CIA Analyst: Are China & Russia Behind an Imminent Terrorist Attack on America?
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He really tried to damage the United States and our national security and he is a traitor and he's lucky he's not in the United States because I would think he deserves a death penalty.
It's not even an OSINT war.
There's basically a war between the MI5 and the CIA. Over Hamza bin Laden, and the CIA is not being honest.
He's alive in the future in their dream world, a part of the caliphate.
That means they're going to take us over.
You know, they're going to change the way our government works, the way our system works, so we can become an Islamic society.
And people need to understand that is the goal.
The attackers are in country to include the suicide bombers, the suicide vests are in country, and the weapons are in country.
Just to maintain terrorists in the United States for that long, not get them caught or thwarted is complicated, it's expensive.
So we do believe still the intent is for the attack to occur in 2025.
And they are ready to do it and they're well trained.
There are pipelines up through Mexico.
So they're actually mostly run by China and Russia that Al-Qaeda is using through Mexico.
Sarah Adams is a former CIA intelligence analyst and targeter.
Senior advisor to the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Benghazi.
And co-author of the Know Thy Enemy series, which offers in-depth investigations into the infamous Benghazi, Abbey Gate, and October 7th terror attacks.
Now Sarah is issuing an entirely new warning, a warning of the most perilous security environment the world has seen since 9-11, an imminent attack on the United States homeland, and how America's enemies, ranging from terror groups like al-Qaeda and the Taliban, to great powers like China and Russia are coordinating to bring it all to fruition.
The only question is, is anyone going to listen before it's too late?
Today we have Sarah Adams.
She needs no introduction.
But to get started, if you don't mind, I've become quite a fan of your X account recently.
And I want to read one of your recent posts because I think it really encompasses a lot that's going on that people might not be.
Fully aware of.
On your X, you posted, It's time for honesty.
Our current strategy ignores the real threat.
So with that in mind, I just want to start with one simple question.
Are Americans today secure?
Well, I mean, Americans aren't secure.
The main reason is obviously because of the open border policy, right?
And a lot of nefarious actors came in, not just terrorists.
So we are at our least secure point since 9-11, in my opinion.
Okay, then let me back that up a little bit and make it more specific.
Since January 20th and the inauguration of Donald Trump, do you feel that Americans are more secure or less secure, especially when you consider his cabinet picks like Hegseth at the DOD or Rubio at State, Ratcliffe for the CIA? Are these decisions that are going to put Americans in a better position, in your belief, or are we backsliding?
I think we're going to be in a better position because I think they're being a little more honest about the threats.
But as you can imagine, when you ignore something for four years, it's festered and now it's a much bigger problem.
So they can't fix everything quick enough.
And what are the biggest challenges that this administration is going to have to face?
What are the fixes that need to be made, kind of from ones they can do quickly to ones that are going to take more long-term strategic planning?
Yeah, I mean...
Quick fixes are tough, right?
I think the near-term issue is going to be a major terrorist attack, because as you can imagine, when that happens, it throws your whole agenda off.
So I think that needs to be a near-term focus.
Obviously, the biggest issue is the border, but that's a long-term, you know, that's going to take 30 years to fix at this point.
So we have a lot of issues going on, and then we still have our near-peer problems, right?
We have the Russia problem and the China problem that we have to deal with, but we've...
Done a bad job of dealing with all the threats simultaneously, right?
We're kind of like a dog chasing this toy and that toy and that toy, and we need a better strategy to counter all of it.
Yeah, I agree.
And you brought up a lot of different points that I definitely want to touch on throughout this interview, especially Russia, China, the border.
I think they all kind of sort of interlocated a certain position.
You can't really separate one from the other.
But on the note of the inauguration and obviously Trump taking over the Biden administration, I want to go back a few years to another sort of nexus in the Biden-Trump crossover, which would have been the Afghanistan withdrawal.
So I remember sitting there watching that on TV thinking, I don't really know what, but it feels like something's drastically changing here.
Sort of the same feeling that I have when I was watching 9-11 when I was a kid, although obviously viscerally it was a little bit different.
So there's a bunch of arguments over what actually happened and what the effects of that will be.
So from your expert, you know, sort of viewpoint, where does the fault lie in our failed withdrawal?
And given that we can all sort of agree that it was a failed withdrawal, how has that event changed the security outlook for everyday Americans?
Yeah, so there's multiple faults.
Obviously, we really shouldn't have done the Doha deal and made it solely with the Taliban and cut out the rest of the Afghan government.
But in the Doha deal, we had red lines, right?
And if Taliban crossed those red lines, the deal would be ended and we would keep troops in Afghanistan.
And even in the deal, it wasn't clear we would pull out a Bagram.
There was still going to be a number of troops that stayed in Bagram.
So the deal wasn't even followed to the T. The Biden administration quickly wanted to pull everyone out.
They set an arbitrary date of 9-11, and they didn't even start planning an actual withdrawal of people until August 15th.
So think about that.
They gave themselves less than a month to even do it.
The attack happened at Abbey Gate, and then they basically closed down within days, right?
The withdrawal, as you can imagine, shifted the balance of power to the enemy.
Now, in Afghanistan, it shifted the power to the enemy to the terrorists, but Russia saw this as weakness, right?
And it's why they thought now was an opportune time to do Ukraine.
And then the terrorists in general, especially Iran, saw this as a weakness, and that's why they pushed forward really strong using Hamas, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban to do the attacks in Israel in 2023, right?
Right.
So this has been a continued catalyst of failure.
And then we had the Syrian blitzkrieg, obviously, in November, another aftermath of the fall of Kabul.
So when I was reading some of your work, it continuously shocked me how interrelated all of these different groups were.
But I want to start with the Taliban because I remember when they took over, there was this false promise that they're going to normalize, they're going to institute, you know, reforms that make them more of a normal actor on the world stage.
And of course, we learned very quickly that that was all one big lie.
I think most of us realized that from the beginning.
But what was the goal or what was the realistic idea that the Taliban would normalize or was there ever one?
What has the Taliban done since they've actually taken power in Afghanistan?
Yeah, I mean, all that was shortsighted.
It was Taliban, in our government's opinion, was the most powerful entity in the country.
We want to get out.
We'll just hand the country to the Taliban.
They'll leave us alone, we'll leave them alone, and we can move on, right?
That was the belief.
Obviously, that's not true.
Now, what the Taliban then did, as we've talked about, so, you know, it fell in August of 2021. By November of 2021, they were already issuing passports to terrorists.
You could come on Thursday, be a terrorist from any group, and get passports.
November, they also met for the first time with Julani and started planning the Syrian blitzkrieg.
In March, the next March of 2022, is when they sat down and started planning the Hamas attacks with Iran, al-Qaeda, and Hamas, right?
It moved that quickly.
Within six months, they planned those two huge events, and look what happened when they actually went to fruition.
Right.
So you're telling me, and it's not just you making these claims very clearly, it's well understood.
That the Taliban is working with all these other groups, and clearly they're not going to be a normal actor on the world stage.
So why, from what I can tell, is so much American taxpayer money going to fund the Taliban?
And we know this because you can finally see some senators trying to do something, right?
Senator Sheehy in Tuberville proposed a bill to stop it, and the West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito also just recently introduced legislation that would stop American taxpayer funds from going to the Taliban.
And then going to other terrorist groups.
Why is this still happening?
You know, we do this everywhere, which is really unfortunate, right?
We throw money at a problem.
We even throw money at our enemy.
And with Afghanistan, there's two pots of money that are a problem.
We send humanitarian aid that we say is going to help the people who aren't being taken care of by the Taliban, but it's going to the Taliban.
And then we send counterterrorism dollars to the Taliban for this fake ISIS fight the CIA and the DoD have.
The Taliban, to them, is their key counterterrorism ally against ISIS. It's the biggest...
It's a joke.
ISIS has grown threefold in the last three years, but they're lying and saying it's their key ally.
So you're saying that the Taliban is funding groups like Al Qaeda and also Hamas, but then they're also claiming to help us on the counterterrorism fight with ISIS. Isn't it very well believable that some of that money that we're giving to the Taliban is ending up directly in ISIS's pockets as well?
It is.
We actually followed some of the money, and it went straight from the Ministry of Interior building in Kabul to ISIS training camps in Afghanistan.
And even our government is lying and saying there are no ISIS training camps anymore in Afghanistan.
They were closed down.
Actually, the biggest camp, it's really funny, do you remember when we dropped that big Moab, that huge bomb?
So they built a camp there, and it's an ISIS-Al Qaeda camp.
Taliban camp.
It's gigantic.
It's one of the biggest camps in Afghanistan.
Isis, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban in one camp?
They all share the same camp.
It's gigantic.
And then we have our government saying, oh yeah, they're fighting ISIS and there's no more ISIS in Afghanistan.
It's like this insane world we've now lived in when you can see these things on imagery.
Now, is this just the government dealing with sunk costs that, oh, we spent this much money, you know, furthering this delusion?
Or do they really believe that the Taliban is helping us in any way, shape, or form?
At first it was just to get out.
Now I do think we have had people, I think it's a counterintelligence problem, that have drank the juice and believed Taliban's intelligence, and they've now convinced policymakers, and there are people who will look at you straight in the face and say we're fighting ISKP with the Taliban, and they honestly believe it, which is scary.
Well, I would hope that we're going to see a little bit of a change with that with the new intelligence apparatus that's hopefully being formed, but...
I want to get to one specific group, and I know for people in your world, and after reading a lot of your work, I have so much more respect for Middle East intelligence gathering because just keeping the web of names straight seems like a full-time job.
But again and again, al-Qaeda comes up.
Al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda.
I think most Americans, when Osama bin Laden was killed by the SEALs, kind of stopped thinking about al-Qaeda at all.
So what is the current status of al-Qaeda and what are their goals considering their jihad or their views for America?
Yeah, well, it's not just that Americans stop thinking about al-Qaeda.
You know, there was actually a media push at the time from the administration.
To make us think, Al-Qaeda's done, Al-Qaeda's over, we defeated Al-Qaeda.
And that's what the administration was putting out, and that's what the press was putting out.
So, you know, like when Benghazi happened in 2012, for example, you know, soon after his death, about a year after, nobody was honest that was an Al-Qaeda attack.
So Al-Qaeda has been involved in all these things over the years.
They've been involved in some big attacks in Afghanistan, like they did an attack against, like, the Emirati diplomats there.
We'll never see Al-Qaeda's name on it, right?
So for like the last 10 plus years, our own government and our own media covered up Al-Qaeda's involvement.
So that's why Americans think Al-Qaeda's done because nobody's been giving them correct information.
It's almost like not their fault.
So is our government, or at least I guess government writ large, on purpose pulling the wool over the eyes of the American people?
Or like you said, is it just their intelligence gathering apparatus is so bad that they don't know what's going on?
Yeah, it's twofold, right?
They're lacking collection on al-Qaeda.
And instead of just being honest and saying we don't have a collection, they're just saying al-Qaeda is not doing anything.
And they want the counterterrorism fight to focus solely on ISIS. And so they say that's the only goal, that's the purpose, that's the enemy.
And they're not even being honest.
Then al-Qaeda and ISIS are working together, right?
So the enemy is...
Beating us on the narrative.
And then we're not actioning the enemy in the way we should or going after the senior leaders or terrorists we should.
Even like I told you, our operations right now against ISIS are in Syria.
But ISIS's central shura is based in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
They left Syria years ago, right?
So we're not even taking out the key leaders.
It's like cannon fodder.
Well, I'm glad that you used the term key leader because there seems to be another major disconnect between U.S. intelligence and, I guess, European intelligence and just kind of the OSINT community, which is, and again, so many things about your work blew my mind, but Hamza bin Laden.
I had not heard that in American mainstream media since the administration declared him dead during Trump's first term.
Yet, the British intelligence and the Mir are reporting that he's alive.
Your work is telling me he's alive.
And moreover, your work is telling me he was intricately involved in the planning for October 7th.
How can both of these things exist at the same time?
I'm so confused.
Yeah, as you pointed out, it's not even an OSINT war.
There's basically a war between the MI5 and the CIA. We tried to put it in the press for a year-plus in the U.S., and no one would touch it.
They said, no, we went to the CIA. They said, he's dead, we won't print it.
So the U.S. press was controlled and would only print it with CIA's approval, which is crazy.
So the British intelligence released it themselves.
So Hamza bin Laden is very much alive.
He actually, him and I, He and his brother Abdullah were leading a lot of the fight when Kabul fell.
People call that the Taliban fighting the Afghan government.
That was actually led a lot by al-Qaeda, and it was al-Qaeda taking down the Afghan government.
No one's been honest about that.
And then, yes, Hamza bin Laden was one of the key plotters of the Hamas attacks.
And he's the one that actually basically allowed the Hamas terrorists, a third of them, trained in Afghanistan for that attack.
And Hamas, I mean, Hamza oversaw it and his brother Abdullah is in charge of all the al-Qaeda training camps.
So he chose which training camps the Hamas terrorists would fight in.
So the bin Ladens are very involved in the Hamas attacks.
Yeah.
So if you search on Google right now, the first 10 results outside of that Mir article are Hamza bin Laden dead and they're years old.
So does the CIA have that much of a grip over the American media apparatus that they can control the narrative to that degree?
Yeah, they don't have just a control over the media apparatus.
If you go to other branches of the intelligence community, they'll say, we can't talk about Hamza, we get pushback from CIA. If you go to HIPC, same thing.
They say, we get pushback from CIA, not just on Hamza bin Laden, but on the fake ISKP operations with the Taliban.
So CIA has kind of a grip on these Afghan narratives and their information is wrong.
And they're collecting information from the Taliban.
They're putting it in classified channels and they're basically compromising our intelligence collection on terrorism.
And I keep saying it should be a whole counterintelligence investigation.
You know, if this was China or if this is Russia and we allowed this to happen, that's how it would be handled.
Why are we not handling that way when terrorists are compromising our collection?
Well, especially since we spent the last, you know, year and a half supporting Israel.
Well, to whatever degree you want to argue, we've supported Israel's fight against Hamas and Gaza.
I think that's debatable.
But it seems to me not debatable that we know Hamas did not plan this on their own.
They don't have the capabilities to do so.
We know the IRGC was involved.
That's always been out there.
And, you know, part of the mainstream narrative.
But when you look into it and the work that you've done makes it quite clear that there were other scrupulous actors involved, including the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the Taliban who were funding.
And then Al-Qaeda, who is apparently led by Osama bin Laden's son.
How does that escape the...
And forgive me if I'm feigning ignorance here, I don't know, but how does that escape the narrative in America that that is going on?
I think it's the fact that our government does control a lot of the narrative, right?
So if they're not giving this to media outlets, if they're not giving it to New York Times, they're not giving it to Washington Post, it's not going out.
When it doesn't go out on those large publications, it doesn't go out on the small local news as well, right?
So it's not proliferating down to everyday Americans.
So they don't know these things.
I mean, just if you talk about our money going into Afghanistan, some of that money we give to the Taliban actually gets brought over.
It's given to the IRGC, too.
Like, we're even funding the Iranian terrorists through Afghanistan, right?
And just nobody actually is paying any attention to where the money is going.
And Americans need to be more involved in where their taxpayer dollars are going.
Yeah, well, like I said, hopefully a couple of these bills that have been suggested actually make it through Congress and we can get something done about that because it seems ridiculous to me.
Backing up just a little bit, you obviously have made quite a name for yourself with your work on Benghazi.
That was fantastic.
Know Thy Enemy Benghazi was great.
But I also just finished reading, and I hope to bring it up here, because I recommend a lot of people to read the October 7th report that you worked on.
And it would take forever to kind of break that whole thing down.
But just for people that might not be aware, what role did the Taliban and al-Qaeda have along with the IRGC in actually planning that event?
Yeah, they decided to actually plan the event in Afghanistan because it was a safe haven.
They knew we gave up collection there, and the Taliban knew they controlled the information that went to the U.S. government, right?
So they knew they'd be safe planning it in Afghanistan.
So they did much of the planning there.
The initial meeting was there.
Kind of the second strategy meeting was there.
A lot of the planning actually was over Telegram.
The U.S. really should have intercepted that.
They didn't, right?
And then I told you a third of the attackers.
came to Afghanistan and trained.
Also, the Taliban provided weapons.
They shipped weapons from Barm Cha, kind of down in Helmand.
To Gaza in advance of the attacks, right?
So they were very integral.
And now what a lot of people don't understand is, so Israel has been fighting Hamas since that time, and they have killed a lot of Hamas members.
But instead of the five to six camps the Taliban allowed Hamas to use to prepare for the attacks, they opened it up to a dozen.
So now a dozen al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan train Hamas fighters.
So when you kill one in Israel, they train So they have now made more Hamas terrorists than were killed in Israel.
And because we're not bombing the camps, we're allowing Hamas to basically be reconstituted in Afghanistan.
So what is the interest of these groups to work together?
Because obviously, if you look at it from the outside, you have different sects of Islam involved.
You have different ideologies.
You have different worldviews.
What is the interest of a group like the Taliban or Al-Qaeda working with Hamas?
What do they get from this?
Yeah, well, this actually happened.
A lot of people don't know.
So Hamas and Al-Qaeda fought together at times in Syria, actually, and the Syrian government banned Hamas.
Al-Qaeda and Hamas actually also fought together in the second Libyan civil war.
That was 2014 to 2017. So it's just this wasn't reported out.
They were actually doing joint efforts together against the mutual enemy, Assad, and then, of course, General Haftar in Libya.
The big catalyst, though, is Hamza bin Laden.
His father wanted to bring all the groups together.
Hamza made it a goal and he's...
We've done a ton of negotiations, compromises, as you can imagine, to bring the groups together.
They brought them together under something.
It's got a lot of different names.
I call it the Islamic Army.
They call it the Army of Imam Mahdi.
But the goal is we work together, Sunni or Shia, doesn't matter, because our goal is to recreate the Islamic caliphates, right?
So the last one ended, you know, whatever it was, 70 years ago.
Now they want to bring the caliphates back.
Afghanistan was the start.
Syria was number two.
Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Mali, Burkina Faso are kind of like the next wave to create the caliphate.
So they have a joint goal now and they're all working together on that goal.
So this brings me to an interesting kind of crux in the road because if you talk to a lot of everyday Americans that you know they work at a car dealership or they're teaching school.
You'll tell them about this and they'll say, okay, but that's their business in the Middle East.
Let whatever happens, happens over there.
If we stay out of it, really the only reason they're mad at us is because we intervened and we bombed them and we're creating the terrorists.
Let's let them do their own thing.
Is that true?
Are we making ourselves enemies?
Or do they have kind of a larger ideology that really supersedes anything that we might do?
Yeah, I mean, if you go off the most basic thing they say, hey, if you get off Muslim lands, we'll leave you alone.
But that's actually not true.
The caliphate...
China exists, and the U.S. becomes a piece of the caliphate.
It's really interesting.
So the caliphate actually exists with China.
So China can have its empire and its world, and then there is the Islamic caliphate, but in the Islamic caliphate, the U.S. is a piece of the Islamic caliphate.
We don't leave the Middle East and they leave us alone.
They'll leave China alone, but we are going to become, you know, in the future, in their dream world, a part of the caliphate.
That means they're going to take us over.
They're going to change the way our government works, the way our system works, so we can become an Islamic society.
And people need to understand that is the goal.
So why is this Quranic teachings or is it something that's evolved?
How does China become exempt from this caliphate where America and I assume Europe fall squarely within the borders of that?
Yeah, I mean, obviously Spain is the biggest piece they want to retake as a caliphate once they finish off North Africa and they go up to Spain, right?
So Europe is a huge piece of it.
It's really the Western beliefs they want to...
So they think it's kind of the Western view of the world, right, who helped create Israel in all those issues, right?
If they don't get rid of the Western view and the Western belief that comes from the U.S. government, the British government, the Israeli government, they'll keep having that problem, right?
So they need to eliminate us.
They don't get those issues from China.
They don't view China in that same way.
They view them as someone they can coexist with in the future.
That reminds me of something that you mentioned a couple times before, is the historical lens that they view the West through is very interesting, because you pointed out that the October 7th date was chosen for a specific reason, and that has a lot to do with Western behavior in the Middle East or around Israel.
Could you just explain why October 7th was picked in the first place?
Yeah, so it was picked by Sireful Odell, who's basically the head of al-Qaeda's external operations right now, and he's also the mastermind of al-Qaeda's homeland attack in the U.S. that's coming up.
So he chose October 7th because that's the day at the time President Bush...
We called and made the announcement of the air bombing campaign in Afghanistan, and it was primarily in Kandahar, which was Al-Qaeda's stronghold, and that's when we basically carpet bombed Kandahar, and that day is very important to them, and so that is why they chose that date to get at us.
So a lot of Americans don't understand.
Like, the attacks in Israel were the dress rehearsal, and the dress rehearsal for the U.S. attack, right?
So they did the attack in Israel.
They're learning from it.
They're growing from it.
They're going to attack us, and it's going to be bigger and better in their mind than what they did in Israel.
So when I hear you say that, it brings kind of two emotions to me.
It brings confidence because we have someone, you know, on our side that knows this so well, but also the assurity with which you say the attack is going to happen is...
Quite frightening, to be honest with you.
What makes you so sure that this attack on the homeland from Islamic terrorists is going to happen?
So there's multiple reasons.
Number one, it's kind of what al-Qaeda says.
So al-Qaeda says the attackers got here.
The attack is across multiple cities, as you can imagine.
It's in multiple modes on transportation, using suicide bombers on airlines, etc.
Well, in all these years that they've been sending these attackers here since 2021, the U.S. has yet to catch one of these attackers, right?
So we haven't thwarted anything.
So let's say we even get 10 of the attackers, right?
Well, there's huge pieces of...
We're failing to disrupt, right?
So the attack is going to happen because we haven't thwarted it.
In the past, some of the big plots, like the big airliner plot in 2006, thanks to British intelligence, we thwarted that, right?
We don't have the intelligence collection anymore in Afghanistan or the ally to thwart these attacks over there.
So now we have to deal with them on U.S. soil.
So they planned the attack for 2025. They could shift it.
You've read our Israel report.
They shifted that a year.
So it could be 2025. They could wait.
But from what we know, the attackers are in country to include the suicide bombers, the suicide vests are in country, and the weapons are in country.
Just to maintain terrorists in the United States for that long, not get them caught or thwarted, is complicated.
It's expensive.
So we do believe still the intent is for the attack to occur in 2025, and they are ready to do it, and they're well-trained.
And would you say the number is, you think, that are here currently?
So there's different...
I mean, Al-Qaeda says they sent 1,000.
I think it could be slightly exaggerated, but as you know, it was 1,400 for the Hamas attacks.
So the number isn't off.
I care less about the exact number of attackers.
I do believe 10% is going to be suicide bombers, and I feel strongly.
So I think suicide bombers are between 75 and 100. I think that number is pretty accurate.
So I do think we just need to deal with the fact there's going to be an attack.
You know, I don't care if it's 200 terrorists or 400 terrorists, right?
Our community has never even had attacks where there's like more than five.
So it's going to be a whole different scenario we need to deal with.
And these teams did train in groups of five to seven.
So communities at the very least have to plan for an attack using five to seven terrorists.
Well, yeah, I guess if you look at places like Mumbai, it doesn't take an overwhelming amount of people to cause vast amounts of damage.
You see what happened with ISIS in Russia or Moscow, and you see in Mumbai, and you see places in Africa quite frequently.
And you think, okay, well, after 9-11, we kind of got a handle on this.
But then you remember, oh, like 10 years later, we had the Boston Marathon bombings.
Those were a little bit of a lone wolf, but still the same ideology.
So what is being done now that obviously people at higher levels are aware of this, and we have a new administration?
Is there anything going on to prepare and arm the public to better respond to what sounds like would be a tragedy?
Yeah, we haven't seen anything pushed down.
I mean, you know, it was publicly known, I went and talked to, like, Governor DeSantis.
I live in Florida.
And he wasn't giving anything from the federal government on terrorist threats at all.
So we've been trying to push ground up, as you can imagine.
Now, luckily, because there's this big initiative to deal with the border and to move people out of this country who shouldn't be here, we do hope some of the terrorists will get wrapped up in some of these kind of, like, ice raids, right?
But do they even know?
That these are the terrorists, right?
Because most of them aren't going to be on watch lists, right?
These are new attackers.
This will be their first big event, right?
So we do have to do a lot of educating, and we do have to get people involved in the community level, because it's going to be communities likely that help thwart this.
I guess in America, we don't have to deal with the direct effects of groups like al-Qaeda and the Taliban on a daily basis, but one that we do, you know, a newly minted terrorist group that we have to deal with is the cartel.
So do they have any role in funneling these terrorists over, funneling weapons over?
Is there a place in the puzzle for the cartel at this point?
Yeah, the interesting part is, so there are pipelines up through Mexico.
So they're actually mostly run by China and Russia that al-Qaeda is using through Mexico.
And then Surajideen Haqqani from the Taliban has one.
He runs with China, too.
And then it's China and Russia who make the relationships and have those long-standing kind of financial ties to the cartels.
So, you know, when we talk about all these threats, they really are all at the border, right?
The terrorists are working.
The cartels are working.
Russia and China are working.
It's kind of being ignored that this is being enabled by China and Russia.
And I think that piece of it is being lost.
So they're the connector between the terrorists and the cartels.
And it is good now to see the cartels being looked at as terrorist groups, but there's still not this come-togetherness of all these parties that people are understanding or working.
Think about it.
Someone works cartels.
Someone works terrorists.
I work terrorist groups together.
I'm Al Qaeda.
I'm ISIS. Someone works China.
Someone works Russia.
None of them all cross-collaborate.
So we don't have anyone tackling this problem the way it needs to be looked at.
Well, that's a good chance to get into the Russia and China discussion because this falls a little bit more in my background.
So our near-peer competitors, Russia, China, those are the two main ones.
I want to start with Russia, though.
So, again, another thing that I could not believe is you said The initial attack on October 7th was actually supposed to happen in 2022, but for a myriad of logistical reasons and deaths of key leadership, that was pushed off.
But Moscow was actually pushing Hamas to carry forward on October 7th, 2022. Why does Russia have such a vested interest in the Hamas attacks on Israel?
Well, the interesting part is when they decided to plan the Hamas attacks, it was March, right after Russia invaded Ukraine.
And the terrorists, especially Iran, said this is the time to do it because the U.S. is going to be focused on Ukraine with Russia.
At that time is when they reached out to Russia and said, hey, are you OK with this?
And they're like, go forth and conquer.
And they're like, OK, we're going to shoot for October.
And then, as you know, it started to get pushed.
Well, that's when Russia kind of circled back and like, hey.
My war in Ukraine didn't go as fast as I thought it would, right?
We're losing lots of bodies, etc.
And as you saw, they didn't just lose lots of bodies, they had problems with Wagner, and Wagner felt, hey, you're using us as cannon fodder, and there's almost like a moral injury between Wagner, the military in Russia, and then Progosian, and that was a disaster in the end.
So Russia then started pushing, no, no, no, do it in 2222, because it helps us.
So yeah, so Russia ended up getting more...
We're involved than when, yeah, you have our blessing, go forth and conquer.
Now, since Russia has gotten extremely involved within Afghanistan, they're fixing a lot of the equipment we left damaged or weren't working.
They got, like, the C-130s up and running again.
Al-Qaeda set up all these labs, like Summer Chemical.
Biological, there's pieces working on uranium, etc.
In these labs, there's Russian scientists, Chinese scientists, North Korean scientists, Pakistani scientists, and Iranian scientists.
So if we don't understand that all of our enemies are coming together within Afghanistan, we're missing the boat.
And they know they can because they know we gave up collection there.
So they know we're missing it.
Well, yeah, I read somewhere there was 97 to 98% of all intelligence gathering was lost after the pullout, which is insane.
And it seems like that has formed the perfect hotbed for all of our enemies to, you know, hang out like the group of doom and plot our demise, for lack of a better phrase.
Yeah, and that figure comes from the general running sitcom, right?
That's just not a number someone pulled out of their butt, right?
He saw and watched all the collection we lost.
So how does Russia work with or manipulate or be manipulated by these groups?
Because...
As recently as prior to this interview I checked, and the Taliban is still listed as a terrorist organization by the Russian government, yet the Russian government invites them to the St. Petersburg Economic Forum and is trying to legitimize them as a state actor.
So is this just all a charade?
How does Russia manipulate these groups?
Yeah, multiple pieces are at play here.
They actually are taking the Taliban off the list in Russia.
I don't know why it hasn't gone through yet, but Putin has announced it.
Numerous things.
They obviously want just the access in Afghanistan, as you can imagine.
The role Iran plays, Iran's very valuable to Russia, you know, besides being a big piece of its drone program for Ukraine, right?
So we focus on Afghanistan, but a big piece of this is the Russia-Iran relationship.
And then when the Moscow attacks happened, Russia got forced to work with the Taliban, like we do, to go after ISKP, right?
So that was then who they had to ally with, you know, in their mind to deal with the ISKP. Correct.
So, the Russians were fighting with everybody in Syria, I guess.
And then they're supporting the Taliban, who was supporting their enemies in Syria.
But now they're working with the Taliban to fight against ISIS to prevent attacks on their homeland.
So, forgive me if this web seems a little complicated.
Yeah.
And then when you talk about Syria, right, the Russians got pushed out of Syria.
They basically pick up their main base.
They move it to Libya.
And that's its own mess, right?
So, yeah, it's at some point the Russia terrorist relationship has to implode, just like the U.S. relationship with Taliban and Jelani and Syria has to implode.
Right.
Because these actors and these beliefs don't exist in the same world.
And now that Russia's down in Libya, where they fight al-Qaeda and ISIS from, everything's going to implode with all this reliance on these terrorist proxies.
Yeah, I mean, one would think so.
But I guess what they're just trying to do, right, is use whatever chess piece they can as part of their larger gambit against the United States, correct?
Yeah.
Terrorists have always been used short-term strategic gains by us, by Russia, by whomever is playing the game, Pakistan, India, whoever it is, right?
And it's a short term fix to their big problem.
But then no one deals with, obviously, the after fact of now you made that enemy or that terrorist group stronger, more legitimate.
You gave them advanced weaponry, et cetera.
Well, on that note, if the terrorists are kind of a chess piece for the Russians, then at least as far as I can tell and from everything that I know in my time in Asia, they're Russia is almost a chess piece for the Chinese because they are the big brother in the relationship now.
They have the purse strings.
They have the growing military.
They have the better economy.
I mean, I guess you could debate that on a couple fronts, but they're big brother now.
So where does China fit into all this?
Obviously, Afghanistan fell.
They occupied that vacuum.
What was that like?
What did they see in Afghanistan when we withdrew?
Well, the interesting part is China has always had the relationship, you know, with the Taliban.
And when we negotiated the Doha deal, we negotiated with a terrorist named Mullah Abdul Ghani Barader.
His goal, I mean, his role in the Taliban, he was number two.
He ran the operations.
The role he has that nobody's honest about is he was the Taliban's liaison to China.
So we made a peace deal with the Taliban's liaison to China.
So China didn't have to do anything to get in the door when the Taliban took over.
They have fostered this relationship since like 2008, 2009. It was well cemented, right?
So then they just moved in their supplies.
The funny part is China kept trying to get inside Afghanistan and the Afghan government.
We'll like bomb their equipment when they brought it in, you know, like keep pushing back.
And then when the Taliban came in, they rolled in, they took all the mines they wanted to take, etc.
They started doing a lot of things like getting the biometrics working for the Taliban so they could hunt down our allies, right?
Putting CCTV all over Kabul, right?
So a woman couldn't walk around.
So China leaned in and did all the things to the Taliban needed because China is really good at meeting your needs, right?
They don't care.
They don't care about human rights.
You know, they don't have that vested interest.
Like, you need to protect the women, right?
So they go in and they deliver what you want, and then they get what they want.
And obviously they have access to the uranium mines, the lithium mines, so many different things now in Afghanistan that we really never brought to the level it needed to be.
You know, Afghanistan could be a very wealthy country.
The U.S. didn't actually invest into those industries and really establish it, which is a very strange thing.
You know, a lot of money went into Afghanistan and it really went to corrupt entities and persons.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It doesn't seem like we had a very long-term strategic vision for why we were over there.
And it seems like China might be playing a little bit of a longer game.
And have at least kind of outflanked us on that position.
But how does Xinjiang and, like, China's activities in the Xinjiang region and Afghanistan, is there a relationship there?
Like, are you talking about, like, when they're dealing with their own terrorists?
Correct, yeah, because, I mean, ostensibly that's why all the repression in Xinjiang happened was because of domestic terror threats to Beijing.
But I just didn't know if the Afghanistan and Xinjiang, or if there even was a relationship there.
Yeah, there's actually not.
So even when China years ago, 15 plus years ago, created the relationship with the Taliban, it was only to collect, you know, on the Uyghurs and the terrorist threat of the Islamists in China.
So Taliban was never aligned with them.
The funny part is, though, Taliban is aligned with Al-Qaeda, and over the years, Taliban and Al-Qaeda have come together, and Al-Qaeda is very close to ETIN, the East Turkmenistan Islamic movement.
That's basically the main terrorist group China is fighting.
So the head of the group, yeah, the head of the group is, and you saw it in our paper, he's...
Based in Kabul.
He's in the safe house where one of the Hamas meetings was.
So there is now this constant fight between China, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda.
Like, hey, you're fostering them in Afghanistan.
So the interesting part is the head of the Taliban went to Siraj Adin Haqqani, and he's like, you've got to fix this.
I'm so sick of the Chinese showing up once a month and complaining about this.
So what Siraj Adin Haqqani did was like, oh, fine, I'll tell E-Tim they have to go and be ready and support the Syrian blitzkrieg.
So the funny part is, that's why in Syria you're seeing all these, like, Uyghurs, and people are like, why are these guys in Syria?
It's because Siraj Adin's like, you've got to go to Syria and not be in Afghanistan for a bit so we don't have China complaining about us.
But that's why everyone's like, why is ETIM in Syria?
But that's why they were sent by Siraj Adin Haqqani.
So there's also all these little chess moves and games going on to appease China, just like they're appeasing our intelligence community by, like, fake killing some ISIS guys.
So I guess both sides are sort of getting what they want out of the relationship, at least in the short term.
Well, they think they're getting what they want, right?
China thinks the Taliban are pushing out ETIM, which they're not.
They're just like, go fight here for a month or two and come back to Afghanistan.
The U.S. thinks the Taliban's killing ISIS. They're killing random people and calling it ISIS. So ISIS is growing and we're not killing any of these people.
So we're really not getting what we want either.
We're actually helping grow ISIS. Oh, that's fun.
I'm glad that our tax dollars are being put to good use.
So on the China note, more specifically, the direct competition between China and the United States.
I want to ask you a question that might come off as controversial, but I guess I don't really think so.
But considering the hacks and the invasion of our critical infrastructure, like water plants and power plants, and the information campaigns online, economic subterfuge, IP theft.
Would it be fair to say that the United States and China are already at war in a sense?
We are.
We are at least in a position where everybody is doing like the left of left of launch for war, right?
So China's putting everything in place.
So taking, like you said, over parts of our power grid, land, ports.
So when we do go to war, they just shut it all down.
They shut the power down.
They shut the port down, right?
They take control of these things.
So our military can't even deploy, right?
So we're at this pre-war stage and we're like failing.
And we're kind of basically giving up territory to China, and it's not being viewed in that way, right?
Nobody's really taking it serious.
And it's getting to be dangerous.
I don't know if you saw it was like outside of Fort Bragg and those weird like Chechens or at the special operator's house.
Well, the really interesting thing I learned after the fact is they worked for a Chinese telecommunications company.
And when that was given to the U.S. government saying, you need to look into this, this is a big problem.
I don't really look at China's ownership of this, etc.
Stuff like that should be very concerning because now they're impacting our warfighter on U.S. soil.
What are they doing?
This is dangerous.
A lot of our warfighters are overseas.
There and your family is there and you're overseas and you don't know what's going on.
So I think there's a lot of things we need to start paying attention to what China is doing.
We don't exactly understand what they're all doing.
Well, yeah.
I mean, as far as the pressure or the terror that, you know, terror groups can bring to bear on the United States, and it is a huge deal.
Don't make no mistake about that.
What China could do, their capabilities and power and economic power are so far beyond anything that a terrorist group could do, and we seem to just be shoving our heads in the sand with it.
Well, we're just letting China do what they want, right?
China wants to slowly take us over over time and then make us like a piece of their kingdom, right?
And they are slowly doing it.
Sorry to interrupt you, but what drives me crazy is people are like, why is China our enemy?
You know, what have they ever done to us?
The PLA documents make very clear, and Xi Jinping's worldview, they say it over and over and over.
They want to dominate the region, and if they dominate the region, they dominate.
Yeah, I mean, and...
China does do a lot of influence operations, right?
Especially to our younger generation.
Sometimes if your enemy isn't pointing a gun at you, it's hard to view them that way.
I mean, I know I'm in the government and China stole my data all the time, right?
So I don't trust them at all.
It's like, you have my social security, I'm on the black web, you assholes.
But you know what I mean?
It's hard to get people to the influence side of things and to know there's different ways to fight war.
I mean, China's famous for fighting wars in these ways, but we're not.
We view war as, like, dropping the troops, right, bringing the heavy equipment, and not everybody views war that way.
No, gray zone tactics are a real thing, and pretty soon gray zone turns into a real conflict.
And if it does turn into a conflict, probably over, you know, a Taiwan invasion attempt, it feels like they've occupied so much of our information dissemination process that they could.
Well, like, for instance, TikTok, right?
You saw how TikTok turned and you saw how the younger generation could give a shit, for lack of a better phrase, about their data.
Sure, China take my data, but we know it's not about that.
And now with something like DeepSeek, I read that Pentagon employees were downloading DeepSeek and using it onto the computer for days before they were instructed not to.
Yeah, on their government computers.
Fire them, like today.
They have to be.
Like, that's got to...
I mean, I'm not calling for anybody's job because I don't know, but it seems like that would be a fireable offense.
No, that's 100% a fireable offense.
So if we go hot with China, how can they use this information manipulation to kind of, you know, win that war?
Well, remember, we have full recruitment centers in the United States, like in California, and they're in Chinese, right?
Like you go, and you go to the recruiter to get in the U.S. military, and it's fully in Chinese, right?
So it's so much beyond these apps, the control and influence.
We have the Chinese government running and controlling lots of our chambers of commerce, for example, right?
Different large landholding and investment firms, for example.
They know how to take in all this information and control it and influence you.
The app is just another benefit and bonus to them because they can pull you in in different ways and get you information and just even know how you think.
That's the greatest thing about artificial intelligence, right?
They get to learn from you when you're on these apps and saying things, and then they know how to target you and influence you.
Yeah, the thing that worries me, and tell me if this is unfounded, is if there, you know, there is an invasion of Taiwan and, you know, most in the military and strategic planning, international relations would agree that we do not want China to take over Taiwan.
But could they not use these influence operations to launch an invasion?
And by that time, they've already convinced most of younger Americans that they're actually not the bad guy.
They're actually the good guy.
And so, they prevent us from even helping because the public sentiment is so against it.
Yeah, because it's the whole imperialism thing, or, you know, the West shouldn't dictate what other countries do.
If they make you believe the Taiwanese want to be a part of China, especially as China's slowly trying to put people into their political system, and over time, eventually the politicians in Taiwan will likely be pro-Chinese, just because China's spending so much time and effort on it, right?
So, yeah, if you educate people saying, hey...
All these problems happen because of British influence or U.S. influence.
Then you do lose the support.
We're having a lot of this information problem, you know, in the Gaza region.
Right.
So it shows how easy and simple this is to do to influence people.
Well, yeah, I don't know if you've heard, but China is actually a bustling democracy with tall buildings that light up at night and everyone's having a great time there.
Yeah, it's odd because they're always tearing, like, blowing the buildings up because they made all these buildings and they ran out of money and the people in the country don't have the money.
Like, oh, we just have the full apartment buildings because we actually, our people aren't making the money to even occupy them.
I mean, there's so many things that people aren't understanding of what's really happening in China and life is difficult.
People will pay mortgage on a house for five years and the house will never be built and then all of a sudden they default and they're like, oh, sorry, I guess that money's gone now.
Yeah, it's an insane place and some insane things are happening over there.
I know Middle East is more your go-to zone, but would you say the likelihood of conflict with China, like real physical conflict, is something that America needs to be prepared for in the near future?
I think we need to be prepared for it because I feel we're actually pushing it a little more than China because I feel China's like, we can wait 100 years and slowly take this over and slowly influence it.
But then the U.S. war machine is pushing a little harder, like, oh, China's going over these red lines, China's doing this.
And the problem is China's advancing faster than us, right?
I mean, the hypersonic weapon test proved it.
And it's making our government very nervous and very scared.
And sometimes when that happens, they go on the off.
And so I do think we're pushing a little bit more of a war with China as our enemy, because we're like, it's going to happen anyway.
Let's do this to stop their innovation and stop their growth.
So we do have to watch.
Both sides are playing this in interesting ways.
And they're playing the same game, but differently.
And that's dangerous, too.
Yeah, the one thing that does worry me is just Xi Jinping's, you know, shelf life.
He is a human and will die, and it seems like he does have specific ambitions for his legacy, you know, to surpass Mao.
And just the headwinds that are going towards, like, Chinese development with their birth rates and their economics, it just, it seems like there's a powder keg.
And I don't want to predict what will happen, but I just, I would hope that our defense department and intelligence agencies are ready to handle whatever's coming, I hope.
Yeah, I hope.
I mean, they've had a hard problem competing with China in multiple places, right?
And China has won in Africa, in Latin America, etc.
So we do have to change the way we handle China no matter what the future holds.
If it's going to be war or if it just continues to be strategic confrontation, we have to do it better.
Yeah, and real quick, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it about, I don't know, 2012, 2014, didn't we basically lose all human asset collection abilities in China?
Didn't the CIA have like a huge...
There was a huge, like, it was like a leak.
It was tradecraft.
And it wasn't just the CIA. I believe DOD had a big tradecraft issue, too.
And China was able to identify undercover officers and some of their operations, too.
We have a hard problem with tradecraft.
Multiple reasons.
One, people go in an assumed name.
And that's almost impossible now, as you can imagine, with technology.
Even if I went in a fake name around the world now, people know me.
I've traveled personally to these locations, right, in my true name, etc.
And it's getting harder and harder to put people undercover, right?
So that is a difficult thing.
We're also grappling with, like, what's the future of undercover operations if you can't actually make a person undercover?
Yeah.
I do not envy, especially with the advances in artificial intelligence, to kind of weed those things out.
I don't know.
I feel like maybe good tradecraft is going to be more important than ever moving forward because there's some things that you just can't replace with stuff that's not on the ground.
And look, Israel has a masked guy.
A Hamas guy can wear a mask and you only see his eyes.
And Israel's identifying them.
So, you know, the technology is so much getting even beyond tradecraft that, yeah, we're going to have to find new ways to do things.
We're going to need some Mission Impossible masks here pretty soon.
Yes, that'd be awesome.
Okay, kind of the last thing I wanted to touch on, it's sort of taking an offshoot, but it's been dominating the discussion on Twitter recently, mostly because of...
I think he's a traitor.
I don't think we should ever let him back into the country.
And I think he is where he belongs in Russia.
And he landed where he belongs.
Now, a lot of people...
We only know Snowden from the movie, right?
And boy, the movie painted him in this great light, in this hero, in this person who's showing all this U.S. government corruption.
Now, the U.S. government has actual processes, right?
Snowden didn't try to go to any inspector general office, right?
He did not try to take...
Any path.
He just stole all the data, released whatever he felt like, and if people actually paid attention to what he released, he actually even told the terrorists in the tribal areas of Pakistan how we collect on them, ended our collection.
They all changed their tradecraft, right?
That is not a man who's trying to help everyday Americans not be spied on by their government, right?
He really tried to damage the United States and our national security, and he is a traitor, and he's lucky he's not in the United States.
Because I would think he deserves a death penalty.
Well, yeah.
And I didn't want to tip my hand on my opinion on this, but he sat with the South China Morning Post and basically revealed our data collection methods to them.
So I wouldn't say that's really a patriotic American thing to do, but, you know, I am just a simple man.
So I'll let the Internet decide.
Yeah.
Okay.
You've given us tons of time, but I want to give you the chance to leave on what do you think is the most important thing for just Yeah, I think really what we saw in North Carolina, you know, during, in the aftermath of the hurricane is such a good example of what you should expect, right?
Paralysis by our government, right?
Maybe a whole week before somebody gets to you, right?
I feel if we start emergency planning off of something like a crisis like that, you can be more prepared if something happens.
Now, the majority of Americans, even if a big attack happens in the United States, they're not going to be impacted directly by the attack.
But the telecommunications are going to go down.
There's going to be misinformation.
There's going to be fear, right?
Is it going to continue to happen?
There could even be potentially a period of martial law.
There's going to be a lot of confusion.
So the more resilient you can get now and prepare yourself, the better, right?
Family emergency plans, medical.
If you are in a situation and something happens, first responders are not coming anytime soon.
At least that's Al-Qaeda's goal, right?
So if you can be a force multiplier and save someone's life or give them care until they can get to something at a higher level, that's what you need to be doing for your community and your neighbors.
And you hope there's people that do it for your family if you're not in the area to help them.
I think we need to get to the community level and really become more resilient and prepared.
And then if other things happen, hurricanes happen, active shooters out of school happen, you're now 10 steps ahead.
Like, preparing has never hurt anybody.
Well, I think that's great advice.
And I really do.
Just the treasure trove of information and insight that you've given today, I really, really appreciate you taking the time with us.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, thank you so much.
And hopefully we can work together in the future, too, and appreciate everything you do.