What kind of relationships. I think Jen wrote a book on this. And what kind of relationships the CIA.

And, sorry, the presidents have with the CIA. Depends on how often they use Covid action. So, you know, there's this. All these. All these little things that come into play that are much more prevalent in American society than, for instance, in other societies. If you think about autocratic regimes who introduce these changes again, I'm going to go back to Turkey because there you can see the country developing and changing and evolving. You see how even though they put Covid action under a particular house, it's still the head of the state that controls how Covid action is used. It's not just because they know who does it, how they do it. They have some kind of parameters. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's done democratically or that there is oversight or there's accountability for it.

[Luca Trenta]

I found it quite interesting in the book. Covert action is described in some very interesting ways. Sometimes it is a silver bullet, sometimes it is a seductive option. I think Rory has long written about COVID action as a method to manage decline, which I think something similar also comes up in the book about Palestine. I think Steve Wagner calls it a coping mechanism.

Have you found any of these descriptions particularly persuasive, or does it really depend on each state having their own perspective on it?

[Rory Cormac]

Well, I think for the reasons I can kind of outline there, the decline, the seduction of it. I think leaders from many different regime types across time and space, rightly or wrongly, see this as a useful tool when there is a problem which cannot be solved easily by sending in the army or doing sanctions or through diplomatic negotiations.

Prime ministers, presidents, dictators, know that they potentially have teams who are skilled at certain options. So I think I am persuaded by the fact that it is a almost universally seductive tool for those in power. The question is, I think, more contested whether it should be a seductive tool because one of the risks that we have is that if a leader is seduced by cave action and sees it as a, whatever the phrase silver bullet, magic option, whatever third option to solve a problem quickly which can't be solved through open means, then for me that's often a recipe for disaster. And cave action, when it is, is most impactful or most useful, it works in a complementary manner to other overt tools of foreign policy. So if a president just says seduced by it and just says, I need this problem fixed, I need this person removing or this election rigged. Go, go, go now. It's seductive, but for me anyway, it's going to fail nine times out of ten.

[Luca Trenta]

We're talking hypothetically, of course, about the person removed. And one.

[Magda Long]

Yeah, hypothetically, yeah. I think I would call it a slow acting toxin, frankly, that kind of seeps into institutions, norms, proxies. It kind of just gets into it and you know, you get addicting, addicted to it, you know, for all the reasons that that. Lori, Lori. Hi, Lori. Rory can explain. Sorry about that.

Okay, maybe this is one of those things that can get edited for all the reasons that Rory had explained.

But obviously, you know, the drawback and then a blowback, reputational damage, the overshot and mission creep are real issues. They're real problems, you know, and they have existed throughout the time. It's not something that, you know, they're just going to disappear. I mean, we're talking about COVID actions from First World War, Second World War, Cold War. They're all coming out eventually, right? And, and frankly distorts the policy process in a way that if you're thinking that.

It'S a quick solution to a problem, if you don't have your policy in line, then it's going to cause more trouble than solve. So in many respects it's undermining.

To the bigger picture and to bigger policy objectives and strategy.

[Luca Trenta]

Perhaps. One final question. I think we touched upon this at the very start. The books probably takes a giant step towards moving intelligence studies away from both the sort of Anglosphere, but also from some of the usual suspects, I guess, of intelligence studies, for example, say, Israel.

What things have you learned by looking at the more unusual cases that come up in the book? And how do you think this type of scholarship should be taken forward?

[Mark Stout]

I'll toss in something on the unusual end and I'll defer to my betters on taking the scholarship forward.

One of the things that really struck me out of Kirill Avramov's chapter on Bulgaria, and this has been alluded to earlier in the conversation, is how. What? Yes, all right, so Bulgaria is very much a subordinate ally of the Soviet Union and very much or to a substantial degree does what the KGA wants it to. That said, it does its own thing. And one of the things that really struck me, or does it also does its own thing. One of the things that really struck me was the rather strange uses that Bulgaria put its intelligence services and what you, I think would have to call his covert action capabilities, to one of which was.

Acquiring, legally or otherwise, artifacts and manuscripts from, you know, medieval Bulgarian history.

From around the world and bringing them back to Bulgaria as a part of a larger project to support the ideological notion that the Todoro Shifkov's daughter was promoting the Bulgarian model of modernization being something different from Soviet dialectical materialism, and somehow bringing in medieval manuscripts contributed to that. And at the same time they were trying to discredit historians outside of Bulgaria who had visions of Bulgarian history that were not state approved, while at the same time providing privileged access to many of these manuscripts and artifacts to historians who they thought were on side. Right. And this, this whole notion of like reshaping centuries long history and understanding of culture as a function of an intelligence service engaging in covert actions just struck me as really odd and remarkable, which I suppose in a way gets back to this question of what the heck is covert action?

[Rory Cormac]

Anyway, I love that. I'm glad you mentioned that one Mark, because that was my favorite bits in the whole book in that Bulgarian case. Two very quick points from me. One finding is this is a part of international relations. Loads of states do it. The books are dominated by the US and Russia isn't to create a false equivalence. States do it different ways, different.

Levels of intensity. But this is a part of international relations, and we cannot understand international relations without understanding covert action. Point number two is that we alluded to earlier states, smaller states, medium powers, states in the global south also do this, and they do it with their own agency and their own ability to navigate their own way through international relations. They're not pawns of the great powers. And so where do we go from here? My kind of call for scholars is to continue widening the net, looking at more and more states and then integrating it into international relations. I think one of the international History. One of the challenges we have is that a lot of the scholarship exists in an intelligence studies silo where you have books on cobalt action or books on intelligence. What we need is this to be integrated into the wider theories of international relationships, wide international history, to show how this kind of works in practice in an integrated manner, because that is how it works. And we shouldn't just talk to each other. We should be talking to all the IR theorists and all the international historians, because this stuff is important.

[Magda Long]

I think I'm going to hop on what Rory just said. And for me, I think what came across through all of these studies was that how Covid action is also used as a balancing act to avoid retaliation by offended parties, whether it was the US or whether Soviet Union during the Cold War or during the Second World War for Turkey with Germany and the U.S. but another thing that really is kind of.

Well, not. It's something that's just making me think that requires, you know, more research and more in depth kind of assessment is how the nature of national transnational threats is pushing states to engage in operations for domestic reasons. So for, you know, for their own domestic problems, but internationally. Right, so what do I mean by this? I mean that, you know, states that are dealing with the extremists, insurgency, terrorism, transnational organized crime, you know, sometimes they take their operations against these actors that operate in their states, they take it abroad. Right. So they're not necessarily trying to influence the foreign state, but by virtue of their action, they're violating territorial integrity of these states they are influencing. Right. So I'm thinking about, you know, renditions, assassinations, UAV strikes, and, you know.

Kidnappings. Right. So these are all the things that intelligence agencies do.

Abroad. Right. As well as domestically. So for instance, you had in the, in 1982, four.

Nigerian and Mossad kidnapping attempt against of Umaru Doku, and they tried to kidnap him from the uk they failed. And there was a massive blow up between the British government and Nigerian government for doing this. And then the leader of the independent people of Biafra was also Namdi Kanu was also kidnapped in Kenya and brought back to Nigeria for trial. Right. And then apparently they didn't want to assassinate him because they were worried about the blowback. And again, I guess Kanu is a British citizen then. If you're thinking about the CIA kidnappings in Italy several years ago, it was a very public court case. It was not necessarily geared towards Italy. It was. They had a reason for domestic reason and they were concerned about terrorism, but it violated Italian territorial integrity. So all these cases, I feel like the Khashoggi murder in Turkey by the.

Saudi assassins or India's assassinations of the Sikhs in Canada. So all of these things are kind of they're not necessarily they go back to what we discussed at the very beginning. Right. You know, they're problematic in that they're domestic issues, but not necessarily influencing foreign state. But by virtue of their action, they are kind of.

[Luca Trenta]

Well, thanks a lot. Thank you, Magda, Rory and Mark for being with us. And once again, the book is called Covert National Approaches to Unannowledged Intervention and is published by Georgetown just this year, 2025. Thanks again.

[Magda Long]

Thank you so much for having us. Luca, really enjoyed this. Thank you.