Former Acting CIA Director Says Officials Should Have ‘Sense of Urgency’ on Terrorism

Michael Morell, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 6, 2016. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The former acting director of the CIA said there needs to be more “urgency” from elected officials to prevent a possible terrorist attack in the United States.

“There needs to be a sense of urgency about this, and I think the American public needs to understand what the threat is. That’s why we called for a public congressional hearing just on the terrorist threats to the homeland,” former acting CIA Director Michael Morell told CBS’s “Face The Nation” on Sunday, adding that Americans “need to hear what the administration is doing about this in a broad sense.”

Earlier this month, Mr. Morell and another former federal official wrote that the current situation in the United States bears some similarity to the time leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

He referred to warnings about terrorist attacks inspired by the Hamas attacks in Israel in October as well as issues around U.S.-Mexico border security.

“The vetting system, beyond not having the information, the vetting system does not provide all of the information that the government has,” Mr. Morell said referring to how immigration authorities process illegal immigrants. “So it’s lack of information, and it is the system itself.”

“There are all sorts of issues here that need to be resolved,” he continued to say, responding to a question about officials reportedly detaining several nationals from Tajikistan who allegedly had ties to the ISIS terrorist group.

Earlier in June, Mr. Morell noted in a Foreign Affairs article with a former U.S. assistant secretary, Graham Allison, that “hundreds of individuals on the United States’ terrorist watch list attempted to enter the country via the southern border.”

“It is not difficult to imagine a person, or even a group, with the intent to do harm slipping across a border” before purchasing weapons and carrying out a “large massacre,” they wrote.

The article made several references to statements made by FBI Director Christopher Wray in recent months during both House and Senate hearings, although he was delivering those warnings in the context of trying to secure more funding for his bureau and to pass a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) earlier this year.

On June 4, the FBI director told a Senate panel that the agency has seen a rise in the “threat from foreign terrorists” after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks carried out by Hamas in Israel.

Before October, “there was already a heightened risk of violence in the United States,” Mr. Wray said. “Since then, we’ve seen a rogue’s gallery of foreign terrorist organizations call for attacks against Americans and our allies. Given those calls for action, our most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home.”

As an analyst for the CIA, Mr. Morell notably gave the daily brief to former President George W. Bush, including on the morning of the 9/11 attacks. He was later named as acting CIA director under the Obama administration.

Earlier in June, President Joe Biden signed a measure that broadly instituted an asylum ban on people caught illegally crossing the U.S.–Mexico border once an average of 2,500 people had entered per day for seven days. The move was considered a major enforcement move just months ahead of the November presidential election.