Julia Curlee Lawfare Public Service Fellow, former CIA officer and NSC Director, current citizen.

“If we're going to draw sort of vast conclusions about covert action, we're talking about a secret activity for which our data set is limited… when the data set I was able to use is an unclassified one put together by the CIA historian that ends in 2011. So who knows? There might be other key comparators to this.”

The Lawfare Podcast · Policy · November 2026

Context

Pressed on whether an apparent covert success might be luck, she adds a candid caveat about how little public data exists for rating covert operations.

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Transcript

The Lawfare Podcast Around 30:00 into the episode

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Benjamin Wittes

…this, that the events that transpired correlated nearly precisely, and we'll get to a few exceptions in a moment, with Russian interests. But is there any way to know that that means the covert action was a success rather than that the covert action was a really good bit of futuristic betting?

Julia Curlee

You're humming in on a pure methodological problem that I think is inescapable for evaluating covert action, this causality question of coincidence versus like, did it actually cause that? And you were right. And I could add on top of that, if we're going to draw sort of vast conclusions about covert action, we're talking about a secret activity for which our data set is limited, including the U.S., that we're saying this is one of the most successful covert actions in history when the data set I was able to use is an unclassified one put together by the CIA historian that ends in 2011. So who knows? There might be other key comparators to this. Yeah, because we've been

Benjamin Wittes

doing so well since 2000. We have been doing

Julia Curlee

very well. So it is a very difficult question. We have from that data set drawn what seemed to be some best practices in covert action for which this operation followed, whether it is the using what's there and building upon that, whether it is the finding that for a political action such as this…

Benjamin Wittes

All right. Let's talk about some of the downsides from the Russian point of view. The Russian economy is a disaster. Partly in response to U.S. sanctions, which are partly in response to this, although the Weight of them are all about Ukraine. So, how do you understand the downside of this? And I…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Lawfare Podcast

“Most of the successful ones are actually not that expensive. And if they are expensive, then you're probably using the wrong tool. You probably should be doing something that is overt, that uses the mass of the other institutions of the United States, like the military, to achieve an objective.” — Julia Curlee, The Lawfare Podcast

“It is humility in what we can actually achieve using this tool, which is probably best used as a scalpel, not a hammer. And for the United States, I think that we are not well suited as a country to use this to interfere in other countries' political systems. We have a pretty bad track record of it sustaining good results over time.” — Julia Curlee, The Lawfare Podcast