How Different Countries Execute Covert Action | Magda Long & Rory Cormac | Ep. 389
The Team House
dee takos
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 27 December 2025
⏱️ 85 minutes
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Summary
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00:00 Start
02:58 Defining Covert Action: Perspectives and Challenges
05:59 The Role of Covert Action in International Relations
09:05 Comparative Approaches to Covert Action
12:01 The Impact of Domestic Politics on Covert Operations
15:05 Case Studies: Covert Action in Different Countries
18:08 The Evolution of Covert Action Post-9/11
21:08 The UK vs. US Approaches to Covert Action
23:58 Existential Threats and Covert Action in Israel
27:13 The Future of Covert Action: Trends and Predictions
43:21 Geopolitical Tactics and COVID Operations
46:00 India's Evolving Covert Actions
49:53 The Brutality of Apartheid South Africa
54:56 Brazil's Covert Action in a Democratic Context
58:41 Authoritarian States and Covert Action
01:07:45 The Future of Covert Action in a Multipolar World
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | if an action is blatantly obvious and is implausibly |
| 0:05.7 | deniable. You know, I'm thinking Russian alleged attempts to poison dissidents in |
| 0:12.4 | Salisbury, for example, in the UK, when it was so obviously them and the |
| 0:18.0 | not all Novichok means of poisoning, so wildly implausible, which then made us think, |
| 0:25.9 | okay, what does that tell us about the role of secrecy in some of these operations? |
| 0:30.9 | How deniable does it have to be to be covert action? |
| 0:38.4 | Hey, everyone. |
| 0:39.2 | Welcome to episode 380-something of the team house. |
| 0:43.3 | I'm not exactly sure where we're at, maybe 87, maybe 88. |
| 0:46.6 | We'll see. |
| 0:47.2 | We'll see. |
| 0:47.6 | It's a surprise. |
| 0:49.3 | Today on the show, we have two academics. |
| 0:52.3 | Really happy to have on the show today. Magda Long and |
| 0:56.0 | Rory Cormick. Magda received her doctorate from King's College London. She's a research fellow |
| 1:02.0 | at a few academic institutions in the UK and U.S. And Rory Cormick is a professor of international |
| 1:07.6 | relations at the University of Nottingham. And are, |
| 1:11.8 | Rory, if you could bring us up to speed, both of you please. Are there any additional |
| 1:16.5 | publications that you want to mention? Because I think Rory, you wrote a, a previous book about |
| 1:21.2 | this subject, but mainly what we're going to be talking about tonight is this book, |
| 1:25.5 | Covert Action, National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention. Any other books that you want to point out to people? Well, it would be rude not to, I suppose. Well, first of all, thanks ever so much for having us on. And, yeah, we're delighted to talk about the book that we co-edited with a couple of other colleagues. |
| 1:45.1 | So I'll just give a quick shout out to Jen, Lester, Mark Stoughton, Damien Van Puyveld, on this kind of comparative international approach to covert action, which kind of came out of numerous discussions. I mean, I can't remember how it came about. me and Mark were planning a book, and then Damien was planning a similar book, |
... |
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