Counterterror Chief Interview Culls Only Cliches

Professional athletes and government intelligence officials have at least one shared characteristic: Both give a lot of media interviews, but despite an abundance of words spoken neither offers anything beyond tired clichés. I often wonder why journalists bother conducting such interviews. Rarely will a professional athlete state anything more substantive than “we just take each game one at a time,” or “we just need to play hard.” Likewise, intelligence officials, by necessity, rarely provide any statements more enlightening than “al-Qaeda wants to kill Americans,” or “It’s not IF we will be hit again, it is WHEN.” Both of those canned intelligence answers are of course true, but journalists hardly needed to interview an intelligence expert to confirm their veracity.

Newsweek reporters recently interviewed the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) chief, Retired Vice Admiral John Scott Redd, and stunned no one with their headline article, “We are Going to Get Hit Again.” Did they really need to interrupt the presumably busy work schedule of the NCTC chief to obtain such common sense information? In the cat and mouse game that occurs daily between the news media and the intelligence community, one ground rule applies: when an intelligence officer speaks on the record, nothing newsworthy will be offered. The corollary to that rule is that only intelligence sources who speak on condition of anonymity have the potential to reveal something that rises beyond clichéd sound bites.

What gems of wisdom did the Newsweek team mine from the understandably tight-lipped NCTC chief? Some examples follow:

What I’ll tell you about bin Laden is if we knew where he was, he’d either be dead or captured. It’s that simple. [He’s] obviously a tough target. That whole area is a tough target.

…We’ve got this intelligence threat; we’re pretty certain we know what’s going on. We don’t have all the tactical details about it, [but] in some ways it’s not unlike the U.K. aviation threat last year. So we know there is a threat out there. The question is, what do we do about it? And the response was, we stood up an interagency task force under NCTC leadership….

…We have very strong indicators that Al Qaeda is planning to attack the West and is likely to [try to] attack, and we are pretty sure about that….

…What we do have, though, is a couple of threads that indicate, you know, some very tactical stuff, and that's what—you know, that’s what you’re seeing bits and pieces of, and I really can’t go much more into it….

…It’s still there. It’s very serious, you know, and we’re watching it. We’re learning more all the time, but it’s still a very serious threat….

…But these guys are smart. They are determined. They are patient. So over time we are going to lose a battle or two. We are going to get hit again, you know, but you’ve got to have the stick-to-itiveness or persistence to outlast it…..

…Statistically, you can’t bat 1.000 forever, but we haven’t been hit for six years, [which is] no accident….

NCTC Chief Redd gave the type of answers journalists should expect from intelligence officials: clichéd, common sense, and superficial. Had he answered Newsweek’s questions in any more detail he would have divulged classified information, a felony offense. Newsweek’s readers may have been impressed by an interview of such a high level official, but they were surely disappointed by the complete lack of original or newsworthy information provided in the article.

Announcing to Americans that terrorists are planning to attack the west is equivalent to professional athletes stating in pre-game interviews that “our opponent will come at us with everything they have,” or “the team that wants it most will win tonight.” These interviews offer ample truth, but sparse substance. Athletes, like intelligence officials, are wise to speak only in general terms rather than reveal anything from their playbooks that might help the opposing team. Fans and news readers may find the practice annoying, but success on the sports field or battlefield often depends on holding the playbook close to the vest. Admiral Redd did an admirable job of pleasing Newsweek with headline quotes while telling Americans nothing we did not already know.

John Scott Redd NCTC National Counterterrorism Center Newsweek Al Qaeda War on Terror Intelligence Agencies