Hello, true, hello. Welcome back to our new spies listeners. Welcome back to our new assignment, the True Spies Debrief. Here on the debrief, we catch up with some of our favorite guests from the True Spies Archive

for a deeper look at the themes, events and insights that fascinate them.

Robert DeWittie spent 26 years as a CIA undercover operations officer.

In the True Spies episode, Justice for Leon Klinghofer,

he recounted his hunt for justice after the killing of an American war veteran aboard a cruise ship

in the Mediterranean. Today, Bob works as an instructor for multiple government agencies,

and more and more he's being asked to speak on the dangers

of transnational repression, the intimidation, harassment, or other human rights abuses

perpetrated by countries on their own people beyond their borders. True spies' producer Morgan

Child sat down with Bob for a crash course in transnational repression

and to hear why these abuses are becoming more common around the world.

So Bob, thank you for being here.

There are a lot of things that we could talk about today, but this topic is something

that's currently quite top of mind for you.

I'd like to start by hearing about how you define transnational repression

and also by asking you why it's become a particular area of focus for you.

Yeah, so transnational repression is kind of any effort by a government to silence, to harass, to intimidate,

to pressure their citizens that live outside of their country. So in other words, citizens of their country that live in other countries,

transnational repression is an effort to, again, get them to stop

what they're doing or to get them to issue statements in support of that government or to support

that government in some ways or just stop opposing that government. And so it's kind of always been

around. I think we're just paying more attention to it lately

...