Meantime, a more in-depth look at threats here in the homeland. I want to bring in CBS News national security contributor, Samantha Vinograd. She served as former assistant secretary for counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security. Sam, thank you very much for joining us. So the Department of Homeland Security is saying it’s unlikely that large scale physical attacks will happen here in the US. However, they say Iran could launch more targeted physical attacks, smaller scale, and that cyber attacks are possible. What are we looking at?
Well, what we’re looking at is the fact that for the past several decades, the Iranian regime has seriously invested in surrogate networks in the United States and around the world. Those surrogate networks have been successful in trying to launch assassination attempts against government officials, dissidents, members of the Jewish community, and others.
And so, for that reason, in my experience, Tony, the federal, state, and local government officials at any given time have a serious amount of ongoing investigations into Iranian-backed criminal and counterterrorism-related threats. Certainly, after the assassination of the supreme leader and the ongoing kinetic conflict in the Middle East, the ability for the regime to try to tap into those surrogate networks to try to retaliate for what’s happening is even higher.
And that’s why we are seeing really unprecedented cooperation between all levels of government, and probably the private sector, to try to share information, increase intelligence gathering, intelligence analysis, and to deter attacks by putting out more physical patrols, more visible law enforcement and other matters.
TONY: Sam, how credible, how imminent are the potential attacks, the threats against the Jewish community, the US government officials, the US military community? What do you know at this hour?
What I can say is the Iranians have come pretty close in the past and really—I’ve worked closely with the NYPD and others. We have a really incredible law enforcement intelligence community in this country. But the Iranian regime is quite sophisticated and good at what it does. I am not a huge fan of saying there’s no credible or imminent threat because that can change very, very quickly for something to go to noncredible and to become imminent.
Instead, I think it’s important that members of the public remain on heightened alert, that if you see something, say something. And when it comes to cyber hygiene, when it comes to emails and links and files that you’re getting right now, that everybody stay on high alert to the environment around them while all of this is ongoing.
TONY: All right. Sam Vinograd, thank you very much.
