So the way I like to explain it is you have created a relationship with a guy who you have nothing in common with. As a counterterrorism officer, your job is to get insider information. You need to stop terrorist attacks from occurring.
I say, Abu Muhammad, I am so impressed by what you have done in the last few months. And so as a counterterrorism officer, I'm a little sick like that.
And what you find when you look at individuals like this and you look at the people that are the most successful A lot of counterterrorist guys that I train and the Special Operations guys.
And one of the things that I certainly realized as I looked through my entire life-- starting as a child and my experiences then through to undergraduate, five years in counterterrorism, then the MBA program-- was this sense of always being somewhere I didn't quite feel like I fitted in. And what's been very interesting, the reaction to the book so far is so many other people have said that that was something that
So I feel very comfortable intuitively with the decisions that I'm trying to make. He worked in the Counterterrorism Unit.
who was still speaking in broken Hebrew, there was a lot of surprise when he was admitted to a unit called Sayeret Matkal, which is the most elite counterterrorism unit of the Israeli Defense Forces. Up until the 1980s, this was a unit that was hand-selected.
Then the people in the crowd started getting really angry with the police. I've been contacted by the British counterterrorism police about my safety and security.
special adviser for counterinsurgency to Secretary of State condalisa rice senior counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq and chief counterterrorism strategist for the US state department he's a former Australian army officer which will explain his slight accent with combat experience in Southeast Asia and the Middle East please give a Google welcome
I say, Abu Muhammad, I am so impressed by what you have done in the last few months. a lot of the leadership that hasn't been killed in counterterrorism operations is in Libya.
I mean that was certainly there. My career-- I had spent five years in counterterrorism, which was really an amazing five years. I had started that after 9/11 and had this amazing set of experiences when, certainly in the UK, the infrastructure in place to at least deal
"The bacterial strain you're dealing with was designed by a young researcher employed by the bioterrorism division of the United States government. It was originally commissioned under the auspices of counterterrorism." Cole's voiced turned briefly bitter, causing Andy and Elsa to exchange worried glances. Bitterness wasn't native to Cole's state of being.
the RAND Corporation he most recently served as the representative for the commander US Special Operations Command to the assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations he specializes in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism with their particular focus on Afghanistan Pakistan and al-qaeda Jones is the author of in the graveyard of Empires America's war in Afghanistan
And I thought I might, when I finished undergrad, go and start my own business. But then I took the other path that entrepreneurs take and became a counterterrorism officer, as you do. So one of the things that strikes me about all of these endeavors, maybe except for the nail polish-- but all of the other endeavors really
But I think that's such a key piece of what a Tough Mudder means. And one of the things I really do miss from my time in counterterrorism was there was a very deep sense of camaraderie
Um, so let me give you another concrete example. Uh Chris Rufo, who's maybe the like rights leading cultural activist. He uh recently had a post about Joe Kent, who is a Trump counterterrorism official who resigned in protest over the Iran war. Now, Kent was aligned with the sort of Carlson Owens wing of the party, and
And it answers all the key questions, like, how in the world did you get into the CIA? It talks about my career at the CIA, which was being an undercover counterterrorism officer along with my husband. We served together for 10 years, primarily in the Middle East.
And that's the point of the book. How did you go from being someone who wanted to become a ballerina to actually becoming an expert with counterterrorism in the CIA? Yeah. So people just assume, you must have grown up wanting to be a spy.
I mean, I just decided, I've got to figure out how to be a really good intelligence officer. And so I built up this expertise over time, a counterintelligence and a counterterrorism expertise, until finally the point at which I demonstrated very clearly that I could walk into a debriefing room with an Arab source and get him to give me intelligence he wouldn't give other people.
I say, Abu Muhammad, I am so impressed by what you have done in the last few months. It's not hard to recruit in the Middle East, especially for counterterrorism operations.
And about 20 or 30 minutes later, when everybody came back in and told us the second one hit, we kind of knew that at that point it was a terrorist attack, because I've been focused on counterterrorism since probably about '98, '99. So that pretty much ended the exercise for us.
So it's really tough to be completely underestimated all the time. But at the same time, it can be useful, especially in the agency, when you're dealing with counterterrorism issues. There are a lot of experiences in which it was good to be underestimated.
Then I spent 20 years starting and running high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. And then last year, I was in the White House, where I worked in the National Security Council in their counterterrorism group. I got there one week before the 9/11, crisis. Helped build a new Homeland Security plan for the whole country." Without missing a beat, Eric, she points and she says, "Nothing you said qualifies you