Bill Tallen

In my past life, I visited the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), where my branch of the Department of Energy, like many other federal law enforcement agencies, assigned employees to temporary duty on a rotating basis to augment NCTC’s permanent staff. It was a professional organization then, and has not been tainted by corruption and politicization as some of its federal sister agencies in the intelligence and law enforcement community have been. 

NCTC is the U.S. government’s primary organization for integration of all intelligence operations and analysis relating to international terrorism and counterterrorism. It reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), currently Tulsi Gabbard.  

On Friday, Sept. 19, NCTC released an unclassified public assessment “intended to inform federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial government, law enforcement and first responders of al-Qa’ida’s recent calls for attacks against the United States.” It was apparently accompanied by classified briefings to appropriate levels of government. 

The unclassified document cites recent al-Qa’ida (hereafter AQ) statements, publications and videos that celebrate recent jihadist attacks inside the United States and call for its followers to conduct more attacks nationwide, via simple methods such as firearms, explosives, knives, vehicle-ramming or Molotov cocktails as opposed to more complex operations involving weapons of mass destruction, aviation and high value, symbolic or economic targets. NCTC points out that large protests, civil disturbances or other public gatherings provide excellent opportunities.

I wrote a paper at the Naval War College in 2007 warning of just such a shift in terrorist targeting and our unpreparedness for it. A few weeks ago, I wrote here about the emerging evidence that AQ and its affiliates have used the opportunity of our (until recently) porous southern border to infiltrate hundreds or thousands of trained operators into the United States. This is the first open acknowledgment by the U.S. government of the growing magnitude and immediacy of this threat. If you haven’t yet spent a few unsettling hours reading Kurt Schlichter’s ‘The Attack’ or Pineapple Press’ “The Gathering Storm,” I recommend them both, again. Alternatively, keep your head in the sand, and start digging deeper before it gets noisy.

Unfortunately, the establishment perspective on AQ’s intent and objectives is still shifting slowly, while recent open-source intelligence suggests a major sea-change. NCTC discusses “Symbolic Economic Targets,” which may be an example of “fighting the last war.” AQ certainly learned in 2001, even if we did not, that this was not an effective strategy for them. Its damage to the U.S. and world economy was negligible, and the reaction it provoked was massively disproportionate, forcing AQ onto the defensive and into the shadows, and resulting in an increase rather than a decline in American presence and influence in the Middle East, the exact opposite of AQ’s stated goals. American analysts and strategists have stubbornly refused to recognize that AQ is an intelligent, adaptive enemy; and they’re back with a vengeance.

In NCTC’s current assessment we do find that this target set has been expanded to include sporting and music events, public gatherings, and other special events that draw large crowds — but without a simple statement that the immediate goal would be to achieve mass casualties and terror without resorting to weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical or biological), which have proven very difficult to develop, produce and deploy undetected. 

What NCTC does not acknowledge (so far, and in its unclassified assessment) is emerging intelligence from Afghanistan that the focus has shifted even farther, to smaller targets like churches, schools and public health facilities across the country, no longer confined to major urban areas but instead distributed nationwide. Instead of a handful of high profile targets like the World Trading Center that most of the country would experience remotely on their screens, they would hit 100 or 1,000 targets across the country, spreading the horrific impacts into smaller cities, towns and rural areas so that no one can feel safe. Such attacks would maximize the impact of small teams using simple weapons like rifles, grenades and IEDs — and might also include attacks on key infrastructure using similar low-tech methods.

NCTC also frames two additional target sets, one of which, attacks on government and public officials, is from several perspectives a clear and present danger. 

To be sure, NCTC is an intelligence and analysis organization. It does not command any federal operational force, much less the state and local law enforcement officers and others who will be the first responders. It is therefore forgivable that its recommendations are largely limited to prevention, but not responding to attacks in progress, or even mitigating their consequences. That is for the rest of us to consider — and prepare for. The better prepared we are, the greater the chance we can still deter the threat or defeat it.