SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE ANALYSIS - From the Middle East to Russia’s war on Ukraine, cybersecurity to disinformation to the emergence of an axis of powers - Russia and China in particular - aiming to counter the West, the range of national and global security threats today is as complex as it’s ever been.
Recently the former head of counterterrorism for the New York City Police Department, John Miller, warned of what he called "a perfect storm" of elements that might bring security risks to U.S. shores: the Israel-Hamas war, and the extent to which it has revitalized terrorist groups "that had lost their raison d’etre"; Hezbollah, a powerful militant group in the region but also an internationally-positioned terrorist organization; and foreign powers including Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and others - all "stirring the pot" in their own attempts to weaken the influence of the U.S. and its western allies. Add in the myriad efforts to use the internet to inflame and divide Americans in an election year, Miller said, and "we are back to a lights-blinking-red place again.”
The Cipher Brief convened a group of experts who have spent long careers worrying about threats to U.S. security, and asked them to reflect on some of these issues, and share which among them they find most worrisome and why.
GLOBAL BACKGROUND
Israel-Hamas
- Negotiations for a ceasefire and release of hostages held in Gaza continue, though it appears increasingly unlikely a deal will be reached before the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israeli forces will continue their campaign against Hamas, including in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, despite international pressure against moving on the city, where an estimated 1.5 million Palestinians are now located, most of whom fled homes further north to escape Israeli military advances.
- Lebanon and Hezbollah are studying a U.S. proposal to pacify the Israel-Lebanon border and stop cross-border violence. Hezbollah has launched regular rocket attacks into Israel in support of Hamas, and Israel has retaliated with strikes in southern Lebanon.
Houthis and the Red Sea
- Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen have been attacking commercial vessels in the Red Sea since Israel's war on Gaza began last October. A Houthi missile strike on the bulk carrier True Confidence on Tuesday killed three crew members, the first fatal attack by the group since its campaign began.
- The U.S. has conducted strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, both unilaterally and jointly with the U.K. The U.S. is also leading a multilnational naval coalition, Operation Prosperity Guardian, to protect commercial vessels in the Red Sea. The E.U. launched its own operation, called Aspides, to protect shipping in the region. The Houthis have said they will not be deterred from launching further attacks.
- The U.S. is also working to curb Iran’s supply of advanced weapons and military equipment, including drones and long-range missiles parts, to the Houthis.
U.S.-Europe Terror Threat
- Western officials report that the Israel-Hamas war has increased the threat of far-right and Islamist terrorism. In the latest incident, four teens were arrested in Brussels on Sunday on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack.
Russia-Ukraine
- Russia has made recent advances in Ukraine, most notably last month's capture of the town of Avdiivka. Ukraine has blamed a shortfall of ammunition for the fall of Avdiivka, and called for more Western aid to defend against fresh Russian assaults.
- While a Ukraine aid package continues to founder in the U.S. Congress, European allies have pledged new support for Ukraine, including a Czech plan to send thousands of rounds of ammunition sourced from outside of the E.U. to Kyiv.
China
- China continues to pressure Taiwan through both gray-zone activities and intrusive maritime patrols around Taiwan’s front-line Kinmen islands.
- China is increasingly clashing with the Philippines over maritime disputes in the South China Sea. Recent incidents include collisions between Chinese and Philippine coast guard vessels and increased Chinese pressure on a Philippine military outpost in the disputed Second Thomas Shoal.
Disinformation
- FBI Director Christopher Wray has warned that the U.S. faces unprecedented election security threats this year, noting that artificial intelligence and other technological advances have lowered the barrier to entry for threat actors to engage in malign influence.
THE BRIEFING
The Cipher Brief tapped three deeply-experienced former CIA Officers to assess today's threat matrix.
Beth Sanner former deputy director for National Intelligence at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Sanner retired from the CIA with 35 years of national security experience.
Linda Weissgold spent 37 years at the CIA, where she served as a Deputy Director for Analysis and head of the CIA's Office of Terrorism Analysis.
Ted Singer is a former CIA senior Intelligence service officer who served in executive leadership positions at the CIA and was a five-time chief of station for the agency.
This excerpt of the full briefing has been edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: What are the global issues that have you most concerned?
Singer: The crocodile closest to the canoe is a new front in the Middle East started by Hezbollah, or Israel goading Hezbollah into opening up a new front, so that the Israelis don't look like they're the bad guys. March will be a telling month for that, to see whether Hezbollah will keep its powder dry and how much the Israelis will continue to poke. Then let's watch how the next generation of jihadists start viewing this crisis. They're there now, whether it's lone wolves or little groups, but they're out there.
Weissgold: So often we talk about the fact that we have to be able - as an intelligence community, as a policy community - to walk and chew gum at the same time. We can't just say we're going to “pivot to China.” I never liked that, because it made it sound like we were turning 180 degrees and we weren't going to focus on other things. So we have to figure out a way as an intelligence community, as a policy community, to be agile enough to focus on all of these.
It would be an absolute shame if we were to take our eye off the ball in terms of how what's going on in the Middle East right now, is fueling potential future jihadists, how it's being exploited already for recruitment. How even with the Houthis and the ships that they're attacking, they say they're doing it in the name of the Gaza conflict, when really it has nothing to do with that. We have to continue to maintain that level of vigilance that we have done for so long, but we're probably going to have to figure out new ways to do it. That's the challenge.
Sanner: I'm watching what's going on between Israel and Hezbollah because that's really the next potential expansion of this war. And also the Red Sea. Obviously, the Houthis but we also had the deepest strike that we've seen in years from Israel into Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. That's 60 miles from the border. In that strike, they killed the head of Hezbollah's eastern commander in Lebanon.
This is a pretty big deal and my belief is that an opening up of a second front of the war will come as a result of Israeli actions more than any other player. That is something we have to watch. It's just really a matter of time. There are 80,000 Israelis still displaced from the north. That is an untenable situation and the question is when the Israelis feel ready to go at it.
The Cipher Brief: We've talked with folks here for a while about the likelihood of that second front but we've also seen indications that Hezbollah has no interest in expanding this war and also that Iran has no interest in pushing them to do so.
Weissgold: With Israel and Hezbollah, the idea that neither of them really wants it doesn't mean it won't happen. You have Israelis who have had to evacuate from the northern area of Israel, and Hezbollah is now actually shelling into areas deeper into Israel than we've seen in a long time.
I think the same is true for Iran right now. Iran probably doesn't want there to be an all-out war. They are not looking to have another one of their proxies or affiliates in a war right now. But again, a miscalculation is quite possible.
I would also mention the Arab Street. We haven't really talked much about that since the Arab Spring. Most of the Arab leaders have had to pay more attention to this than ever before. And while we haven't seen the Palestinian cause really energize the Arab Street yet, that could happen, and drive this in directions that people are not necessarily thinking that they want it to go right now.
The Cipher Brief: How are you thinking about this broader alliance of nations opposed in one way or another to the U.S. - China and Russia, Iran and North Korea? How worried are you about that?
Sanner: Looking ahead, we're seeing what we've all worried about for years, which is our adversaries working more closely together. That has been a choice that China has made, joining with Russia. The war in Ukraine is accelerating that trend that already existed.
Unfortunately, we're starting to see cooperation and collaboration across different lines and in a way that is much deeper than we had before. We have North Korea, we had a report on how factories are running 24-7 to produce munitions for the Russian military, whereas their other factories are running at 30 percent capacity because they're short on electricity. So they're being paid obviously, and Russia is helping them in some way, shape or form.
We know that's got to be the case with Iran as well. We are waiting for this interstate treaty (between Russia and Iran), and folks are really worried about whether that will result in modern fighter aircraft going to Iran. Something the Iranians currently lack is an air force, so that could be a huge problem for instability in the Middle East. They already have the largest missile force in the region.
We really have to do a better job on sanctions enforcement. There's a lot of focus right now on U.S. components going into Russia. They're also getting into Iran and North Korea despite the sanctions regime, because we are not effectively enforcing them. There are a lot of ways to do that. We have to look ahead and see what can we do about this, because we don't want to end up 20 years from now being in a much worse place. That's what I worry about.
Weissgold: It's not that we haven't seen these relationships before - the “Axis of Evil,” all of those terms that have been coined in the past, but I think the environment in which this is now unfolding is different and I think a lot of this has to do with the challenges that are occurring to the international order. Increasingly, I think what we're seeing is that the system that was set up largely after World War II is less equipped than ever to meet the needs and the demands of the citizenry around the world.
And so you have governments that are increasingly trying to figure out how they're going to do that in a world in which China now wants to have not just a seat at the table, they want to be at the head of it. And powers like Russia, declining powers, they're not willing to give up their seat. They'd rather upend the whole table than give up their seat. I think that we're seeing that play out with Ukraine, and you have other countries, whether they be Iran or North Korea or some of our previous allies, that are looking to figure out how they navigate this changing world.
Singer: Let me just offer, as an example, the country of Sudan. That was a Hamas training ground at one point in time. That was a bin Laden hideout at one point. Not that long ago, the Israelis regularly and frequently bombed Hamas training camps in Sudan. We went through big convulsions to get Sudan off of the terrorist list. They were actually a signatory to the Abraham Accords (with Israel).
Well, this country is now almost everything we were talking about in this frayed international order. You have former Wagner mercenaries exploiting gold mines. You have a civil war in which Saudi Arabia and its closest ally and neighbor, the UAE, are on different sides. We are focused on this axis of evil, which certainly posed an existential threat at some point, but there's a lot else that's going to go on in the world of little deals, little bargains, every country for itself that is going to start shopping between the emerging alliances. And that, I think, is what I'm looking at when we start talking about the big-picture challenges coming out of that fraying of the global order.
The Cipher Brief: Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns in the U.S., we know they're meant to divide U.S. citizens as we approach the November presidential election. One such campaign is targeting Americans, drumming up talk of a potential civil war related to border issues that are dividing the country politically. How are you thinking about these threats?
Sanner: I worry more now than ever that foreign disinformation is mingling with U.S. polarization, and that for so much of our population, this disinformation finds not only ready access, but it's being generated independently, and domestically. And so I just think that it's merging together more and more.
This campaign sounds to me a lot like a Russian campaign. They haven't stopped, and they continue to be at the forefront of a lot of this kind of campaigning. And what the Russians did in 2020 and they continue to do today, is they find witting or unwitting U.S. influencers to promote their ideas. That's a problem. It's easier to defeat a bot than it is to defeat ideas being promoted by Americans. That is a big concern of mine.
The second thing is that we are starting to see some shift in how China is conducting their disinformation. And we have seen examples now of them promoting a lot more of this idea of dividing America, of trying to make Americans think democracy doesn't work and that our system is broken.
Singer: There was a devious Russian disinformation gimmick on Twitter where they arrested a young Russian who claimed he had been recruited and trained by Ukrainians that the CIA had trained - and that his mission was to kill Tucker Carlson, while Carlson was in Russia interviewing Putin. These are going to pop up and proliferate, probably exponentially, from now until our elections in November.
I haven't seen any indication that the Russians have meddled in our own domestic conversation about Palestinians versus Israel, but just like any of the other seams in our society, I imagine that the Russians will pick and create divisiveness on that one. As this conflict continues, after 75 years of bipartisan support for Israel, this is the first time in my life that I see stickers saying “free Palestine.” And the Russians are masters at picking at things that they see pop up in our society, and I share with all of my colleagues here the same nervousness that it's just going to expand exponentially from now until November.
Weissgold: Disinformation is not new, but the pace, the scope and the tools that are available is what has changed over time. And social media has definitely been not a good thing when it comes to this. What I have found is that far too often the American reader is passive. They're not looking at something and critically evaluating the idea. Was that piece of information designed to evoke emotion or was it actually trying to inform me? And if it was designed to evoke emotion, maybe you better really think about who was the person behind that and what were they trying to influence?
What we need is to inculcate starting early in our education system, this idea that you need to be a responsible and active participant in the information that you get. You need to be questioning it. We're going to have to become a more informed public and a more discerning public when it comes to the way we take in information.
One of the things that is really important for intelligence analysts to monitor is what is already being censored in a country, whether it be Russia or China or North Korea, because that's often a demonstrative sign of the things that are worrying that leader where they feel vulnerable. It wouldn't be a bad idea to try and get to the Russian public with more information, but again, a lot of that information is being censored.
Sanner: We should make sure that the United States sticks to providing information that is factual and that we don't become proponents of disinformation. I think that would be a huge mistake, and I think that there are plenty of things for us to say that are absolutely real, true, factual about our adversaries.
The real challenge there is that back in the day, we figured out how to get information into (the Soviet Bloc), smuggling things in the pre-internet digital age, and now we have to find new tools to do it and in a way that looks authentic. There are ways to do that and we probably should be doing that more, but I also think the United States doesn't have to be the only group in the world that's putting out information. We should give ammunition - factual information - to influencers, people who have stature in other countries, to help them understand what the choices are, and not always be talking about it in kind of American terms.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
