Research Agenda
My research crosses the fields of intelligence studies, foreign policy, international law, and human rights. It speaks to the tension between security and human rights, how and why organizations change, how foreign policies are formulated, and when law can make a difference.
Digital National Security Archive.
CIA Covert Operations: The Truman Years, 1946-1953 (fall 2025, ProQuest): This pivotal collection of 2,500 declassified U.S. government documents focuses on the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency and the challenges that policymakers and operatives faced in their attempts to establish a permanent peacetime foreign intelligence agency that would struggle to learn the art of covert action, intelligence collection, and analysis. The collection highlights memorandums from the highest levels of the secret government, including over a hundred memos from Directors of Central Intelligence, Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (1947–1950), and Walter Bedell Smith (1950–1953) to President Harry S. Truman. Hundreds of memos from the National Security Council’s covert action approval committees, the 10-2 Panel, the 10-5 Panel, and the Psychological Strategy Board, provide an insider's view on the evolution of America’s embrace of secret tools to deal with foreign crises. Within the CIA, hundreds of memos from the Office of Policy Coordination—which oversaw cover actions, and the General Counsel’s office—which was tasked with reviewing the legality of Agency actions, provide a rich overview of the inner workings of the CIA. Finally, the collection also includes hundreds of documents on the CIA’s first projects that employed peacetime psychological warfare, political action, and paramilitary operations overseas. These documents illuminate the details of CIA operations in France, Italy, East Germany, Berlin, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Albania, Korea, and the Middle East.
CIA Covert Operations: Southeast Asia, 1954-1975 (2027): I am currently researching and curating this set of 2,500 U.S. declassified documents on U.S. intelligence operations in South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand from the 1950s to the fall of Saigon.
Book Projects.
I am working on a book manuscript titled Impunity Thrives in (Legal) Darkness: Intelligence Operations, Secret Law, and the Limits of Accountability. Secret laws are binding official government pronouncements that prescribe and proscribe behavior, confer power, but are withheld from public view. This book shows how and why long-standing democracies like the U.S., UK, India, Israel, Canada, Germany, and others are increasingly creating secret laws? I argue that states are designing secret law to enhance their national security powers at the expense of human rights. Secret laws can authorize state officials to violate human rights and commit war crimes with impunity. They do so by enabling what I call the three avenues to impunity: prosecutorial discretion, judicial “avoidance doctrines,” and the defenses of necessity and mistake of law. These avenues to impunity are especially successful at the national level, where most international crimes are investigated. If carefully designed, secret law can also enable a strong mistake of law defense before the International Criminal Court to exonerate war crimes.
I am working on a second book project (with Luca Trenta) that presents a documentary history of CIA covert operations during the Cold War. Each chapter introduces a different CIA covert operation and includes declassified meeting minutes where U.S. officials debated, reviewed, or approved the secret project. It gives readers an insider view into the CIA's covert action high command.
Digital National Security Archive.
CIA Covert Operations: The Truman Years, 1946-1953 (fall 2025, ProQuest): This pivotal collection of 2,500 declassified U.S. government documents focuses on the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency and the challenges that policymakers and operatives faced in their attempts to establish a permanent peacetime foreign intelligence agency that would struggle to learn the art of covert action, intelligence collection, and analysis. The collection highlights memorandums from the highest levels of the secret government, including over a hundred memos from Directors of Central Intelligence, Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (1947–1950), and Walter Bedell Smith (1950–1953) to President Harry S. Truman. Hundreds of memos from the National Security Council’s covert action approval committees, the 10-2 Panel, the 10-5 Panel, and the Psychological Strategy Board, provide an insider's view on the evolution of America’s embrace of secret tools to deal with foreign crises. Within the CIA, hundreds of memos from the Office of Policy Coordination—which oversaw cover actions, and the General Counsel’s office—which was tasked with reviewing the legality of Agency actions, provide a rich overview of the inner workings of the CIA. Finally, the collection also includes hundreds of documents on the CIA’s first projects that employed peacetime psychological warfare, political action, and paramilitary operations overseas. These documents illuminate the details of CIA operations in France, Italy, East Germany, Berlin, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Albania, Korea, and the Middle East.
CIA Covert Operations: Southeast Asia, 1954-1975 (2027): I am currently researching and curating this set of 2,500 U.S. declassified documents on U.S. intelligence operations in South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand from the 1950s to the fall of Saigon.
Book Projects.
I am working on a book manuscript titled Impunity Thrives in (Legal) Darkness: Intelligence Operations, Secret Law, and the Limits of Accountability. Secret laws are binding official government pronouncements that prescribe and proscribe behavior, confer power, but are withheld from public view. This book shows how and why long-standing democracies like the U.S., UK, India, Israel, Canada, Germany, and others are increasingly creating secret laws? I argue that states are designing secret law to enhance their national security powers at the expense of human rights. Secret laws can authorize state officials to violate human rights and commit war crimes with impunity. They do so by enabling what I call the three avenues to impunity: prosecutorial discretion, judicial “avoidance doctrines,” and the defenses of necessity and mistake of law. These avenues to impunity are especially successful at the national level, where most international crimes are investigated. If carefully designed, secret law can also enable a strong mistake of law defense before the International Criminal Court to exonerate war crimes.
I am working on a second book project (with Luca Trenta) that presents a documentary history of CIA covert operations during the Cold War. Each chapter introduces a different CIA covert operation and includes declassified meeting minutes where U.S. officials debated, reviewed, or approved the secret project. It gives readers an insider view into the CIA's covert action high command.