'If You Can Keep It': How ready are American security agencies for Iran?

You know, every day on Up First, NPR's Golden Globe nominated morning news podcast, we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story are questions. What really happened? What really mattered? What happens next? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow up first wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why. Fighting escalates across the Middle East as oil prices spike, and Iran names the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as its new supreme leader. This despite warnings by President Trump that he'd be an unacceptable choice. Meanwhile, on U.S. soil, national security experts warn that Iran might seek reprisals within the United States. Their questioning are readiness to defend against them. Days before the United States dropped its first bombs on Iran, FBI director Kash Patel fired. members of a team that monitored threats from the Islamic Republic. The reason? They had investigated President Trump's handling of classified documents. That move came amid a year of layoffs, budget cuts, resignations, and shifting priorities across national security agencies, including the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security. As U.S. officials warn Iran could retaliate with cyber attacks or terror attacks on U.S. soil, Does the United States still have the capacity to defend the homeland? That's the question we're trying to answer in the latest edition of If You Can Keep It, our weekly politics series. I'm Jen White. And I'm Todd Zwillick. You're listening to the 1A podcast. We'll be back with more after this short break. Stay with us.

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how long it might last. President Trump initially said it would last a matter of days, then he said weeks. Reporting on Friday suggested the Pentagon is preparing for the operation to run into September. So if Iran were planning some form of retaliation, what do national security experts say about when we might see something? I think the when is always a huge question, right? But, I mean, it would depend, I think, to some degree on the calculation maybe of how long Iran thinks it will be under attack, right? I mean, if Iran believed that this was going to be wrapped up in two or three weeks, we might account. expect that maybe they wouldn't, you know, pull everything out of their arsenal at the moment. But how long they're going to be under stress? What do they need to plan for for a continuity of operations in their own government? In other words, like, should we do something now because we might not be able to do it in a week or two weeks or a month? So that will factor into some degree to, you know, our defensive calculations, I think, and Suzanne, obviously and Dan can speak really well to this. But, you know, I think if you're in this Homeland Security Department right now, bracing for all possibilities, right? And you have to kind of rank order them or if you're in the FBI. But if we're going to be at this for months and months, potentially, then that threat doesn't diminish. I think it stays either pretty high or just keeps increasing. Dan, Shane mentions rank order and some of the types of attacks or attempted attacks we've seen in the past from Iran. Cyber, obviously, proxy attacks, proxy groups, Hezbollah. Others may be sponsoring attacks. Individuals turned loose somewhere in American society. Tell us a little bit more about what kinds of attacks or attempted attacks we've seen from Iran what they've looked like. So there's an extremely wide range, and you mentioned cyber as one possibility. Iran is highly integrated with the Lebanese Hezbollah to the point where a lot of their overseas networks are really one. broader kind of service and a set of operatives. And they've been active in situations like these, especially against targets overseas. So we've seen them attacking Israeli and Jewish targets, not just in the Middle East, of course, but also in Argentina, in Europe, in Thailand. And we could easily imagine a similar set of attacks on Americans overseas. The next step and the much more escalatory step would be attacks on the U.S. homeland. And in the last decade, we've seen Iran at times work with criminal groups. We've seen Iran try to encourage loan attackers. And there have been some indication that Iran and Hezbollah have scouted targets, have done reconnaissance. The very important caveat is that Iran recognizes that... An attack on U.S. soil against Americans would be highly escalatory. There are two ways to think about this. One is such a step for Iran would be...

perhaps no going back, it might rally support for the war in the United States, increasing pressure on Iran. But the flip side is this is a truly existential crisis for the Iranian regime. President Trump has announced that he seeks regime change. They've killed the Supreme Leader. So a lot of the rules that applied in previous years might not apply right now. Susanna Ron has carried out cyber attacks before, sort of famous for it in security circles. How capable are they in the cyber domain now? Yeah, so their capability has... I'm sure, been degraded by some of the actions that have been taken. Israel claims to have bombed an IRGC compound that includes the cyber warfare headquarters for the IRGC. But as Dan noted, with respect to attacks generally, and it is true with cyber as well, they have capabilities outside of Iran. In addition, we have some indication that their communications infrastructure, at least, is still intact. The reports that the assembly of experts that chose their new leader in Iran normally meets in person. But when the building where they normally meet was bombed, it was empty because they had decided to meet virtually. That gives us some indication that there is still a communications infrastructure that could be used. But their capability prior to this outset of war was not insignificant. It's not on a par with Russia or China, but it is not insignificant. Back in 2013, they attacked Saudi Arabia's major oil companies, Saudi Aramco, and were able to destroy, effectively, we call it brick, but make useless, 30,000 computers and took down operations for 11 days. They have shown a, I think, somewhat reckless, but certainly risk-averse willingness to attack inside the United States. They carried out a similar destructive attack on the Sands Casino in Las Vegas because they didn't like something the owner had said, and they went in and destroyed many of those computers. So that kind of destructive attack they are capable of, and certainly they have good capabilities to hack into systems. They often, in 2012, again, 2011, 2013, they engaged in denial of service attacks against U.S. banks who had participated in enforcing sanctions against Iran. That's an attack where you overwhelm the system and effectively take down sites for some period of time. We're pretty good at handling denial of service attacks. We've certainly gotten better since then. And largely what we see with Iranian cyber attacks now is an effort to get in. They go after critical infrastructure. But

Getting into a system is only the first step in bringing down critical infrastructure, and they have not demonstrated that kind of capacity. Shane, Suzanne, Suzanne mentioned Iran's cyber capabilities don't reach the level of Russia and China, but Russia's reportedly sharing intelligence with Iran to target U.S. forces. So. As we said, it's much more advanced and its cyber capabilities. Could we also see Russia assisting Iran on that front? Yeah, I think that's a real possibility. And we've seen a historic relationship between the Russian and the Iranian intelligence services on the cyber domain going back a number of years. This would be a place for them to sort of, you know, swap techniques, swap capabilities. Maybe there are things that even Russia would be able to do, kind of picking up the slack, if you want to think about it that way, for Iran while they're under stress. And we've also seen, of course, Iran providing technology to Russia in the way of drones and unmanned aerial vehicles for use in Ukraine. So there already is a kind of government-to-government combat information sharing relationship there that I think we could see now again. Christopher from Michigan writes, speaking as an Iraq war combat veteran and as someone who watched the second plane strike as a sophomore on 9-11, who couldn't imagine why anyone would attack the U.S., I worry now that the concept of blowback isn't talked about anymore. Oh, how soon we forget. After this quick break, we'll hear more from you and how our country's capacity to defend against these threats has been affected by the Trump administration's staffing reductions and shifting priorities.

This is Terry Gross. When I was celebrating my 50th anniversary hosting Fresh Air, I asked my guest, Roastmaster General Jeff Ross, to roast me. Terry Gross, a barely living legend. Still at it. Listen to Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. On a new episode of Are We Doomed? We are losing the moon. The moon is indeed drifting away. And what to do? Blow it up? Yeah, I think that's overkill. The moon, why we might need it, a real plan to nuke it, and new space race for it. Join me for Are We Doomed, distributed by the NPR network. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. On this season of Planet Money Summer School, we follow the money. And not just the dollars. We're following the Yuan, the Naira, the Krona, and more. Every Wednesday this summer, we're taking you on a world tour to meet the people, trying new solutions to old economic problems. Planet Money Summer School. Grab some friends, pack your bags, and don't forget the sunscreen. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems. More information is at waltonfamilyfoundation.org. Let's get back to our conversation. We're discussing U.S. readiness for the possibility of retaliatory attacks by Iran on U.S. soil. Tom wrote in to say, if you consider our weak security on our drinking water alone, the potential is catastrophic. And Jack writes, assuming Iran manages to carry out attacks on U.S. soil, do we have any idea of what or who specifically they'll be targeting? Dan, we'll come to you first on that. So it's often very hard to do specifics because to say the obvious, it's a very dynamic process. So if U.S. officials know that... a particular set of targets or individuals is on the top of the Iranian list. They are better guarded. There's more efforts to disrupt. So therefore, the Iranian shift. And there's a constant back and forth. And what this sometimes leads to is terrorists kind of going down a list and ending up with relatively low-level targets. So they might prefer to attack a military base that is active in operations in the Middle East, but that's well guarded. So therefore, they go after. or a bar where soldiers hang out. And that's not as glamorous a target. It's not as high in their list, but it's much more feasible. This question of feasibility, though, is a really important one because there is a huge U.S. effort to try to disrupt operations, not just in the United States, but the connections to Iranian leaders and operatives overseas. And that's something that the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency.

Worried about this at a high level are government folks, not individuals. There will be, again, as I say, state and locals stepping up. The men and women who have these roles throughout federal government, who are those career professionals, are focused like laser beams on the security of these events. I do worry at a higher level about our capacity, certainly to respond. to an event that might happen, because that really is, again, and all hands on deck. harder to plan for the precise what might happen in advance. It requires a lot of agility to respond to events on the ground. And so you really need folks who are used to working together. You need an interagency process at the federal level that has exercised that what we call muscle memory of coming together and bringing to the table what you each can bring to the table, what each of you is doing so that you have a coordinated... response, we don't get a sense that there is a normal interagency process happening in the federal government today. Let's dig into that a little bit and start with some of the expertise that's been lost over the last year through retirements, firings, layoffs. We said at the top that FBI director Kash Patel fired about a dozen personnel because they were assigned to work on the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Some of them have been described as members of this elite counterintelligence unit. Shane, what do we know about who exactly was fired and what they did? So counterintelligence agents at the Bureau, their job essentially is to... Take the information, the intelligence that's coming in about foreign governments that might be trying to operate, often like in the espionage space, but also in the terrorism space. And they will coordinate with people who specialize in the FBI in terrorism and take these information and prioritize it and try to understand it and see where our vulnerabilities are, what people might be planning, what information can they push out to state and local governments through the Homeland Security Department, what cases can be prosecuted. These are folks who really are expert in watching. what foreign governments do and how they operate and how they try to harm Americans, both overseas, but also principally here we're talking in the United States. And that muscle memory that Suzanne was speaking about is so crucial because we're talking about people who, you know, sit in an officer, they're out in the field who know the person to call in a state government law enforcement agency or the person to call it the NYPD or the person to call it CIA to run something by them. That is a very informal kind of mechanism. that is not just based in paper, it's based in relationships. And when you fire those people who are a key part of that, you're losing both the institutionally expertise, the subject matter expertise, but people in that system who talk to one another. And this has been a real problem, even going back to the beginning of the administration. I mean, in the first days, a number of people who were our liaisons in the Justice Department to...

European intelligence services and partners were fired. I remember talking to someone from one of those services that week who said, basically, when we pick up the phone, there's no one there to pick it up right now. We don't know who's on the other end. So it's really these human relationships that get disrupted in addition to the years-long expertise that you only get by being an FBI agent who studies the Iranians or the Russians. Well, when it comes to the Department of Homeland Security, there's also been a realignment of priorities. Lots of resources and personnel have been redirected to President Trump's immigration crackdown. And so, Shane, what do we know about? that department's ability to now track foreign operatives or emerging threats, if so much of the focus has been redirected. I think it's been strained, for sure. We should also remember, too, that the DHS got a huge amount of additional money for this. So there is still money going to the places like the intelligence and analysis unit at DHS or the places that interact with state and local governments. But there is going to be a strain there because of the politics of the moment, too, the distractions that they're undergoing. You know, I know from hearing. from some sources in the government that in the midst of this current shutdown that's going on with funding for DHS, with the exception of immigration enforcement, which has its own kind of supply of money, some of the analysts who were working on the Iran accounts were furloughed. Now, they've been called back, is my understanding. But in a moment where funding is impacted, you can imagine that there are people who would normally be at their desks, so to speak, who might not be. Hopefully they're now being called back. But that's a disruption. That's a strain. Those are people. who will come back and have to work without pay. And as anybody knows who's ever worked in an organization that's going through any kind of crisis, it's hugely distracting at the end of the day. These are not robots. These are people who have lives and other things that they worry about who have to go to work. And this is just compounding that stress when you have the politics and the funding issues associated with it. Well, Dan, in addition to... reductions at the FBI firings, as Jen and Shane mentioned, DHS, the Department of Justice, their National Security Division's counterterrorism section has also lost people, approximately half of its prosecutors, within the last year, down to 20 people, according to reports. If American capacity is diminished, where do you think the effects? Show up first. Is it on the desk that Shane Harris describes people furloughed because of a shutdown in political fights? Reordering of priorities at DHS, DOJ. We're pushing on different parts of the balloon in this question. So which ones are the most critical? So it's hard to say in part because it's like any well-oiled machine, right? If you have your car engine, obviously you care about the transmission, but a failure with a spark plug can also prove disastrous as well. So the big and small both matter. I would highlight a point that Suzanne made, though, which is about the broader coordination. A lot of the job of the federal government is to coordinate.

with state and local, but also overseas. And to be clear, I'm sure that is being done, right? I don't want to make it sound like there was nothing going on. But that said, it's probably diminished. It's probably confused. And in terms of this administration's kind of unity of effort on other areas has been limited for the Iran War. So I'd be surprised if it were working exceptionally well. With regard to counterterrorism, the one thing I would add to the earlier points is also the increase in politicized intelligence, where this administration has in other areas essentially said the president has declared the situation, you know, for example, in Venezuela to be one where the government is deeply involved in the drug trade, and when the intelligence community comes up with more nuanced. interpretations, that has been met with hostility, people have been fired. And as a result, there may be a reluctance to bring bad news to political masters. And that is one of the jobs of intelligence is to say, you know, sir or ma'am, there is a potential problem and we need to deal with it. And I worry that that hesitation could cause critical problems at this point. We're hearing from many of you. We got this from Pat and Michigan who says, leaving our citizens and staffs of our consulates to fend for themselves to leave the area doesn't bode well for our security here at home. Was this an oversight or lack of planning? Shane, what do we know? Well, in cases where diplomatic personnel are told that they can leave or their families can leave, that's actually a pretty standard procedure if there's going to be conflict in the region. So I don't think it necessarily indicates anything is failing. The problem would be, of course, if there were no ways of getting them out and the support systems that are in place to fly them back and provide logistics for them, we're breaking down. But personnel leaving embassies in the middle of a war is not something we're unaccustomed to seeing. We also got this comment from a listener. They're commenting on something we heard from an earlier listener about the Independence Day parade. And this person writes, there will be tens of thousands of events this year for the 250th. They all can't be hardened. Dozens of small attacks are just as dangerous as one big attack. Suzanne, I'd love your response to that. Yeah, well, I think that's true. We've long thought that in the terrorism, counterterrorism context, that a series of events, and I think it is true in the cyber context as well. And a series of maybe not terribly significant but disruptive cyber attacks similarly can have a significant impact on Americans' psyche, if you will. And, of course, with the terrorist attack, We worry about an additional loss of life. One of the things we've noted is that the bad guys don't necessarily see this the same way or they don't have the capacity to do it. We've wondered since 9-11 why we haven't seen that kind of rollout. But certainly, we haven't really talked about disinformation campaigns and information operations. But Iran uses cyber very much to send a message.

And I certainly would anticipate that in addition to just causing disruption, that Iran would use this cyber attacks as part of its message to say to Americans, do you really want to be in this war, right? That there is a cost to you, that this disruption and that it could get worse. So I think. that concern about a series of smaller scale attacks or events is well placed. Dan, anything to add there? One thing that is surprisingly difficult for terrorists is to do... I'll say, coordinated operations. And that can be something that involves defending a well-defended target, where they need to be highly trained. They need to have excellent operational security. Or, as the listener suggested, multiple targets could be difficult for similar reasons. The first attack is not necessarily a hard one. The parade is not defended everywhere. But doing it in multiple places. greatly increases the chance of disruption. And what we've seen again and again for terrorist groups in general, but also for Iranian-backed individuals, is they make a lot of mistakes. And I want to be clear counterterrorism is not perfect. And at times they miss things, they shouldn't miss. But that said, terrorists are far less perfect. And there are a lot of chances for disruption. And so, yes, there are truly thousands of events that are going to be happening. And yes, it is quite possible that one might be hit by a terrorist attack. But the odds still are exceptionally low for any individual event. And the more high-profile the event, the more the government is going to be focused on. We're discussing how Iran might retaliate on U.S. soil. So to come, what chaos at the Department of Homeland Security means for our safety? We'll be right back.

This season on Planet Money Summer School, we're going on a world tour. And first up, we're following the money down under. From Australia's market where people buy and sell water to how New Zealand is changing the way central banks fight inflation. Pack your bags and come along as we learn from the rest of the world. Planet Money Summer School, listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Before we return to our discussion about the war, we'd love your help with an upcoming episode. Lawmakers and members of the Trump administration are increasingly framing the war in Iran as a religious war. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called it such and spoke of the threat of radical Islamic terrorists, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified the war by saying Iran is run by, quote, religious fanatic lunatics. Now members of Congress are requesting an investigation into a report that some military leaders are invoking apocalyptic theology in briefings about the war in Iran. This is all taking place as experts warn that religion in the Middle East could be used as a tool to invoke a wider conflict. What concerns or questions do you have about faith's role as a factor for war? Leave us a voicemail at 855-236-12 or leave a message using our app 1A voxpop. Now back to threats to the homeland. Shane, you've been writing about American preparedness in this state of war, what Iran might do and how officials are trying to anticipate it. I want to play a little piece of sound that comes from your latest story in the Atlantic and have you describe exactly what we're listening to here. Steve, have, fish, fish, how?

Shane Harris, that sounds like a scratchy radio transmission from... 1974. What is that? It's definitely a scratchy radio transmission. So what you heard is a man reading a sequence of numbers in Persian or the language spoken in Iran. What we call that is a numbers station. And for people who are fans of Cold War era, spy novels and TV shows, they might recognize this as something that was often used to communicate with agents that were hiding behind lines or covertly. I think I've seen it in the American. You probably saw it in the Americans, exactly. It was in an episode in the first season. But this is what we just played is recent. This is just recent. So this station started broadcasting on shortwave radio on February 28th, about 12 hours after the first bomb started falling. And there has been a really interested kind of community, myself included, of trying to figure out what is this? Initially, there was some speculation of, wait, is this Iran trying to contact agents or proxies overseas, like the kinds that we've been talking about? Because this way of communicating well, very... old school is actually quite secure if you want to do it this way. There's some reason to believe now that the Iranian government may actually be trying to interfere with this broadcast, which would suggest that there is someone outside of Iran trying to communicate with someone inside of Iran. Why they would go to the lengths of using a old school Cold War technique? Well, there is an internet blackout in Iran right now. Maybe this is an easier way of communicating. The sort of novel feature of this particular form of communication. in a numbers station is that if you do it right, the code, the numbers that you're hearing are unbreakable. No one except the sender and the recipient will ever know what those numbers actually mean if you're operating the correct way. So it's just another instance of kind of lower tech techniques coming into bear in this very high-tech war. We don't know who's behind it, but we do know that the station is real. If you have a shortwave radio, you can go tune into it and go listen to it yourself. And it's just kind of been a fascinating mystery that's been emerging in the middle of a... kind of in the shadows of this larger war that we're watching. Let's get to more of your questions. Gwen and Cambridge says, what can be done to ensure that DHS cybersecurity staff can do their jobs to protect us rather than being shifted to ice rolls? Would congressional oversight be able to help with this? And another person writes, I live in Massachusetts, where Foxborough, the town where the World Cup games will take place, has still not received the funds for security that they were promised. Are we wrong to think that those in charge of our federal government are not competently managing the systems in place to protect us. I'll come to you first on that, Suzanne. Yeah, great questions, both of them. And absolutely, I think, congressional oversight. can and should play a role in making sure that we have the folks in place that we need to have at this moment and that things like the disbursement of the grant money for the World Cup is happening. We know that certainly contracts and I think perhaps the disbursement of grants had been held up at Secretary Kristi Noem's desk. She wanted to approve virtually every dollar that went out of the department.

With her departure, we will not have a confirmed director immediately. We'll have somebody acting, but I would hope that they would move quickly to release those funds because, again, our state and local folks need to be purchasing the resources and capabilities they need there. In terms of my old shop, SISA, it's important to note that they are not just responsible for cybersecurity, both of federal systems. and of our critical infrastructure, even that which is in private hands. But they also have an important physical... security mission. They are very involved in helping with counterterrorism attacks that might target our critical infrastructure and helping critical infrastructure owners and operators. That's electric grid, water, transportation, all of those things that we depend upon, be prepared and respond and have the information they need. So it's vitally important. And even though we're in a shutdown, and I will say the cutbacks that happened under Doge, both the firings. And then the folks who left, who were encouraged to leave and who walked out the door, reduced that workforce by about a third, at least a third. And now with the shutdown, we're down from 3,400 workforce to somewhere between 800 and 900 people. And as Shane pointed out, DHS has the discretion, even in a shutdown. to call people back when something like this happens. We are now in a war with Iran, and I would certainly hope that they would call those folks back, both on the physical and the cyber security side. One of the offices that was decimated... in the firings and the furloughs was the stakeholder engagement office, the office that is designated to interact with state and local officials and critical infrastructure owners and operators in these kinds of circumstances. So absolutely, Congress should be all over this. They should know exactly who is in place and who is not and be putting pressure to bring folks back who need to be fulfilling these roles. Suzanne says Congress should be all over this. But are they? No, I mean, we have honestly, one of the great sort of overarching stories of the past year in the administration has been the degree to which I think the Republican-controlled Congress is simply not exercising its prerogative as a go-equal branch of government, right? And we have just seen a very permissive attitude for much of what the administration has done with regards to the firings, with what Doge did, basically no real pushback to this. And so, you know, traditionally oversight is there to stand.

these kinds of maybe misguided or politically motivated decisions from happening. And it's just not happening now. And I don't think that you see engagement by the overseers in Congress. Maybe there's some exceptions at the committee level in some of these places. But generally you're seeing, I think, members very interested in scoring political points and getting involved in meme wars with each other and not taking the degree of seriousness that they need to run a government in time of war. I mean, this is a genuine crisis that we're facing. right now, and Americans shouldn't forget that. And the government and the Congress are not operating as they should. Well, the Senate will have to weigh in on the confirmation of Markwayne Mullin. He's a Republican senator from Oklahoma. That's who President Trump has put forward to head up DHS now that Kristi Noem is out. Shane, what can you tell us about his background and his national security experience? I've not done a great study of him. I will admit, but I mean, this is somebody who I think is clearly politically allied with the president and somebody who I think is he is picking in large part because he... has been, we know from reporting, the president has been less than thrilled with Kristi Noem's management of the department, which is not to say that it's her mismanagement per se, but more maybe of the political optics of some of the things that she got in the middle of. But I think that when you're kind of switching horses in midstream like this, what he's looking for is somebody who I can think, you know, probably run the immigration enforcement operation of which he has said he is very much committed to doing. And that's kind of like the primary role right now. for the secretary, and to try and do that maybe in a bit more of a kind of low profile way than Kristi Noem, who was herself just kind of constantly making headlines. Well, we got this comment from Stephanie who says, as someone who provides research based on information to CIA in 2003 regarding storefront money laundering the supported terror in this country and abroad, I can unequivocally state that too often targets. are on the FBI radar, but there's a failure to pursue or investigate fully. Is there a heightened probability of a terror attack at home? You bet, says Stephanie. Dan, that brings a question to mind. I mean, when attacks do happen in Western countries, they're often carried out by individuals. that are inspired rather than directed, whether it's money laundering or direct attacks. What's more likely? What is the threat matrix look like now in terms of Iran? Inspiring attacks the way ISIS might just sort of generally being anti-American and jihadist or directing attacks directly, putting people on the ground and giving them marching orders. So Iran is somewhere in the middle with regard to the United States. We haven't seen significant numbers of pro-Iranian inspired attacks. Iranian propaganda doesn't have the same oomph as ISIS propaganda did. And Iran, in general, sought to control things. And as a result, it wasn't looking for kind of random actions. They wanted to make sure if there was an attack.

it was determining the timing and as much of the location as possible. That said, the top-down directed attacks are difficult. There's a lot of monitoring of this. So what we have seen is Iran work with criminal groups or work with kind of one-off individuals who are not particularly skilled, but therefore who are expendable. Iran is often, if you will, try and provide a little capability in a little direction, but not always micromanaging things the way it might for some very, very narrow, high-impact operations. Suzanne, I don't want to overlook something you mentioned earlier, which is that foreign adversaries may try to exploit division in the U.S. through misinformation and propaganda. Meanwhile, the Trump administration shut down the key office in the State Department charged with fighting foreign disinformation online. It was once known as the Global Engagement Center. How does that fit into this homeland security picture in this moment? Yeah, they not only shut down the relevant office at the State Department. They shut down the offices in every federal department and agency that had entities focused on understanding and countering disinformation targeting the American public. So we have no remaining offices that have that specific mission. at a time when our adversaries are increasing their sophistication with respect to information operations. What was the explanation for that move? The explanation was that they were concerned that all of that effort at disinformation was really just aimed at silencing conservative voices. And when you look online, what do you see? Well, our adversaries continue to use our open environment on the Internet to pretend to be Americans, to push false narratives, to mimic local news organizations to covertly... fund influencers on the Internet. They use a range of methods to influence the American public. And if we think that Iran is not using information operations to exacerbate divisions in our country and very specifically, obviously, to increase opposition to this war, to undermine support for this operation, then we are just fooling ourselves because, again, as has been noted, they're facing an existential threat. are absolutely doing this. And I think we're seeing some indication that Russia, which has a very sophisticated information operations infrastructure, is supporting that as well. I would expect that Russia and perhaps China would come in, frankly, on both sides of the issue.

just to exacerbate divisions in our country. It is a way of weakening us as a nation. And they have a long track record of doing so. Well, we got several comments from several of you along the same lines. Concern over a potential terrorist attack and the upcoming midterms. Michael says seeing conspiracies behind every bush, I wonder whether an attack on the homeland would allow the cancellation. of midterm elections. Jill has a similar concern. It would give Donald Trump a reason to federalize or cancel the November. elections. Shane Harris, a lot of people are concerned about this. You've seen it everywhere. Reality check on whether that's a real concern and how it would work. Ordinarily, I would say probably not because I wouldn't say the government would sweep in and use a foreign terrorist attack as an excuse to seize the elections. Now I would say it's a very real concern. And the reason for that is that the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who, to be clear in a situation like this, should be acting as the primary intelligence advisor to the president. appears to be spending most of her time trying to gin up false narratives and pretexts about foreign interference in previous elections as a way of coming in and federalizing elections, whatever that might mean, by the way, because it's not at all clear. But I know from reporting and talking to people around this issue that she and others working for the government are actively trying to come up with some kind of pretext to it, the very least so doubt about the legitimacy of elections and the security of voting machines and that there is. an effort to craft some kind of executive order that would allow the president to use this foreign threat as a pretext for exercising federal control. You could easily imagine how a terrorist attack could be used for that same reason. So, Shane, in just a couple of sentences, what are you watching most closely in the next few weeks? Right now, I want to see if we see any indications of cyber attacks or probing from infrastructure attacks and anything that looks like Iran trying to activate foreign proxy groups in the United States. Well, lots to watch in the weeks to come. staff writer at the Atlantic covering national security and intelligence. Also with us today, Suzanne Spalding. She's a former Undersecretary for the Department of Homeland Security, where she led the National Protection and Programs Directorate, now called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or SISA, and Daniel, and Daniel. And Daniel, he's director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. Shane, Suzanne, Daniel, thanks to you all. Today's producer was Alison Brody. This program comes to you from WAMU, part of American University in Washington distributed by NPR. I'm Jen White. And I'm Todd's Willick. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk more soon. This is One-A.

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