"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 48

In this episode: Counterterrorism Chief Says Hamas Attack and Gaza War Have Reshaped Terror Threat

April 2, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 48

Episode 48: Counterterrorism Chief Says Hamas Attack and Gaza War Have Reshaped Terror Threat

When Christine Abizaid — the director of the National Counterterrorism Center — first began working for the United States government in 2002, the biggest terror threat facing the U.S. was from al-Qaeda. Now, homegrown far-right terrorists pose a key threat, the Hamas attacks on October 7th and the ongoing war in Gaza are fueling new risks, and some American politicians claim that lots of terrorists are entering the U.S. through the southern border. In a rare interview, Abizaid describes the real terror threats facing the United States today.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Fox News can confirm now that an illegal migrant on the terror watch list was arrested in Eagle Pass, Texas.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued a warning about the possibility of Mideast terrorists making their way into the U.S. through the southern border.

ARCHIVAL Ted Cruz: Border patrol agents are actively looking for Hamas, for Hezbollah, for Palestinian jihad, for terrorists coming across.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: These are the people that are coming into our country and they're coming from jails and they're coming from prisons and they're terrorists. They're being let into our country and it's horrible.

Peter Bergen: We're hearing a lot of rhetoric about terrorists pouring across the southern border. Is that true?

Christine Abizaid: When I look at the intelligence about whether or not terrorist groups are sending operatives across the United States border to conduct attacks here, I don't have that intelligence. I do not have any intelligence today that the terrorist groups that we're concerned about are trying to send operatives here through our southwest border to conduct attacks. That is not what we're seeing.

Peter Bergen: You've worked in the intelligence community almost since 9/11. Can you think of a single terrorist attack in the United States that was conducted by somebody who came across the southern border?

Christine Abizaid: No.

If terrorists were really streaming in through the southern border, if the quote “same people” who carried out the violent attacks in Israel on October 7th were entering the U.S. through the southern border and planning an attack on the United States, as former President Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz have suggested, Christine Abizaid is someone who would know.

She's the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the U.S. government agency that collects and analyzes all the information about terror threats from around the globe. It's the intelligence hub for the U.S. government's counterterrorism efforts. Abizaid joined the government shortly after 9/11, and she’s spent the bulk of her professional career studying and chasing terrorists. She did it for the Defense Intelligence Agency on the ground in Iraq. She did it for the National Security Council in Washington before becoming a deputy assistant Secretary of Defense focusing on Afghanistan.

I’ve been studying terrorism for a long time and I can tell you that Christine Abizaid has insights about terrorism threats that you should really listen to. And Abizaid points out the fact that last year, on the southern border, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol stopped and ID’d people whose identities matched those on the terror watch list 249 times is actually a sign that the system is working.

Christine Abizaid: And in fact, we've looked at this, and of those 47 foreign terrorist organization-linked attacks that have happened in the United States since 9/11, none have been associated with an individual who crossed the southwest border. We've got a vulnerability issue that we need to address that we need to take seriously, that we've actually built an entire intelligence and border security apparatus to try and protect against. And, you know, a lot of the sort of data about encounters of known and suspected terrorists on the United States border are really derived from this system that we've built to try and make sure we understand who's coming across the United States border and whether or not they present a threat.

Peter Bergen: The publicly available figures from Border Patrol: 249 encounters with people on the terrorism list on the southern border and 487 on the U.S. border with Canada. This is in 2023. The terrorism watch list, according to a CBS News investigation, involves two million people. So being on the terrorism watch list, it’s not like a super exclusive list. It's people who are in some way, maybe somehow associated. And I presume if somebody on the terrorism watch list was encountered at the southern border and was actually a terrorist, that we would arrest them and we would put them on trial… right?

Christine Abizaid: The encounters that are often referenced are actually the system at work. Not not every individual that crosses the border that also pings on that list presents a direct threat to the United States. There's a lot of context that we try and understand about every single one of these encounters to determine whether, in fact, this lighting up of the system actually reflects a clear and present danger. And for every encounter that we've had, we do digging as an intelligence community, as a law enforcement community, as a border security community to try and get at the heart of, do we have a threat at the border or in the country as a result of what's going on? And again, I have no intelligence to indicate that terrorists are currently trying to infiltrate the United States to conduct attacks.

So while Abizaid is certainly staying vigilant about the Southern border, she’s also focused on a whole lot of other threats.

Christine Abizaid: Al-Qaeda is raising its profile in both West and East Africa. ISIS is spreading across that continent there. You also have racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism, which is not just a problem here in the United States. Um, you have the dynamic in Afghanistan that has particularly helped ISIS-K sort of rebuild and present a different kind of threat than it was prior to the, to the U.S. military departure from there.And you have Iranian-supported, Iranian-directed terrorism, whether it's Lebanese Hezbollah, whether it's the Houthis, whether it's Iranian state agents, whether it's individuals that are vaguely tied to the Iranian apparatus.

And the world of counterterrorism in 2024 looks a lot different than the one that existed when Abizaid began her career in intelligence more than 20 years ago. When she got her start in 2002, the National Counterterrorism Center that she now directs didn't even exist. And the biggest terror threat was from a hierarchical organization named al-Qaeda, with its charismatic leader, Osama bin Laden.

Now, al-Qaeda is a shadow of its former self and the nature of the terror threat facing the United States has changed as well. Since 9/11, more than 130 people have been killed in the United States by homegrown far right terrorists. And during the same period, there's only been one lethal jihadist terrorist attack in the United States that was carried out by a foreign national with ties to an organized terrorist group. That’s when a Saudi military officer killed three sailors at a naval base in Florida in 2019.

But since the Hamas attacks on October 7th in Israel, the terrorism threats have begun to morph and to shift again.

Christine Abizaid: You see all these groups sort of running to this event, trying to exploit it for their own purposes. They look at an attack like Hamas did and see common cause with it, even if ideologically they don't care about Hamas. They're celebrating this success against the Jewish population, applauding its success and trying to find ways to use this moment to reconstitute, rebuild, brand their work, brand their attacks as somehow part of this movement of solidarity.

Up next, in a rare interview, National Counterterrorism Director Christine Abizaid takes you through the terror threats post-October 7th.

I'm Peter Bergen, and this is In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

ARCHIVAL George W. Bush: Today I sign an act of Congress authorizing intelligence programs vital to our security and creating a national commission to investigate the events of September the 11th, 2001 and the years that led up to that event.

After the 9/11 attacks, there was one really big question that everyone was asking: how could the government have not seen this coming? The 9/11 Commission sought answers to that question.

ARCHIVAL 9/11 Commissioner: [SOUND OF A GAVEL] That's the official start of our first public hearing of what is going to be a extraordinarily difficult and important job, we believe, for the country.

ARCHIVAL George W. Bush: This investigation should carefully examine all the evidence and follow all the facts, wherever they lead. We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of September the 11th.

The 9/11 Commission recommended that a National Counterterrorism Center be established.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster: Today, in a rare August recess hearing, the Commission's leaders told Congress what went wrong.

The idea was to make sure that the kinds of intelligence failures — the failures to connect the dots — would never happen again.

ARCHIVAL 9/11 Commissioner: We have concluded that the intelligence community is not going to get its job done unless somebody is really in charge. That is just not the case now. And we paid the price.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster: They urged Congress to adopt the report's two central recommendations: a national counterterrorism center for better coordination and a national intelligence director to oversee all 15 intelligence agencies.

The current director of the National Counterterrorism Center is Christine Abizaid. She was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2021.

Christine Abizaid: At the National Counterterrorism Center, we have analysts from CIA, we have officers from DHS, we have military detailees, we have NSA, we have FBI. Everyone is in the room at the same time, learning from each other, operating on an assumption of coordination and collaboration that will make us better, that will help us connect those dots. Getting my daily brief every day one of my number one questions is always, who has this information? You guys are briefing me on however many threats across the globe. Has this been shared? Do our partners understand this?

Some 10,000 to 20,000 pieces of intelligence come in each day to the National Counterterrorism operations center. This includes things like potential targets, or tactics that might be used, and even names of potential terrorists. And every single piece of intelligence that comes in gets eyes on it.

Christine Abizaid: We have an operation center that exists to monitor global terrorism events on a 24/7 basis and connect across the wider counterterrorism community to make sure that if an event is happening, if it's breaking, we understand what's going on, who may have been involved and whether or not we've got other threats that we have to deal with as a community as a result.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF THE THEME MUSIC OF 24]

Christine Abizaid: If you watch the show 24 with Kiefer Sutherland, you will see what it's like to be in the National Counterterrorism Watch Center.

ARCHIVAL 24, Speaker 1: A 747 just blew up over the Mojave Desert. Preliminary reports make it sound like it was a bomb.

ARCHIVAL 24, Speaker 2: Get me Walsh on the phone now.

Christine Abizaid: You have cubicles that analysts sit at, in sort of little bullpens, allows them to do swivel chair analysis and debate with their colleagues on a daily basis what any new piece of intelligence means about the global threat that we're dealing with. If you want to see the place hum, come in the middle of a real crisis, because that is when the entire center will come together. This organization is really just an inspiring place to come work.

Abizaid is one of the youngest people to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, as well as the first woman and openly gay person to do so. And while she's quite outspoken about these firsts, she isn't someone who necessarily likes to talk a lot about herself.

Peter Bergen: Can I ask you a couple of personal questions?

Christine Abizaid: Sure. [BOTH LAUGH] These are my least favorite questions but yes, let’s do it. I can't wait.

Peter Bergen: Um, you're certainly the first woman to run the National Counterterrorism Center, and you're also openly gay. And you've talked a lot about that publicly. Tell me what that means and how that affects the way you work.

Christine Abizaid: I am the first female director of the National Counterterrorism Center. I'm the first openly gay director. I'm the first mom that is in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center. I don't necessarily know how to bring that to bear in any meaningful way as the leader, other than to be authentic and transparent about who I am and what it means for, you know, how we should operate as an organization where everyone can bring every part of themselves to the mission.

Peter Bergen: You're a big soccer player…

Christine Abizaid: Ah, I was a big soccer player.

Peter Bergen: Ok. You're in the UC San Diego record books. You played in college.

Christine Abizaid: Am I? Am I in the record books still?

Peter Bergen: Apparently.

She is. She helped lead her team to the national championships. Her coach in college called her quote, “An impact player from day one,” and someone who just wouldn’t “back off.” And one area she's laser-focused on right now is the war in Gaza and the Hamas attacks on October 7th, which precipitated that war.

Christine Abizaid: I think we're dealing with one of the most consequential terrorist acts of the post-9/11 era.

Abizaid says the October 7th attack, which was streamed live on social media and took place in an environment where everyone is highly connected online, has had what she calls an energizing effect on other terrorist organizations, groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. Even if all these groups don't exactly share the same ideologies as Hamas.

Christine Abizaid: Hamas' attack comes at a time when al-Qaeda and ISIS are both struggling in many ways to mount a major capability that is relevant to the United States.I won't talk about the intelligence, but in very public ways, you see all these groups sort of running to this event trying to exploit it for their own purposes, trying to gain new adherents to the al-Qaeda cause because of what Hamas did, in a really opportunistic way, and some of these groups need to reconstitute, rebuild, refinance because they have been suppressed by, you know, global counterterrorism efforts over a two-decade period.

Christine Abizaid: You see it in the public statements, the flood of propaganda that a group like al-Qaeda and every single affiliate in al-Qaeda's network has posted. You see it in the way that ISIS is trying to design an attack campaign that specifically leverages that event and ties their operations to it. You see it in sort of statements from groups like the Nordic Resistance Movement in Scandinavia, really kind of leveraging the antisemitic nature of the attack to try and make a broader point about their own ideology. Some of these groups are probably forming as we speak, sort of consuming what's happening in Gaza in a way that will be defining for how terrorism presents itself over the next decade.

And the Hamas attack hasn't just brought new energy to well-established terrorist organizations.

Christine Abizaid: You look at the number one way in which terrorism presents today, and it's by individuals inspired by so much of this sort of activity that happens globally. It's much more complicated than what we were dealing with in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when you had a single hierarchical terrorist organization operating from a relatively small location compared to what we're dealing with today, without the level of connectivity or ability to engage large populations with their propaganda. And so that just creates a great deal of uncertainty in the environment that I think is going to shape the next decade of what terrorism looks like. The Israeli-Palestinian cause is now newly resonant for a whole new generation. I mean, there's a discovery of this issue and the history of this issue that is mobilizing, that is radicalizing and that will almost certainly inspire an attack in the future.

Peter Bergen: Listeners may not realize that obviously Israelis died, but also at least 30 Americans died and at least 10 were taken hostage. The intention was not an anti-American attack, but the result was that you have really one of the biggest anti-American terrorist attacks since 9/11 happen on October 7th.

Christine Abizaid: I think about this a lot, actually. Hamas is a terrorist organization that we follow from a national counterterrorism perspective. And that we try and understand, you know, what threat does it pose to Americans and the United States? And it was always considered to pose a relatively low threat, because its agenda was not about us. Its agenda was about Israel. And yet, exactly what you described happened, which is, more Americans died in this attack than in any other post 9/11 terrorist attack, except for the Pulse nightclub shooting.

Peter Bergen: In Orlando.

Christine Abizaid: In Orlando, which was inspired by ISIS. It was not actually sort of conducted or hierarchically directed or enabled by any terrorist group.

Peter Bergen: Are there Hamas sleeper cells in the U.S. and I know it's hard to prove negatives, but is there any indication that's the case?

Christine Abizaid: No.

Peter Bergen: You say that with great… certainty.

Christine Abizaid: Traditionally the Hamas concern that we've had here in the United States is about the financing activity they're doing in support of their operational networks that are focused in the Palestinian territories against Israeli interests. That's still what we think Hamas's main operational objective is. Um, we do not have any indication that Hamas has any operational capability here in the United States or has the intent to try and establish operational capability in the United States for the purpose of attacks.

Peter Bergen: October 7th has clearly been a hugely emotional issue for people on both sides of this issue. And we've seen a Palestinian boy who was murdered in the United States, Palestinian students who were attacked. We've seen a growth in antisemitic incidents. We've seen an American serviceman burn himself to death in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. What's going on? And how do these emotions around the Gaza war affect what you do?

Christine Abizaid: So when we characterize the overall threat environment facing the United States, it's one that's most defined by what individual attackers will do, right? Individuals inspired by any range of ideology, any range of event, inspired to act by al-Qaeda, by ISIS, even by racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists. And, and sort of, you know, in this age of, I think, rising antisemitism of high, a high degree of connectivity and the ability to share highly emotive content in an instant to populations that are dealing emotionally with an incredibly harrowing situation in the Middle East, I certainly worry about those individuals consuming this conflict and what it might mean for their pathway to radicalization and their pathway to mobilization to violence.

Peter Bergen Are people getting radicalized more quickly in general, and then sometimes carrying out a violent act?

Christine Abizaid: We've done analysis about the radicalization to mobilization timelines that are typical or at least average across the various attacks that we've seen here in the United States. And it's something like, sort of 20 months. More than a year, less than two where, you know, from initial engagement to actually mobilizing to violence.

Christine Abizaid: The problem is that, you know, that average is derived from studies of individuals where their individual situation, their motivations, their pathway, which is often circuitous and goes from, you know, racially, ethnically motivated violent extremists to consumption of ISIS propaganda to somehow resulting in an attack that is actually Neo-Nazi in nature. I mean it is very difficult to sort of set a pattern for how this phenomenon or how an individual might emerge as an actual threat. And it presents a much more difficult counterterrorism challenge for a counterterrorism community that was really built to deal with the threat posed by hierarchically directed, organized terrorist groups that plot in networks and make themselves a target that you can dismantle in many ways. The individualized nature of the way the threat emerges today is a much different challenge than what we're still seeing, but that was dominant in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

The war in Gaza is also seeding additional conflicts all across the Middle East.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1:Yemen based Houthis who are backed by Iran tried to hijack a container ship and shot at U.S. Navy helicopters the Houthis say they're targeting Israeli bound ships in solidarity with the Palestinians, but have repeatedly attacked ships with no connection to Israel.

ARCHIVAL NEWSCASTER 2: U.S. targets in Syria and Iraq have been attacked at least 23 times in the past two weeks.

ARCHIVAL NEWSCASTER 3: The Pentagon said last week that those behind the attacks are supported by Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

So Abizaid is paying a lot of attention to what Iran is doing.

Christine Abizaid: I would say that Iranian activity in today's threat landscape is the most active we've seen them since, probably, the early ‘80s.

Peter Bergen: And that's when they backed Hezbollah in Lebanon. They blew up the U.S. Marines barracks. Killed 241 American servicemen.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF SIRENS, SHOUTING]

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster: The Marines said a speeding pickup truck crashed through barriers and exploded in the lobby of the headquarters building where Marines were sleeping. The blast opened a crater 30 feet deep and 40 feet across, causing the four story structure to collapse, killing, trapping, and injuring those inside.

Peter Bergen: They blew up the U.S. embassy. They killed a senior CIA official.

Christine Abizaid: And they were going around killing dissidents all over the world.

And more recently the Iranians targeted former President Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The Justice Department is charging an Iranian operative for plotting to murder former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton. The Department of Justice believes the plot was retaliation for a U.S. airstrike that killed a powerful Iranian general in Iraq back in 2020.

Peter Bergen:For the show, we interviewed John Bolton, you know, he has a 24/7 security secret service detail. They came in a day ahead of time to really scope out the studio.

Christine Abizaid: I would say it's broadly consistent with what Iran has sort of been willing to do through its state agents for decades. But it is happening at a level of activity that is pretty dramatic, and it's pretty dramatic in the degree to which they're willing to operate in places that I would have assumed they would have understood as escalatory. So, for instance, being willing to try and plot the killing of former U.S. government officials inside the United States homeland, because they feel as if it is appropriate and proportional retaliation for the death of Qasem Soleimani.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: This morning, a major escalation in the Middle East after a U.S. airstrike killed the general regarded as the second most powerful person in Iran.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Soleimani is also responsible for killing more than 600 American troops during the Iraq war. To put that into perspective for you at home, 17 percent of all U.S. deaths in Iraq between 2003 and 2011 were orchestrated by this man.

To avenge Solemani’s killing, Iranian-backed militias launched attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq, and Iran plotted to assassinate John Bolton — as well as former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, among others.

Christine Abizaid: There's, I think, over a dozen countries where there's some activity that you would tie back to Iran's willingness to either go after dissidents or regime critics or otherwise retaliate, that's what the Iranian state agents are doing. Then you have their ties to groups like Lebanese Hezbollah, which still maintains a global terrorist capability. You see the capability of the Iraqi Shia militant groups that is on display right now in the midst of this conflict, after which they've conducted over 150 attacks against the U.S. presence there.You look at the support that they're providing to a group like the Houthis, which is wreaking havoc in the Red Sea. And then their traditional ties to Palestinian groups, primarily Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but also Hamas, you know they have a broad swath of proxies. We've got to be, from a counterterrorism perspective, very cognizant of and aggressive in addressing.

Abizaid says the reason Iran is doing all of this is with the ultimate goal of forcing the U.S. military to withdraw its forces from Iraq and Syria so Iran can achieve its goal of controlling the region.

Peter Bergen: We're in a bind because we don't want to escalate too far into a bigger regional conflict, right? I mean, we want to sort of do calibrated responses, but they're kind of in a bind too, because they've got huge economic problems. They've got protests that they've had a sort of, you know, extirpate with extreme violence… It's not in their interest, although, you know, people make mistakes all the time and wander into a war.

Christine Abizaid: This is actually the concern that we have on a daily basis as we're monitoring activity that's happening in the Middle East and whether or not it is the event that will have escalatory consequences that will actually increase the scope of what we're dealing with, uh, by a significant degree.

Christine Abizaid: Iran does not want an all-out war with the United States. They don't even want an all-out war with, with Israel. They're trying to find ways to both engage in this overall objective of undermining the Israelis, of pushing the United States out of the region, without actually precipitating a major conflict, which they understand the significant capability that the United States military can bring to bear when it is engaged in all-out conflict. So the concern is not that everyone wants to go to war. It's that nobody wants to, but the likelihood of escalation in this environment where everyone has sort of a loose understanding of what these red lines might be and events could change your perception of whether one of those has been crossed at any given time. I mean, it just makes for a combustible environment, that we've got to really carefully manage day in and day out.

Peter Bergen: And since you started in the business, these groups the United States had a complete monopoly on armed drones, and now every terrorist group in the world has armed drones of any significance. So, can you reflect a little bit about, you know, how that’s different, right? That these groups have access to weaponry that they didn't have before?

Christine Abizaid: Well, this is the fundamental difference between sort of non-state actors working outside of any state control and non-state actors that specifically court state support and therefore the military capabilities that go along with it. State sponsorship of terrorism has real meaningful consequences for the level of sophistication that we actually deal with when an attack happens. And it also creates this interesting conundrum. I mean in the al-Qaeda and ISIS context, you're never questioning intent.

Christine Abizaid: You're always kind of evaluating capability. In the case of something like Iranian-sponsored terrorism, this capability, and intent calculation is almost flipped. You know, they have the capability, but whether they want to use it and reap the consequences of being catastrophically successful is a different question. And so, there's a much higher degree of analysis that has to go into this question of intent, the understanding of red lines, what would in fact be escalatory in any given actor's minds, and what's the degree of relationship between that actor and their state sponsor. I mean, if you look at something like Hamas's October 7th attack, we don't assess that Iran had any foreknowledge of that, that Hezbollah had any foreknowledge of that, but it still happened. And look at the consequences we're dealing with in the wider Middle East.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

And then of course there’s Afghanistan.

Christine Abizaid: Afghanistan's always been a milieu of terrorist groups or extremist elements.

One Afghanistan-based group she’s been concerned about is ISIS-Khorasan or ISIS-K — the group that’s believed responsible for one of the most lethal terrorist attacks in years — at a concert hall near Moscow that killed at least 143 people. This demonstrated that ISIS-K is now capable of carrying out mass casualty attacks some 2,000 miles from its home base. We interviewed Abizaid before the Moscow attack happened, but she made clear in our discussion that ISIS-K poses a threat beyond Central Asia, especially since the U.S. withdrew its forces from Afghanistan in 2021.

Christine Abizaid: I was not certain we would be in a place in two years time that al-Qaeda was the least of my concerns from Afghanistan. Now the ISIS-Khorasan problem is a problem that has to remain a top intelligence priority for us as the National Counterterrorism Center. It's got a regional presence and projects especially regionally in a way that those in Pakistan, those in Iran, those in Central Asia would tell you is a real concern. And so it's very clear to us that it's got to remain a top priority.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Peter Bergen: I wanted to ask you about the racially motivated violent extremists, because obviously we have a lot of that in this country. We had the riot at the U.S. Capitol. The FBI, that's their largest kind of concern, and you're mostly looking outside the country with the work you do, but the distinction between domestic terrorism and international terrorism seems to be kind of like collapsing because after all, Anders Breivik in Norway killed 77 people, and he was a neo-Nazi. He's been very influential on a number of people in the United States. The guy who killed more than 50 people at a mosque in New Zealand has been very influential, not just in the United States, but uh, you know, these manifestos, these actions seem to be… people kind of cut and paste just like people learn from school shootings in this country, so how does that affect your job?

Christine Abizaid: This idea of racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism as either a domestic or international terrorism problem, I think is exactly as you say, collapsing. I mean, this is a fundamentally transnational problem. It presents itself in ways that are much different than when you're dealing with a hierarchical organized terrorist group. When you have sort of this ethos of leaderless resistance, where individuals will emerge from networks to conduct attacks largely based on their own motivation, but still supported by sort of, a general ideology and desire to, you know, conduct attacks against minority populations, they have antisemitic attacks, there’s anti-LGBTQ attacks. And it's happening here in the United States, but if you look at some of the attackers in the United States who, you know, go into Buffalo and kill Black Americans at a supermarket there, and you read the manifesto, that manifesto is inspired by Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch, it's inspired by Breivik in Norway, you know you look at an attack that happened in Slovakia that was inspired by what happened in Buffalo.

Christine Abizaid: This is a fundamentally transnational problem that requires the international community to think of it that way. My concern about how racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism and the attacks have presented is that we're all sort of dealing with it in our domestic context, you know, whether it's an attack in Australia that's anti-government or, a network in Germany that's disrupted or, you know, the threats that we see in the Scandinavian countries or other parts of the world, I mean, we all have sort of these incidents that seem like single incidents, but actually all relate to each other as a real transnational problem. And so trying to distinguish what's happening here in the United States as a purely domestic issue actually presents challenges for how we would assess what's going on across the globe. And so we're trying to be pretty judicious in understanding the foreign links to what happens here in the homeland and the links that the United States has to anything that happens overseas.

Peter Bergen: The person who attacked the New Zealand mosque and killed 51 people, he livestreamed his attack on Facebook. The Hamas operatives on October 7th many of them had GoPros and they filmed everything. How does that change things?

Christine Abizaid: It makes things immediately real and accessible and makes it very difficult to sort of stop the spread of this content when it's being provided to those that will watch it, will replicate it, will send it to their networks as fast as it's being produced. We actually looked at the timeline for a livestream event that actually, I think it happened in the Buffalo shooting, and how quickly that even when we had with social media companies immediately, stop the transfer of the imagery of that attack it still spread, much farther than you could imagine in a very short amount of time. And this ability to share real-time emotive content to a broad array of individuals that are already likely susceptible to consuming this and potentially mobilizing to violence as a result, is what makes this individualized, inspired threat so difficult to actually get predictive and proactive against. It makes you fundamentally reactive in a way that is a real challenge for preventing the next tragedy.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

The terrorism challenges facing the U.S. are real. But the hysterical rhetoric around this real challenge...

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: This is the worst border ever in the history of the world…

...which has heated up during this election year — and can be heard here between former President Trump and Sean Hannity, in a Fox News interview at the southern border — doesn’t really solve any of the issues.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: You have terrorists coming. You know, I, I've noticed, uh, as somebody that watches your show a lot, I think you're, I think you do a fantastic job, but you say 100 percent certain, I hate to hear it, that we're going to have a big attack at some point. I pray that I'm wrong. You're probably right.

Trump has also promised to step up travel bans from, quote “terror-plagued countries” if he gets re-elected.

Peter Bergen: Do you think a Muslim travel ban would be useful?

Christine Abizaid: No.

Peter Bergen: Why not?

Christine Abizaid: Because I think it's overly broad and actually could have the effect of flooding the system with false positives in a way that presents real challenge for the counterterrorism community that I've already described is, is trying to cover a broad array of territory and understand threats at a level of identity. And noise in the system that is not legitimately representative of an actual threat would be problematic in my view.

A ban on people coming from several Muslim-majority countries, Abizaid explains, is essentially a way of saying that all those people are terrorists. And so in theory you’d have to track all those people, track their activity. And that would make it really hard to actually flag or remove the real threats.

And while Abizaid is emphatic about there being no intelligence to suggest that terrorist groups are trying to send their operatives across the Southern border, she says the sheer number of people coming across the border presents a vulnerability that the intelligence community is taking very seriously. It’s a point that Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI, testified about recently on Capitol Hill.

ARCHIVAL Christopher Wray: I've testified repeatedly that we are concerned about the, terrorism implications…

And he mentioned an area of specific concern in response to a question from Republican Senator Marco Rubio, about the networks who smuggle people across that border.

ARCHIVAL Marco Rubio: There are smuggling networks all over the world that specialize in moving people from all over the world, including from the Middle East, Central Asia and so forth. Are we aware of any of these smuggling organizations are run by or, um, are conducted by people that have ties, for example, to ISIS or other terrorist organizations?

ARCHIVAL Christopher Wray: So I want to be a little bit careful how far I can go in open session, but there, uh, you know, there is a particular network, um, that, has, uh, where some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have ISIS ties, uh, that we're very concerned about,

And in March, U.S. Border Patrol agents stopped a migrant at the Southern border who claimed to be a member of Hezbollah and he also claimed he was coming to try to make a bomb. An investigation into those claims is ongoing.

So what are we supposed to make of all this?

I’ve been covering terrorism for three decades, and here’s what I can tell you: On 9/11 and in the 23 years since then, terrorist attacks in the U.S. were never carried out by militants crossing the southern border.

But as FBI Director Wray said, he's concerned that folks with connections to terrorist groups might try and exploit the southern border. That’s a completely legit concern, and it’s his job to worry about any potential threats. And National Counterterrorism Director Abizaid did tell us that there is a vulnerability issue at the border they need to address. And that’s why the U.S. government has built an entire intelligence and border security system apparatus.

So the notion that terrorists are pouring in across the southern border and plotting multiple attacks is a fairy tale and one that Abizaid clearly told us there is no evidence for. And she’s in charge of coordinating all the terrorism intelligence that comes in from all 18 of the United States’ intelligence agencies. But that doesn't mean you won't be hearing a lot more about that particular fairy tale in the upcoming presidential election.

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If you want to learn some more about some of the issues we discussed in this episode, I recommend a couple of books by… myself: The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and al-Qaeda and U nited States of Jihad: Who Are America's Homegrown Terrorists and How to Stop Them? Both are available on Audible.

And you’re interested in hearing some more about Iran’s role in spreading violence across the Middle East and sponsoring terrorist groups around the world, and if you missed our episode last week, please check it out. You’ll hear from two leading experts who’ve spent their careers helping world leaders understand the Islamic Republic of Iran and its role in the world.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.

This episode was produced by Alexandra Salomon, with help from Nathan Ray.

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Our staff also includes Erik German, Laura Tillman, Luke Cregan, Holly DeMuth, Sandy Melara, and JP Swenson.

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