On the morning of September 11, 2001, the chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, Father Mychal Judge, was told that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. He changed from his Franciscan habit into his chaplain’s uniform, donned his fire helmet, and joined the rush of brave men and women to the Twin Towers. When he arrived, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani saw him. The mayor grabbed Father Mychal by the arm and asked him to pray for the city. Father Mychal looked at the mayor with his usual big grin and said, “I always do.” Only moments later, as Father Mychal was heading straight into danger to minister to his firemen, falling debris from the collapsing South Tower struck him down. An iconic photograph captured the moment when firemen and first responders carried Father Mychal’s limp body from the debris. Father Mychal was the first victim recovered at the scene, making him the city’s first officially recorded fatality of the attacks.
At almost exactly the same time that Father Mychal fell, Kevin Shaeffer, a young officer in the Naval Operations Center in the Pentagon, was following the terrible events in New York. With no warning, his workplace exploded in an orange fireball as Flight 77 crashed through the building. At the moment of impact, Kevin was thrown across the room. He would later learn that all twenty-nine of his coworkers had perished in that instant. The intense heat melted his name tag, but, perhaps foreshadowing what was to come, did not touch the ribbons on his uniform. Remembering his emergency training, Kevin smothered the flames engulfing his clothes and hair. Breathing in jet fuel and thick black smoke, Kevin crawled through water gushing from pipes and past live electrical wires toward the blue sky he glimpsed through gaps in the wreckage. He called out for help, and, at first, no one answered.
Nearby, an army sergeant first class named Steve Workman heard the explosion and ran toward the burning Ops Center. He found Kevin and immediately recognized the severity of his injuries. Steve helped Kevin to safety, and he prevented Kevin from going into shock by raising his legs. Steve helped Kevin into one of the first ambulances on the scene and rode with him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Along the way, Steve asked Kevin about his life, his family, and his hobbies, anything to keep him conscious. At the hospital, the best trauma doctors on the planet gave Kevin a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. He had third-degree burns over almost half his body and extreme difficulty breathing. In the following weeks, Kevin battled infections, fluid buildup in his lungs, and the pain of the burns. During surgery in early October, Kevin went into cardiac arrest and died twice on the operating table, but he was brought back to life each time. After many months, seventeen operations, and countless hours of torturous physical therapy, Kevin recovered. He was among the last of those injured on 9/11 to be released from the hospital.
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Why tell these stories? Because they underscore two extremely important points: one, the world is a very dangerous place, and two, it takes heroes to protect us from those dangers—US diplomats, intelligence officers, military personnel, and federal law enforcement officers, not to mention local police officers and fire fighters. And there is little doubt in my mind that the world is going to become an even more dangerous place in terms of international terrorism, and that our need for heroes—like Father Mychal, Kevin, and Steve—is, unfortunately, only going to continue to grow.
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In February 2013, as President Obama was considering options for a US military presence in Afghanistan after 2014, Tom Donilon, the president’s national security advisor, had a request for Matt Olsen, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and me, the acting director of CIA. He asked that we have a conversation with the president about what the threat from international terrorists—primarily al Qa‘ida—would look like in the years ahead, so that the president could think about Afghanistan in a broader context. It was a great question, and to prepare for the meeting I huddled for two hours in my office with CIA’s best and brightest experts on international terrorism.
As always, the smartest and most insightful person in the room was the director of the Counterterrorism Center, Roger (because he is undercover I cannot use his real name). Roger is the hardest-working and most dedicated officer with whom I have worked at the Agency. He has run the center for several years—longer than anyone before him—and he has produced results. He is tough to work with because he sets the bar very high, but there is no better person to be protecting the country from al Qa‘ida. My last official act—literally five minutes before my successor took over as deputy director—was to call Roger and simply tell him that I thought he was the most talented operations officer with whom I had ever worked. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, then a quiet “Thank you.”
Roger presented the most insightful ideas during the prep session, and I went home that night and wrote out what I wanted to tell the president. I presented CIA’s thoughts to the president on February 21, 2013. I talked about how we saw the extremist threat at the moment, how it had changed since 9/11, and how we thought it would evolve in the years ahead. In addition, I outlined the state of our overseas partnerships that are so critical to dealing with the threat. The overarching theme of my presentation—almost two years ago to the day of the writing of this book and well before the rise of ISIS—was that the war against Islamic extremism was far from over and that this war would be one that would be fought by multiple generations. I told the president that my children’s generation and my grandchildren’s generation would still be fighting this fight.
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Twenty years into my career I was asked to be George W. Bush’s first intelligence briefer, and I spent several months of that time providing unspecified warnings that al Qa‘ida was about to hit us somewhere. Those briefings, of course, included the August 6, 2001, piece Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in the United States. Thirty years into my career I was asked to become a member of the Deputies Committee of Barack Obama’s National Security Council by serving as the deputy director of CIA. In that capacity I would provide many briefings to the president over the next three and a half years about al Qa‘ida, our successes against it, and the many threats it still posed. This included the February 21, 2013, briefing requested by Tom Donilon.
In this chapter I want to give you—the readers of this book—a briefing on the terrorist threat we are facing, and I will do it as if I were speaking to a president of the United States, albeit with unclassified information. The key questions are what is the threat today, where is it going, and what should the United States do about all of this? Because CIA does not recommend policy, this latter question is not something an intelligence officer would normally brief to a president, but, given the importance of the issue, I will do it here in this book.
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Let’s start the briefing with two overarching points. First, extremists inspired by Usama Bin Ladin’s ideology consider themselves to be at war with the United States and they want to attack us—and neither one of these two facts will change anytime soon. It is important to never forget that—no matter how long it has been since the last attack here in the homeland.
Second, in the post-9/11 fight against these terrorists, we have scored a great victory but so have the extremists. Our great victory has been the severe degradation and near defeat of al Qa‘ida’s core leadership, still located in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the group responsible for the terror that occurred on that beautiful, bright sunny day in September 2001. The degradation has been so severe that al Qa‘ida in Pakistan no longer has the capability to conduct a 9/11 style attack—multiple, simultaneous, complex attacks that kill thousands.
Al Qa‘ida’s great victory has been the spread of its ideology, its franchising, across a geographic area that now runs from northern Nigeria north into the Sahel, primarily in northern Mali, and across North Africa from Morocco to Algeria to Tunisia to Libya and Egypt; that includes parts of East Africa, primarily in Somalia but also in Kenya; that stretches across the Gulf of Aden into Yemen and up to Iraq and Syria, still in South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh), and in some parts of Southeast Asia. All told, some 20 countries now have groups of terrorists inside their borders espousing the jihadist ideology.
This spread began because of Bin Ladin’s successes in East Africa, Yemen, and the United States (the embassy bombings in 1998, the Cole bombing in 2000, and 9/11). These al Qa‘ida victories created a following for Bin Ladin across the Muslim world. He became a role model. The spread was given a boost by the operatives who fled South Asia after 9/11 and by Muslim opposition to the Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan—just as Bin Ladin had hoped. But the spread of the al Qa‘ida brand has been given perhaps its most significant lift as a result of the Arab Spring, which created safe havens in which al Qa‘ida could operate and that provided the franchises with much-needed recruits, money, and weapons.
This geographic dispersion is important because it stretches the diplomatic, intelligence, and military resources of the United States—at a time when the available resources are shrinking. The State Department has never been given—by any of a number of administrations and different Congresses—the resources it needs to do its job around the globe. The intelligence community and the US military were given an infusion of resources in the aftermath of 9/11, but those budgets have been falling for the last few years and they will likely continue to fall. But these cuts are in no way automatic. They are a conscious choice that the administration, Congress, and the American people are making.
These two “victories”—one for the good guys and one for the bad guys—have altered the threat landscape in significant ways. The change is defined by a reduction of the threat from the original al Qa‘ida organization but a significant expansion of the threat from the emerging groups, a reduction in the threat of large, spectacular attacks but a skyrocketing rise in the threat of small-scale attacks. And this is playing out. Jim Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, told Congress in July 2015 that “when the final accounting is done, 2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years such data has been compiled.”
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So, this is the threat from a general perspective. What about the threat posed by individual terrorist groups? That is the next issue to cover in this briefing
ISIS. The Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) is a very good place to start because the group has grown faster than any terrorist group we can remember and because the threat it poses to us is as wide-ranging as any we have seen.
ISIS was born of al Qa‘ida. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, al Qa‘ida made a calculated choice to confront us there. It built its organization in Iraq around Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, who trained with al Qa‘ida in Afghanistan before 9/11 and who led an Islamic extremist organization in northern Iraq prior to the war. He had an on-again, off-again relationship with Bin Ladin: he did not like being managed from Pakistan, but he shared Bin Ladin’s ideology fully. He also had the benefit of the many foreign nationals who raced to Iraq to join the jihadist fight against the West.
Zarqawi’s organization, called al Qa‘ida in Iraq (AQI), pursued a fiendish strategy of attacking not only coalition and Iraqi government targets but also Shi’a targets. The goal was to start a civil war and to significantly undercut the stability of Iraq, making our job that much more difficult. Regrettably, AQI was assisted by two decisions by the Coalition Provisional Authority (the temporary governing entity established by the United States following the invasion of Iraq). The edicts were made in the early weeks after the cessation of combat operations. The decisions—to remove anyone who had been a member of Saddam’s Baath Party from a position inside the Iraqi government, and to disband any organization with close ties to the Baath Party—resulted in the collapse of the Iraqi military and security services. The resulting vacuum was filled by Iraqi Sunni insurgents, Shi’a militias, and AQI.
The United States, together with its coalition partners and the Iraqis, worked over a period of years to get Iraq under control in general and to destroy AQI in particular. Great success was achieved by the end of the Bush administration in January 2009, with AQI on the ropes. That progress continued through the end of 2011, when the last US troops were withdrawn from Iraq. AQI, however, benefited from the military vacuum—both because there was less military and intelligence pressure on the group but also because Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, without the United States in the country, felt emboldened to move even more aggressively in an authoritarian direction, alienating and disenfranchising Sunnis at every turn. Moderate Sunnis began to support AQI.
AQI also benefited from its involvement in Syria (it was when AQI joined the fight in Syria that the group changed its name to ISIS). ISIS added Syrians and foreign fighters to its ranks, built its supply of arms and money, and gained significant battlefield experience fighting the Assad regime. Together with the security vacuum in Iraq and Maliki’s alienation of the Sunnis, this culminated in ISIS’s successful blitzkrieg across western Iraq in the spring and summer of 2014, seizing large amounts of territory. ISIS now controls more territory—in Iraq and Syria—than any other terrorist group anywhere in the world.
It is interesting to note that ISIS is not the first extremist group to take and hold territory. Al-Shabab in Somalia did so a number of years ago and still holds territory there, al Qa‘ida in the Islamic Maghreb did so in Mali in 2012, and al Qa‘ida in Yemen did so there at roughly the same time. I fully expect extremist groups to attempt to take—and sometimes to be successful in taking—territory in the years ahead. But no group has taken so much territory so quickly as ISIS has.
Although there is a deep rift between the leadership of al Qa‘ida and the leadership of ISIS, it is important to note that ISIS is effectively al Qa‘ida. ISIS shares Bin Ladin’s long-term goal of establishing a global caliphate, it sees both the West and its allies in the Middle East as it its primary enemies, and it sees violence as the most effective means of achieving its goals. The only reason that ISIS is not formally part of al Qa‘ida is that the group does not want to have to follow the guidance of Zawahiri. It’s an issue of “who should be calling the shots,” not an issue of a different vision.
ISIS poses four significant threats to the United States. First, ISIS is a threat to the stability of the entire Middle East. ISIS is putting the territorial integrity of both Iraq and Syria at risk. And a collapse of either or both of these states could easily spread throughout the region, bringing with it sectarian and religious strife, humanitarian crises, and the violent redrawing of borders, all in a part of the world that remains critical to US national security.
Second, ISIS’s success on the battlefield and its Madison-Avenue quality messaging on the internet is attracting vulnerable young men and women to travel to Syria and Iraq to join its cause. At this writing, at least twenty thousand foreign nationals from roughly ninety countries have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the fight. Most have joined ISIS. This flow of foreigners has outstripped the flow of fighters into Iraq during the war there a decade ago. And there are more foreign fighters in Syria today than there were in Afghanistan in the 1980s working to drive the Soviet Union out of that country. These foreign nationals are getting experience on the battlefield, and they are becoming increasingly radicalized to ISIS’s cause.
There is a particular subset of these fighters to worry about. Somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 jihadist wannabes have traveled to Syria and Iraq from Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and the United States. They all have easy access to the U.S. homeland.
There are two possibilities here to worry about. One is that these fighters will leave the Middle East and either conduct an attack on their own or conduct an attack at the direction of the ISIS leadership. The former has already happened in Europe but not yet in the United States (but it will). In spring 2014, a young Frenchman, Mehdi Nemmouche, who went to fight in Syria, returned to Europe and shot three people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels.
The latter—an ISIS-directed attack—has not yet occurred either, but it will as well. Today, such an attack would be relatively unsophisticated (small scale) but over time ISIS’s capability to conduct a more complex attack will grow. This is what long-term safe haven in Iraq and Syria would give ISIS, and it is exactly what the group is planning to do. They have announced their intentions to attack us—just like Bin Ladin did in the years prior to 9/11.
Third, ISIS is building a following among other extremist groups around the world—again, at a more rapid pace than al Qa‘ida ever enjoyed. This has occurred in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Afghanistan. More will follow. This makes these groups, which are already dangerous even more dangerous because they will increasingly target ISIS’s enemies (including us) and they will increasingly take-on ISIS’s brutality. We saw the former play out in early 2015 when an ISIS-associated group in Libya killed an American—in an attack on a hotel in Tripoli frequented by diplomats and international businessmen. We saw the second play out just a few weeks later when another ISIS-affiliated group in Libya beheaded twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christians.
And, fourth, ISIS’s message is radicalizing young men and women around the globe who have never traveled to Syria or Iraq but who want to commit an attack to demonstrate their solidarity with ISIS. Such an ISIS-inspired attack has already occurred in the United States—an individual with sympathies for ISIS attacked two New York City police officers with a hatchet. Al Qa‘ida has inspired such attacks here—the Fort Hood shootings in late 2009 that killed thirteen and the Boston Marathon bombing in spring 2013 that killed five and injured nearly three hundred.
We can expect more of these kinds of attacks in the United States. Attacks by ISIS-inspired individuals are occurring at a rapid pace around the world—roughly ten since ISIS took control of so much terriroty. Two such attacks have occurred in Canada—including the October 2014 attack on the Parliament building. And another occurred in Sydney, Australia, in December 2014. Many planning such attacks—in Australia, Western Europe, and the United States—have been arrested before they could carry out their terrorist plans.
AQAP. Al Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qa‘ida in Yemen—the group most tightly aligned to the al Qa‘ida leadership in Pakistan—poses an even greater threat to the US homeland than does ISIS, at least for now. The last three attempted attacks by an al Qa‘ida group against the United States—the Christmas day bomber in 2009, the printer cartridge plot in 2010, and the nonmetallic bomb plot in 2012—were all AQAP plots. Two of these came close to being great successes for al Qa‘ida. To put it bluntly, I would not be surprised if AQAP tomorrow brought down a US airliner traveling from London to New York or from New York to Los Angeles or anywhere else in the United States. Not surprised at all.
And one AQAP senior leader is more dangerous than the rest—Ibrahim al-Asiri, a Saudi by birth and AQAP’s chief bomb maker. Asiri is the mastermind behind new explosive devices designed to evade security checks. He is smart and creative, and he is training a new generation of AQAP bomb makers. He undoubtedly has trained dozens over the past couple at years. He may well be the most dangerous terrorist alive today. He is a master at his craft and he is evil.
He built a rectum bomb and recruited his younger brother, Abdullah, to use it in an attempt to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s most senior security official, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, the country’s minister of the interior and now deputy crown prince. Abdullah pretended to be a repentant terrorist, and in a meeting with Prince Muhammad designed to symbolize the sincerity of his change of heart, he detonated the device. The two were sitting on pillows on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, when Abdullah hit a button on a cell phone, detonating the explosives. Abdullah was killed instantly—pieces of him were scattered all over the room, including the ceiling—but Prince Muhammad, sitting just inches away, survived with only minor injuries. He did not even spend a night in the hospital. Scientists explain Prince Muhammad’s survival in terms of the physics of the blast, but the prince does not accept this explanation. He thinks that God saved him for a purpose—to continue to help keep his country safe from terrorism, particularly from AQAP, an organization located on the same peninsula as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I find the prince’s reasoning compelling.
Asiri’s bomb exploits go well beyond killing his own brother. Asiri was the mastermind behind young Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear bomb, which nearly brought down an airliner flying from Amsterdam to Detroit. Asiri also built a bomb hidden in a printer cartridge that, once the cartridge was placed in a printer, was nearly impossible to find. The goal was to bring down a cargo plane—or multiple cargo planes. The printer cartridge bomb could not be found on traditional airport scanners, and dogs trained to identify explosives could not find it either. He also built a non-metallic suicide vest, again designed to bring down airliners, and he has experimented with surgically implanting explosive devices inside human bodies.
AQAP’s capabilities were on full display in Paris in January 2015, when two brothers attacked the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo over the media outlet’s lampooning of the Prophet Muhammad. The attack, which killed twelve, was methodical and demonstrated planning, organization, and precision. The brothers escaped the scene, were found two days later twenty miles northeast of Paris, took hostages, and were finally gunned down by police after a nine-hour siege. At the same time the siege was underway, a third individual conducted a sympathy attack, taking and killing four hostages at a kosher market in Paris, before the police killed him as well. The assault on Charlie Hebdo was the largest terrorist attack in France since 1961. It dominated the news for several days.
One of the brothers in 2011 had traveled to Yemen, where he attended a terrorist training camp run by AQAP. He met with a leading operative of the group, an American named Anwar al-Awlaki, who was intent on conducting attacks in the United States and Western Europe. During the operation in Paris, the brothers announced their allegiance to AQAP, and subsequently AQAP claimed to have directed the brothers to attack Charlie Hebdo and to have provided them with funding. If AQAP’s claims are true—and I think they are—this would represent AQAP’s first successful attack in the West and the largest al Qa‘ida attack in Western Europe since the London bombings ten years earlier.
AQSL. So where does the threat to the US homeland from al Qa‘ida in Pakistan, the al Qa‘ida senior leadership, stand today? Al Qa‘ida in Pakistan still has the ability to carry out attacks in the United States, but only small-scale attacks—a singular event that might kill a hundred or fewer. I do not want to understate the significance of such an attack, but al Qa‘ida in Pakistan no longer has the ability to conduct a 9/11-style event.
It had that capability twice—in the period just before 9/11 and from 2006 to 2010. It was taken from the group the first time by the US paramilitary and military intervention in Afghanistan and by Pakistan’s decision to work with CIA against al Qa‘ida. And it was taken from the group the second time by the aggressive CT operations begun by President Bush in August 2008 and continued by President Obama.
But just because it does not have that capability today does not mean it will not get it back someday. And that could happen. Indeed, it may even be likely to happen, given trends in Afghanistan. Even in a best-case outcome for Afghanistan post a withdrawal of US forces, in which the government controls Kabul and most cities, the Taliban will control swaths of Afghan territory in the south and east. (The worst-case outcome is that the Taliban will be knocking on the door of Kabul within eighteen months of the departure of US forces.) The al Qa‘ida leadership in the FATA, if not defeated by then, will find safe havens with the Taliban. Some members will stay in Pakistan, but many will move back across the border into Afghanistan. And if the United States cannot or chooses not to contest al Qa‘ida there, the group will rebound, it will resurge, and it will eventually again pose a 9/11-style threat to the homeland. If this were to occur, it would mean that all of our efforts in Afghanistan over the past fourteen years—the longest war in American history—would have been for naught. What a terrible thing that would be.
And, as in Yemen, there is one particular terrorist in South Asia whom I worry the most about—Farouq al-Qahtani. The al Qa‘ida leadership in Pakistan sent al-Qahtani to Afghanistan as a back-stop so al Qa‘ida could regroup if it lost its sanctuary in Pakistan. Al-Qahtani took his men to one of the most inhospitable places on the planet—Afghanistan’s Kunar and Nuristan Provinces, where steep mountain peaks and narrow river valleys make movement extremely difficult. There al-Qahtani has developed a following among the Taliban and the locals, and his al Qa‘ida branch has grown as more operatives have joined his group.
Al-Qahtani, a Qatari by birth, is a US counterterrorism expert’s worst nightmare. He is smart and operationally sophisticated. He is also a charismatic leader. He is one of the few al Qa‘ida leaders I worry might have what it takes to replace Bin Ladin. I worry more about al-Qahtani than I do about the current leader of al Qa‘ida, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
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Zawahiri became al Qa‘ida’s new leader, its emir, in June 2011, six weeks after Bin Ladin’s death. Zawahiri was born in Egypt in June 1951 and comes from a prominent family. His father’s uncle, Rabi’a al-Zawahiri, was the grand imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar University. His maternal grandfather was a highly regarded academic who served as the president of Cairo University and founded King Saud University in Riyadh. During his teenage years, Zawahiri began a lifelong association with Islamic extremism—to the point where he and some fellow students discussed overthrowing the regime of President Nasser. In 1980, like other ideologically motivated extremists, Zawahiri spent time in Peshawar, a Pakistani city near the Afghan border, where he met and connected with a young Usama bin Ladin. In 1981, after returning from Pakistan, Zawahiri would be implicated, tried, and thrown in prison for allegedly participating in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Some years later, Zawahiri was released from prison and became the new leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), a group which the United States believes helped participate, along with al Qa‘ida, in the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. Just two years later the collaboration between Bin Ladin’s al Qa‘ida and Zawahiri’s EIJ became a full merger of the two organizations, with Zawahiri taking on the role of second in command.
Zawahiri is a less charismatic leader than Bin Ladin, possibly one of the reasons that he was not publically named as al Qa‘ida’s new leader until six weeks after the Abbottabad raid. Since assuming his leadership position, he has presided over the group’s global expansion, but this has been much more a result of the regional affiliates’ actions than Zawahiri’s leadership. Zawahiri in 2013 publicly expelled ISIS, suspending its franchise and stripping it of its status as part of the al Qa‘ida global enterprise, because it had disregarded Zawahiri’s order for ISIS to stay out of Syria. Zawahiri, like Bin Ladin and al Qa‘ida’s other senior leaders, places great importance on maintaining unity, so the move to expel ISIS can be read as a significant step by Zawahiri—but also a failure on his part to bring ISIS into line.
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The Khorasan Group. ISIS is not the only terrorist group in Syria. The first jihadist group there to rise against President Assad was Jabhat al-Nusra. While ISIS grew out of the old al Qa‘ida in Iraq, al-Nusra was formed from an old organization of Syrian extremists, who had helped to facilitate the movement of foreign fighters into Iraq, via Syria, during the initial rise of AQI during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Unlike ISIS, al-Nusra is fully in the camp of the al Qa‘ida leadership in Pakistan. Al-Nusra is an official affiliate of al Qa‘ida, and al-Nusra accepts guidance from Zawahiri.
Early in the fight against Assad, Zawahiri sent a group of his own operatives from Pakistan to Syria. Zawahiri had two objectives for the group: one was to assist al-Nusra in its fight against Assad and the second was to use Syria as a base of operations for attacks the West, to include attacks against the United States. This group of operatives from Pakistan is called the Khorasan Group. Like AQAP and AQSL, the Khorasan Group has the capability to conduct successful attacks in the United States. And, like with ISIS, the more safehaven al-Nusra has in Syria, the more potent their attack capability against the West will become over time.
Boko Haram. Finally, I worry about Boko Haram. While the group has not yet focused on the US Homeland or on Western Europe, it could do so in the years ahead. And if it does, Boko Haram would pose a particularly worrisome threat because of its savage approach to its cause (Boko Haram kills roughly a thousand Nigerian civilians a year and in 2014 kidnapped two hundred Nigerian school girls because it believes girls should not be in school) and because the worldwide Nigerian diaspora would allow Boko Haram operational advantage. That is, Boko Haram’s operatives could hide in plain sight among the many Nigerians living outside of Nigeria.
Other Groups. There is a long list of other jihadist groups, largely in Africa—but also more broadly—who pose a local threat to US interests and our allies. These groups regularly conduct attacks—three of the best known are the September 2012 attacks in Benghazi against our diplomatic facility, an attack in September 2013 in Nairobi, Kenya, involving a number of terrorists from the al Qa‘ida–affiliated group al-Shabab assaulting an upscale mall, and the January 2013 attack in In Amenas, Algeria, which involed terrorists from Mali taking hostages at a natural gas facility in eastern Algeria operated by British Petroleum and Norway’s Statoil. In these three attacks, terrorists killed over a hundred people, including seven Americans. The risk to Americans living and traveling overseas has never been greater.
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The final part of the “this is not over” warning is the most important part of the briefing. Al Qa‘ida, if given a safe haven for some length of time, will again try to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Al Qa‘ida’s groups in various locations and at various times have shown an interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, radiological devices, chemical weapons, and biological weapons. And they will try again.
A recent reminder of this desire was the acquisition by the moderate Sunni opposition in Syria of an ISIS computer. ISIS left the computer behind after retreating from a January 2014 firefight with the opposition. The laptop contains 35,347 hidden files, and these files contain a treasure trove of information on the group, including documents that make clear ISIS’s interest in acquiring a biological weapons capability. A nineteen-page document explains how to develop biological weapons, including how to weaponize the bubonic plague from diseased animals, and a twenty-six-page document justifies on religious grounds the use of weapons of mass destruction. The first document states, “The advantage of biological weapons is that they do not cost a lot of money, while the human casualties can be huge.” The second document notes, “If Muslims cannot defeat the unbelievers in a different way, it is permissible to use weapons of mass destruction—even if it kills all of them and wipes them and their descendants off the face of the Earth.” While some of these documents are dated—going back to Bin Ladin’s pre-9/11 days—they underscore the desire of extremists to get their hands on the world’s most dangerous weapons.
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Now, to the last part of the briefing, which tries to answer the toughest of questions: how do we deal with the problem of terrorism and how do we end this menace?
The most important concept that policy-makers—and the American public—must accept is that, if we are to keep the homeland and Americans overseas safe, we must maintain pressure on al Qa‘ida. Always. This concept needs to be the basis of our policy toward al Qa‘ida wherever it takes root.
But that is not the same thing as saying the United States needs to be the sole actor in putting that pressure on al Qa‘ida. Quite the contrary: it is best if other countries take the lead when they have the necessary capabilities and that we act only when there is no other option. Not only does this make sense from the perspective of not playing into al Qa‘ida’s narrative about the United States, but it also has the best chance of being accepted, long term, by the American people.
What does this mean in practice? First, the US intelligence community and military must—along with our allies—expend resources and effort to build the intelligence, security, military, and rule of law capabilities of the frontline states against al Qa‘ida—particularly those who have been historically weak and those that have been weakened by the Arab Spring. This is a long-term effort, but it has to be systematic, it has to be sustained, and it has to be funded.
Second, having the capabilities is not enough—a willingness of the frontline states to use them against extremist groups is also required. And here American diplomacy must take the lead. The State Department needs to be active in convincing countries to fight terrorism within their borders. And the president and his or her senior national security team must actively support this diplomacy. Third, we need to have global partners who are willing to take action outside their own borders when necessary—so that we are not the only country doing so. That’s another job for our country’s diplomats, including our top diplomat, the president of the United States. For example, this is what France did in Mali in January 2013.
The French government, growing increasingly concerned about the threat from al Qa‘ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), took action. AQIM, reinforced with thousands of weapons from the Libyan stockpile, had taken advantage of a security vacuum in the north caused by the political crisis in Mali. As a result AQIM was able to seize control of a large swath of territory approximately the size of Texas, imposing shari’a law and opening training camps for jihadists of all types. Understanding that France would be AQIM’s number one target, the French responded, putting thousands of troops on the ground and going toe-to-toe with the enemy, killing hundreds of terrorists, driving them back into the mountains, and denying them a vitally important safe haven. The US military supported this effort. The French are to be commended for this action. It is a model for what we need our other allies to do from time to time.
The Kenyans and Ethiopians took a similar step in Somalia in 2011. Deeply concerned about the growth of al-Shabab, an al Qa‘ida–associated terrorist group in Somalia, both countries acted in concert—the Ethiopians directly with their own troops, and the Kenyans using a surrogate force. As in Mali, this intervention was successful in killing hundreds of terrorists and taking valuable territory from them. Al-Shabab is weaker today as a result. The United States was less supportive of this venture—we had doubts about whether it would work or not—but now that it has, we should be providing as much support as possible.
Fourth, the United States needs to act when no one else is able. Whether the action is air strikes from manned or unmanned assets, action from Special Forces personnel on the ground either alone or in close support of others, or even the use of conventional military forces, the United States needs to be willing and able to act. And the leadership of the executive branch and Congress must explain to the American people why this is important. Leadership is not about following public opinion. Leadership is about guiding public opinion to a place that best serves American interests over the longer term.
All of the above is necessary, but it is not enough to win the war over the long term, as more and more terrorists are created every day. To win the war over the longer term, we and our allies must address the issues that create terrorists in the first place. We must address the disease as well as the symptoms. We must undermine the jihadist appeal to disenchanted young Muslims. We must discredit the terrorists’ narrative that hatred and violence are the only mechanisms for dealing with the modern world and the resulting pressures on Islam. This effort essentially requires winning the war of ideas. But it also requires minimizing the number of disenchanted young Muslims through economic and social development. Counter-radicalization is a two-part effort.
Counter-radicalization has not been a major focus of the United States since 9/11, but action on this front is just as important as action on the intelligence, law enforcement, and military fronts. There have been steps in this direction, but much more needs to be done. Developing the policies to get at the root causes of why young men and some women join terrorist groups has never really gotten off the ground. For every hour that I spent in the Situation Room talking about counter-radicalization, I spent a thousand hours talking about dealing with young men who had already become radicalized. The dollars spent by our government on programs related to counter-radicalization are an infinitesimally small percentage of the government’s overall CT budget.
It is not unreasonable to ask, “Why have we not attacked the problem at its roots?” The answer is twofold. First, the priority will always be on those individuals who are trying to attack the United States. That will always take precedence over the longer-term issues. And, second, the issues involved in counter-radicalization are numerous and complex, and require a number of countries to take the right steps. The issues involve good governance; anti-corruption; economic development; social service provision, particularly education; religious tolerance; and a host of other issues. Most important, for every narrative of al Qa‘ida’s, there must be a counter-narrative delivered loudly and widely—by the United States and our allies, by governments in countries where young people are radicalized, and by Islamic scholars and clerics..
One of the best examples of success in this area is Indonesia—the home to the largest Muslim population on the planet. Between 9/11 and 2006, Indonesia suffered sixteen terrorist attacks, resulting in more than three hundred deaths. In the next eight years, there were only five attacks, causing fourteen deaths. And, as of early 2015, only about 150 Indonesians had gone to fight in Syria, a remarkably low number for its population and for its terrorist past. While excellent intelligence and law enforcement work have played a role—and these tools will remain vital, particularly as many terrorists will be released from prison over the next few years—so have the Indonesian government’s counter-radicalization programs.
At the core of Jakarta’s program is a willingness to work with any entity that can reach young people with the right messages. The program is systematic and reaches almost every part of Indonesian society. The messages are essentially two—that the extremist interpretation of Islam is not consistent with the Koran, and that there is great value in tolerance.
Religious organizations in Indonesia are popular within society and are therefore an important channel for delivering the government’s counter-narrative to al Qa‘ida. Jakarta, for example, works with imams and mosques to offer a variety of perspectives on Islam, particularly to youth and student groups. Schools are also a focus—courses emphasize inclusion and tolerance. All the world’s religions are now studied, not just Islam, and schools are working to provide multiple perspectives on some of the issues that have played a role in radicalization, such as the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians.
Popular culture is also used. The government communicates with young people through popular musicians who communicate carefully crafted messages aimed at counteracting radical ideas. Music with lyrics about tolerance as an alternative to extremism has become popular in Indonesia and indeed throughout Southeast Asia. All of this is supported by a variety of media—books, articles, newsletters, the Internet, television, and radio. TV and the Internet focus on urban populations. Radio stations reach rural areas.
All of this, of course, requires focus, effort, and resources. It needs to be done throughout the Muslim world. It needs to be led by the governments in question. And it needs to be supported by the United States.
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To me this is the most important chapter in the book, because it is about the threat from al Qa‘ida going forward and what we need to do to deal with it. But in sharing my thoughts in this chapter, I do not mean to imply that international terrorism is the only national security issue facing the United States. Quite the contrary. Terrorism is only one of many security issues we are facing as a country. Al Qa‘ida, as dangerous as it is, is only one of the things that keeps me up at night.
I believe national security issues can be put into two bins—national security threats and national security challenges that, if not managed effectively, could become threats. In addition to terrorism, the threats we face include “cyber”—cyber espionage, cyber crime, and cyber warfare—Iran, North Korea, narcotics and human trafficking, the intelligence activities of our adversaries, and others. The challenges we face are also many and include the rise of China, the Cold War–like behavior of Russia, the future stability of key countries like Pakistan, and historic change in what is still the most important place on the planet—the Middle East.
Of the threats, two stand out to me—“cyber” and Iran. The online world of cyber is now the preferred method that intelligence services use in stealing national defense secrets. Several nations have the capability to attack our critical infrastructure—transportation, finance, energy, etc.—in a way that could literally bring our nation to a standstill. Cyber is used by both foreign governments and foreign companies to steal the intellectual property of American companies—to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Cyber crime, largely committed by organized crime groups, is now generating as much money as the illegal drug trade. And all of this is going to get worse as cyber tools spread to more adversaries and as even more advanced tools are developed.
On Iran, it is very easy to go immediately to the nuclear issue, but our problems with Iran are much deeper. Iran wants to be the hegemonic power in the Middle East; it wants, in short, to reestablish the Persian Empire, which at its height in 500 BCE controlled 45 percent of the world’s population. Moreover, many Iranian leaders believe that Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth. Iran itself practices terrorism as a tool of statecraft, and Iran supports terrorist groups that target Israel, including the most significant ones—Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran supports insurgent groups in the Persian Gulf that want to overthrow the governments there. It supports the Houthi insurgency in Yemen, which in early 2015 overthrew the legitimate government of Yemen. And on top of all that, is Iran’s nuclear program. Iran is going to be a problem for the United States for a long time to come.
Among the national security challenges, none is more important than China. The US-China relationship is the most important bilateral tie in the world. There are two sides to the relationship—one positive and one negative. The positive includes the economic relationship between China and the United States, which is vital to both countries’ futures. In addition, based on meetings I had with my Chinese counterparts, there are more global national security issues where our interests overlap than where they are in tension, creating opportunities to work together. The negative side includes the fact that China is a rising power relative to the United States—and that China wants a greater say and greater influence in East Asia, where the US is currently in the driver’s seat; it also includes the fact that each country needs to prepare for war against the other (because our militaries are in close proximity to each other). Each plans for such a war, each trains for it, and each must equip its forces with the modern weaponry to fight it. Both of these trends on the negative side of the equation lead to tension in the relationship. The key question—the key challenge—is how to mitigate the downsides while taking advantage of the upsides to push the relationship forward. This will be a major task of the next president. President Obama began this agenda with his Asia-Pacific rebalancing and in his conversations with Chinese president Xi, and our next president must aggressively move the agenda forward.
The United States, of course, is going to have to deal with all these problems, and doing so successfully is going to require many things—including first-rate intelligence. Why? Because intelligence has never been more important than it is today. That is because without intelligence, policy-makers cannot understand many of these issues, cannot make policy on them, and, in most cases, cannot carry out the policy they establish. Just think about it this way: almost any expert, using open sources, can provide real insights on the eurozone crisis, German politics, or the Japanese economy. But only the intelligence community can provide insights on the plans, intentions, and capabilities of al Qa‘ida, the status of the Iranian nuclear program, or the capabilities of North Korean missiles. In short, this is a critical time to be an intelligence officer.
Dealing with these issues will also require educating our allies and adversaries alike on what the United States is all about. I was struck during my thirty-three-year career how many misperceptions there are of the United States and our policies. The Supreme Leader in Iran and the leadership of North Korea, for example, both believe that the United States wants to overthrow their regimes and is working to do so. That is not true. Russian president Putin believes that the United States was behind the protests in the streets of Kiev that began the Russia-Ukraine crisis. That is not true. The number of misperceptions and even conspiracy theories is large and worrying—because it both creates threats and makes managing them difficult.
* * *
I remember visiting with Afghan president Karzai in Kabul in late 2010 only a few weeks after WikiLeaks, an online organization that publishes secret information, posted on its website and disseminated to several news organizations thousands of US State Department cables. The documents were provided by Chelsea Manning, who was serving with the US military in Iraq. Many of the cables reported on discussions that US diplomats had with foreign leaders as well as our diplomats’ thoughts on a large variety of foreign policy issues. The damage to US foreign policy was immediate and significant.
When I walked into Karzai’s office that day, the first thing he said to me was “Congratulations, Michael.” I said, “Mr. President, congratulations for what?” “For WikiLeaks,” he said. I said, “Mr. President, I don’t follow you. I don’t understand.” He said, “WikiLeaks was a brilliant CIA operation. Now foreign leaders will not talk to the State Department; they will only talk to CIA. Great job.” I jokingly responded, “If only we were that good.” But to Karzai this was not humor. He really believed it. He really believed that CIA had leaked thousands of classified State Department documents to get a leg up in the bureaucracy. It was an example of the kind of misperceptions and conspiracy theories that abound in the world.
* * *
Successfully dealing with the national security threats and challenges facing the United States also requires US leadership. No other country on the planet has the resources or the credibility to play that leadership role. American leadership is a necessary condition for mitigating the many threats and dealing with the many challenges we face. And policy-makers—most important the president and the leadership in Congress—have a responsibility to educate the American people on the threats and the important role required by the United States.
Policy-makers must approach the threats and challenges this country faces with the same sense of urgency as the officers I worked with from our Counterterrorism Center. There is a sign as you enter an important office in CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. The sign is a picture of the burning Twin Towers on 9/11, and there are words printed at the top. Those words are “Today is September 12, 2001.” That is the mind-set with which CTC does its job today and it is the mind-set with which CIA combats all the threats I just talked about.
And finally, we can only mitigate the threats facing us and deal with the challenges if we are strong as a nation, and we can be strong only if our political leaders make decisions that move our economy and our society forward. Because at the end of the day the most important determinant of a nation’s national security is the health of its economy and its society. That is why it is vital for our leaders to come together, discuss the tough issues, compromise, and make decisions. Nothing is more important to our future security as a nation.
* * *
Let me come back to the two stories that opened the chapter. First, Steve and Kevin.
For his courageous actions on 9/11, Steve earned the Soldier’s Medal, the highest peacetime award for valor. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, he became a casualty assistance officer, helping others through their times of grief. He continues to serve our country today at the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Following his recovery Kevin went on to serve on the 9/11 Commission, and he worked for CIA in our Counterterrorism Center, helping to keep our country safe from other attacks. He worked there until after Bin Ladin was brought to justice, and then he felt he could finally move on.
One more word about Kevin. In those early hours on September 11, the doctors were not sure Kevin would live. And for many months they were not sure that he would ever be able to have children. But Kevin and his wife eventually had three beautiful children, and, of course, they named their son Steve.
And finally, Father Mychal Judge, who, like Kevin and Steve, acted when he needed to act. On September 10, 2001, Mychal Judge gave his last sermon at the dedication of a renovated firehouse in New York City. He said,
That’s the way it is. Good days. And bad days. Up days. Down days. Sad days. Happy days. But never a boring day on the job. You do what God has called you to do. You show up. You put one foot in front of another. You get on the rig and you go out and you do the job—which is a mystery. And a surprise. You have no idea when you get on that rig. No matter how big the call. No matter how small. You have no idea what God is calling you to do. But he needs you. He needs me. He needs all of us.
Father Mychal, Kevin, and Steve. I believe that all three were heroes, that all three are true leaders, and that the actions of all three speak to us about the importance of the United States’s taking a leadership role in the world to deal with the very difficult issues that we are facing today, and will continue to face for a long time to come.