Current Research

Book Project: Secrecy and Oversight: Principal-Agent Alignment and Democratic Oversight of Covert Action

Secrecy and Oversight asks a question at the heart of American democracy: can Congress really control the CIA’s secret operations? Challenging the enduring “rogue elephant” myth of an unaccountable intelligence community, this book develops a new theory of principal-agent alignment to explain when congressional law succeeds in shaping covert action—and when it backfires. Drawing on declassified archival documents, the book traces covert operations across three conflicts and five presidential administrations: U.S. support for anti-communist factions in Angola (1974–1989), the covert arms pipeline to Bosnia during the Yugoslav wars (1992–1995), and CIA-military cooperation in Afghanistan (2001–2014). It shows that procedural laws—those regulating decisionmaking processes—tend to encourage executive caution, while substantive prohibitions on covert methods or locations can unintentionally expand covert action rather than restrain it. Blending international relations, law, and archival history, and extending its framework comparatively to the United Kingdom and Germany, this book offers essential insight for scholars, policymakers, and readers grappling with executive power, intelligence oversight, and the deep-state debate.

Book Project: Dangerously Provocative: Women’s Movements and the Shadow of Surveillance

Dangerously Provocative uncovers how U.S. intelligence agencies cast women’s activism as both a resource to exploit and a threat to contain. From the first through the third waves of feminism, the FBI and CIA systematically co-opted, surveilled, and undermined women’s groups, driven by patriarchal and racialized logics that determined who counted as a legitimate political actor. Applying feminist, constructivist, and intersectional lenses to intelligence history, the book introduces the Utility-Threat Spectrum to explain how four determinants—ideology, tactics, organizational makeup, and networks—shaped official responses along a continuum from co-optation to undermining. Case studies range from CIA sponsorship of the Committee of Correspondence to FBI infiltration of the Women’s Liberation Movement, with comparative evidence from the Canadian security services. Dangerously Provocative offers a powerful framework for understanding how patriarchal assumptions defined “threat” in democratic societies.

Works in Progress 

  • Soldiers of Fortune: Recruitment of Covert Agents in the Church Committee’s Interim Report on Assassination (forthcoming Fall 2026, Intelligence and National Security Church Committee at 50 Special Issue)

This article uses the Church Committee’s interim report on assassination to analyse how U.S. officials recruited individuals for violent covert actions. As security becomes increasingly corporatised, veterans and irregular actors provide a ready pool of trained personnel, particularly when domestic constraints limit conventional force. Drawing on scholarship on intelligence agents, rebel mobilization, and criminal networks, I argue that recruitment decisions hinge on variation in role exposure and attribution risk. I compare the use of foreign criminals in the 1960 Lumumba plot (QJWIN; WIROGUE) with U.S. collaboration with organized crime against Castro, using declassified documents, testimony, and historical accounts.

  • Public Intelligence Disclosure and the Creation of Audience Costs in International Crises (with Ofek Riemer)

Recent years have witnessed states’ growing use of official public intelligence disclosure (OPID) in international crises for various purposes, including resilience, legitimacy, and coercion. In particular, the coercive potential of OPID remains uncertain and underexplored. In this article, we build on audience cost theory to examine if and to what extent a leader is liable to pay a price in public opinion if they fail to eliminate a threat they have deliberately brought to the public’s attention. Fielding the classic “repel an invader” survey experiment in the United States and Israel—two national cultures that vary sharply in their attitudes toward government secrecy—we find that publicly disclosing intelligence and then backing down indeed generates audience costs, albeit less than an empty threat to use military force. While frequency does not reinforce this effect, our findings suggest that the type of intelligence being disclosed and its perceived value and sensitivity increases audience costs, with responses showing similar cross-national concerns for publicizing sensitive information. Ultimately, our findings suggest that OPID may serve as a credible step on the ladder of escalation short of threats of the use of force.

  • The Agency of the Agency: Intelligence Organizations and Strategic Disclosures (with Keren Yarhi-Milo)

Intelligence agencies are idealized as objective sources of information for policy decisions. But these agencies also have their own bureaucratic interests that may differ from those of their executive principal. In what ways do intelligence services engage in disclosure of secret information to the public to influence policy debates within democracies? We theorize that intelligence agencies choose among four strategies: strategic disclosure, persuasion, rehabilitative disclosure, and policy-directed disclosure. Two main considerations shape this decision: First, whether the intelligence community perceives an imminent threat to its credibility among important audiences, including the public, elites, or allies. Second, whether that threat implicates the use of intelligence products in current policy debates. Several cases illustrate how intelligence agencies select between these strategy options: Iran NIE (strategic disclosure); CIA’s Team A/Team B competitive analysis (persuasion); CIA’s Family Jewels (rehabilitative disclosure); and NSA’s canceled THINTHREAD program (persuasion escalating to disclosure). In conclusion, we consider implications for civilian-intelligence relations and democratic backsliding.

  • A Matter of Proportionality? Eroding Customary International Law and Public Support for the Use of Force

Existing observational studies have been unable to adequately explain why states comply with international legal obligations, especially those deriving from nonbinding international legal principles. Existing studies suggest that customary international law should have no different effect than treaty law on support for the use of force in international relations. This article theorizes that information on customary international law should decrease support for potentially violative uses of force. This article explores morality and reputation mechanisms of compliance with international law, using mediation analysis. In sum, survey experiments fielded in 2017 and 2023 show there is a significant effect of customary international law restraining potentially violative uses of force abroad, but that effect has decreased over time. Specifically, when information on customary international law is paired with statements that international organizations may deem the use of force as a violation, respondents significantly decreased their support for the use of force. Finally, there is significant evidence that morality serves to fully mediate the relationship between customary international law and support for the use of force.