HOW TO STAGE A COUP, Rory Cormac

Much mythologized and heavily romanticized, covert action is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the grey zone within international politics.

This was good fun. Essentially a tour of spookwork past and present (the book was published in 2022).

The grey zone is not some blurred line between war and peace; such a thing has always existed. The real grey zone is epistemic: blurred lines between what we know, what we do not know, and what we think we know. The novelty in all of this comes from the fluctuating space between covert action and public knowledge, the decline of state secrecy and the rise of multiple competing narratives churned out across a kaleidoscopic media landscape.

There are, perhaps obviously, things here that I can connect to the Prigozhin book, especially considering he ran the troll farm Internet Research Agency, and that book’s detailing of infighting in the adhocracy:

Russia seeks to seamlessly meld disinformation, subversion, offensive cyber operations and conventional military force. This is not to exaggerate the success of Russia’s approach, though. Putin is no chess grandmaster, deviously manoeuvring his pieces across a global board. Russia’s intelligence agencies compete with each other; covert action is the outcome of bureaucratic infighting. They might take on dangerously risky operations simply to outdo each other; they might encroach on each other’s turf; they might tell Putin what he wants to hear simply to curry favour. As one former Russian intelligence officer put it: ‘You do not bring bad news to the tsar’s table.’

Here, I came across the term liminal warfare, which I find defined elsewhere as “a type of warfare that involves operating near the threshold of detectability. It’s characterized by ambiguous actions that are designed to achieve political objectives without triggering a military response.” Per Cormac:

The Kremlin in particular sponsors operations which are ‘sufficient to keep the wound bleeding but insufficient, thus far, to warrant massive retaliation.

I also find herein this little gem:

One head of intelligence at the end of the Cold War acknowledged the secret services’ droit de mort, or right of death.

It’s a very readable book, rippling through ten aspects of global covert action, going deep into detail and unearthing all kinds of interesting stuff while transmitting lessons learned and marking out the immediate future in clear and often disturbing terms.

The next decades will witness more, not fewer, covert actions. As hidden hands become less hidden, these covert actions will rely on confusion, disruption, ambiguity and cynicism; they will reflect our age of formlessness.

Very educational for me. All kinds of useful stuff. Glad I read it.

HOW TO STAGE A COUP, Rory Cormac (UK) (US+)