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Dr Luca Trenta is a lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University. He is the holder of a 2017 British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award for this project. He previously received a British Academy Small Research grant in 2016 for his project on 'Targeted killing? The recurrence of assassination is US foreign policy.' He has published a monograph on risk and presidential decision-making with Routledge. He has also published articles on US foreign policy and presidential decision-making in Diplomacy and Statecraft and in The Journal of Transatlantic Studies. His research interests include US foreign policy, intelligence, covert action, assassination, and the use of drones. He is a regular contributor to The Conversation, Talk Radio and BBC Radio Wales. 

Project Leader

Dr Simon Willmetts is a lecturer in American Studies at the University of Hull. His research falls broadly within the fields of film history, cultural theory and US foreign policy. Before joining Hull he worked on the AHRC project at Warwick University entitled The Landscapes of Secrecy: The CIA and the Contested Record of US Foreign Policy. Simon’s work for the project examined filmic representations of the Agency. He has published articles in the Journal of American Studies, the Journal of British Cinema and Television and the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. His forthcoming book with Edinburgh University Press is a history of the OSS and CIA in Hollywood cinema.

Dr Vladimir Rauta is a University of Portsmouth Teaching Fellow in Strategic Studies based at RAF College Cranwell. His expertise is in indirect third-party military intervention, or, simply put, proxy wars. His research has focused on examining the concept of proxy wars both theoretically and empirically, applying this to Africa. His research interests are not confined to proxy wars. More broadly he is interested in analysing contemporary forms of projecting political violence, both overt and covert. Additionally, he is interested in the links between proxy wars and intelligence studies, as part of the broader processes of covert assistance/action to (para)military groups and strategic deniability.

I am currently a 2nd year PhD candidate at University College London. My PhD is titled 'The Pentagon’s Spies: A Study of the Defense Intelligence Agency, from JFK to Trump.' My research is a historical study examining the evolution of US defence intelligence, from the Cold War to the present day, through the lens of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was set up in 1961, by then Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, as an attempt to streamline and improve the accuracy of military intelligence. President Obama has commented that the agency has been a “critical component” of the United States national defense, both in war and peacetime. However, outside of the US intelligence community, the role of the DIA is largely unknown, as historians have tended to focus on the exploits of the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency. My thesis investigates the DIA's contribution to US national security, particularly, the agency's focus on counter-terrorism in the 1980s for which it was awarded the Defense Department’s ‘Joint Meritorious Unit Award’ by Caspar Weinberger, and the increasing expansion of its HUMINT (human intelligence) capability in the post 9/11 era. My broader research interests include covert action and Cold War US Foreign Policy, nuclear history (my MA dissertation was on the Able Archer 83 incident), and the rise of the US national security state from 1947 onwards.

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Lloyd Hopkins is a PhD candidate at Swansea University. His research focuses on the interdisciplinary study US military and defence strategy. Lloyd’s research interests include the dynamics unconventional warfare, military change and innovation, strategic culture, and covert action. His doctoral research forms a strategic cultural analysis of “remote” warfare. He is particularly interested in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles through the spectrum of conflict. Lloyd has delivered classes on the practice of drone-led targeted killing to schools as part of supra-curricular programmes.  

Martin Horton-Eddison is a PhD candidate with the Global Drug Policy Observatory at Swansea University. His PhD is entitled 'Crypto-Drug Markets: A Unique Challenge to the Global Drug Prohibition Regime?' His research investigates the transnational crypto-drug market phenomena and the (potential) associated challenges for international drug control policy. The research operates within, and will contribute to, IR Regime Theory, and intersects with questions regarding the ongoing primacy of the state in the international system, traditional conceptions of identity, international and domestic legal jurisdictions, as well as the role of intelligence agencies and covert action.