Nance is the author of several books, including: Terrorism Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner’s Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities.
He spoke to Emergency Management the day after Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel ran a truck through a crowd on a famous waterfront in Nice, France, on July 14, killing 84 people.
At this early stage of the investigation, what do you make of the man who drove a truck though the crowd in France? Was he what you’d call a “lone wolf?”
First off I don’t like the term “lone wolf.” ISIS themselves actually use the phrase “lone jihadi.” They like that. We also categorize these guys as lone wolves and known wolves. Known wolves are those that have actually come under the counterterrorism umbrella, have a record related to radicalization and things like that. People we should have had our eye on like Omar Mateen down in Orlando. People who have been interviewed by the FBI.
Then you have the unknown wolves: people who self-radicalize, operationalize whatever plan that is in their heads and then execute that plan without any communication with anybody. Or their communications are so covert and successful that they didn’t become known wolves.
In taking a look at this guy in Nice, the chief prosecutor says we have no indications of his radicalization or communications with known entities. That tells you it happened in his head or the communication structure they set up was so covert, they’ve yet to be detected.
That leans us away from the known-wolf picture because he had no record. The only thing he had been picked up on was weapons smuggling charges or charges relating to illicit weapons. If you’re in Europe, everyone has illicit weapons. They are highly envious of the American access to weapons. For them these are status symbols — having access to weapons — and they are also very good sources of money. So that must have been attractive to him.
He was a recent Tunisian immigrant to France. Not everybody [there] can get a job — it’s about the size of New York state. For these guys, they’re concentrated in these places where there aren’t a lot of jobs, there’s a very young immigrant community there, and a lot of them don’t assimilate into society like American Muslims. And they aren’t French, either in culture or mindset, so they play along the fringes to make money however they can.
The difference between him and the Paris attackers and the Brussels attackers is that when those guys became radicalized they did their hijra, their migration to Iraq and Syria, and became combat commanders, they became soldiers and fighters. Then they reinfiltrated France as clandestine agents, carried out an operation as a cell, and did these operations both in Paris and Brussels.
This guy is an unknown wolf. In intelligence parlance he’s sort of a clean-skin operative — no contact with law enforcement other than one charge. No history of radicalization, although there were some indicators that he was along the radicalization pathway.
Usually they find some trace of these people on social media. Is it relatively uncommon for them to be really unknown?
It depends on the individual. Some people watch the videos and adore them and they become entranced by these operations. On the other hand, you have knuckleheads who see one and they’re going to do that. The Navy Seals have a phrase: We have wanna-bes and gonna-bes. There are guys who really get radicalized [over time], and then there’s those who wake up one morning and say, “I’m going to be a jihadi.”
Here’s my ideological path to radicalization: The first step is admiration. That’s when they watch videos and such, that’s internal. No. 2 is inspiration, where the images and religious rhetoric overwhelm you and make you feel like you should be a part or could be a part of that. Then comes step three, radicalization, when you affiliate with the terrorist philosophy. We call this the “fan boy stage.” You’re making tweets and things like that. Next is isolation. It’s a cult technique. ISIS is a cult.
Isolation is where these guys perform hijra, where you go and emigrate overseas. That isolation could put you in Syria or Iraq fighting with them, and you cut yourself off from the land of the unbelievers. But they also have this thing called mental hijra, where if you can’t make it to us, cut yourself off from the land of disbelievers around you, like the San Bernardino [Calif.] killers cut themselves off from their mother and child. They stopped going to mosque. Stopping mosque is a key indicator, especially if they were religious before that. That means they want no part in people that they think are dirty.
Step five is identification, where you adopt the trappings, hold up pictures of you holding guns, etc. Step six is dedication where you swear your loyalty oath, and that’s close to when you die. Seven is execution.
These could be months, years or minutes apart.
You described ISIS and the West as two heavyweight boxers exchanging blows. Every time we drop a bomb, they counter. Can you elaborate?
We’ve killed more than 23,000 ISIS fighters in the last two years. We believe that their combat strength of foreign fighters is down from 35,000 to 40,000 to about 12,500, so we’ve degraded that organization. [We have a] kinetic ground war, where we have surrounded them with four different armies, our special forces and our day/night bombing of just about everything that looks bigger than a pile of rocks. But ISIS can inspire a mentally deranged person in the United States or a guy who’s having a psycho-sexual crisis like the guy in Orlando, to act out and kill people in the United States and then equate that act of terrorism in the United States as a failure of the tens of thousands of 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs where we are literally vaporizing that group. They’re terrorists. Their job is to terrorize in any capacity. And we terrorize ourselves. Emergency managers are the one class of people that have to ground themselves in hard facts about who the enemy is. They have to get rid of the political jargon of radical Islam and things like that.
There should be a recognition of threat capacity, then response based on the best capacity of your organization and its inherent skills and training. That could have been a runaway truck. A runaway truck goes over a cliff, falls into a baseball stadium and crushes everybody in the stands. You don’t know. You deal with the situation at hand. All of this requires you to have good intelligence, and that means intelligence that’s detached from the political noise that is out there.
Do Americans misunderstand this fight?
First off the terms that people are using — “radical Islam,” “Sharia Law” — we are not fighting Islam. If that’s the case, why did we go to Afghanistan and put in an America-friendly government and get rid of the brutal Taliban? Why did we lose 2,600 soldiers there?
We lost 4,493 American soldiers in Iraq. If you believe that we’re at war with Islam, then you believe that those wars were worthless and that we should leave there and leave the Muslim worlds to ISIS and al-Qaida.
Let’s discuss information sharing. There has been criticism of the FBI after the Boston bombings and the Orlando shootings that information wasn’t shared with locals.
I’m here in New York state and just in the last eight months I’ve done six conferences. I saw every joint terrorism task force in the state, including the SWAT, dog handling teams and all the maritime teams here, and they have pushed the joint terrorism task force link down to the precinct liaison level. There is a terrorism liaison officer in every law enforcement and emergency management jurisdiction in the state.
When I did the liaison officer’s program a few months ago, it was all fire and emergency managers and they got the exact same information the SWAT guys got except how to kick that door down. They got the same intelligence, and that’s what we need to do nationally. Every state should be creating an intelligence liaison organization where information gets pushed down to the street level.
