Episode 33. Fighting Terrorism is a Team Effort with General Francis Taylor and Ambassador Tina Kaidanow Part I

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy: (00:00) Our podcast brings together senior US diplomats and senior US military leaders in conversations about their partnerships in tackling some of our toughest national security challenges. I am Ambassador Deborah McCarthy, the producer and host of the series. Today, our guests are General Francis Taylor and Ambassador Tina Kaidanow. General Francis Taylor served as the Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security from 2014 to 2017. General Taylor's had a remarkable career both in and out of government. In public service, General Taylor served 31 years in the US Air Force. He then became the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the State Department. Later, he was the Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security, in charge of all embassies. Ambassador Tina Kaidanow is the Senior Advisor for International Cooperation in the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. She too has had a remarkable career. Years ago we were colleagues in the European Bureau at the Department of State when I was at the US Embassy in Greece. At the State Department, Tina Kaidanow was the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in charge of Political Military Affairs and before that she was the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. Among her many other senior jobs in national security, Ambassador Kaidanow was Deputy Ambassador at the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan and the first US Ambassador to the Republic of Kosovo. Frank, Tina, you worked together during the important period of 2014 to 2016 to protect our country by fighting the scourge of international terrorism. Early in that period, ISIL conquered a major portion of the territory of Iraq and Syria. They beheaded people, including Americans and captured these acts on video. They also crucified and raped to repress local populations. We had to send our troops back into Iraq to help defeat them. During the same timeframe there were also terrorist attacks in Canada, Australia, France, Lebanon, Turkey, Brussels, as well as within Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen. Also in Africa, Boko Haram killed thousands of people and terrorized with brutal tactics including the kidnapping of children for enslavement. Tina, you were the State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism during this period. Can you explain to our listeners how the State Department, US Embassies, and diplomats work to fight against the threat of international terrorism?

Amb. Kaidanow: (02:44) Thanks Deborah. First of all, it's really great to be back together with Frank who was really a close friend and colleague during that time frame that you talked about. You, I think captured it quite well. This was an amazing and really consequential period in which we saw, in a very rapid time frame, the rise of an extremely verbal and very dangerous, but more than dangerous, really something we had never seen before with respect to a foreign force that had come into Iraq and was growing in its strength and its power. And the consequence of that, not just in Iraq but globally. State Department has a number of equities on the counterterrorism side, but there is an actual State Department Counterterrorism Coordinator, and that is a position that is created by statute. So in other words, by law.

Amb. McCarthy: (03:33) And that's a position that Frank held before.

Amb. Kaidanow: (03:35) That is correct.

Gen. Taylor: (03:37) Correct.

Amb. McCarthy: (03:37) You've both had the same job.

Amb. Kaidanow: (03:38) Yes. It's interesting because people don't know that the idea behind it was--we have to fit our counter terrorism efforts into the larger scheme of our foreign policy. In essence, I can sort of give you at least several functions. There were more, but the several functions that the Counterterrorism Coordinator used to, when I was doing it, focus on, and that was, for example, we have counterparts all over the world, we have counterparts in Europe, we have counterparts in other parts of the world where counterterrorism is important because it, terrorism itself is a growing scourge. How do they deal with these efforts? How do they deal with the threat of terrorism? Part of what the State Department would do is we had funds available and we had individuals who could go to these places, evaluate some of the things that they were doing, and again, in coordination with some of our other agencies, whether it was DHS, whether it was FBI, whether it was Defense Department, trying to figure out what the United States government as a whole could do in order to try at least and ensure that we had methodologies that would help them. What could we do by way of helping them to secure their borders? What could we do by way of helping them to protect their homeland? What could we do by way of ensuring that foreign fighters were not leaving their countries and going off to fight and then you know, becoming very good fighters and then coming back and threatening them.

Amb. McCarthy: (04:58) And threatening us.

Amb. Kaidanow: (04:58) And threatening us as well. That's correct. We also were able with the US Treasury to designate so-called terrorist groups and extremist groups. In other words, how do we get at the financial flows that sustain some of these groups.

Amb. McCarthy: (05:12) How we freeze their financial flows.

Amb. Kaidanow: (05:12) Exactly. We would try and find ways to, first of all, where is that money flowing in the first place, so there's a lot of intelligence that goes behind this, and try and figure out where does that money flow, how does it get to those groups? Hezbollah, some of the others, Hamas, large scale groups that have global operations and some of them that are more specific to certain countries, certain regions, so forth. How do we help countries in those regions stop those flows and how do we ensure that if there's money either coming out of or going through the United States, we have methodologies to stop that. We also did quite a bit, especially towards the end of my time, what they called countering violent extremism, which is how do you get at some of the roots of things that drive terrorism or drive extremism.

Amb. McCarthy: (05:55) Frank, I want to turn to you, and during this period you were the Under Secretary of Intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security. DHS is in charge of our borders and takes the lead in communicating with state and local authorities to keep them abreast of threats including terrorism threats. How does DHS work to keep terrorism away from US shores?

Gen. Taylor: (06:16) It is a very big question.

Amb. McCarthy: (06:18) I thought I'd start in a broad fashion and narrow it down.

Gen. Taylor: (06:21) I would start with the fact that DHS was created in 2003 in the aftermath of 9/11 for the coordination of both federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial efforts against terrorism and has worked over the course of the last 16 years to help build processes that connect our state and local partners to DHS for the transfer of information, classified and unclassified information. Today a police officer sitting in a squad car can run a check on an individual and determine whether that individual is on some terrorism watch list. That didn't happen in 2002, 2003, so we've tried to build structures that allow us to move information to where it needs to move and that is generally to the officers in the squad cars. Two of the 9/11 hijackers were actually pulled over for a traffic stop, but that police officer did not know who they were dealing with and I think about how the world would have changed had that police officer had the data that he or she needed to make an appropriate arrest or get these people into the hands of the FBI. So DHS has worked very hard to build a relationship with state, local, tribal and territorial to get intelligence information to those individuals that the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in our country, the 800,000 cops on the street that are really going to be the first responders to any sort of event. More broadly, we've worked internationally with our partners to again, exchange information, with a great deal of help from the State Department and the FBI and the CIA and others, to ensure that not only the intelligence that flows from those foreign partners, but also the intelligence that we develop, gets exchanged in a very systematic way. To Tina's earlier point, fighting terrorism is a team sport. Terrorists know no borders. They know no loyalty to nationality. All they are loyal to is their ideology and so they can be anywhere, anytime. And the way we fight them is through information that allows us to better understand who they are, where they're operating, and to interdict them as quickly as we can.

Amb. McCarthy: (08:39) Well, during this period, 2014-2015, tens of thousands of foreign fighters went to join ISIL in Iraq and Syria. And this included some Americans. Who were these Americans who joined ISIL? What do we know about how they were recruited or what inspired them to join?

Gen. Taylor: (08:57) You know, ISIS as an organization was the first global terrorist organization, in my view, to exploit the internet and social media in a most effective way. Anwar Awlaki, who was the Yemeni born imam who went back to Yemen in 2010 I believe, and was killed, his writings are still on the internet. Many of the adherents to ISIS read from Awlaki, his writings about terrorism and threats and those sorts of things. But more importantly, ISIS began to recruit very sophisticated young men and women who knew how to exploit social media. And they began a global social media campaign to tell this story of how wonderful ISIS is, how wonderful coming to the caliphate would be, join your brothers and sisters to defend Islam and those sorts of things. And people believed it. People from across the globe believed it. I remember there's one young lady from Alabama who decided that she was going to leave college and go to the caliphate and she made her way to the caliphate based upon kind of a social media view of what she was about to find. I don't think she found that when she got there, but that's how they did it.

Amb. McCarthy: (10:12) Did she make it back?

Gen. Taylor: (10:13) She is one of the people who are in custody, I believe, in Syria right now, trying to get back and I am not sure where our government's policy is with regard to repatriating American citizens who've been involved in ISIS. But it was in my view, the most sophisticated social media campaign that I had seen a terrorist organization use. And they did so in recruiting thousands of foreign fighters through this propaganda to come to Syria and to fight in Syria and Iraq.

Amb. McCarthy: (10:44) How many Americans actually went? Do we have a rough estimate?

Gen. Taylor: (10:48) Less than 500, way less than 500.

Amb. Kaidanow: (10:51) Yea. It's, the numbers don't speak to me as much as I have to say the who was attracted, it was unique and this was true in Europe in a very interesting way. We always assume somehow that the people who will become terrorists are people who, for example, come from very poor backgrounds who are disadvantaged in some way. And that may be true in certain parts of the world, but in this instance, and this was again sort of the first emergence of some of this that we had seen both in the United States and also in Europe I would say, the people that were attracted by this unique social media campaign that was conducted by ISIS, was actually less the socially disadvantaged, more the individuals who were disaffected in some way. For example, second generation Americans, parents were immigrants had come, had worked very hard to come to this country who had made a success for themselves in some instances, and yet the second generation would be attracted somehow to the lure of ISIS or terrorism. What that tells you is again, the sophistication of the methodology and the way that they went after these guys because what they said to them was, listen, you know, your life doesn't have a purpose. Let us give you a purpose. And they were seeking something. The seeking something was what led them ultimately to think that maybe they would gain by going to Iraq and fighting on behalf of Isis, which I think when they got there they found obviously that things were not necessarily what they expected.

Amb. McCarthy: (12:16) But were they also ones who were not sons and daughters of recent immigrants, but who were intellectually disaffected and joined as well?

Amb. Kaidanow: (12:24) There were some. I think, you know, again, it was an interesting array of people, but the sort of common theme among them, and you still saw this again as I said in Europe, a number of those, like for example in the Paris attacks and so forth, they were people who were, some of them were criminals actually or had a criminal background, but more they were, again, young people who had nothing really else in their lives, were attracted by this message, found it inspirational and that they could go and make life meaningful for themselves and become in fact martyrs. And that's what drove them to go. By the way, it was gender free. I mean, in other words it was men and it was women and that was also unusual. That had not been the case previously. So you were dealing with something that you really hadn't seen before. Fighting back against that was very challenging because how do you do that? A.) You have to discern that this is even going on and you're breaking into a very personalized conversation because the way they would conduct a lot of this is if you showed any interest, then they had facilitators who would come back at you a second time, a third time and see if they could draw you in even further.

Amb. McCarthy: (13:30) Work to recruit you.

New Speaker: (13:30) Exactly. And that was not something that previously had been a way of doing any of this. First of all, finding out how that was going on, what message do you then come back with in order to fight against something like that? Well, how do you craft a message that you can, as the force that's trying to come in there and either stop the flow of the fighters or as someone you know, who is trying to actually save some of these youth who needed that help. And in some instances you even saw members of the community seeing that their children were being attracted in this way, come to law enforcement and say, help us. Which is really something if you think about it, we'd never seen that before.

Amb. McCarthy: (14:09) I wanted to ask you as you're talking about this whole-of-government effort, but whole-of-society effort, not only us but others in Europe and other places. The US convened in 2015, a summit on countering violent extremism with more than 60 countries and a whole-of-society effort was launched to address the multiple factors that were fueling people joining and fueling extremism. What exactly was this international effort and was it effective and is it still ongoing?

Amb. Kaidanow: (14:39) The summit was, I think, an expression of interest on the part of all of these countries and it was meant to sort of generate that interest from the United States on again, how do we address some of these drivers of terrorism more generally? The difficulty comes in in trying to figure out what are those root causes. Again, we make a lot of assumptions. The assumption is that, you know, poverty drives terrorism and extremism, that it is better obviously to have populations that aren't feeling disaffected in some way to make sure that youth is feeling like they have a purpose in life. All that I think is true. There's no question. But I don't know that that necessarily gets you to a place where you can feel comfortable that specific kinds of recruitment efforts are not still going to be ongoing. We do have ongoing efforts on countering violent extremism and trying to figure out what is the best messaging, how do you deliver those messages? What are the larger programs that we can initiate and then sustain with some of our other partners overseas in order to try, and again, dissuade either young people or others to become radicalized. Oftentimes when you see the actual perpetrators of these attacks, and certainly that's the case in Europe and other places, what you find is it's not necessarily what you would have assumed.

Amb. McCarthy: (15:54) I see.

Amb. Kaidanow: (15:54) It's a very complicated, very difficult question.

Gen. Taylor: (15:57) I think it's a global question.

Amb. Kaidanow: (15:59) It is.

Gen. Taylor: (15:59) And I think the value of the conference was to convene the world to begin to talk about this, but it's really a local phenomenon. Tina mentioned communities in the US. When you say a Muslim community in the US you know, what are you talking about? The Pakistani community? You're talking a Syrian community? You're talking folks from the Caucasus?

Amb. McCarthy: (16:20) There's not one community.

Gen. Taylor: (16:21) Not one community, it's many communities. And trying to empower communities to understand what to look for, begins a process of understanding violent extremism from the perspective of the community. Paris is not Brussels. Two very different challenges in terms of violent extremism in Paris and in Brussels, but empowering officials to understand that, what tools to use to examine it.

Amb. McCarthy: (16:47) And not just officials at the top level, but local, all the way down.

Amb. Kaidanow: (16:49) Local, mostly local law enforcement.

Gen. Taylor: (16:50) Indeed.

Amb. McCarthy: (16:50) And DHS did a lot of outreach to local communities.

Gen. Taylor: (16:53) Absolutely. Communities began coming to the department saying, we need help. We're seeing our children radicalize. How can you help us better understand? And I know Secretary Johnson visited many Muslim communities across this country with a message of, here's tools that you can use to help and DHS will come in and help you build seminars and that sort of thing to inform parents. Countering violent extremism is like countering gangs. It's the same kind of phenomenon and the strongest counter to that is strong families who understand what their children are facing and are able to intervene. The government can't do that at a high level, but what we can do is empower citizens to understand how this threat is manifesting itself so that they can do what families always do, and that's to try to protect their children from things that are a danger to them. And that continues today in terms of communities across this country, needing that kind of support to defend themselves from this kind of propaganda.

Speaker 3: (17:53) And that is it for this episode of The General and the Ambassador. My guests today were General Frank Taylor and Ambassador Tina Kaidanow. The program The General and the Ambassador is a project of the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Una Chapman Cox Foundation. You can find us on all podcast sites and we urge you to give us comments as well as great reviews. We would also love to hear from you on suggestions for future episodes. You can reach us via email at general.ambassador.podcast@gmail.com and we have a website, generalambassadorpodcast.com. This concludes Part I of our podcast with General Frank Taylor and Ambassador Tina Kaidanow. Stay tuned for Part II. I'm ambassador Deborah McCarthy. Thank you so much for listening.