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Hello, welcome to episode 3 of the War Pod, the official podcast of the Remote Warfare Programme, a London-based research initiative focusing on remote warfare, the trend where states support local and regional forces on the front lines rather than deploying large numbers of their own troops. The Remote Warfare Programme is part of the Oxford Research Group

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a peace and security think tank. I'm Abigail Watson, Senior Research Officer. In this episode we'll be joined by our director, Emily Knowles, as well as Rory Cormack and Andrew Mumford from the University of Nottingham. We will discuss their new project on collusion and explore whether there are parallels between their work and our own research into remote

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warfare. Enjoy the show. Hi, so I'm here with Andrew Mumford and Rory Cormack at the University of Nottingham. We're just about to start a new project on collusion, so it'd be really interesting if you could just talk us through what gave you the idea for this project, what was really the impetus

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of starting new work on this at this point? A confluence of our research agenda sort of working around that very issue of how and why do states create alliances with various different states and non-state actors. We're trying to understand what motivates them to take the form of action that they do in a

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sort of non-obvious, indirect, rather dark and secret way and we felt it was about time that we started to shed some light on these sort of dark corners of foreign policy making here in the UK. It was a confluence also of broader policy discussions that were happening at the time. If you remember a couple of years ago when Gavin Williamson first became Defence

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Secretary, he was making a lot of talk, in fact I think it was one of his first press conferences, he openly said that he would actively embrace the idea of killing all British ISIS members who were still in Syria and Iraq. Now that put British collusion in targeted killing, which is the specific focus of mine and Rory's new research project, collusion

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in targeted killing, that brought that right to the front and centre of British defence policy options and it made headline news and it got us thinking about the ways in which a. what are the policy repercussions of adopting collusion with other states, which has happened before if you look at Jihadi John intelligence sharing with the US in order to kill a British

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citizen, but also try and think about the historical lineage that has got us to a point whereby defence secretaries think it's viable as an option to collude with other states or maybe even non-state actors historically to kill enemies of the state and it got us thinking about where this had come from. Williamson wasn't pulling this out of a hat,

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we know that there's a long history. Unlike many of his other statements, whatever happened to him. That's true, but it got us thinking about whether there was a particularly British approach to this behaviour, where we think we can pinpoint the beginning of this behaviour and where it's taken us historically. Because all the talk is always about Northern Ireland, isn't it? Whenever anyone

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says collusion in the killing context as opposed to Suez-style collusion, it's always Ireland, Ireland, Ireland and that's kind of accepted now, there's been so many inquiries going over the same cases and they're all kind of saying the same thing and so we're wondering, well was Ireland a one-off? Surely Britain fought in other similar kind of end-of-empire-y unconventional conflicts,

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is still fighting unconventional conflicts now, so this whole collusion in Northern Ireland thing, it can't be a one-off, it must be part of a broader approach, where's it come from and what's the legacy today? Do you have any sense of what case studies you're going to be looking at then going back? So we've become quite interested in the idea about where it became strategic,

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where it becomes intrinsic to Britain's approach, so we've sort of rested on the idea, haven't we, that actually the SOE in World War II is pretty important in this, if you look at the the activities that Britain undertook with partisans across Yugoslavia and Mediterranean, behind the Eastern Front, that this collusion with non-state actors in order to

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to kill enemy combatants becomes important in sort of Churchill's notions of ungentlemanly conduct of warfare, but then Britain, even after the end of World War II, Britain doesn't have much time to sort of pause and reflect on its way of warfare because the unravelling of empire, as Roy's already mentioned, the colonial small wars of decolonisation across Malaya,

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across Kenya, Palestine, Cyprus, offer again these important opportunities for the UK to try and extricate themselves from these hot localised conflicts, save face state-managed withdrawal from empire, but still try and ensure that the whole sort of post-imperial security situation is to their political liking, and that involved working with organisations, paramilitary organisations,

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rival militia groups, to try and engineer that extraction from empire that was very messy but allowed for a little bit of underhand activity on the side too. In a lot of these cases there's more than one actor involved, so you've got the Brits as the main counter-insurgent against the insurgents, but there's always a few kind of loyalist groups knocking about in Malaya or in

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Cyprus with the Turkish paramilitary groups, Yemen and Aden, South Arabia, so one would assume, and in fact SAS doctrine from 1969 explicitly says that their aim is to co-opt, work with locally recruited forces, guerrilla forces it says, to work against a common enemy, so this must be pretty common in a lot of end of empire

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conflicts, and so we're just trying to work out is that the case, why, what are the factors determining this and how relevant is it today? And can I just jump in and ask, when you're talking about collusion, how broad a definition, what are the aspects of that, what does collusion look like, how are you defining it in each of these case studies? Well it's a tricky one because we don't

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want to define it differently per case study, we want to try and have a working definition, but obviously there is debate and each of the various inquiries into Ireland have slightly different, depending on how broadly you want to define, how actively versus passively you want to define it, and I think that the kind of working definition we would adopt would be similar to that

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adopted by Desmond de Silva who did the most recent Finucane inquiry, and he said look it's got to be active, so it's got to be agents of the state, agents of the state aiding through giving weapons or information to militant groups, but it also can be passive, so turning a blind eye, willfully ignoring, not investigating things properly, but the distinction

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that de Silva makes is that the passive element of collusion has to be deliberate, so it's government agents willingly ignoring the activity of paramilitary actors, otherwise it becomes really, really, really broad, if they weren't aware, they were accidentally not aware through inefficiencies or through not being on top of

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their brief, does that constitute collusion? But in some senses maybe there are examples of when the state is deliberately keeping ministers unaware, and that allegation has been raised about Ireland a few times, but for me anyway, I think it can be active and passive, but it's got to have that sense of deliberateness, otherwise it can just be incompetence.

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And beyond sort of charting the lineage of this, beyond Northern Ireland and beyond the obvious cases, what would be the desired outcome of this project, what are you hoping to look at, and what are you expecting the outcome to be? I think one of the key things is trying to understand and comprehend whether there is actually a British way of collusion, something that defines the way

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in which the British state over the last half a century or more has gone about trying to engineer outcomes in particular conflicts through passive or active collusion with other states or non-state actors. One of the things we've done as part of our preliminary research, we were in Belfast a couple of weeks ago, we've done a couple of large-scale archival scoping exercises digitally,

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and what's emerging is a pattern of creating conditions whereby an outcome can be engineered. It's not necessarily direct interference in an obvious way, no smoking guns placed in other people's hands is it, but it's a lot of engineering of situations whereby the outcome can be manipulated through exercising the utility of certain groups. Now that's interesting for us

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because that doesn't look necessarily like your sort of classic collusion, but there are various forms it can take that we're interested in trying to explore, whether it's passing on intelligence or not passing on intelligence in some cases that can result in the death of an enemy combatant. How high up does it go? Now that seems to be part and parcel of a lot of the

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current literature on collusion. As we've already said, most of it is focused on Northern Ireland. A lot of it is pushing a line about top-down modes of collusion. This is coming from number 10, right, this sort of... It's coming from the JIC. Anyone ever read a JIC assessment, they would know the JIC did nothing that interesting or tactical, it's all very

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analysis and assessments, and I'm always shocked when these, particularly the more advocacy literature, blames the JIC for collusion because having spent a long time writing a book on the JIC and assessments. So it's locating the sources. Locating the level at which collusion occurred is going to be important to identifying what this British way

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looked like, and so far we've not found anything that points to top-down collusion. It was not necessarily a state policy. That's not to say it didn't occur. So we're trying to navigate a path between two very clear, distinct poles in the literature right now, which is on the one hand, the advocacy literature that Rory's already mentioned that's associated with Northern

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Ireland, which tries to push a line about strategic state-level collusion, collusion as a state policy, that Thatcher was pushing this throughout the 80s as a personal way of trying to tackle the troubles, and at the other end of the spectrum, you've got the complete denials that collusion never occurred, the more orthodox official state line, which we also know

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not to be particularly true. We're trying to chart this course in the middle that identifies the location of collusion, the causes of that collusion, the consequences of that collusion in order to try and understand how we got to a point now where we're trying to deal with, say, British citizens fighting for ISIS through Northern Ireland, through those colonial small wars

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of the 50s and 60s, all the way back to World War II. Just picking up on that British way idea, I think that's really interesting. When we consider target to kill it, or assassination, putting aside the various definitional issues, when we consider assassination, people think of the CIA and

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poison darts and Castro and everything, and there's an American way of doing this, golden age of the 50s, obviously, and then constrained, and then various legal justifications to target killing these days. We also think of Israel and the Mossad, very famous for its thorough target killing program, shall we say. But when people say,

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what's the British approach? How do Britain think about target killing? We don't have the same history. There are times when MI6 has plotted killing certain leaders, NASA being the most famous example. There are plenty of times when MI6 has been asked to kill a foreign leader and they said, no, no, foreign secretary, we don't do that kind of thing. So we don't have that

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same tradition as the Americans or the Israelis, but we don't mind other people doing it on our behalf, at least historically. Having looked at enough of these archival files from the SIS side of things and the Foreign Office side of things, we don't have a tradition of killing people. James Bond doesn't exist. There's no license to kill going around bumping people

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off left, right and centre. But we're not averse if someone, if I say we, the British government, disclaimer, I do not work for the British government, if somebody in one of these end of empire wars or in decolonisation, Iran 53 for example, if somebody dies that the British state didn't mind dying, that was kind of okay. Yeah, that's so interesting because you mentioned

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Jihadi John in your, or Mohammed al-Mawzi in your opening statement and these statements from the British government about how we operated, you know, hand in glove with the Americans over that strike, which the Americans took in the end. And it's interesting to me that, especially given your backgrounds, diversity in covert action and proxy warfare and, you know, how does this pull on

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past, because this sounds similar and distinct from, you know, how we might think of proxy wars of the past or covert action of the past. So I think it'd be really useful to tease through how collusion is part of that, maybe different to that, and how like modern day might be different. It could involve all of those elements because my previous work on proxy wars, and both of us,

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both of us sort of take quite long historical views in our work, whether it's mine on proxy wars or Rory's on covert action. So if we're looking at collusion, we can try and see and understand how historically that has involved both trying to utilise other actors outside of the British military system to work alongside, both either formally or informally, and can

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involve facilitating other states to undertake acts of covert action that can be based on British intelligence. So it's actually, the project is a sort of a nice confluence of our previous work, and it's nice to be able to to work together actually for the first time on, considering we're working on tangential areas of research for so long. He just wants a friend.

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Someone else to write up the eventual research papers. Exactly, well one of us needed a telegenic face, the other's the face for radio and podcasts, so please leave. The opportunity though, it serves to sort of think about the processes of decision making. We're quite looking, we're interested in, we've been looking a lot at outcomes,

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but this project on collusion is looking more at those, the decisions that led to outcomes, about why the UK political system, the UK defence establishment was more keen to try and undertake more indirect acts of intervention in certain conflicts, or try and ensure that if ultimately an act of targeted killing was deemed necessary, why Britain didn't go down the

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American or the Israeli route of getting our own hands dirty. And trying to explain that is intriguing to us. And is there anything else you wanted to add from your covert action? Well, I suppose it kind of came out of the research I was doing for the book on British covert action, which was, because one of the big questions is, did MI6 go around covertly killing people in a way

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the CIA did? No, is the answer, but there were time and time again I came up with examples of where covert action was deliberately used to create a climate conducive to a particular person being killed. Now, whether that was through propaganda, trying to discredit a particular target, going all the way back to the Iranian coup in 1953, when Britain was deliberately

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smearing certain leaders loyal to the Prime Minister, and then if one of those people happened to be killed, like the Chief of Police was, so be it. And all the way through to some of the more recent declassifications about Northern Ireland, where in the 80s MI5 were launching propaganda designed to unnerve Republican paramilitants, and for Newton kind of got wrapped

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up in that. So this pattern of using propaganda to unnerve people the state didn't like, people with a thorn in the side of the state, and then it almost becomes inevitable that these people will become a victim of a killing. So you've got, one of my favourite examples actually was from the 50s, when Britain wanted to kill Ho Chi Minh, and obviously Britain doesn't

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do that kind of thing because it's terribly un-British, so the plan went like this, we don't just kill Ho Chi Minh. What they did, they planned to do, was start an argument inside the Politburo, that argument would then escalate to the extent that someone else kills Ho Chi Minh as a consequence of that argument, which the Brits would have started. Obviously never happened, or I don't

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know if it was approved or not, but it obviously didn't work. But that's a kind of a classic example of how Britain was doing this. Lumumba in 1961 is another example, first democratically elected leader of Congo obviously, killed largely at the authority of the Belgians, but the British hand and the American hand were behind there, removing protection, discrediting,

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bribing people to, parliamentarians to criticise him, discredit him, smear him. So you see this almost double deniability, that the British hand is twice removed, which was a pattern, and that's something that we wanted to explore a little bit more. That's so interesting, and did you get a sense that this is a strategy that has been evolving, that you can see sort of

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lessons being learned throughout the UK experience, and then today are we looking at what you might consider like a finely honed strategy on collusion that's built out of these decades of experience, or has this always been a sort of ad hoc? I think it's ad hoc, because for me anyway, it's a consequence of Britain not wanting to do, not wanting to get

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its hands dirty. Sometimes for normative reasons, because we're Britain and we don't do that kind of thing. More often because they're worried about turning someone into a martyr, more practical consequences. And so this became a consequence of that initial reluctance to do what the CIA might have done. And because it's an intangible consequence of policy, rather than policy itself,

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I don't think there's any kind of attempt to hone it into a strategy or anything. It's almost like what would inevitably happen if we don't kill someone, but various other policies are in place, such as austerisation, such as operating in a kind of grey zone between war and peace without operational oversight, without coordination of different actors. So it kind of becomes a

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quasi-inevitable outcome, rather than a strategy or policy in itself. I certainly have seen no evidence to see this is kind of coordinated at state level, but I do think it's a consequence of other decisions. I'm interested as well where you think the primary drivers for the ebbs and flows of this approach come from. Do you think it's a sense of domestic constraints around what

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our parliaments and publics would accept, or is it based more on international relations and international reputation, or somewhere in between the two? I think one strand actually that's emerging right now is the autonomy of local leaders and local commanders. And if you think about the ways in which, say, individuals like Frank Kitson are able to

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sort of hone the pseudo-gang technique in Kenya, and then, well I know Kitson becomes a bit of a bogeyman, doesn't he, for Irish republicans, but the way in which that method or certain counterinsurgency elements that he is able to pioneer in Kenya get transferred to Northern Ireland, trying to think about ways in which local commanders are able to find innovative ways to

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collude with loyalists, with opposition forces, is actually quite interesting. And that's one way we're trying to think about this, or trying to revise this notion of top-down collusion, that actually there seems to be some innovation going on at local level, but does buy in, you're right, that does buy into this notion of we've got to keep this fairly low-key, we can't let this

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escalate into something bigger, but there are ideas that start to get, that start to be innovated on the ground, that we find interesting ways, keeny-meany operations in Yemen, you know, for example, that, okay, rather crude by today's standards, but they try to find innovative ways to try and infiltrate enemy personnel, to try and

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undertake acts of targeted killing, so all of these are interesting sort of local level innovations that we're quite interested in, that hopefully can allow us to try and revise notions of national level policy. I think a scrutiny point is a good one as well though, which builds into your research on remote warfare, is that the levels of,

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when there is more scrutiny about an operation, or there is, which can lead to public resentment of boots on the ground, the horrible phrase, that creates, we think, conditions which would enable collusion to flourish. If there was less scrutiny, and it was miles and miles away on the far side of the world, in Malaya or somewhere, then you're more likely to

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a. see conventional forces doing bad and counterproductive stuff, which has since come to light, whereas if it's closer to home, like Ireland, where there is a lot more scrutiny, then, and there was a lot of scrutiny of the so-called shoot to kill units and undercover MRF, that kind of stuff in the early 1970s, I think the level of scrutiny, if there's a lot of scrutiny,

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it can enable collusion to flourish, because you have, again, you have that double deniability, you have that extra hand removed, and I think the idea of distance is quite important here. That's so interesting, and I know that you've done a lot of work as well on deniability, both plausible and implausible, of operations, and we certainly have lots of discussions about

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the impact that the information environment today is having on this idea of a secret operation, or a secret relationship, and I guess post things like the WikiLeaks exposure of diplomatic relations, and the fact that, you know, conducting a secret bombing campaign in another country, even if it is over the other side of the world, seems to be, you know,

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not something that people could get away with now. Do you see an impact of this sort of information age, information environment on things like collusion, or does this happen at a level of removal from official policy that still makes this sort of secret relationship possible? I think it's lower, yes, it's at a lower level, but because of the difficulty of keeping things

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secret and plausibly deniable, why take the risk of then tasking somebody to do something which is illegal, improper, dodgy, whatever you think of it, why, even if it's kind of covert, why take that risk instead, and as the British, like I can't comment on the current stuff because it's not really my field, but in the older times, yeah the older times, in the Biblical days,

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in post-45 international history, when it was still very difficult to keep things secret, the Brits decided, well instead of tasking someone to do this, kill somebody, we shouldn't do that, but instead we'll create these conditions where this person dies, and therefore if and when it does come out, we can say it wasn't us, and those denials are

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pretty plausible, because there was no smoking gun. But the social, you know, the area of social media, fake news, does exacerbate the potential for that conditioning that we've already identified was a key British trait historically, to become amplified, that the sowing of disinformation is a potent conditioner to a febrile political atmosphere that can engender a killing or an

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assassination, by default, by a third party, that we wanted to engender in the first place, so it has the capacity to be a key aid. Yeah, it's so interesting isn't it, and even when it doesn't come to, you know, an actual killing or targeted killing, you can look at those parallels towards how much is that sort of setting the conditions for particular decisions to be made in elections,

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you know, altering a narrative around an election in another country, to depose a particular government, or to bring someone specific in, I mean, how much of a collusion, in your way, is it you focusing on targeted killing, because that's your interest area, or how much do you see it linked to collusion around other areas of foreign policy as well, that may be slightly less lethal,

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but nonetheless quite instructive when you're looking at influence, and the influence of the UK and its partners over partner countries. Targeted killing became the specific lens through which we wanted to look at collusion first and foremost, going back to the sort of the starting point of Jihadi John, and seeing how targeted killing and collusion in that became headline news,

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became an important way that Britain was dealing with a contemporary security problem, and then trying to sort of work backwards from that was the reason why we wanted to keep targeted killing as our sort of primary focus. However, I think that this project is probably going to open the doors to sort of other elements too, where collusion has resulted in, say,

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change the government, so it's a first step. And it ties into that broader idea about covert action more generally, which is what impact can one expect from covert action, and the general consensus is you can only give history a helping hand, you can nudge events in the right direction, but it's very difficult to overthrow a government from scratch, you need to have

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rebels in place who you can support. If you want to manipulate an election, you need to have divisions that you can exploit, you can't create those divisions from scratch. So what we see with the Russians in 2016, for example, it wasn't getting Trump elected per se, it was exploiting the divisions which enabled Trump to be elected. There's a kind of similar principle, I suppose.

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All of which seems to be a fairly good pitch for governments to have a clear idea of what their, you know, strategic objectives are, so that you can be creating conditions that are hopefully supportive of them, or at least, you know, something, as you say, kind of keeping your options open. Yeah, and I think that that plays into quite a lot of the conversations we've had

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around remote warfare, that I think parallel your own work around how this, because it feels one step removed from your own forces doing the action, it can present the idea of this being risk-free, or a lower risk option, and I feel like that only perpetuates that danger. Massively, it's, I agree, I think it's a higher risk, that's why we definitely overlap, because

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if I was being really cynical, you could say, if you wanted to take a drone strike and kill someone, and you do it yourself, yes there are going to be lots of criticisms, but at least you've got control of that, and at least it's your technology, your man or woman, you're pressing the button, you're killing the person.