Julia Curlee
Lawfare Public Service Fellow, former CIA officer and NSC Director, current citizen.
“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.”
The Lawfare Podcast · Policy · November 2026
Context
Asked what a CIA instructor should teach recruits from the 2016 Russian influence operation, the former practitioner says covert action works best narrow and cheap, and that the US record at it is poor.
Transcript
and there were plenty of other counteractions that Russia took in the decade afterwards that have done severe damage to the Russian economy and its people, most principally the invasion of Ukraine.
…that also does covert actions. And what should we learn from this? Should we be actively measuring in lots of countries' internal affairs? Should we be running covert campaigns in Greenland? Should we be, you know, what should we be taking from this as a lesson of success for our own covert action?
…War, where you have Gustav Rakados, one of the key minds behind this, being asked about the, you know, to toast the success of the operation. And he says, we'll see because he has seen these before, and he knows that over time, the success can fade and that the blowback can be real. And in the movie, they talk about the rise. Of al-Qaeda, which one can argue about that direct causality. But 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. I think at the beginning of the Cold War, it was quite successful in Italy once or twice. But you could make a sound argument if looking at the U.S. interventions in Iran that interfering in Iran domestic processes helped lay the groundwork for the rise of the IRGC and the Iranian revolutionary regime. Obviously, many other things were happening at the time, but Iranians remember viscerally our…
And what about in a defensive sense? You end the piece with two lessons for us as a recipient nation of this Russia’s Covert Action. I want to read them and then have you flesh out both a little bit. 10 years on Russia's 2016 operation offers two lessons. First, a foreign intervention pays off most…
You know, like a lot of things as we think about how to Trump proof the presidency, I will start off with the caveat that there may be no proofing the presidency against the president, but there are probably things we could do to increase friction so that, as I discussed in this, the winner's veto…
We are going to leave it there, Julia Curlee. The piece is the unhidden hand. And it was published in Lawfaire several days ago on October 22nd. How Russia's greatest returns from the 2000, from 2016 came from the president it helped elect. Thank you for joining us today.
More from The Lawfare Podcast
