Over the past eight months, in more than a hundred hours of interviews, my partners Jules and Gedeon Naudet and I have talked with Tenet, his deputies, and the 11 other living former directors of the CIA for The Spymasters, a documentary set to air Nov. 12, 2015, article for Politico that has made news around the world. I detailed the unheeded warnings in a Nov. Long before the famous President’s Daily Brief, “ Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.,” both the Clinton and the Bush White Houses received repeated and urgent warnings from CIA Director George Tenet that an attack was coming. leaders have had their heads in the sand. If, before the Paris attacks, the Obama White House believed that the ISIS threat had been “contained,” it is not the first time U.S.

encountered what I would call a climate of disbelief.” To say we’re not in their gun sights reminds me of pre-9/11, where the C.I.A. But unless they are stamped out, they’ll come here. The ISIS objective is to consolidate their so-called caliphate. “Most of them are going to try and do what they tell you they’re going to do. Cofer Black, former head of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, says of the Paris assault: “An out-of-the-blue attack with so many moving parts is bad news for us.” “I’ve come to the view when dealing with bad guys, that you should believe what they say,” John McLaughlin, a longtime former deputy director, told me recently. Allah willing, we shall roast them with explosive belts and car bombs.”Īt the CIA, no one is under any illusion that the threat of more ISIS attacks on Europe-or even U.S. The macabre videotape from ISIS came barely a week after the bloody carnage in Paris: “We bring Hollande and the people around him good tidings-as we bring Obama good tidings….

Spymasters cia in the crosshairs