Christine “Christy” Abizaid was sworn in as director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) in June of 2021, as the threat of terrorism was already on the rise. Domestic terrorism investigations had grown by 357% over the decade prior to her swearing in as the new head of the organization tasked with collecting and sharing information on those threats with federal, state and local government partners.
Just months after Abizaid was sworn in to the role, The Cipher Brief sat down with her at The Cipher Brief Threat Conference in her first public interview as director, to talk about how the terrorist threat to America was changing.
“First of all, we’ve got to recognize just how ideologically diverse the threat is,” she said during the onstage interview. “If you think about where the threat to the homeland is most likely to emerge from, it’s most likely to emerge from individuals who are inspired to act by some ideology, whether that’s a domestic violent extremist ideology, or whether it’s an Al-Qaeda-inspired ideology.”
Three years later, as she prepares to retire, the threat landscape is no less diverse.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told the House Appropriations Committee in April that he was hard-pressed to recall a time “where so many threats to our public safety were so elevated all at once” telling the committee that, “we’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole ‘nother level after October 7.”
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