CIA Director: ISIS Likely Planning Istanbul-Style U.S. Attack

Following a speech he gave Wednesday afternoon at the Council on Foreign Relations, Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan fielded a number of questions, most of which centered on the recent bombing in Istanbul, Turkey, and on the continued threat of ISIS and Islamist terror attacks.

Click here to read his prepared remarks.

Brennan said that while the Istanbul attack bore the “hallmarks” of ISIS activity, the organization has a standing policy of not claiming credit or responsibility for such attacks inside Turkey. There are two reasons why, he added.

“I think what they do is, they carry out these attacks to gain the benefits from it, in terms of sending a signal to our Turkish partners,” he said, “at the same time, not wanting to potentially maybe alienating some of those individuals inside of Turkey that they may still be trying to gain the support of.”

He said ISIS has been largely successful with these attacks because with “suicide attacks,” there is no need for planning an escape. Their planning is only limited to the effort needed to penetrate the facility and cause as much death and destruction possible.

Brennan also claimed easy access to “automatic weapons” and “technologies that allow them to communicate quite securely without having security and intelligence agencies able to understand what it is that they are plotting” have made it easier to conduct these types of operations.

Moderator Judy Woodruff then asked if this was “something that the rest of the world just has to get used to,” prompting a sharp response from the CIA director. He said he doesn’t think Americans, in particular, should ever “get used to it.”

“I think what we have to do is to redouble our efforts to try to uncover what they’re doing, stop them, in terms of carrying out these attacks, but also go to the source of it, which is those who are directing and orchestrating these attacks,” he said. “And [ISIS], most of the attacks are either directed or incited by their external operations group, which is resident in the Syria/Iraq theater.”

During the question-and-answer portion of the appearance, Brennan was asked about recent comments he made about an Istanbul-style attack in the U.S. Ken Dilanian of NBC News asked if the CIA had credible evidence of such a threat.

He said that he was noting ISIS’s ability to “carry out and incite an array of terrorist attacks in the region, beyond the region, directly, indirectly,” and that he would be surprised if it wasn’t considering similar attacks on Americans. With the U.S. trying to “destroy as much of this poison inside of Syria and Iraq as possible,” it would be an appealing target.

“I think what you see in the propagation of their material—they have a magazine, Dabiq, that goes out—that says exactly that. It exhorts individuals to do it,” he said. “So if anybody here believes that, you know, the U.S. homeland is hermetically sealed and that [ISIS] would not consider that, I think—I would guard against that.”