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MSW Media. Spy Talk, a podcast at the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, national security and military operations.

Jeff Stein

Hi there, I'm Jeff Stein.

Michael Isikoff

I'm Michael Isikoff.

Karen Greenberg

And I'm Karen Greenberg.

Jeff Stein

Welcome to another edition of the Spy Talk podcast. Nice to be back with you again this week. As usual, lots of fireworks on the intelligence front, starting with last night's odd speech by President Trump on Chinese involvement or attempts to be involved in US Elections. Mike.

Michael Isikoff

Yeah, look, given the hype that somehow the President was going to vindicate his long debunked claims of a stolen election in 2020, obviously nothing in the speech and the newly declassified documents back that up. And therefore, you know, that's the major takeaway that many have that this is

Jeff Stein

old wine and new bottles.

Michael Isikoff

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, and, and look, it can be. It has a, a short term political purpose which is somehow to get the Senate to pass this, you know, safe act that he. Which would require people to show their citizenship papers in order to register to vote. Right. That's not going to happen. More long term, more dangerous. The idea that this can sort of cast a Cloud over whatever happens or is about to happen in 20, you know, this November with the 2016 midterms, and could conceivably give the administration a pretext to sort of intervene, interfere, send, you know, ICE agents to the polls or military troops. That said, the declassified documents I found pretty interesting.

Jeff Stein

They are.

Michael Isikoff

Yeah.

Jeff Stein

I mean, let's do talk about Chinese attempts.

Michael Isikoff

Look, I remember many years ago, during the 2008 presidential campaign, it was first reported by Newsweek immediately after the election that both the Obama and the McCain campaigns had been hacked by the Chinese. And the Chinese were pouring over internal emails of campaign staffers. The general consensus view at the time was that this was an intelligence operation to get insight into who might be in positions of authority in the government after the election that would impact the US China policy. And it was alarming. It actually didn't become public that it was the Chinese. We knew about the hack in 2008. It didn't become public that it was the Chinese until 2013, when I reported it then at NBC, because the Obama administration was going to confront the Chinese and tell them to cut it out. Well, lesson one, the Chinese don't heed warnings very well. Okay. Because as we learned from the new documents, not only did they not cut it out, they stepped up their game and actually in 2020, acquired the personal voting information of more than 220 million Americans.

Jeff Stein

Well, I wanted to. I wanted to mention that the way Trump brought that up was as if he could somehow manipulate votes and elections. You know, as you know, Mike. Well, when I was at the Washington Post, we used voter lists to try to find people. I mean, it's not like these are classified lists. They're, for the most part, publicly available.

Michael Isikoff

That doesn't mean it's not unsettling that the Chinese have a vast database on every one of us.

Jeff Stein

Well, if I were them, and it's easy to discern that they would be running their computers through all those names to see if something pops up that is interesting to them, not to manipulate.

Michael Isikoff

Yeah, well, you know, certainly they might have the potential, but there's no evidence that they did, so you got to keep that in context. But there was other stuff in these declassified documents that didn't get any attention. First of all, on the hacking front. In the documents, it's reported that the Chinese hacked the Biden campaign in 2020 as well. They got inside the emails of Biden campaign staffers that had never been reported before. Okay. So I thought that was pretty significant if it was important in 2008, it should be equally important in 2020. And the other thing, that is something Trump was never going to mention. But I'm reading from a National Intelligence council report in August 2020, declassified and released last night. We assessed that Russia is using a range of measures prim to denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti Russia establishment, for example, is directing or encouraging proxies to spread claims about Biden. Some Kremlin linked actors are also seeking to boost Trump's candidacy on social media. More broadly, Moscow's efforts seek to amplify social discord in the US and undermine Washington's global standing. We had this huge uproar in 2016 when the Russians did this, and there they were doing it again in 2020. Supposedly Obama, towards the end of 2016, had warned the Russians to cut it out. Lesson two, the Russians don't take warnings very well either. So there's a lot of really interesting details in these docs. Unfortunately, they do not, or fortunately they do not add up to anything about what Trump wants them to add up to.

Jeff Stein

Karen?

Karen Greenberg

No, I was just going to say, and even John Solomon, even he was saying that there was no there there in terms of, you know, messing with the 2020 election so far in terms of the documents that he had looked over.

Michael Isikoff

Right. But he's still looking, he pointed out.

Karen Greenberg

Still looking, but still to be able to say that in that conclusive a way about what he'd already seen.

Michael Isikoff

We should point out that John Solomon is a former journalist who worked at AP and the Washington Post who has since turned maga, full maga and working at the White House.

Jeff Stein

We had to move on.

Michael Isikoff

Yes.

Jeff Stein

I felt this the other day like I Woke up in 1954. These speeches about communism in 1954. I was, I just want to point

Karen Greenberg

out,

Jeff Stein

age comes wisdom. I've heard. Yeah, yeah, hasn't that train hasn't gotten to me yet. So anyway, Joe McCarthy, I have here a list of 200 communists in the State Department where it seems like we're only one step away from that. I mean, Rubio just un, un, unspooled this wild speech to delegates from around the world to his attempt to his, you know, convening them to attempt to nail left wing activism and terrorism as a major threat facing the United States. I, I don't really. What do you have to say about that, Mike?

Michael Isikoff

Well, we're going to hear a lot to say about that from our upcoming guest, Colin Clark, who is one of the leading counterterrorism specialists in the country and you know, we're going to have him on in a moment. But I think the basic takeaway is that the administration is politicizing what should be a nonpartisan endeavor and that is trying to combat and minimize international and national terrorism. And that, you know, left wing is in the mix, but it's hardly the dominant threat right now. It's still religious, ideological, Islamic terrorism, you know, Al Qaeda, ISIS and affiliated groups which are gaining strength especially in sub Sahara Africa. And not to mention the threat of right wing terrorism, which is statistically far more prevalent than left wing terrorism.

Karen Greenberg

So let me just add one thing to what you just said, which is that this repeated word of global, global, global ties is for a reason. It's not just, oh, we all face the same threat, so let's, you know, share our resources. It's because under the law, you know, we have laws against international terrorism. We have laws that are based on ties groups abroad that make it easier to investigate and prosecute those who are considered guilty of those ties. As opposed to, we don't have a domestic terrorism statute as we've talked about. We have ways of going after domestic terrorism, but our apparatus, because it was set up after 911 is set up for the pursuit of terrorists in a global context with international ties.

Jeff Stein

Yeah, and our major allies have been scoffing at this idea of left wing terrorism being the major problem for them. I mean, it has been a bit of a problem in Greece and Italy, but they're thinking about, you know, jihadi terrorism and Iranian terrorism. So that's what's on their mind. So they just laughed up their sleeves at this initiative by Secretary Rubio and

Michael Isikoff

some countries refuse to attend entirely. So entirely there is that. But let's, let's set up our great guest and hear from him on this score.

Jeff Stein

So our guest today is Colin Clark, who is the executive director of the Sufon center, an independent non profit organization based in New York City that has done a lot of work on security issues involving domestic and transnational terrorism, international security and geopolitics. And Colin Clark is one of their leading experts and recognized globally, I would say, as a leading expert on terrorism. His latest book is Moscow's Mercenaries, the Rise and Fall of the Wagner Group. He's also an author of after the Caliphate, the Islamic State and the Future of Terrorist Diaspora. What we're going to talk about today is a lot of what's going on in terms of who's a terrorist and what's the biggest national security threat to the United States. So without further ado, let's bring on Colin Clark.

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Colin Clark

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Jeff Stein

to me because it's so easy to use.

Colin Clark

It's like, I can't stop. I'm addicted. Start your free trial@shopify.com.

Jeff Stein

Colin welcome to Spy Talk.

Colin Clark

Thanks for having me.

Jeff Stein

You have spent the better part of the past 20 years or so examining the phenomenon of terrorism in the 20th, 21st century. What do you make of the recent developments with senior officials? Sebastian Gorka, the so called terrorism czar at the White House National Security Council, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and of course Stephen Miller singling out left wing terrorism, even communism as a major, if not the major, national security threat to us. You, you had some remarks on Twitter slash X about that recently. So give us your raw, unedited opinion.

Colin Clark

Yeah, I mean it was certainly surprising because I think if you polled the top 10 counterterrorism experts in the world, nonpartisan, that is, none of them would list the far left as the most important threat facing the United States. Most probably wouldn't include it in the top three. I would guess in some kind of varying order you'd have Sunni jihadist groups, Shia extremists backed by Iran, and far right groups, individuals, networks. Far left would probably come in, you know, after those. Now look, we could quibble. It depends on where you are in the world. And if you look at some of the countries that were invited to the White House as part of this anti far left powwow, Italy and Greece do have anarchist groups. They do have violent far left groups. But there's A lot of things that happen in other parts of the world that don't impact the United States. So in a time of dwindling counterterrorism resources, this is not where I would put my energy, focus or time. I think it's fine to look at violent far left groups, and I think we are seeing an uptick in violent far left plotting. But why single out one part of the ideological spectrum if not for politics, which seems to me to be the clear driving force here? And that's dangerous, frankly.

Michael Isikoff

So just this week, the State Department convened, as you mentioned, this huge international conference dedicated to what it called the resurgence of far left political terrorism. And Stephen Miller was quoted as saying there, left wing terrorism always ends in bloodshed, misery and suffering, as what terrorism doesn't. Yeah. Painting a scene. This is the Washington Post reporting, of deformed individuals who would turn Western society into a gulag if left to their own devices. Just taking apart, you, you acknowledge there has been an uptick. What is that uptick? Where is it coming from? And how does it fit into a larger counterterrorism matrix, if it does at all?

Colin Clark

Yeah. Well, let's go back a few years when we saw the rise of the violent far right, which I think a lot of counterterrorism experts would say we missed because we were so locked in and so focused on Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and their various regional branches throughout the world. And rightfully so. We were hit hard on 911 by Al Qaeda and then spent the next 20 years fighting against its, its offshoots. So, you know, but during that time, we missed the rise of far right ideology. We're not even the rise, the resurgence. Right. Because these all ebb and flow as, as terrorism scholars recognize. Recognize. But when we saw the rise of groups like the base and Atomwaffen and right wing militias and the Russian imperial movement and all of these things that Coalesced, you know, 2017 to 2021, and we started seeing protests against Covid and George Floyd. Protests. There was the left and the right out there in the streets pitted against each other. And myself and other counterterrorism experts at the time talked about this phenomena of, of reciprocal radicalization. So as the far right grows in kind, you're going to see a growth in the far left. We've now seen that with Trump back in office, the grievances of the far left have grown. Add in the Gaza war, which tends to, you know, folks against the war in Gaza, against Israeli military campaigns in the Middle east are on that side of the Ideological spectrum. We've seen a pushback against President Trump's immigration policies and against the deployment of ICE in various cities. These all feed in and data centers

Jeff Stein

now become a target.

Colin Clark

So this is a. Well, that's a whole other thing that my colleague Clara Brockhart works on really closely, and she's been one of the first to kind of put her finger on that and track what we're seeing in terms of anti AI extremism. You're right, that that kind of is a hard thing to place along the ideological spectrum. But we also have salad bar extremists now. Right. They pick and choose. What are the things that motivate them. It's a very trying time for counterterrorism specialists because this is. And I actually went back, I couldn't remember the date. I wrote an article with Bruce Hoffman, and it was 2021 for the cipher Brief, where we said that the threat picture now looks kaleidoscopic in nature when it was once monochromatic.

Jeff Stein

Right.

Colin Clark

And so it's so diverse, the ideologies that motivate people. We have this stuff that the FBI calls NVE now. Nihilistic, violent extremism. Right. There's really a complicated threat matrix when we look at it. But to boil this down to people and gulags, I mean, it's almost a character. It's hard to take that seriously. And I think for those of us that. That. And this is a very serious business, read the counterterrorism strategy. We were disappointed because it seemed a highly partisan, which is, you know, shouldn't impact anything related to counterterrorism. But there was these odd references. I mean, put it this way, we're now at war with the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism in Iran, which has long sponsored Lebanese Hezbollah. The word Hezbollah appeared in the counterterrorism strategy as many times as the word transgender did. Go figure.

Karen Greenberg

Colin, I want to follow up on the. On the counterterrorism strategy bit for a minute. So, you know, because they really point, and one of them is, I love this language. Legacy jihadist.

Jeff Stein

Right.

Karen Greenberg

And so one of the things that you and your colleagues have been doing at the Tufan center is tracking the legacy jihadist movement or organizations over the past five years. Are we on an uptick? Are we on a downtick? I mean, where are we in that, that they decided to focus on that in that way? And would you call it legacy? Do you think legacy is the right. Right way to define that, or would you define it differently?

Colin Clark

No, I would just call it what I think it is and what the shared nomenclature in the field is, Sunni jihadist groups, which are different than Shia extremist groups. And those are basically comprised of the legacy Islamist groups, Al Qaeda and their Islamic State and their various affiliates, branches and offshoots. My senses they were trying to tuck the Muslim Brotherhood in under that umbrella or do something cute in that regard. But again, this shouldn't be a political document. And frankly, I've had people say, oh, you know, you really beat these guys up over the release of the CT strategy. You were really harsh on them. You know, I lost a week of my life having to talk about this and write about this. I wanted it to be good. I wanted them to put out a really sound strategy so I could go about my business. And as an American citizen, I want a government that gets it. That's not what happened. They put out a highly partisan document, you know, riddled with false claims, browbeating our adversaries. There's a line in there that says Europe must increase its CT capabilities immediately, as if it were a dad scolding a son. That's not the way to get your allies to pull their own weight, frankly.

Jeff Stein

And it's not like they haven't had to deal with terrorism before.

Colin Clark

Look, I was over in Austria just last month in Vienna, meeting with the Austrian chancellor, actually talking about the threats that the Austrians face. If you remember, that's where the foiled ISIS K attack against Taylor Swift's concert was. And there's a lot of legacy Islamist or jihadist groups that threaten Europe, quite frankly. As you know, Karen, the epicenter of jihadist terrorism right now is sub Saharan Africa. And if you look at the Islamic State in the Sahel, if you look at Somalia in the Horn of Africa, if you look at ISIS in the drc, I mean, this is a huge threat that we're ignoring. I've been making the comparison recently that what's happening in the Sahel reminds me eerily of pre 2001 Afghanistan, where we talk about something like a failed state or an ungoverned space. Here we're talking about a failed region. If you look at Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, it's just a hornet's nest of jihadist groups. And people say, oh, well, they're content to just, you know, be contained to the region.

Karen Greenberg

And do they have leaders until they're not? Do they have leaders like with Al Qaeda? You know, the difference in large part had to do with the power and the, you know, the. The sway of the leadership. What about in Africa and tactical brilliance

Jeff Stein

of the leadership to pull off the

Colin Clark

9 11, far more fragmented. More fragmented. And then, you know, it depends. I would say it depends. When you look at a group like jnm, the leaders are more politically minded, but when you look at the Islamic State, you know that their raison debt includes external operations and attacking the West. And I want to give credit here to my colleague Lucas Weber, who is a fellow with us at the Sioux Center. He's been tracking and raising the alarm on the number of plots that have been disrupted recently going from North Africa into Southern Europe, so from Morocco into Spain, because ISIS is swinging for the fences. And it feels like you can go back to foreign affairs. Last year when Graham Allison and Mike Morell wrote, you know, that, that piece, the, the Lights are Flashing Red or whatever it was titled, a lot of people feel like that. So you have, you know, a persistent and steady threat. You have diminished CT resources which have been diverted to other areas, including great power competition. And you have an administration that's looking through, you know, a very politicized lend at the threat of terrorism and focusing on things that people don't really consider a priority. Now, I just want to caveat that by saying one thing. I'm not here saying that left wing terrorism isn't a thing, that we should ignore left wing violence. All I'm saying is we should prioritize based on what we think the threat is, rack and stack those priorities and attack it that way. I think the fact that there's been multiple assassination attempts against the the President feeds into making this threat to be perhaps more than it is. But again, there's a whole range of things that kind of go into this assessment.

Michael Isikoff

Just picking up on that score, there's not much doubt about where all this is coming from. I've been reading Regime Change, the new book by the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, and they write that after the Charlie Kirk assassination, the White House got all worked up and Trump, quoting from the book now privately told JD Vance and Stephen Miller to, quote, go wild in their efforts to crack down on left wing terrorism. Vance declared they would, quote, go after the NGO network that Femens facilitates and engages in violence, mentioning in particular the Ford foundation and the Open Society foundation, the nonprofit run by George Soros. This seemed to be what they were thinking about now in time travel.

Jeff Stein

Yeah, back to the 1950s.

Michael Isikoff

What do you make of that? And the idea that some sort of amorphous, pretty mainstream, relatively mainstream NGO network might somehow be affiliated with this supposed uptick in left wing terrorism, I've never

Colin Clark

seen evidence to support that.

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Yeah.

Colin Clark

Ever. I, I mean, I don't want to go on about it. There's just, it's not a thing, as far as I'm aware. I'm open to being convinced if someone wants to make that case.

Michael Isikoff

Right.

Colin Clark

I highly suspect this is a lark, you know, and look, the politicization of counterterrorism makes every American citizen less safe. It's, it's actually that simple. And, and it's terrible that someone's tried to kill the president on multiple occasions, and it's awful that Charlie Kirk was assassinated. I don't ever think that political violence is the answer, but the response shouldn't be, you know, cherry picking what the threats facing this country are.

Jeff Stein

It reminds me of, you know, naming Iraq as a major participant in 911 somehow. I mean, they were obsessed of going after Saddam Hussein is like, wrong country, Colin.

Karen Greenberg

So when you're talking about. I want to know how these groups differ. So when we think about jihadist groups, we think about organizational structures, we think about networks, but in terms of what's being called left wing terrorism in this country, and therefore thinking about the counterterrorism strategy, how are they the same or different from how you think about the way we've crafted our counterterrorism policy in terms of Al Qaeda and other groups like isis?

Colin Clark

Yeah. So Al Qaeda and the Islamic State are much more actual groups or organizations than anything that antifa resembles. Antifa is a network. It's a loosely organized network of people that largely are opposed to fascism and that can be defined in a really broad way. Some of them are violent, you know, some of them do advocate for acts of terrorism and sabotage. The numbers are small compared to what we've seen on the far right. I mean, if you look at CSIS data for the past decade, the far right has killed 112Americans in over 152 attacks. The far left 13, over 35 attacks. So even when you look at the US State Department fact sheet about left wing violence, they're talking about groups in Europe and, you know, and they're talking about. So now, just like there was with the far right, with the Russian imperial movement, which was the first far right group ever designated by the United States. And that happened under Trump 1.0. So let's give credit where credit is due. And during Trump 1.0, they also talked about the threat of far right violence when there was different people in the administration. It was completely omitted from the recent Counterterrorism strategy totally altogether. And then we saw an attack against a mosque in San Diego just about a week after the strategy was released. But to get back to your question, Karen, you know, Al Qaeda, Islamic State, you know, groups like Al Shabaab, they're far, you know, there's an organizational structure there and so you can attack them in different ways. Now, in that same article I referenced earlier that Bruce and I wrote, we kind of nodded to organizational structure becoming less of an issue overall for terrorists. And I think that's largely true. There's different reasons why emerging technology kind of, it allows individuals and small cells to be far more powerful than they would be without that organizational structure. But, but to say that Antifa is. And look, actually if you go back to former DHS secretary Kristi Noem, she made this comparison. She actually made the comparison and she said that Antifa is, and I quote, just as dangerous and quote, just as sophisticated as isis, Hasl, or Hamas. I couldn't find one counterterrorism expert that would support.

Jeff Stein

Yeah, there was that famous episode and the senior FBI counterterrorism counterintelligence official who was asked, where is their headquarters? Who are their leaders? Zero. You couldn't come up with anything.

Colin Clark

So anyway, now, again, but, but also this, this could change and this may very well change. I, I don't think it's wrong to look at far left violence, to look at potential connections overseas. We should be agnostic who. It doesn't matter what the ideology is motivating terrorism. We should want to understand it and counter it. So I'm not saying this is a complete waste of time, but to make it the number one overall priority and to spend resources on it at the cost of not looking at other threats, that's worrisome to me.

Jeff Stein

I have a question about intelligence analysis being skewed, but we have to step away for a moment.

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Jeff Stein

and okay, we're back. I just wanted to bring up Colin. This news that came out last week that the result of an internal survey CIA analysts reported rising concerns of political interference by the Trump administration worrying that it's affecting the objectivity of analysis overall. So this just seems to be a blob that's spreading from DHS to CIA skewering the intelligence and and because they they're pushing this so publicly is skewering Americans perception of what the threat is. How do you think actually how do you think how effective that might be?

Colin Clark

Look, I think it's terrible that this is happening. It doesn't necessarily surprise me. And you made the reference earlier to after 9 11, you know, lumping a rock into the whole story. If you remember there's another famous case of pressuring intelligence analysts to reach a certain conclusion that also had to deal with, with invading Iraq. So, you know, what's old is new again, I guess. But, you know, the IC in general has been demoralized. I think the national security and counterterrorism apparatus writ large has been decimated by DOGE cuts. You know, not only are are we seeing longtime experts and people with significant experience leaving these roles, but in my opinion, and I, you know, I'm a former college professor, I still work with a lot of young people, they're being deterred from even entering this field in the first place. And so I think the lag effect of what's happening right now politically in the national security space is going to have severely negative implications. And we're not going to see those until a few years out when all of a sudden we have this paucity of counterterrorism experts, people that actually know this subject because they've either retired, gone elsewhere, or they never came into the field. And that's going to impact us in a really bad way.

Michael Isikoff

So what would be a smart counterterrorism strategy at this point, given the threats that are out there?

Colin Clark

You know, I said, how could we get to one? The first thing that I would do would be to invite people that I regard as top people in the field to Capitol Hill, right, nonpartisan, not from a left wing or a right wing think tank, and ask them to present data that they've collected and analyzed about what the nature of the threat is. And then I'd want to know what does the threat picture look like globally? What does it look like in places where the US maintains interest overseas, and what does it look like with respect to the homeland? I would then want to rack and stack those threats. I'd consider them all together, and then I would take what finite resources I have and allay them against those threats. I think that look to go back to the CT strategy for a second, it doesn't get everything wrong. There's some things in there that it gets right. Countering use of WMD by terrorists, looking at hostage taking as something that's, you know, again, talking about what's old is new. Again, terrorists are using that more effectively. Looking at cartels, and again, I've written and spoken publicly about why I don't think cartels should be counted as foreign terrorist organizations, but they are. And so like, I'm not going to go re litigate that. Okay, how do we deal with them? How do we prepare for a potential Blowback and looking at those threats. So it's just looking at the issue and, and being apolitical about it. When the strategy was released and I read it, it prompted me to actually go back and reread every counterterrorism strategy since 9 11, which I did. There was one we put out right after 9 11. There was another one, I think in 2004. There was one in 2011 under Obama, there was the 2018 Trump 1.0 strategy. And then there was a domestic strategy under Biden in 2020, 21. I went back and I read them all, and then I just went back and reread for a second time the 2018 strategy. And it's a remark, remarkable departure from the one that was released earlier this year. And so what accounts for that? Right. Trump. Trump was the president.

Karen Greenberg

Tell us how so. Yeah, just elaborate on how so, because I did the same thing. I went back and read them.

Colin Clark

Yes. So, you know, for example, in the recent strategy, it mentions President Biden's name seven times. What does that have to do with counterterrorism? Looking back to the previous administration, Trump 1.0, that strategy talks at length about working with allies and partners, working by, with, and through all the things that have helped us as force multipliers, be as successful as we've been in the CT space for the last two and a half decades. So why all of a sudden, stop that? If you go back and you reread and you read Hannah alam's piece in ProPublica, you know, there's almost this kind of bragging in the White House about not sending the strategy through the interagency. Right. And you can tell it reeks of that. It reeks of, you know, having the hand, you know, maybe four or five people's fingerprints on it and their pet rocks. And frankly, I was what I was really disappointed in. And I've talked to a lot of counterterrorism experts in the field about this, who, from left, right to center, all said the same thing, which is the section on Iran looks like it was included at the 11th hour. Because when we're at war now with the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism that has transnational capabilities, that maintains a global web of proxies, and all of a sudden it, it barely, you know, warrants a, a passing mention, that's strange to me. And it just seems like it wasn't well thought through at the expense of other issues that were politically motivated.

Jeff Stein

And this wasn't done by, you know, low level officials who were suspicious sort of stumbling around in the ideological fields to craft this kind of, this is from the top down. I mean what's so striking about the Iran strategy is that the President himself seemed to ignore shop worn intelligence that for just take one issue that the Iranians could most likely cut off the strait of our moods if there was an active war.

Colin Clark

Jeff, A couple of days into the war the President publicly said well you know, nobody thought that they could have done such a thing. And I immediately had, you know, I winced because Look, I spent 10 years at the Rand Corporation. I was the, the ran lead at one point to something called Unified Quest which is the US Army's deep futures war game. And we would go out to the war college in Pennsylvania and we'd, you know, four weeks out of a year and we'd work with allies and partners and interagency. Right. And I can tell you as a career Red teamer, in an Iran scenario, literally what we call a day one turn, what the Red Team does is shut down the straight with some mines, with some shoulder fired missiles, with some suicide attack fast boats. Fast attack boats. So anyone that's even spent a modicum of time thinking about this recognized that that was the most likely scenario. Just to say that it never came up really, I think tells you everything you need to know about what's going on right now. This was something that they thought would happen, start on a Friday and be done before the markets opened. And it's also, I think the fact that it's going so poorly is why we see the President lashing out on social media the way that he does. Threatening to, to destroy a civilization on Easter morning. Like all of these kind of tantrums we're seeing is because it's really not going well. And he feels betrayed that whoever convinced him it would, you know, sold him a bill of goods.

Jeff Stein

Well, it seems like we're all passengers on his boat, you know, can't get out sadly.

Colin Clark

Well, the street is closed, Jeff. There's no movement one way or the other.

Karen Greenberg

Yeah.

Michael Isikoff

So I should point out that the last time you and I spoke, which was towards the start of the war, we were talking about how the leader of Al Qaeda, Sayf Al Adhl, has safe haven in Iran supposedly being protected by the irgc. Has he been heard from at all since the war started? Do we know anything more about his status or what he might be up to?

Colin Clark

Not that I know of. You know, I don't even hear rumors but, but I was hoping that he was going to be One of the, one of the casualties, that was a silver lining for me, but I haven't heard of that. And if you actually look at, you know, some of the recent communications from Mujtala Khomeini, if that's actually him or, you know, purported to be him, whatever, the mouthpiece is functioning at the top of the IRGC at the moment. It threatened revenge against Trump. And now people are, I don't know, I mean, I don't think anyone should be surprised that the Iranians still plan to kill Trump. Trump, you know, under Trump 1.0, they're saying that publicly and then killed the Supreme Leader. So I think, you know, in perpetuity, there's a hit out on the president by the Iranians. And so that's where I think of the, the Al Qaeda stuff is, you know, they've kept these guys for a rainy day for so long. What do they use them for? What do they, what do they try here? And maybe, you know, has the ship sailed? Is, is Scythe too disconnected from the broader global Al Qaeda network that he's not able to make something happen?

Jeff Stein

It seems entirely plausible that they would go to Otto and say, we want some tactical assistance here on some planning to take down Trump or some other major targets.

Karen Greenberg

So following that comment of Jeff's, you referred before to emptying of the government of counterterrorism specialists and experts and not reaching out even for advice now. Right. So this knowledge is within the private sector, and it's. The private sector is still monitoring developments abroad, as you and your colleagues are doing and other think tanks are doing.

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Right.

Karen Greenberg

But my question is, what's happening with other governments that are collecting intelligence, let's say the European governments? I know, Norway, for example, has very robust counterterrorism analysis and strategies. Who's interfacing with them if not the US Government? And how do you see that intelligence capacity being used to protect the United States or not?

Colin Clark

Well, it's a great question. I was in Washington a few weeks ago. We had an event for a project that we were running. And while I was in town, I had a couple of meetings. And I won't name the country, it's a European country. And we had a sit down on all things counterterrorism. And one of the things we heard was, we're so glad that you're here to talk to us. I thought, okay, because no one in the administration will talk to us. And so there's a sense of like, well, what's going on? And I think, you know, why why isn't the administration engaging with the counterterrorism and Middle east experts from our European allies? I think they maybe don't want to hear what our allies have to say because they're going to be upset and ask, you know, we weren't included on the planning of this and then we were lambasted on the back end for not being more eager to participate. Again, this is a kind of 101 and how to lose friends and allies by the administration. And I just keep going back to all these things, make the country less safe. If there's such a concern over what's happening in Europe, and clearly there is, but only with left wing terrorism. You know, I, I don't know.

Jeff Stein

I.

Colin Clark

And you mentioned Norway. I was at an event in Oslo a few years ago. It was a meeting of counterterrorism and law enforcement experts on the far right. And so maybe I should have been questioning at the time why, why aren't we looking at the far left too? Why aren't we making this one big comprehensive thing? But we have a lot to learn from our allies and partners. We've been essential to their success, they've been essential to ours. I mean, I remember, you know, I was working on a task force in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2011 with ISAF, right? It was NATO plus. I mean, everybody was there. There's comparative advantage there. And I think, you know, I often think of if all politics is local, all conflict is global. And so what's manifesting in the US Is connected to what's happening in Europe is connected to what's happening in elsewhere. And if we can only pick and choose which partners we're going to work with with, we're inevitably going to miss some valuable piece of intelligence.

Michael Isikoff

So just back to the strategy for a moment. I mean, first of all, I've seen multiple strategies from multiple administrations. I tend to be deeply skeptical of all of them. They're generally written in generalities. But given what you know about the threat level and where we are right now, what specifically would you say we need more of or less of? Do we need more drone strikes or special forces in sub Saharan Africa? Do we need a revamped, beefed up information strategy aimed at the hearts and minds of people who might succumb to these extremist groups? Give us a little more granularity about what you think we need to be doing right now.

Colin Clark

First, let me agree with you in terms of do I think that if the strategy was more comprehensive that all of a sudden we would be better at counterterrorism? No, it's a document. Right. So like.

Jeff Stein

But.

Colin Clark

But what I think it does do is a couple of things. One, it's symbolic. It shows you what the administration cares about. And if there's a strategy for countering terrorism that completely omits far right terrorism, that sends a message to people that are the victims of far right terrorism. I'm talking to you today from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the Tree of Life attack was. What does that, what message does that send to people that worship in synagogues? You know, we had the El Paso attack in Walmart. What's what messages that send to, you know, immigrants or Hispanics. We had the Buffalo attack, top supermarket where African Americans were burned. These were all far right attacks over the past few years, which doesn't even get a sentence in the counterterrorism strategy. So what does it. So symbolically it's important, right, because it's telling we. We care about protecting certain Americans, but not all. What, what's missing? What would I do differently? One, there's also almost complete, no, completely no mention of anything that's not kinetic. So this is all about tanks, bombs, things that go boom, drone strikes. There's nothing in there about recruitment and radicalization and how you view this over the long term? Well, one way we used to get at that was through agencies like usaid, Right. Which now doesn't really exist. And again, I'm not saying that economic development assistance in Burkina Faso is going to make Al Qaeda shrivel and go away, but it does largely, you know, it helps to reduce the pool of people willing to join extremist groups. You know, not, not all these programs are perfect. There's a lot that should be reviewed and maybe jettisoned. But throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not going to make us safer. The second thing that I was a little bit disappointed in was the lack of focus on the overlap between terrorism and emerging technologies. Me and my colleagues are doing a lot of work in this area, including looking at violent non state after use of drones, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, especially. My colleague Clara Brokert and I wrote a paper for the Hudson Institute looking at how ISIS uses artificial intelligence. We looked at how the group views it theologically. Right. What have they said about what's permissible and what's not in Islam of how to use this technology, how do they use it now and how might they use it in the future? I thought the strategy was a little thin on thinking through how to specifically get at that problem of terrorists using emerging tech as Force multipliers. But again, you're right, it is a strategy. It's a document. But it shows where we're putting our resources, toward what end. And it's also supposed to inspire confidence in the kind of broader national security community that the people that are working on this issue know what they're doing.

Jeff Stein

Last word. Colin, I couldn't agree with you more that what's urgently needed is a bipartisan gathering of real respected experts on terrorism sponsored by a respected organization. We desperately need some clarity. Do we do hearings anymore?

Colin Clark

But, you know, I don't see people testifying on the Hill.

Jeff Stein

My question is where? Who would hold those hearings?

Colin Clark

Yeah, I don't, I, I don't know.

Jeff Stein

And, and the cupboard is bare. I have no doubt that Republicans on a straight line vote. I've little doubt that they will vote to confirm Jay Clayton as a new head of odni, even though he's by law not qualified for the job up. So that's where we're at with maga. Control of the party by Donald Trump. And I hate to leave it on a kind of a sad note, but isn't that where we are? Hard to see a path forward?

Colin Clark

All it takes is, you know, a committee that cares about this issue of counterterrorism. I've testified myself on numerous occasions on this topic. You know, get someone like Bruce Hoffman or Dan Byman or Louise Richardson or Martha Crenshaw or any of the many luminaries our country is blessed to have that have looked at this issue for decades. Brian Michael Jenkins. Right. Bring them to Capitol Hill and ask them these questions, because I just don't have confidence that the people that are running things now actually care about the truth. I think they care about pushing a political agenda through this lens. And again, I come back to the very simple assertion of it's making the country less safe. And that's what bothers me, both as an analyst and as a citizen. And I'd like to see that change,

Jeff Stein

I think, bothers all of us. Well, we have to leave it there. Colin, thanks so much for coming on the show yet again and sharing your expertise. We really appreciate, and I know our listeners do as well.

Colin Clark

Thanks for having me.

Jeff Stein

And that's it it for this week's SpyTalk. Be sure to check out our complete podcast archive on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you haven't already, do, Check out the SpyTalk Co news site on Substack, where we offer steady diet of scoops and original analyses from the intersection of intelligence foreign policy and military operations. Just Google Spy Talk and you'll quickly find your way there. This edition of the Spy Talk Podcast was smoothly produced as always by Kanai and expertly edited by Molly Hawkey for MSW Media. That's it. See you around. I'm Jeff Stein.

Michael Isikoff

I'm Michael Isagoff.

Karen Greenberg

I'm Karen Greenberg.

Jeff Stein

Thanks for listening.

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