How Different Countries Execute Covert Action | Magda Long & Rory Cormac | Ep. 389

This conversation explores the multifaceted nature of covert action in international relations, featuring insights from academics Magda Long and Rory Cormack. They discuss the definitions, historical contexts, and varying approaches to covert action across different nations, emphasizing the role of non-state actors and the implications for global politics. The discussion also touches on the evolution of covert action in the US and UK, the impact of emerging technologies, and the future trends in this complex field. buy their book here : https://a.co/d/0k7BOdE or here: https://press.georgetown.edu/Book/Covert-Action Today's Sponsors: Wild Alaskan Company⬇️ https://wildalaskan.com/HOUSE Get $35 off your first order! GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 25% off! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics... JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video -early access to shows -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured __________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" 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 Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:57Speaker 02

  If an action is blatantly obvious and is implausible deniable, you know, I'm thinking Russian alleged attempts to poison dissidents in Salisbury, for example, in the UK, when it was so obviously them and the Novichok means of poisoning, so wildly implausible, which then made us think, okay, what does that tell us about the role of secrecy in some of these operations? How deniable does it have to be to be covert action?

• 1:36Jack Murphy?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 380 something of the Team House. I'm not exactly sure where we're at, maybe 87, maybe 88. We'll see, we'll see. It's a surprise. Today on the show, we have two academics, really happy to have on the show today, Egna Long and Rory Cormack. Magda received her doctorate from King's College London. She's a research fellow at a few academic institutions in the UK and US. And Rory Cormack is a professor of international relations at the University of Nottingham. And Rory, if you could bring us up to speed, both of you, please. Are there any additional publications that you want to mention? Because I think Rory, you wrote a previous book about this subject, but mainly what we're going to be

• 2:21Jack Murphy?

  talking about tonight is this book, Covert Action: National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention. Any other books that you want to point out to people?

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Well, it would be rude not to, I suppose. Well, first of all, thanks ever so much for for having us on. And yeah, we're delighted to talk about the book that we co-edited with a couple of other colleagues. So I'm just going to quick shout out to Jen Lester, Mark Stout, and Damien van Poelveld 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, and then Magda and Jen were planning a similar book. And we decided it would just make sense instead of competing to join forces. But seeing as you ask, Jack, I also wrote another book a

• 3:11Speaker 02

  couple of years back, which is a kind of overview of a synthesis of covert action academic research, and the latest thinking on it, but hopefully distilled in a accessible way for the general interested reader. And it's called How to Stage a Coup.

• 3:30Jack Murphy?

  I have the book on my shelf in the office, Rory. To my shame, I have not read it yet. So don't hold it against me. Magda, anything else? Do you want to talk about any previous works that you published, or anything you're working on now?

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Well, I'm relatively new to this world. I only just finished my PhD about two years ago. So I have not published as prolifically as my esteemed colleague Rory Cormack, who I feel like publishes a book every two years, which is amazing. But currently, I'm working on several

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Articles and on a book of my own about American covert action after the Cold War. So I'm looking at six different presidents and how they use covert action and what's changed in American covert action and how is there something new that we need to learn about from their experiences? So hopefully that's going to be coming out at some point. And currently I look at more of a shadow side of statecraft, how governments secretly shape and world events using spies, mercenaries, or criminals as tools of power and how their covert alliances shape global politics and below the threshold of war. So that's what I'm working on.

• 4:53Jack Murphy?

  That's great. Yeah, no, I'm excited to read it. And so this book, Covert Action, as you pointed out, the two of you edited it with a few others, and there's probably like, what, close to 20 authors in this book? And each chapter describes a different country's approach to covert action. So you get in the book, you know, some of the ones you'd expect, United States, Canada, Australia, France, Iran, North Korea, or maybe Iran is not in there, but China, Russia, North Korea is in there. But then additionally, there's a whole bunch of countries that really aren't commonly written about in these types of books.

• 5:36Jack Murphy?

  Palestine, Israel, India, Lebanon, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, Nigeria, Bulgaria, a bunch of other different countries and their approaches to covert action. And that's what, for me personally, made this book really interesting and had new information in it that I wasn't aware of. So I appreciate you guys going the extra mile to take on such a heavy lift.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Well, it was tricky because we deliberately wanted to be provocative, right? And we deliberately wanted to try and push that envelope of the historiography and say, "Look, everyone uses America as the reference point, particularly historically." I think we say in the book, "The CIA dominates the history books and Russia dominates today's headlines." And that is the, particularly the US, is the reference point for all discussions about covert action. It's all rooted in the so-called CIA golden age of coups in the 1950s. And that intellectual baggage shapes our understanding.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  And one of the questions we asked ourselves, which I don't know if it's a bold or a silly question, too provocative, was, "Is this actually a thing? And is this a part of secret statecraft? Or is this just a uniquely American tool which has grown out of a uniquely American political culture?

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Or can we say that there is comparison between the US, China, Russia? And can we go back a stage further and say, "Does Brazil engage in covert action? Does Lebanon engage in covert action? And what does that tell us about covert action?" And we came, it was a bit sticky at times, trying to compare, maybe not quite like for like. And then we got into all of these debates about, "Well, when does covert action become repression, internal policing? For example, if an authoritarian regime is going around..."

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Murdering or kidnapping dissidents who happen to be living overseas. And the primary aim is to protect the the regime by, you know, wiping out and disrupting dissident movements. Um, is that covert action as we in the West or the US would understand it? Or is that about, you know, domestic or transnational repression? So it got quite quickly, it sounded like quite a fun project and it was a fun project. And we really enjoyed doing it, but quite quickly we came under some quite sticky questions about statecraft and who does what and the relationship between uh different, you know, tools of the dark arts or how did you put it, Magda? Sub, sub threshold, secret, statecrafty, dark artsy stuff is a technical, technical term.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  Technical term, technical term, yes.

• 8:43Jack Murphy?

  That's, that's actually a, a great, uh, jumping off point. Um, because I wanted to ask the two of you how you define covert action. And that may sound like a kind of pedantic question to some of our listeners. They think assassinations, recruiting spies, sabotage, um, things like that. But you did come up with like a fairly narrow explanation of what fits in that kind of framework of covert action. If you guys could explain that.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, sure. So I, I'll take this one simply because uh I study uh the United States um more um when it comes to covert activities. And I think uh one of the challenges that we had at the very beginning was trying to stay away from the American definition of covert action, right? Which is an activities, uh, a activity, an activity or activities of the US government to influence political, economic or military conditions abroad. Uh, where the US government is not intended to be apparent or acknowledged publicly, right? So that's, that's a very strong definition from a very bureaucratic. Uh, you know, you have different separations of powers, you have overs.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  So there's so much kind of punched into that. Uh, but then we decided, well, we can't apply if we're looking broadly. If we're looking at different countries and how they view covert action and what covert action means to them. We can't apply the definition of covert action from the US to this. So uh we came up with something that, as Rory explained, we went back and forth. Um, that is a little bit uh more nuanced and it gives um. It gave us an opportunity to also include transnational repression abroad as part of COVID activities. So we framed it as politically motivated and unacknowledged interference by

• 10:35Speaker 04

  states or state-related entities in the affairs of others, which is designed to influence conditions in a favorable manner. Essentially, we focused on unacknowledged as opposed to deniable, which is in the American definition, right? To give, to open it up a little bit more precisely for the reasons that Rory had explained in a sense, how do we, you know, domestic repression versus foreign repression, you know, if you're thinking about it, by nature of activity abroad, you're already violating sovereignty of a state, right? So is that already COVID action? You're already influencing

• 11:17Speaker 04

  perceptions, cognition. So there is so much going on there. So how can it not be COVID action? So this new definition that we, not new definition per se, but, you know, broader kind of emphasis on what we would include as COVID action helped us, you know, put together so many chapters in so many countries with different approaches to this particular problem.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  And I think that's, it's really important because on one level, when two professors start talking about semantics of definitions and stuff, you know, there's a risk that it becomes, that becomes this kind of, you know, professorial pontificating about isms and stuff. But Mag is spot on because these definitions and how we set the parameters have really significant real world consequences for, you know, what is in scope and what's out of scope? What are we, what's included in the book and what's not included in the book? How can we compare different states? And I think the point about Deniable versus unacknowledged. On one level, again, it sounds a bit, you know,

• 12:27Speaker 02

  potentially a bit professorial pontification, but Magda is exactly right that it gets to some, I think, really interesting, significant questions. For example, we've heard loads in the last 10 years or so about particularly Russian covert actions, many of which, particularly before 2022, commentators seemed to think of as being quite successful. Russia was quite good at disinformation and sabotage and, dare I say, at electoral interference. And yet, these, if we use the American definition, were not remotely plausibly deniable. They were, in fact,

• 13:07Speaker 02

  wildly implausibly deniable. And this, I think, creates a really significant question about, well, if, if an action is blatantly obvious and is implausibly deniable, you know, I'm thinking, Russian alleged attempts to poison dissidents in Salisbury, for example, in the UK, when it was so obvious to them and the, although Novichok means of poisoning, the ridiculous interview that the two suspects gave, where they literally read off the Wikipedia page saying, oh, no, no, we weren't there to poison anybody. We were there to see the, and I quote, 23-metre-high

• 13:50Speaker 02

  spire from Salisbury Cathedral, whatever it was. This is, it's so wildly implausible, which then made us think, okay, what does that tell us about the role of secrecy in some of these operations? How deniable does it have to be to be covert action? And in fact, that's one of the kind of big questions that got me interested in this subject 20, 25 years ago now, God, I'm getting old, was around the CIA's operation, working with the Mujahideen against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in the 1980s. You know, it's a famous example of covert action, and one which is widely deemed to be successful.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  And yet wasn't remotely plausibly deniable. Everyone knew they were at it. So that raises the question, was it covert? What does covert mean? Does it have to be deniable to be successful? Probably not. And so by grappling with, you know, the definition, that opens up, I think, quite some quite important debates about the role of secrecy in the kind of conflict that we're seeing around the world right now.

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• 18:20Speaker 06

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• 19:17Speaker 00

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• 20:16Jack Murphy?

  You know, Rory, as you're speaking, if I recall correctly, you just published a white paper about sabotage operations, didn't you?

• 20:25Speaker 02

  I did. Yes, I did.

• 20:28Jack Murphy?

  And I think that that subject kind of teases out exactly what you're speaking to, is that the Russians are doing sabotage operations, the West is doing sabotage operations, and everyone knows exactly what the score is, right?

• 20:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what do we mean by the role of covertness? And another great example, which Magda knows more about than I do, she might want to elaborate, is around what's going on with with Trump and covert action in Venezuela right now, where you've got the president literally telling everybody that he is doing covert action. Now, how on earth does that play in with our understandings of secret statecraft? I mean, Magda, what on earth do you make of that?

• 21:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, so this is, uh, this is one of the, you know, when I, when I think about secrecy, when I think about what COVID action is intended to do, and I think our book really kind of hammers the, hammers this point, is that there are a lot of times, it's not just about influencing foreign policy, it's about signaling, right? It's about sending a message, you know, and uh, in this particular instance, there are so many different reasons why, why these things are happening and, and you know, I'm not quite sure I can say them all in a, in a public forum without, uh, you know, getting into trouble back at home. But, um, the reality of it is, um, you know, is it COVID action? Has it already happened before he announced that he was doing COVID action? Is it, is it COVID action if the special operations

• 21:56Speaker 04

  uh, forces are doing it? You know, are they doing it on the Title X or, or Title 50? Are they sheeted? I don't know. You know, the reality of it, there's just so many different avenues. But also, you know, we're so, we're so into this, you know, uh, are we doing COVID action Venezuela? Are we doing COVID action in, in, in Mexico and other, other, uh, other countries where we've designated these cartels as terrorists? Uh, but the reality is, we've been doing this all, all, you know, for decades. We've been doing this since the end of the Cold War. And this is nothing new, except that we are talking about it and we're signaling and we're threatening and we're bullying, um, you know, whether it's the particular nations that are, we, we're having this kind of signaling with, or whether we're telling

• 22:38Speaker 04

  the rest of the world. But there is a lot of signaling and messaging going on here. Uh, and whilst it may be new to, to, to Americans, uh, and American COVID action in terms, but it's, it's not new. If you read our book, you'll see this is nothing new. This has been going on for, for, for decades, centuries, if you will, since we started using COVID action. So, um, I think in, in, in those terms, the, the, the scope is much broader and it kind of. Realistically, it also gives us not just, you know, a broader picture of what we're talking about here, but also potential options, how to mitigate threats from such operations. You know, if you don't, if we call it COVID action and you say, well, it's not COVID

• 23:20Speaker 04

  action because X, Y, and Z, let's send the law enforcement or let's send the military's, you know, operation people to do this because it's not really intelligence. Well, that's a problem too, right? Because now we're separating it according to how we understand COVID action to be. But in reality, our adversaries couldn't care less whether we have Title X or Title 50, you know. So, so I think it's, you know, it's like the rest of the world doesn't operate on our wavelength in these terms or in this particular space. So I think we need to be a little bit more open minded about this.

• 23:57Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. I've had some interesting conversations with people in India's special operations units, you know, especially when R A W is allegedly whacking people in Western countries, you know, the big incident in Canada, there's been some rumors about America. I'm like, hey, man, like, this is bad news. Like, you can't be just like shooting people in the United States like it's gonna, or Canada, that's gonna create a huge international blowback. And they just kind of shrug, like, it doesn't, it doesn't resonate the same to them. They're like, so what? You guys tried to sanction us in the 80s. How'd that go for you? Okay. You know, it's just seen through a completely different lens.

• 24:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's almost like baiting. You say, what are you gonna do about it?

• 24:42Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 04

  And it's essentially, it's not just, I mean, there's, how dare you tell us what to do if you're not doing it yourself, you know? So there's all these things, like, you know, we're talking about COVID action and attacking ships and, you know, killing people in boats. But at the same time, we're telling others, oh, you know, human rights violations and violations of international laws.

• 25:03Jack Murphy?

  The way, the way they perceive it is that we're harboring Calistani terrorists on our soil. So it's legit, you know, but.

• 25:13Jack Murphy?

  That's how they view it.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay. This is going, yeah.

• 25:18Jack Murphy?

  So let's, if only to sort of like juxtapose the larger conversation about covert operations, I'd like to ask each of you about sort of your areas of specialty. Rory, about the UK and Magda about the US approach. And Rory, when I was reading your chapter about the UK approach to covert action, you know, what actually kind of jumped right out at me, your conclusion is very similar to, I'm, have you ever seen the documentary, The Mayfair Set?

• 25:48Speaker 02

  No.

• 25:50Jack Murphy?

  You should. It's a Robert Curtis documentary. And he concludes that the British used the SAS to sort of keep the empire going in a more covert and discreet manner as it was kind of imploding on itself. And during a time of social turmoil and rising leftist sentiments in the UK, that this was seen as sort of like a callback to the Knights of the Round Table sort of mythology that you have this small group of tough men that will go out and do this. But you mentioned in your chapter about how covert action was used as sort of a coping mechanism

• 26:32Jack Murphy?

  as the British Empire was sort of collapsing inward on itself.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  That's entirely it. And I can't remember if I included the quote in the chapter or not, but there was a wonderful line where it was end of the Cold War. So, you know, as you know, existential crisis for intelligence agencies in the West, what are we doing now? What are we for? And the Queen Elizabeth II's private secretary went to visit the chief of MI6 and said, what, what is MI6 for in the 1990s? What can I report back to Her Majesty? And the chief of MI6 said, tell Her Majesty that her secret service is the last penumbra of her empire.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  And I think that quote just sums up exactly what you're getting at, that there is a, there is a, I don't know, a service out there operating in the shadows to try to protect and promote British influence against.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  What has essentially been long term decline? And what we've seen, looking back over the last hundred years or so, is, you know, the UK has declined dramatically in terms of its military power, its economic power, its, its political power. But it hasn't given up on its perceived global responsibilities. British leaders still talk about, obviously, the UK still has a seat in the UN Security Council, so it's not just an illusion. But they still talk about global power, global interests, working in the Indo-Pacific or wherever it may be. And it's a hangover from imperial days.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Now, the problem is that the UK does not have the economic might or the political might, or particularly the military might these days, to back up a lot of, a lot of that. And because the UK is effectively a bit skint at the moment, we are seeing more rhetoric, more emphasis placed on the role of secret intelligence, the role of special forces, to act as a, as a force multiplier, to act as a way of bridging this gap between what UK leaders perceive Britain's global role to be and the actual pounds and muscle and equipment which the UK has or doesn't have to do it.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Because you see, for example, during the, during the Empire, the imperial days, the 19th century, when the UK wanted something done, it would do a bit of gunboat diplomacy, the, you know, send the gunships out, intimidate the, intimidate the locals and get its own way. Or, you know, colonialism was so wrapped up in political influence, covert and otherwise, bribery here, a bit of, bit of something else somewhere else, and it was kind of normal. Now, as the Empire dwindled and the UK was rightly unable to overtly manipulate local populations by...

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Messing around with constitutions or whatever it may be, that political power is gone. And they realised that if they wanted to carry on doing that kind of thing, they would be accused not not unreasonably of meddling in neo imperialism. And so they turn to SIS, to to secret statecraft, to try and to try and bridge that gap. And I think we've seen that all the way through since the the Second World War. And I think we're seeing that dramatically at the moment. As UK Armed Forces and military gets cut over the last 20 years. Who is the one piece of the UK security state which is seeing investment?

• 30:24Speaker 02

  It is the secret services and and special forces broadly defined. Because they are seen rightly or wrongly as a way of using smoke and mirrors to try to maintain as much influence as possible. And even just today, the chief of SIS, the new the new chief of SIS, was talking about the role of MI6 as a soft power instrument around the world. And I think that's increasingly increasing the increasing the role. It's a it's a it's a stopgap. It's a way of plugging that gap between capabilities and responsibilities.

• 31:03Jack Murphy?

  And, Magda, if you want to speak a little bit about the American approach. You know, the difference, I guess, one of the big differences between the UK and the US is we have a constitution which governs governs some of these things, but it doesn't really prevent us from doing anything in the field of covert action as near as I can tell. Do you want to talk about that?

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, so obviously, the the US has had its, you know, fair share of bad experiences in the 70s that led to all this legislative kind of stray jacket, if you will, of of covert activities that the CIA was doing. And, you know, as a liberal democracy, we we want to hold people accountable. We want to prevent presidents from saying, I didn't know this was going on. I want to, you know, we want to see people held responsible for activities that they were that they were undertaking on the behalf of of the great American nation. And the problem.

• 32:09Speaker 04

  The problem is that when a nation goes through something that, you know, we went through nine eleven, it changes, it changes the risk calculus. It changes how we think about, you know, legislation. It changes how we think about what COVID action is. You know, I'll give you, I think I have three examples for you. So the first one was even before nine eleven, Clinton was trying to, to get the CIA, to authorize the CIA to go after Bin Laden. There's a lot of kind of, is it law enforcement? Is it, you know, do we, can we capture him? But can we capture him without killing him? If we kill him, is it assassination? It's like all this kind of rhetoric back and forth, right?

• 32:54Speaker 04

  But after nine eleven, and he, he was held back mostly because he couldn't make up his mind. But it was, I mean, the presidential finding to, to, to go after Bin Laden. But essentially after nine eleven, he goes online, he goes to and talks to, to, to the media, basically saying, I authorized people to kill him. I, we hired people to kill him. It was all about killing, kill, kill. Like he used the word kill at least three or four times in that sentence. And then you have, you know, Bush, the quote dead or alive, you know, poster, you know? So he kind of goes a little bit, a little bit crazy there. And then you also have him saying international law, what international law? I don't care what international lawyers are saying, you know, we're gonna kick some ass here, right?

• 33:39Speaker 04

  And then you have, I think he was, when Bin Laden was finally gunned down in 2011, we have Obama saying, justice has been done. You know, this is how it was supposed to do. And it kind of, you know, juxtaposes the, what we think about American COVID action, all kind of put in its own little box and you kind of, you know, as I said, streetjacket and said, you will only come out when we tell you to come out. Versus this narrative where we now see it as used as a form of deterrence against, you know, enemies, both state and non-state actors, right?

• 34:19Speaker 04

  So it's no longer this, you know, tool of foreign power, foreign policy only when we can't use military and diplomacy is not enough. It's suddenly become this aggressive. Uh, what did Rory, well, remind me again, do you remember what, what did John Rizzo say? A tool of vengeance or something, something along those lines, right? It's in his book, John Rizzo, the lawyer, um, long-term lawyer for the, for the CIA. Um, so, um, so it kind of changed the perspective of what COVID action was. And now we've reached yet another stage, you know, never mind the cyber operations that we have. That's a completely different kind of worms, right? Where we don't even, most of the time, I don't even know if the CIA is doing these COVID activities in cyberspace.

• 35:03Speaker 04

  It would probably be the, the, um, the military, right? Uh, um, and, uh, uh, cyber command, no cyber command, it wouldn't necessarily. But yeah, actually cyber command may very well be doing it. Or on the other hand, we have, you know, uh, President Trump going around, you know, using COVID action as a tool to threaten people and to say, you know, we're coming. I've authorized a, you know, a COVID action to come and beat the living daylights out of you. So, um, so I think it's gone from one end to another where we kind of saw it packaged neatly with a little bow and say, you will only come out and play when we tell you.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  To nine 11 where he says, unleash the CIA for crying out loud, let it fight, let it do all these things. Uh, but also the CIA is not enough. Shall we give some power to the special operation forces too? So they can play together. So, um, we've seen a, a massive change in, in, in how, you know, COVID action kind of changes from, it goes essentially from this, from one end to another. And we very rarely talk about this, you know, we focus so much on the Cold War and what COVID action was under the Cold War that we, we forget to, to, uh, uh, you know, examine how we have changed and how intelligence community, uh, the intelligence community in the US has changed since.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  Margaret, do you think, just on that, because I think it's so interesting, the point of comparison between the US experience and the British experience, when you've got two states, both with global interests, although one clearly with more power than the other, but working traditionally hand in glove when it comes to intelligence cooperation and liaison, but they're so very, very different. And do you think that the neatness of American definitions, the fact that they write it all down in a way the British don't, the fact that they have, as you mentioned earlier, the difference between Title X and Title 50, and it's all very neat on paper, anyway, which the British don't. The British have a much more flexible and nimble approach,

• 37:08Speaker 02

  and there's no definition, and the British use euphemisms like intelligence effects, or my favourite from the Cold War were nocturnal operations, discreet operations, Machiavellian operations, just any kind of euphemism. And that's been the British way, you know, nimble, flexible, muddling through, making it work in an agile way, looking across the Atlantic and seeing the CIA get bogged down in legal definitions and having to do legal gymnastics about who was actually authorising it because of Title X, Title 50, and it's all blurred and horrible. Do you think, I was really struck by what you're saying then, do you think

• 37:46Speaker 02

  that the neatness of writing everything down has actually, post 9/11, kind of come undone, and has been a bit of a problem for American practitioners? And maybe, dare I say it, the Brits were right.

• 38:04Speaker 04

  This is, in the end of the day, this is all about whether the Brits were right or Americans were wrong in their approach. You see, Jack, this is how it works. We always get there. This is how all our conversations go. But listen, I think we're definitely experiencing something that is challenging, and the definition and legalese of whether it's COVID action or whether it's military authorities are definitely being challenged. But that is to say, you know, they were there for domestic purposes, and the domestic political climate has changed. So they're not as restricting as they used to be.

• 38:49Speaker 04

  There's wiggle room in there, right? You know, like whether we define assassinations, targeted drone strikes or UAV strikes, whether those are termed assassination or not. So there's always been wiggle room here because this is legal language, right? There's always been a little bit of change there. So I think we're definitely struggling with it. And, you know, I'm actually writing a chapter on the future of COVID action. And this is one of the things that I want to look at. You know, do we need to change things? You know, is what we have enough to constrain policymakers, whether they're, well, in this particular instance, frankly, the president, from abusing his power?

• 39:33Speaker 04

  It's not that Congress can approve or, you know, reject COVID action proposal, but they can create trouble if they don't agree with the presidential finding that the president wants to enact. So I think it all kind of depends on a domestic political climate and where we are in Congress. And, you know, who rules what, what house? Who's winning and all that fun stuff? So a lot of it is really just for domestic posturing, political posturing, if I'm honest. I don't think it's precluded the CIA from acting in any particular way, definition or no definition, or special operations from, you know,

• 40:16Speaker 04

  assisting on the Title 50 and, you know, being shipped. So there's that. So I'm not saying we were wrong. I'm not saying you were right. I'm just saying it's complicated.

• 40:30Jack Murphy?

  So let's, I'd really like to dive into some of the chapters on some of the not lesser known countries, but not their intelligence services are not written about quite as prolifically as we do in the Western world. One of the, or two of the chapters, actually, that I really enjoyed and learned a lot from was there's one about Palestine from 1917 to 1948. And then, you know, post, after the creation of Israel and the rise of Mossad. That's another chapter that's very interesting.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I should give a shout out to Stephen Wagner wrote the Palestine chapter and I really, really enjoyed that chapter for the same reasons you did Jackie, you don't read about it much in the literature, which raises that question of, well, is it covert action as we as academics and commentators would understand it. But there are clearly some interesting parallels around, I mean, Stephen writes about disinformation, he writes about assassination. But the thing that really stood out for me from that chapter was the learning and imitation

• 41:42Speaker 02

  between different actors, because the Palestine mandate was a very complex and messy affair involving the Brits and Palestinian guerrillas and Zionists and evolved over 20 odd years. But what Stephen points out is that some of these tools of statecraft are ever-present and that the different state or different actors are learning from each other, passing on skills as one side is training the other and then it's witch allegiance and these ideas,

• 42:27Speaker 02

  you start to see the transfer of techniques, tactics, ideas and thinking. And I think that's another theme from across the book, which is particularly from that era from World War II and just before World War II and during and immediately afterwards, you start to see the transfer of skills, ideas, tactics and doctrine across different groups as these ideas become institutionalized and trained. So yeah, I'll let Maggie comment on the Israel chapter, but I thought that was a great chapter from Stephen.

• 43:04Jack Murphy?

  I just want to point out, I mean, what I thought was very interesting, speaking to what you were just saying, is that the kind of early, pre-Israeli, but I guess you say like Zionist or Jewish intelligence networks in the, in the region, I kind of got their influence from two places, one from, from you guys, from the British. And then the other, it mentions that a lot of the people who were going there were Russian Jews that had grown up during the Bolshevik Revolution and immediately after. And so they grew up in a culture of conspiracy and political assassination. And they brought that skill set with them to their intelligence service.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we've, you know, we read more and more about the long history of Putin and Russia, kind of political culture of, of active measures, COVID action, coercive interference, call it what you like. And more and more scholars are tracing what we see now, Putin's up to all the way back to Bolshevik Revolution and indeed, and indeed before, and some of the Chekka and the Cyrus regime. And what I think we forget sometimes, and why this chapter is, I think, so fascinating, is that that's not just a direct lineage to be traced in Russia, but those ideas actually are exported as people, you know, flee exiles, immigrants,

• 44:31Speaker 02

  wherever they may be. And you start to see this, this lineage branch out. And I think that's a wonderful example of that Chekist ideas and conspiracy theorists and assassinations as part of everyday statecraft start to come, come to, come to play in that particular conflict.

• 44:55Jack Murphy?

  Maggie, you want to go on the Mossad chapter?

• 44:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, so I worked with Melinda Haas on this and it was just, it was a fascinating, you know, chapter to read. And of course, we hear about Mossad's operations quite often. And, you know, they're not very shy about saying that certain operations were conducted by them. But that's the part of their strategy, right? It's this, you know, their targeted killing approach, whether it's the scientists or whether it's, you know, other types of adversaries. It's about strategically important psychological goal. It's not necessarily just about doing the COVID action, not just about stopping these people. But again, like I mentioned, you know, in previous, like I said previously, a lot of these countries are signaling to their adversaries and saying, hey,

• 45:42Speaker 04

  stop messing with us because this is what we're going to do. But what I found also very interesting with the Israel chapter also is this, this notion of red lines, you know, it's like you can push, push, push, push, push, but we don't know when you cross the red line, when Israel is going to, or Mossad is going to react. So kind of this strategic ambiguity is a massive, massive play for, for, for Israel and keeping ambiguity as to, you know, the operations that they're doing or whether, whether, you know, the nuclear ambiguity. And this, this red line policy is actually, I find that fascinating

• 46:25Speaker 04

  because you constantly, you may just do one thing and it's gonna, you know, create a reaction or you may be doing repeatedly different things that will create, create reaction. And one of the other things that I also liked about this chapter, it also shows that, you know, the differences in how COVID action is perceived and what happens to a country that is, that feels, you know, always at risk. It's existential, right, for them. So it kind of pushes the country into a particular frame of mind where, you know, they, they feel that they have to be aggressive in this. It's, it's no longer just defense, we no longer, and it's no longer just influencing politics in another country, it's become much more, I want to say savage frankly,

• 47:09Speaker 04

  in the sense that, you know, you're trying to, you Pretty much get rid of anybody who could potentially be a threat. But then you also have this other side of it, whereas you will work with anybody and everybody, you know, even with your adversaries, you know, to get to the goal. So it's kind of, you know, it shows you the pragmatism of the situations, you know, and no two situations are the same. And it also depends where we, you know, where we're talking seventies, where we're talking about, you know, eighties, nineties, what other geopolitical issues are happening. And, you know, you see this other side of them rescuing people, you know,

• 47:51Speaker 04

  Jews from various other countries and trying repeatedly to, you know, come to terms with countries that they wouldn't usually cooperate with or work with just to save these people. So, so I think it was, it was an interesting point where, you know, obviously, you know, they're well skilled, as we know, and, but they're also very creative. They're exceptionally well creative and clearly they, you know, they've, they think about it. I wonder where, I mean, I don't wonder, I know. The reason that they do things the way they do and that they think is simply because for them, you know, it's existential.

• 48:34Speaker 04

  And then I think that forces the frame of mind in a different direction and makes them approach covert activities in general much more seriously than, you know, if it's more of a, you know, something that's, that's less existential, for instance, so, yeah.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  Like Canada and Australia. And I think that was, because that was one of the really fun things about the book, being able to do this, this comparison about states' approaches and what the different drivers were between, across states who aren't normally examined. So as Magda says, Israel is very much geopolitics, surrounded by enemies and a real sense of existential threat, which leads to an aggressive use of covert action and also a pretty implausibly deniable. Use of covert action, go to the strategic community point. And that's a lovely comparison to, say, Canada,

• 49:32Speaker 02

  who have traditionally not had those levels of, anywhere near those levels of threat. And therefore, you can see almost geopolitics has shaped the Canadian approach.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  It's only more recently as they've become more involved in cyber issues,

• 49:53Speaker 02

  slightly more remotely, that they've become a bit more engaged. Same with Australia, you know, no existential threat, no real threat post-World War II. And only as the rise of China affected them in the last 15 years.

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• 52:01Speaker 02

  Is also has suddenly COVID action risen back up the policy agenda? And so by comparing these different states, you get a really nice window into what drives states to be doing these kinds of tactics.

• 52:16Speaker 04

  I think, Jackie, also one of the other things that you can, you know, you'll probably notice with other states, medium or small-sized states, how it's not constant, their decision to use COVID action is not constant in changes, you know, constantly depending on geopolitical situation, but also for their domestic purposes. So if you look, for instance, one of the chapters that I engaged with was Turkey. You know, if you look, there's like three different stages of Turkish operations there, right? You know, you have your World War I, World War II. Then you have the, you know, that period from the 50s to 2000 until Erdogan comes in. And then after that, how it changes.

• 52:57Speaker 04

  And it changes because, well, because of domestic political situation. Because, and they use COVID activities not simply because, you know, for foreign policy, but also to balance different sides, you know, to balance their adversaries as well as their, you know, allies and kind of keep the peace in many respects, right? So even as they did this in Australia, right? To keep the peace during the Cold War so it wouldn't all blow up. So Turkey does exactly the same thing, kind of trying to balance adversaries and allies. And then you see as a situation around them in their region gets worse,

• 53:39Speaker 04

  they become much, they become very aware of the fact that they are now... Probably one of the key players in the region. So that also influences how they start using covert action abroad. Right. So it's no longer about who is controlling the intelligence organizations, who's pulling the strings. It's more about huh, what can we do to, you know, to create a situation or create a scenario where Turkey has an advantage in the region and is considered one of the key, key players um that, that can influence things to, to its, um, to its advantage. So I found that very, very interesting to see kind of this evolution and, and different, uh, different aspects of it.

• 54:24Jack Murphy?

  Let's uh, jump into India next, if that's okay. I, I think that's an interesting chapter because you know, they had this not, non-aligned policy during the Cold War. I think technically they still do, but I feel like in a, you know, much has been written about the collapse of world order and the rise of a multipolar order. I feel like we're seeing like a very different India as reflected through their intelligence operations in recent years.

• 54:50Speaker 04

  Rory, do you want to grab this one? I'm not very, very, uh, very good with India's stuff, except for the more contemporary things.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, again, a shout out to, to Paul Magda, uh, at KCR, who, who, who wrote this chapter. And I think it's a nice example of the evolution. Um, as Magda was talking about Turkey, you know, similar point applies to India. You see this, this, this evolution, particularly, uh, you know, in post, post-independence where it started off with, um, perhaps because of the political culture, political history, uh, a, a sense of, of caution where covert action was, um, a bit of a, a bit of a dirty word, uh, in the, in the immediate, you know, post-imperial space. You know, I want to.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Differentiate themselves, I'm paraphrasing Paul far too simplistically, but the essence of it is wanted to differentiate themselves from some of the dirty tricks that the the imperious British had been playing on them, wanted to differentiate themselves from some of the Cold War tactics that they were now kind of enmeshed in, didn't want to be seen as a battleground for superpower covert action, which I think wrongly is how a lot of the kind of history literature sees India as a almost a passive, a passive battleground where the Soviet and American rivalry covertly played out, particularly in propaganda

• 56:21Speaker 02

  contests. And then, so it came late to covert action, I think, well, Paul thinks and I agree, as a consequence of colonialism. But then gradually, as, you know, the decades have gone past and it's become, shaken off those colonial bonds, it's becoming more muscular, it's becoming more confident, it's dominating the the region, it's, the leadership's been quite open in the India first approach. And I think what we've seen then is an evolution

• 57:02Speaker 02

  from the caution and circumspection in the late 1940s to 1950s through to the example that you opened the conversation with Jack about the alleged, you know, attempts to bump off various dissidents in in North America. And I think that's a that's a journey as as a country becomes more confident, becomes more muscular, really more ease with itself, shakes off some of those.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  Fears of consequences of colonialism. As a really nice example of of how a state isn't tied to its geopolitics, its history, whatever it can be. Well, I think one of the dangers of banging on about strategic culture is that it doesn't allow a state to to evolve. It always seems that it's kind of rooted in this one particular mindset. And India is a great example of moving from the immediate independence mindset towards what we're seeing now, when it is quite an aggressive actor in this space, not just with with the alleged assassinations and assassination attempts, but also in longish

• 58:15Speaker 02

  history with covert competition with with with Pakistan, with activity around Bangladesh, various allegations of meddling in Sri Lanka. So we're seeing the evolution of a much more muscular posture as India becomes more confident, I think.

• 58:36Jack Murphy?

  I'm let's jump over to South Africa. So this is like, this is a very interesting chapter. And it gets into the intelligence service, the so called civil cooperation bureau. And I think South Africa is one of those, and we're talking about apartheid era South Africa to really in this chapter, to be clear. And I think that's a really interesting case of where there wasn't any separation between church and state, so to speak, like all of these sorts of restraints and laws and things we talk about. None of that seems to have existed in apartheid era South Africa.

• 59:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll start maybe here. I think one of the things that yeah, I might have mentioned this to you when we started this conversation. The first thing that struck me when I started reading that chapter, when Kevin O'Brien sent it, and Kevin has written on this prolifically. So if you if you love learning and reading about South Africa, I would I would encourage you to look some of at some of his other work. But I essentially, one of the first things that came to my mind was like, there is no good guy here. They're all bad. This this is just,

• 59:57Speaker 04

  there is no control. Essentially, everything goes. And as much as they tried to, particularly by the time that BOSS came, the intelligence organization that was running COVID operations, by the time they came to power, oh, they were funded. I think there was just mayhem, were both domestically and abroad. But I think at the same time, you know, in the sixties, you don't see much going on, simply because neither the South Africa nor revolutionary forces actually have the capabilities to to to do COVID activities. But then you see from the seventies and then through the nineties through to the nineties,

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  their activities on both sides evolved and grow. But one of the reasons why they do is because they have all these wars around them at the same time. And their their resources, their capabilities and their knowledge in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism are essentially growing. So they're applying all this in their in their counterinsurgency efforts. But the problem is it just become, and it wasn't just essentially, they didn't just do paramilitary operations. They were doing a whole host of different COVID activities, including propaganda or psyops in their parlance. But

• 1:01:23Speaker 04

  It was just brutal on all accounts. There were a lot of people were killed and you know the brutality of it. So, once the revolutionaries were trying to get to find the traitors within their ranks, they became just as horrible as South Africa and they were treating people, you know, just as equally bad, if you will. So, there's just no good side here. It was just mayhem and violence on every front. But what you see towards the end of it is that the government is losing or the politicians are losing control, completely losing control

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  over this. And they are just... So, now it's no longer about just keeping South Africa within its, you know, and protecting South Africa. It's more about, you know, protecting themselves and growing their capabilities, growing their riches, attacking, killing, you know, threatening. And obviously, you know, a great many paramilitary companies or mercenaries, if you will, had come out of that period. And I think South Africa is still struggling with it and struggling with its past because of it, simply because there was just, I think towards the end in the eighties, they had, I want to say over,

• 1:02:50Speaker 04

  was it over forty different outfits doing Covid action? It was just, it just got absolutely ridiculous.

• 1:02:59Jack Murphy?

  There are also allegations that like within CCB and some of the other structures that they started killing their own people.

• 1:03:06Speaker 04

  Exactly, yes.

• 1:03:08Jack Murphy?

  Some pretty grisly stuff. It's like the machine just has to keep eating. And that's what you were talking about, you know, where this gets completely out of control.

• 1:03:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So I mean, even in that period, you know, by the time the problem, they couldn't, it's almost like one of those things. Covid action forced them to the negotiating table, but then Covid action also took them away from the negotiating. So it was like it was working against itself almost, you know, they were attacking each other from within. And it just, I feel like it became a tool of vengeance and revenge and powers and riches and rather than, you know, what it was intended to be. And even by the 90s,

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  this game was not over. They just, you know, went into private world or, you know, they continued proliferating into, you know, into these mercenaries who provided services throughout Africa and, you know, weapons smuggling, there's all sorts of criminal activities.

• 1:04:11Jack Murphy?

  Let's jump, if we can, to something a little bit different. Brazil. Totally different geopolitical context that they exist in. You guys want to talk about that one a little bit?

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  Well, if I remember correctly, and Magda correct me if I'm wrong, that the, this is a nice example of a state where the political history and culture helped to shape approaches to covert action. During the authoritarian regime, covert action, like with many authoritarian regimes, led from covert action to domestic control and repression. And it's, you know, it's a similar story with apartheid South Africa that Magda was just relating. Where does covert action start or stop?

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Killing a dissident who happens to live across a contested border begin? Where where where's the line? So for people living in Brazil under under dictatorship covert action is a means of of state repression, not dissimilar to, you know, the perceptions of intelligence services in Argentina, for example, we're not quite as bad, but it's it's still has that that connotation. And so when states such as Brazil move towards democracy, there's a reluctance about about covert action, a reluctance to engage in it because it's seen as a tool of of oppression.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  And I think it's a point that actually applies to intelligence services more broadly in as part of democratization. But the new governments have to win over the trust of the people. Because intelligence in in an authoritarian state is, you know, it's it's it's a byword for repression and torture and misery. And so when a new state, you know, transitions to democracy and wants to become uh wants to have a intelligence service which engages in covert action as, you know, as many democratic intelligence services do, uh it has to win over the trust of of the people. And I think Brazil was no exception.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  And another example of that would be uh West Germany's approach to covert action. You know, The BND. Exactly. And coming out of the the horrific legacy of Nazi Germany and repression and torture um and and Holocaust,

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  the West German states was for obvious reasons, very, very reluctant to engage in um in in any kind of dark arts and covert operations. They didn't want to be wiped them white because of the because of Nazi history. And I think one of the findings from the book is that political history. Helps to explain whether certain states have, you know, an unusual level of restraint when it comes to covert action. And maybe Brazil, and if I remember correctly, and certainly West Germany, might be, might be examples of that.

• 1:07:30Jack Murphy?

  I, I, I won't make you guys go through each of them individually for brevity's sake. But I would like to just take a second to talk about Russia, China, and North Korea, the authoritarian states that you look at in this book, and sort of what the findings were of how these states approach covert action versus, you know, all the others we've spoken about, basically.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  It's, it's tricky because

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  we've, one of the, one of the main findings is that lots and lots of states engage in this kind of activity, but they wouldn't see it as covert action. You know, our China chapter explicitly says that the Chinese don't have a word for covert action or a translation for covert action. And therefore, you know, are we misguided when we start talking about Chinese covert action? Is that just a, you know, a ridiculous phrase which means nothing to Chinese government or Chinese people and doesn't actually help, one, us analyze what the Chinese are doing, and two, help, you know, people in the West build

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  resilience against some of these things. So what I think we see is we certainly know that Russia engaged in a lot of this, this activity. We know that China engages in a lot of political influence operations, whether that's propaganda or through, we've seen the UK, we've seen Canada, Australia, New Zealand put out alerts through their intelligence services that China is trying to deniably influence internal democratic processes. And we've seen numerous, numerous inquiries into that. But they do it in a different kind of way, because this is one of the big lessons from the book. We just take the American

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  definition of covert action and transpose it onto China to then understand what the Chinese are doing. You're not going to get very far. So we see the Chinese allegedly working through the diaspora, coercively, wittingly or otherwise, to try and, on a low level, shape the parameters of academic debates, censor what universities can and can't write about, or try to shape economic climate or business. And we've seen leaders in Australia over the last 10 years say that it's a low level, widespread drip, drip, drip of blurring the line between what's legitimate and what's

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  illegitimate, between what's overt and what's covert, between what is broadly acceptable as political lobbying and what is not as coercive interference. And I remember one, I can't remember if it was a head of the Australian intelligence or a former politician, saying one day, you wake up and you realise that the political system's changed because it's happened on this gradual drip, drip, drip of semi-covert political influence. And I think if we take the American definition and apply it to Russia and China, we overplay

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  the focus on secrecy. And I think we overplay the focus on a neat, compartmentalised approach to government, whereas in Russia, in China, it's much more of a whole of government approach engaging in this kind of activity. Certainly on the intelligence side of things with China, it's much more, much more industrialised. And when it comes to Russia, what we're seeing, I think, is a lot of activity. The chief of MI6 today, instead of doing the usual MI6 tour of the global threat perceptions, just focused specifically on Russia, calling them

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  out as being a hardcore hostile state actor. And previous British intelligence chiefs have quoted Russian intelligence services as having gone feral. So we're seeing a widespread increase in activity. But, and I think, Mag, you wrote about this, that it's low level.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  What scholars, including Magda, have called gig economy approach to recruitment of saboteurs and spies. And I think Magda, if you want to elaborate on that, I think that's been a change and is something more distinctive to Russia compared to, say, the US.

• 1:12:05Jack Murphy?

  That's, that's, that is a big thing. And Magda, I'll let you take it. I just want to say in some of my work as a journalist and talking to counterintelligence people and intelligence personnel who have come under surveillance, that foreign intelligence services are going on these like gig websites and hiring just like a DoorDash guy to do surveillance on somebody. Like, it's crazy how it's how it works. But anyway, I'll let you elaborate.

• 1:12:31Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah. I think one of the things that we realized very quickly is that, well, most of these operations that Russia and, you know, other adversaries were undertaking, you know, sabotage were, in particular, throughout Europe, had roots, you know, in the Cold War. They're not that different in a sense. They're attacking the same kind of targets and infrastructure that would have been the target anyway, right? What we realized quickly is that the type of people that were doing this and who were being employed to do this is not the same anymore. So it's not your typical agent. You know, with an

• 1:13:15Speaker 04

  agent intelligence, you groom them, you, you know, you train them or intelligence officers in the end of the day. You know, you work with these people, you train them, you know who they are, you know, you know, you can command them, you can tell them what to do. But now what we're seeing is that they don't necessarily, because a lot of Russian intelligence officers and diplomats have been kicked out of Europe and, you know, and other states. And they don't really have the capability to do these, the number of operations that they do. So they turn to this gig economy approach, employment of individuals who have never done these things, who may think of themselves as the next John Wick or, you

• 1:13:59Speaker 04

  know, your Jason Bourne, and they think they can do this. Whether they have allegiances to Russia, not is irrelevant. Whether they have ideological sympathies, whether they've ever done this. And frankly, in some cases, they don't even know they're doing it for Russia, right? They don't even know to whom they're speaking. So um with essentially what this allows uh the gig economy approach is um is not something that that Russia has invented, you know, uh if you think about um transnational criminal networks, they've been doing this kind of stuff for for years, you know, just hiring an odd person for for for this task or that task here and there, right?

• 1:14:41Speaker 04

  And one side doesn't know what the other side is doing. So it gives you much, much broader approach. Um, you know, in some instances, um, like we've seen in London, for instance, uh, a chap who was recently, um, uh, Errol, do you remember, what was his name again? Do you remember Rory Errol?

• 1:14:57Jack Murphy?

  The kid that went to Poland?

• 1:14:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no, this is a kid who burned the or organized the burning of the storage facility in uh in the UK.

• 1:15:07Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I can't remember his name, sorry.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was, I think it's Errol something, but it's a young kid, he's never done this kind of stuff. He gets contacted by somebody uh working for uh Russian intelligence services, so potentially, I think in the end, it it turned out that it was a Wagner uh link there. Um, says, you know, we wanted to hire several people to burn down the storage facility. They're giving specific instructions. And in the end, what happened is that he didn't follow the instructions they were given, uh, that he was given. So they didn't pay him as much money that um that that that they said they would. And because he didn't burn it to the Wagner standards. I mean, this is, this is how sick this is. And these people, I mean, they're kids most of the time. And the UK is not the only place, you know, where

• 1:15:52Speaker 04

  this happened. You have it, it happens in Poland. Um, I think in Poland, they, one of the individuals was from somewhere from Latin America, uh, and he was told that um uh he needs to take pictures of a bus depot in Germany. Well, why? Well, for insurance purposes. Uh, and you will get, you know, paid whatever amount it was. And sometimes they don't even get paid, frankly, but this one was like, you will get paid, you know, a minimal amount, just go take some pictures, it's an insurance thing. Uh, and the next thing you know, you know, the the bus depot either catches fire or there's an explosion going on and and this this, these kinds of things, you know, sometimes they're refugees just trying to earn a quick buck. Sometimes they're teachers. Uh, so they they have no

• 1:16:37Speaker 04

  training, they're quick, they're cheap, and in the end of the day, Russia doesn't give a damn what happens to them, you know, and uh whether they're caught or not. Like prove it. So essentially, it opens up a can of worms to a type of individuals you can hire through this approach.

• 1:16:57Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:17:12Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:17:23Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:17:28Speaker 08

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:17:34Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:17:54Speaker 00

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• 1:18:21Speaker 01

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• 1:18:53Jack Murphy?

  The last kind of big question I want to ask the two of you is kind of concluding thoughts, I suppose, about all of the things we've been talking about and how it seems that we are moving into more of a multipolar worldview, where we're going to have a number of different states that all see themselves as regional, if not world powers. Things seem to be getting increasingly chaotic. The old Moscow rules and those types of concepts seem to be off the table completely. It's like anything goes. What are your thoughts about the future of covert action and where we're heading in the next 10 to 20 years?

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  You're writing a chapter on that. Okay, I'll go first and you can have the final word because you are the expert. Well, the thing that struck me doing this project is that this is not new and that states have been doing this for literally millennia before states, before states even existed. Obviously, they wouldn't have called it covert action, but these same kinds of principles and means and tactics and objectives go back literally, literally millennia. And far more states do it and have done it than I think we give

• 1:20:13Speaker 02

  credit for in our, in our writings and in the, in the press and in academia. And that's not to create false equivalence. Russia, clearly as Magda was just outlining, has a very, very different approach compared to, say, the UK where I, where I am now. That said, lots of countries engage in, in this kind of, of activity from Brazil through to Chile, through to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, you know, books, chapters we couldn't find all this for in the book and chapters we couldn't write in the book because it would have been outrageously long. So I think we need going forward to understand that this

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  is a part of international statecraft, that coercive unacknowledged interference is something that states do. For different reasons, they do it at different levels of oversight, they do it with different

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  levels of intensity, but it's something lots of states do and we need to acknowledge that this this exists and account for it in our in our thinking. And some of these some of these middle powers and smaller powers have their own agency. They're not just being not just pawns being manipulated by Russia or China or the US. These states

• 1:21:39Speaker 02

  have their own intelligence agencies and are trying to manipulate and shape stuff themselves. And I think we'd be wrong to wipe out their agency by just assuming that Russia is meddling in post-imperial Africa. And that the, you know, the poor post-imperial Africans don't have any say in that and ability with their own intelligence agencies. So I think we'll see more, we'll see, we'll see the trend continuing of more states engaging in this. More states trying to find their own way, playing different powers off against each other, trying to manipulate. I think that it will become more chaotic. I think that it will become noisier. I think it will become more intense. I think the fundamental principles will stay the same.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  States use these tools for particular reasons. They have particular trade offs when using sabotage and other kind of forms of covert operations. That hasn't changed, but the speed, the intensity, supercharged by technology, supercharged by interconnectedness will just make it all more intense, noisier, more chaotic. And I think states will see more of it because states will just do more stuff to try and drown out the the the signals. But I'll hand over to Magda, who is currently thinking about these things in a much more intellectual manner than me.

• 1:23:06Speaker 04

  Not quite, but but thank you very much for thinking that I am.

• 1:23:11Speaker 04

  Well, I I actually agree with you very much. So and the one thing that that we are.

• 1:23:19Speaker 04

  Neglecting, in a manner of speaking, is that the character of COVID action is changing and I think that the states are, it's not just about, you know, rapidly deploying people anymore. It's not about technology necessarily. I think it's about realizing that, and of course, those things are very important, but I think it's about realizing that we may not necessarily be talking about traditional kinetic warfare. I think we're talking about dirty warfare here. And, you know, in your hybrid space and in your gray zone or hybrid warfare space. And I think non-state actors are becoming prolifically important in this next phase.

• 1:24:04Speaker 04

  So, for instance, you've, you know, we've talked about India a little bit. You know, India use criminal actors to commit these assassinations. China uses the Triads to, you know, control the population and for transnational repression. Russia uses criminal actors in their approach to this, to this, to in COVID activities. So you have in more and more states doing this. I mean, Venezuela is also doing exactly the same. I think the criminal actors, paramilitary companies and private security companies are becoming extremely important in this particular, in the next stage. And I think we are, we are seeing a change in,

• 1:24:48Speaker 04

  you know, even in the US, obviously, we've always been using, you know, PMC is maybe not in COVID action officially, but we've always been using officially, I said. We've always been using proxies, you know, and affiliates and auxiliaries. But it is, it is getting to the point where every state is now dipping into this pool. Um, and these non-state actors do not care about allegiances. They do not care about ideology. They care about power, money, prestige, right? So I think we're, we're seeing, we're gonna see quite a lot of change in, in that particular space. I think that it's getting more dangerous.

• 1:25:29Speaker 04

  So, um, because you, intelligence agencies, you know, people who work there, you, you know, they at least have some, um, uh, some similarity in the way they think and the way they feel about their country. Some ideology, some respect, some desire to serve their nation. What are you gonna say about, you know, proxies like, uh, like criminal actors? So I think that's gonna be a, a, a major change. And judging by how the US has been acting and, you know, calling cartels terrorists, um, I think it's a game changer, um, in the international affairs. There's gonna be, it, it's gonna get more complicated.

• 1:26:10Jack Murphy?

  Is there anything, uh, that you guys would like to cover before we get going tonight? Are there any questions you wish I had asked about the book or anything else?

• 1:26:19Speaker 04

  Well, I don't know what I've missed, uh, when I went offline. Sorry about that, but it sounds to me like you were talking about China and Russia.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  You've, you've missed me filibustering while you're off screen for two minutes. That's what you missed. Ever the professional.

• 1:26:33Jack Murphy?

  We were, we were just discussing how authoritarian states approach covert action as opposed to others.

• 1:26:39Speaker 04

  Um, and we talked about Brazil, we talked about, uh, have we, we tackled most of the states, I think, that, that were in there.

• 1:26:47Jack Murphy?

  We haven't gotten into Nigeria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia. Um, there's a whole chapter about like Greeks during the Peloponnesian War that we haven't talked about. That was kind of cool. Um, but I just wanna open the floor, let you guys talk, hit up whatever, um, subject I may have missed that you'd really like to talk about.

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  Not from my end. I think we covered, we covered, we covered a lot there, didn't we?

• 1:27:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:27:14Speaker 04

  I think we covered some of the key, you know, of the key ones and key changes and, you know, why states do what they do. You know, from the Nigerian perspective, I think, you know, they do a lot of CT kind of stuff. And, you know, so there it's not necessarily covert in the same aspect that we would talk about. And we talked about it with with other nations or other countries. So yeah, I think I'm fine. I don't think we need to go into into the remaining ones.

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  I think we name check most of the, if not in detail, we name check most of the most the chapters. And I kind of made a passing reference to the ancient Greek stuff in that in that final answer, where as Jeff, as Jeff said, that we've been doing this, these kind of activities are familiar to us to go back literally millennia. So I, yeah, I think we've, I think we've pretty much ticked most of the, most of the chapters. Yeah.

• 1:28:13Speaker 04

  Thank you, Jack.

• 1:28:14Jack Murphy?

  So the book is covert action, national approaches to unacknowledged intervention. You can go and find it today. Where's the best place for people to go and buy this book?

• 1:28:26Speaker 04

  So the book can be purchased on amazon.com or Georgetown University Press website. And yeah, it's a great holiday gift.

• 1:28:36Speaker 02

  To be fair, it's quite.

• 1:28:38Speaker 04

  Reasonably priced. It's a great holiday gift.

• 1:28:42Jack Murphy?

  And we will have links down the description on this podcast or YouTube video, wherever you watch it, some links down below where you can purchase the book. Thank you, both of you spending some time with us to talk about this subject and your book. And I think this is like a great, you know, we mostly on this podcast interview people who are military veterans or intelligence agency veterans. And it's really cool to get those anecdotal experiences, but it's also cool to zoom out once in a while and get the 40,000 foot view of it all.

• 1:29:18Jack Murphy?

  As sometimes you guys cover things in your research that we missed.

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they're much more interesting.

• 1:29:23Speaker 04

  People who do the work. Yeah.

• 1:29:25Speaker 02

  They're more interesting than us.

• 1:29:28Speaker 02

  Hopefully, hopefully, it's been, it's been, it's been of interesting listeners, but I've certainly enjoyed the conversation. So thanks ever so much for inviting us on, Jack.

• 1:29:37Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yes. Thank you so much for having us. This has been fun.

• 1:29:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you, guys. And for everyone else, we will see you next time. Have a happy holiday.

• 1:29:48Speaker 04

  Thank you. Good night.

• 1:29:49Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:29:52Jack Murphy?

  I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Team House Podcast, the Eyes On Podcast, and the High Side News Outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox and you're going to get the most current podcasts on Eyes On and the Team House and whatever's topical or current on the High Side. So it's another way for us to get the information out to you as social media algorithms are pretty iffy and you never really know what you're going to get. So this is a once a week email. It'll slide into your inbox and it will have, you know, the greatest hits of that week. It's really good. Checking it out.

• 1:30:36Jack Murphy?

  The website for it is teamhospodcast.kit.com/join. Teamhospodcast.kit.com/join. Go there and you enter into your email list or you enter your email into the little thing on the website and you're good to go and that'll be it. So we really appreciate your support and hope you'll consider signing up. The link will also be down in the description if you're looking for it there. And that's teamhospodcast.kit, K I T, kiloindiatango.com backslash join.

• 1:31:14Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Ushkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:31:29Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:31:40Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:31:45Speaker 08

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:31:51Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:33:28Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

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  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

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  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

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  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:35:28Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

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  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

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  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:37:30Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:37:41Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

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  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

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  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

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  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:39:39Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:39:44Speaker 08

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:39:50Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:40:10Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, Study Mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 1:40:37Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:41:13Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Ushkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:41:28Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:41:39Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:41:44Speaker 08

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:41:50Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:42:10Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:43:14Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:43:29Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:43:40Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:43:45Speaker 08

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:43:51Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:44:11Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:45:17Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:45:32Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:45:43Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:45:48Speaker 08

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:45:54Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:46:14Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:47:12Speaker 11

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 1:47:25Speaker 12

  Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair. This is an advertisement for Zolair

• 1:48:10Speaker 12

  paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 1:48:12Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.