CIA Director John Brennan warned Americans hours after Tuesday’s deadly Istanbul terror attack that he fears ISIS is planning similar large-scale offensives inside the United States.
In an interview with Yahoo News, the nation’s top spy said he’s “worried” that a copycat attack will be carried out within our borders by the radical jihadist network, which is believed to be behind the suicide bombings at Ataturk Airport that claimed 41 lives and injured scores more.
“I am worried from the standpoint of an intelligence professional who looks at the capabilities of (ISIS) … and their determination to kill as many as people as possible and to carry out attacks abroad,” Brennan told Yahoo News, adding, “I’d be surprised if (ISIS) is not trying to carry out that kind of attack in the United States.”
Brennan then turned up the scare factor by talking about how easy it would be to “construct” a suicide vest.
“You look at what happened in the Turkish airport, these were suicide vests,” he told Yahoo News. “It’s not that difficult to actually construct and fabricate a suicide vest … so if you have a determined enemy and individuals who are not concerned about escape, that they are going into it with a sense that they are going to die, that really does complicate your strategy in terms of preventing attacks.”
But the spy chief gave a tip of the hat to US Homeland Security officials and his own CIA officers for preventing ISIS operatives from committing attacks on American soil — thus far.
He noted that the terrorists who pulled off attacks in Orlando and San Bernardino were inspired by ISIS, which controls large swaths of land in Iraq and Syria.
And although ISIS has yet to take credit for the Istanbul bloodbath, Brennan said the deadly attack mirrored the terror network’s MO.
“It was a suicide bombing, [which] is usually more (an ISIS) technique,” Brennan said.
A senior US counter-terrorism official agreed with Brennan’s overall assessment of ISIS — but said the FBI was still trying to determine whether Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen was ordered by ISIS in Syria to carry out the savage attack at the Pulse nightclub.
“We’re still going through every aspect of his life to see if we can make any connection between him and (ISIS) in Syria,” said the official.
“That would be our biggest fear, finding out that Syria ordered the attack,” the official said, adding, “That would signal a new front in the war against terror here and would be the first such attack — ordered by the motherland — since 9/11.”
