Brian Lamb: Former Senior Chief Petty Officer Malcolm Nance. What's the story of the Nance family and the military?
Malcolm Nance: You know, I love being called senior chief. It's been a very long while since I served in the Navy. But I come from a very old U.S. military family. And for African-Americans, that's sort of an achievement.
My family started at - the first person to serve was my great, great grandfather in the Civil War who joined the U.S. - 111th U.S. Colored Troops. And his brother, who also joined the 111th U.S. Colored Troops. But for a year, they guarded the Tennessee Valley during the offensives in the Shenandoahs.
And he got bored with it, so he joined the U.S. Navy. He transitioned from the U.S. Army to the U.S. Navy and became a landsman aboard a riverine warfare craft on the Tennessee River. And that started off our family legacy of Army and Navy service -- predominantly Navy, but we accept the Army a little bit.
Brian Lamb: Where did they live in those days?
Malcolm Nance: They lived in - the Nances came from a slave family in Northern Alabama. It's interesting because the original Nances started from the white slave owner in Charleston, South Carolina where my mother is from.
But my father's side came from Western Georgia. There's actually a small place called Nanceville there. And the son of the slave owner had slaves in Northern Alabama and Southern Tennessee. And at the time of the Civil War, that's where virtually African-American Nances originated.
Brian Lamb: When did you decide to become a Navy man?
Malcolm Nance: Well, my father was a master chief in the Navy. And I was born in a naval hospital, Philadelphia Naval Hospital. So it was destined that I was going to go into the family business and his father had served in the Army in World War I and World War II and his father had served in the Indian Wars. And his father had served in the Civil War. So, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that I would join not only my father, but my five other brothers who also served in the U.S. Navy.
Brian Lamb: Why did you go to school to learn Arabic?
Malcolm Nance: You know, it's funny, because from a very early age, I had studied, just was fascinated with the Middle East and particularly the Arab-Israeli War starting in 1967. I must have been seven years old at that time. And then when the '73 war came up and the Munich Olympics, I was just at that age where these things became fascinating to me. And so, it's interesting because I didn't come into the military to study Arabic.
I had studied before that Spanish, French, Chinese, and Russian. And when I got recruited, the recruiter said, "Oh, you speak Russian; we're going to send you to Defense Language Institute." And so, I didn't speak that much Russian. So when I got there, they said, "no, you're going to Arabic. We think that's better suited for you." And when I went into Arabic, I actually tried to quite in my first couple of months. But the Middle East is a very different place from Russia.
The Russian instructors would drop you on a hard beat. The Arabic instructors said, "Listen, you want to quit? No problem. But come back in six weeks." And I was studying so hard, I completely forgot to come back in six weeks. Finished the school and went on to start my career in cryptologic intelligence.
Brian Lamb: What was the first year you were in the Navy?
Malcolm Nance: Yes. The first year I was …
Brian Lamb: No. What was the first year?
Malcolm Nance: Oh, the first year I was in the Navy was 1981.
Brian Lamb: And when did you get out?
Malcolm Nance: I got out in 2001.
Brian Lamb: You know, when you turn on television today and the new shows and I've seen you many times on MSNBC. Most of the time you see a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, former admiral in the U.S. Navy, it's rare that you see a former petty chief officer.
Malcolm Nance: Yes.
Brian Lamb: How is that you - I mean, disagree with me if you want, but how is it that you, being a former senior chief petty officer got to be in this intellectual world? I mean, that's not a putdown. I just want to know how it happened.
Malcolm Nance: Well, you know what John McCain says that the greatest event that ever happened in his life was being educated by a Navy chief. He has great respect for Navy chiefs. We are the lifeblood and the backbone, what we call deckplates leadership of the United States Navy.
And I'm not unique. There are many, many people who are involved in government and certainly in the intelligence community who are senior enlisted. I could also point out that our two national mission forces - Delta Force and SEAL Team Six, every one of them in SEAL Team Six, for example, is a Navy chief petty officer. There are very few officers, the same thing with Delta Force. They're all master sergeants and above. So, we are the people who actually do the work. We don't have to sign off on it.
And so that gave me a very deep grounding in many, many, many different parts of the intelligence community, not just cryptology and foreign language operations. I got to work on many different platforms. But it also showed me a very broad view of how military power and intelligence power is used throughout government.
Brian Lamb: So what is a chief petty officer? And how does that relate to an admiral?
Malcolm Nance: Well, he's God. But the U.S. Navy is the only one of the three services that has, the three different branches of the service, the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, all have officer and enlisted.
The Navy is the only service with officer, enlisted, and chiefs. And chiefs all are the middle management. When you become a chief petty officer you go through an elaborate ceremony to discard yourselves from your junior enlisted ways and to take on the leadership of actually running things as opposed managing things.
But to run things correctly, you actually had to have done that job. And the Navy because of its - back in the days when they formed the chiefs was highly mechanized. And it was a lot more sophisticated than a riffle or an artillery piece. So they created this core cadre of experts. Now, since then they've gone on to create warrant officers, which are people who were senior enlisted who came on and became junior officers. But I had a chance to do that, become a limited duty officer. I decided that there had been already one Master Chief Nance in the Navy. And that I would just retire and then move on to other parts of the intelligence community.
Brian Lamb: Senior chief E-8, master chief E-9, step above.
Malcolm Nance: Right, right.
Brian Lamb: Your father was one more.
Malcolm Nance: I literally turned that down. I did not want to become the second Master Chief Nance.
Brian Lamb: Why?
Malcolm Nance: Because there was one Master Chief Nance and he had already made his mark. He was like one of the first African-Americans in ships engineering. He was one of the first black instructors in the United States Navy. I mean, very proud of his legacy.
Brian Lamb: Where do you live today?
Malcolm Nance: I live between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and a house in upstate New York.
Brian Lamb: What do you do today?
Malcolm Nance: Well, today, I do many different things besides speak on MSNBC as a terrorism expert. I run a virtual think tank called the "Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies."
And it's a very small group of former intelligence officers who have a minimum of 10 years field experience. And one of the things that we've noted in a lot of academic groups and think tanks is they have academics but they don't have anyone with any field experience. And so, we have former CIA, military intelligence officers who all have direct field and operational experience and speak from that perspective.
Brian Lamb: Here you are testifying back in 2007 at the U.S. Helsinki Committee Hearing.
(Video)
Malcolm Nance: Waterboarding of which I was subjected to the maximum limit allowable, is a professional process when done in the hands of a competent team. It is also an inhumane, cruel, degrading torture that was applied regularly by the most evil enemies fought by this nation's armed forces, including the Nazis and the North Vietnamese.
(End of video)
Brian Lamb: When were you waterboarded?
Malcolm Nance: Well, I was waterboarded as part of the onboarding process as a new instructor coming into the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school. That was in 1996, if I'm not mistaken. And, of course, as a new instructor and worse, the senior enlisted amongst the group of trainees in that course, I got maximum everything. And it was a great experience because soon I would be doing the same thing.
I would be showing these tools, these techniques that our enemies used that people without any belief in human rights, who have seen the human spirit as something to be broken. We had to be subjected to that to the maximum. And there are written maximums, well, they don't do it anymore, but they were written maximums at the time.
Brian Lamb: Why don't they do it anymore?
Malcolm Nance: Well, they don't do it anymore because after the CIA program became public, the Department of Defense decided that they weren't going to be validating some of the techniques that were being considered now globally as torture.
Brian Lamb: So when you waterboarded in training, explain what it felt like.
Malcolm Nance: Well, it was a unique experience because as an old chief, we all go through chief's initiation, which is this, sort of, fake simulation that where they put you through a series of stresses and tests. And when I got strapped to the waterboard, thinking, oh, this is part of my onboarding process, I thought it was just going to be a joke. I thought it was just going to be a short simulation and boom, get off and insult me.
But it wasn't at all. It was an extremely professional, highly regimented process where I was strapped down in a matter of seconds. I was systems tested where they talk to you and say, "Breathe, here is what we're going to do. We're going to ask you these questions. You're going to give us these answers."
And before I even knew it, water was being poured into my face, flowing down into my nostrils and then you can feel it. You can actually feel it well up at the bottom of your throat and then start forcing its way down into the esophagus. And it is a horrible feeling. And my first thought, it was very clear was, I'm being tortured and nothing more.
And then I started to kick and thrash and try to force myself off it, but there was just no way. And there are actually other techniques that they can do to make it worse. But they had to give me the maximum amount of water that a person is required to take at the school, so that I understood just that the enemy does have a way to make you talk.
But our program is designed to show you what to say. And the first thing you should say is I was tortured. And that way you spoil the enemy's ability to exploit you. And we do not and did not ever teach torture or condone torture.
We gave a demonstrator tool to show that the enemy has are far worse, far worse examples of what they can do to you. John McCain went through the ropes, which is where they tie your elbows behind you and pop your shoulders out of the shoulder blade, then drag you up on to the ceiling. And you're going to say something. The question is how to say it, when to say it, minimize the damage and defeat the enemy and force them to have to work harder.
Brian Lamb: What's the worst situation you ever found yourself in in the Navy?
Malcolm Nance: I …
Brian Lamb: I'm talking about danger, not personal interaction.
Malcolm Nance: Well, I have a career reputation of being a bullet magnet. I mean I started off in Beirut in 1983, which was horrific. But personal danger, I think when I was in Kuwait in 1991 during the first Gulf War and I was helping EOD Mobile Unit Sixteen …
Brian Lamb: What's EOD mobile?
Malcolm Nance: Oh, I'm sorry, Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit Sixteen. I went ashore as the head of the - as the guy who was in charge of intelligence ashore. And they were clearing sea mines that had been floated into the ocean. And to get there, you had to go through a firing pit. That was along the Kuwaiti Coast. Then you had to walk through a mixed mine field. And then you go to the barbwire and then there, these LGM25 mines, sea mines, the big ones with the big spiky horns would float there.
And the EOD had to go out and defuse those. And one day they asked me and said, "Hey, can you come out and check out these markings?" So I said, "Sure I'll go. I'll go check out those markings." And went out and then while I was looking at the markings, one of the explosive ordnance disposal men said, "Chief, don't move." I said, "Why?" He says, "I think your foot is on a mine."
And it wasn't on a mine. It was just near a bounding mine. And he said, "I'm going to go back to the pit." And he gave me some instructions to move my legs and he said, "OK. Come back to the firing pit." And then he said, "How are you feeling?" I said, "OK." You got to pee. So …
Brian Lamb: What - go ahead.
Malcolm Nance: It was a Valmara type 29 bounding mine. And it's a can about this big. And it's got four spikes on the top, and if I had actually stepped on the mine, it would have shut out to the ground and exploded in like a shotgun shell.
Brian Lamb: Two questions. Take them both, have you ever seen a person killed?
Malcolm Nance: Yes.
Brian Lamb: And secondly, have you ever killed a person?
Malcolm Nance: Well, I certainly have seen a person killed. I fought - I mean, I was in Beirut in 1983. I was in the subsequent combat, Naval combat against the shore positions there. I took part in the Libyan air raid and many other operations. The first Gulf War, I was on the U.S. Tripoli when we hit a sea mine. That wasn't half as bad as being near a mine. I went over to USS Missouri and guided drones to shell Iraqi positions.
Once I went ashore with EOD and then with the Saudi forces, there were a lot of dead there. Gosh, that's just up to the first Gulf War. And then after that, I've been in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. So, there are lots and lots of dead there. And my friends, I had a friend who was vaporized along with a six-man security team that I had built together and sent to the airport. And it took three weeks to separate them all. I mean, it's - war is not a game. It's not a funny thing.
Have I directly fired on individuals? Yes. I have. Now, there's a big difference between when you use a rifle in a defensive purpose. Half the time, you're not aiming. You're trying to, but the enemy moves about. And I was doing mainly suppressive fires in the first Gulf War.
But I've many times put my fingers on the map in Bosnia. We did an air strike in Banja Luka, where working with the intelligence staff, we knew we were going to kill about 56 people. I was on the USS Wainwright when we were in a naval missile battle, the battle of Syria Island. And we went toe-to-toe with Iranian missile boat named the Joshan. And we sank her at 13 nautical miles to us. And that killed about 60 people.
So, everyone in the intelligence community is an intelligence warrior. Some guys are further on the spear tip. We have guys who go out with SEAL platoons now. And then you have people who are back in the rear who like the famous Captain Rochefort of World War II who broke the Japanese codes and won the battle of Midway, like Nimitz said, that man killed more Japanese than anyone individual in the world just by doing that. So, we have a different - there are different perspectives on how people are harmed by what we do.
Brian Lamb: When you said vaporized, explain what that means and how does that happen?
Malcolm Nance: Well, at that time, I was the head of security for a coalition group that was operating out of the Republican Palace in Bagdad. And I had very solid rules on how to get from Camp Victory, the airport to the green zone. And those rules were very simple. Minimum speed was a 100 miles per hour in a straight line for our two-man security vehicle…
Brian Lamb: How far is that by the way?
Malcolm Nance: It's about five miles. It is not far from the green zone. But the most dangerous part is there is this sort of figure eight area called Spaghetti Junction. And Spaghetti Junction is where Al-Qaeda was doing all of their suicide bombing attacks. And they would on-ramp, come up, look for a team, off-ramp, and just do that for like hours until a U.S. convoy or security detail would come by and they'd come along and they'd blow up. And I had a team who broke that rule.
And they went behind a U.S. Army convoy. They got slowed down to 30 miles per hour. And then once they got up to Spaghetti Junction a suicide bomber came literally alongside of them and vaporized them. They were blown to pieces and blown off the overpass and just turn into a seething pile of burning humanity. And it affected me greatly, because I knew that there's a place and a time for having strict, strict rules, and that was one place that those rules should not have been violated. And if they hadn't, granted the U.S. Army convoy might have been attacked, but we would have kept seven people alive.
Brian Lamb: How much of what you've done in your career is top secret and cannot be talked about?
Malcolm Nance: One hundred percent. I worked in - I started out in cryptologic intelligence and signals intelligence. That was the overwhelming amount of what I've done. I was seconded to other agencies and I'm not allowed to discuss those operations. But for the bulk of that, until I became a survival instructor, yes, it was 100 percent.
Brian Lamb: So what would the American people think if they knew what you know?
Malcolm Nance: Well, they would understand that - forget about me, there are thousands of people right now, my brothers and sisters in the intelligence community who, every day, I'm just surprised at how little the American public appreciate how and what they do.
There's a statue of Nathan Hale over at the CIA. And they really live by that creed of - they regret that they have only one life to give for their country, I mean people who take it to heart. I have friends on the wall at the CIA. I have friends on the wall at NSA. And they really enjoy being the spear tip, being out there and keeping the American public safe. And it hurts us greatly when we have failures like 9/11. And I still say us, because I'm retired, but I'm still within the community. I speak for the community.
And I think that's the best thing that I do publicly at all, is that I can help people understand that this is not like it is in the movies, some technological behemoth. These are thousands upon thousands of individuals who only want to serve in silence and make sure that we stay safe.
Brian Lamb: You've got quite a story about 9/11. Where were you?
Malcolm Nance: Oh, that was horrible. At that time, I had an office in Georgetown. I started a consulting company where I was supporting Special Operations Command. And we were preparing interestingly enough for a very large anti-ship terrorism exercise in San Diego.
And in that morning, I had a new office worker, a new chief of staff. And I was - took her to Capitol Hill and I was going to show her around the - where the House Intelligence Committee offices were, where the Senate Intelligence Committee offices were. And we stopped at the Cosi, just behind Capitol Hill on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Brian Lamb: A coffee place.
Malcolm Nance: Yes, there used to be a coffee house there. And they had a TV camera, of course, in there because of all the vote calls. And when I came in, we ordered coffee and then somebody said something about the television. I look at the television. And the first fire was burning at the World Trade Center. And it just struck as all wrong. The air was clear. And I thought about that B-25 that crashed into the Empire State Building in the 1940s.
And they said, yes, an airplane crashed into it. It might have been a small airplane. And we watched until the second airplane flew right into it. And then I knew completely who it was, what it was, why it was. It was Al-Qaeda. It was them using aircraft as cruise missiles in retaliation for our attack in 1997 on the (inaudible) Al Badr training center where we killed several dozen Al-Qaeda members and tried to kill bin Laden. And they used our own laws and technology against us. I jumped into a car. I started driving down Independence Avenue. I think it was Independence Avenue. To the left of the Lincoln Memorial, I stopped at the light and I was listening to the news. And then I saw an airplane flying over where the Sheraton across Arlington Navy Annex, our Marine Corps is, the Marine Corps headquarters …
Brian Lamb: Near the Pentagon.
Malcolm Nance: Right, right. Near the Pentagon. And I said, "Oh, look, they rerouted the airplanes." And normally the airplanes are right over your head coming down the Potomac to land in Reagan. And then the plane just glided right into the building and blew up.
And my first thought was we are under nationwide attack. That New York to this one, there's got to be more. And I drove over Memorial Bridge; I drove right to the - almost to the crash site. Jumped out and ran over to help people.
And at this point, people were starting to stream out of the, I guess, the north side of the west part of the building. And I ran up to one Navy admiral, a female admiral. And I said, "Admiral, I know what's going on. We got to get these people mobilized."
And she had the thousand yard stare. She had no idea what happened. Then I ran towards the helipad where the impact was. And I saw off to the side my favorite person in the world, a young army lieutenant colonel at that time who was a nurse. I didn't know it at the time, I thought she was a doctor. And she was a setting up a triage right along the curb. Secretary Rumsfeld was coming out and moving a stretcher. And I had learned later that she had directed him and his staff to help because he came out to see the crash site.
And I went over to her, "Look, I'm a senior chief. What do you need?" And she said, "I need you to help me get these people mobilized." And so with the help of a Marine sergeant and a Marine Colonel - a Marine Sergeant and a Marine Corporal, we got about 300 people all stacked up and got them stretchers, on six-man stretcher teams and then started going into the Pentagon and removing people out of there.
But the most amazing thing, it has nothing to do with me. This colonel is the single bravest person I ever saw in my life. I mean, at one point she was standing right at the crash site, a few dozen yards. And I ran over to her, next to her leg was the letter C from American Airlines next to her. And I said - I looked down and she had kicked her shoes off to run faster and I said, "Colonel, get your shoes on, you know? We can't afford to lose you." But when we got the call that there was another plane come, before anyone could leave the site, she had everyone pick up every stretcher, every bandage, everything. And she was literally the last person out of the crash site. And then we got it all clear, the first person back. I mean I'd read about that in military descriptions, the last person out, the first person in. I've never seen it, you know?
It's just utterly amazing. And we worked at the crash site all day. I helped with some of the - some of the removal later on that day and then I went home. And like the rest of the nation, broke down in shock. But for me, that is the single greatest thing I did in my day, was to witness the bravery and heroism at the Pentagon. I mean and the best part is that person, Colonel Patricia Horoho later would go on to become General Patricia Horoho and the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army.
Brian Lamb: I heard that you've adopted, this is way off the subject, but I hear you tell the story that you've adopted three Russian kids.
Malcolm Nance: Yes. …
Brian Lamb: When did you do it and why? And at what time and how does that fit into your life?
Malcolm Nance: My wife adopted them. My wife is an American citizen who was born and raised in - she was born in Indiana, but she was raised in Montreal, they're French/Canadian parents, so she has a big French accent. And she adopted three children from Moscow.
And I took over at the crucial part when they were pre-teenies, tweens, and then became teenagers. And I thought that I had experience dealing with young sailors, nothing like raising a teenager or someone who is becoming a teenager.
Brian Lamb: How old were they in 9/11?
Malcolm Nance: When 9/11, I think they were 8, 10, and 11.
Brian Lamb: What did you tell them after that day?
Malcolm Nance: I didn't tell them a lot. And to tell you the truth, for a couple of years, 9/11 would only affect me on 9/11. And the second year after 9/11, in 2003, when I was in Iraq and then came home, that's when it really - you're going to have to manage that trauma at some point.
And I called my wife one day and they were all there and I said I'm sitting at my desk and my desk is spinning and I can't make it stop. And then you have to come - you have to talk. You have to say what you saw, what you did.
And my kids, they appreciate that, that I did something that was selfless. And it was selfless. There is nothing to get out of 9/11, right, other than pain and suffering and to understand that there are many, many people in this country who have love and depth of honor and service to this country who 9/11 is their crux point in their career. And everything after that has been a response to that. And my kids and my family have done very well with that. They really support me.
Brian Lamb: How have you avoided PTSD or have you?
Malcolm Nance: No one avoids PTSD.
Brian Lamb: And it explain what it does to you.
Malcolm Nance: What it really does is I think it's a defensive system that your body and your mind does in order for you to manage events. And my PTSD really came from trying to understand what happened in Beirut in 1983. I'm a Beirut veteran. And just the comprehension of 243 guys being blown up and crushed. And I was living in Washington DC in the mid '80s. I was still - I was at the National Security Agency at that time.
And I met a guy - there's a bookstore here called Kramer Books. And I met an old Vietnam vet who was a combat medic in one of the major battles, the Ia Drang Valley. And he was pinned down for like a week.
And he had no medicine. He was going amongst the wounded for a very long time. And he - I used to joke, like "Old vets, you guys have PTSD. You just sit around and tell war stories all day." And he said, "It sounds like you," you know?
And I realized, am I doing it? And he goes, "Yes." And he goes, "When you come and talk to me, this is your therapy, so tell me, what stressed you the most? What traumatized you the most?" And that's what VFW and the American Legions were after World War I and World War II. They were places for veterans to go and decompress and to manage the stress of what they saw. And those retellings of stories, and you always hear these people say, "Oh, hard veterans don't tell, ever tell their stories." They do, to each other. They tell them all the time.
But you don't want to try to drink. You don't want to try to manage it with drugs or alcohol. Being amongst the camaraderie of our fellow veterans, no matter what war, is the best methodology and that's what therapy is, right? Going and sitting together.
Brian Lamb: Are your three children carrying on the Nance name in the military?
Malcolm Nance: No. Not at all, but I have a niece who is, who is a Nance. And she is in the U.S. Navy right now. And surprisingly, she just came back from her first combat action off of Yemen. She was attacked anti-shipping missiles fired at their ship in Yemen and then cruise missiled the missile sites a couple of days later. So, we have another combat action there in our very long family history.
Brian Lamb: Have you ever met somebody who was an Al-Qaeda member?
Malcolm Nance: Yes. Yes.
Brian Lamb: Have you talked to them?
Malcolm Nance: Yes. In Iraq, it was pretty easy to come upon members of Al-Qaeda that had been rolled up. Where I worked in the Republican Palace, I only worked with Iraqis. I didn't work mainly with U.S. forces.
And every once in a while, they would say, "Hey, come here. This guy is over here," before they were taken into interrogation. We actually had a safe house that was in just south of the Mansour district, near an area called Palestine Street, which was a hard, hard Iraqi - Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Iraqi insurgent headquarters for downtown Bagdad.
Palestine Street, I remember one day walking down or not walking down, rolling down there. And we had soft vehicles. We weren't in armored vehicles. And there was a burning U.S. Bradley infantry fighting vehicle down there that had been destroyed that night. And we had a police post right next door to us. And one night they came in and they said, "Hey, here is one of your friends." And I'm like, not my friend. But this guy was in what they called a "Knights of the Assassins" and this was an Al-Qaeda group that went around at night.
And they had silenced former regime pistols and they would just execute people. And as a matter of fact, I had one of those pistols. There was a famous photograph of me.
Brian Lamb: Photograph of you. Yes.
Malcolm Nance: Yes. With the Knights of the Assassin, Berretta model 92 that these guys would just - they would just come up out of the shadows, step up, shoot an Iraqi policeman in the head and step back into the shadows. But the Iraqis treated them pretty horribly. And it was very important for the U.S. Army to gain control of those guys because the Iraqis were far worse than we were.
Brian Lamb: I've got books all around me that you wrote. Here is the one called the Hacking ISIS.
Malcolm Nance: Right.
Brian Lamb: That's the newest.
Malcolm Nance: Yes. That's the way it is.
Brian Lamb: There's one called Defeating ISIS.
Malcolm Nance: Yes.
Brian Lamb: When was this done?
Malcolm Nance: I started that in December, 2015 and we got it done spring 2016. That's an encyclopedia of ISIS. That is everything there ever could be written about ISIS while they existed. As a matter of fact it started off, its original name was the ISIS Battle Manual. How they fight. And it was designed to show every field of battle that ISIS was on, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Indonesia, their subgroups in Boko Haram in Nigeria, ISIS in the Sahel, Tunisia. Every one of those, including Europe and the United States and the Caribbean is broken out according to organization, missions they've done, personnel who are - have been captured or killed, their organization in there.
And it was designed as in all-encompassing encyclopedia of ISIS. But in the end I also had to put in a strategy on how do you - what do you do with this, right? How do you defeat ISIS? And at that time, I saw that some of the things that were missing from the U.S. strategy was a more aggressive special operations component.
And I created a thing that I called Operation Dark Matter where I recommended joint raids between U.S. and like Syrian Kurd, Iraqi Peshmerga and Iraqi Special Forces raids into Syria and into the lines of communications between ISIS's city for 10 to 12 hours. Maraud, jump back on your helicopters and fly out. And interestingly enough in the last few months, that's actually have been implemented in Northern Syria and Western Iraq.
Brian Lamb: I want to ask you - this little book here. Looks to be somewhat political. Is this your - does this represent your politics, The Plot to Hack America?
Malcolm Nance: The Plot to Hack America actually came out of Hacking ISIS, while we were writing Hacking ISIS, we found that there were to hacks that were done against one, TV 5, TV Cinq in France and another one against the German Bundestag which is Germany's parliament, which were attributed to ISIS and so while we were studying that, we learned that the methodologies, the malware that was introduced and the place where the servers terminated that were stealing the information were certainly not ISIS. They were what are now known as ATP28, right, Cozy Bear. And Cozy Bear was the name that CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company gave for their interpretation of this malware package that belonged to Russian military intelligence, the GRU.
So the GRU had done these two false flag operations. ISIS has hackers, had hackers, some of whom were skilled and we have recently killed and they have a giant propaganda machine, but these two particular instances were Russia pretending to be ISIS to get into two sensitive servers, one was propaganda. The other was governmental.
And when the DNC was hacked, it became very clear that it was the exact same cyber entity, Russia's military intelligence service, the GRU. And CrowdStrike did an analysis of it and said, yes, in fact, there were two of them - Advanced Persistent Threat 28 and Advanced Persistent Threat 29, which was Fancy Bear, which is Russia's secret intelligence service. Their version of the CIA, the SVR or the FSB, right, the predecessor of the follow on, I'm sorry, to the KGB. Now, those groups hacked the DNC and carried out a perfect Watergate. They did exactly what was not done in the original Watergate.
They broke in. They stole information for almost a year. They took that information and they weaponized it and introduced it into the political process. Now, my entire - most of my career as a Republican, and I'm from the Colin Powell School of Republicanism which is honor and country first, right?
And my politics have absolutely nothing to do with that book. That book is an intelligence analysis of what we saw with regards to that operation. And there has to be a logical terminus for an operation. You don't just do it for fun. And the risk of doing this against the DNC, literally carrying out Watergate means that it would have to be approved at the highest level of Russia which is the former KGB director, right?
Vladimir Putin, Career KGB officer, became an autocrat, now runs Russia and has made his FSB the heroes of the post Soviet Union, right, now the Republic of Russia. That means he had to have done this to affect a result. And he wasn't just going to do it to damage Hilary Clinton. There's a lot of evidence that that's why he did it, but there's two parties to this. And no information whatsoever was stolen or used against his opponent.
And when you extrapolate that and boil it down and when you tie it to some of the connections that the Trump campaign had, that operation was done to affect Donald Trump to become the president of the United States.
Brian Lamb: In the back of this book and I want to tell you thanks of your being here, is the U.S. government report on Russia Today. The network that some people in this country can watch and watch it online, but I want to show you two ads that they ran on Russia Today and by the way, before they - people see it, who owns Russia Today?
Malcolm Nance: Oh, Government of Russia. Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin owns and operates Russia Today.
Brian Lamb: And they operate in this country and have a channel. I can watch it in my home.
Malcolm Nance: If you remember old Pravda and Izvestia news agencies in the Soviet Union, they've changed their names. They have new -
Brian Lamb: And the interesting thing in, Northern Virginia, it's a public television station that runs Russia Today.
(Off-mike)
American taxpayer dollars somehow or other gets into this, but I want to show this - they ran these two ads that they did for the audience, part of their promotion, but let's watch - one for Donald Trump and one for Hilary Clinton, back-to-back.
Malcolm Nance: OK.
(Video)
Hillary Clinton: Why aren't I 50 points ahead? We came. We saw. He died. Every time I think about Trump I get allergic. Nobody should be fooled. This is it.
Donald Trump: When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us. Nobody builds walls better than me. The press are liars; they're terrible people. We use people that are soft and weak. When you say we, you, are stupid. The American dream is dead. (Bing, bing, bing, bang, bang, bing, bing, bang, bang).
Because you'd be in jail.
(End of video)
Brian Lamb: Do they have any clout?
Malcolm Nance: They do now. There was a recent poll where amongst Republican voters and Trump voters five years ago, four, five years ago, Russia had a 16 percent approval rating, Vladimir Putin and Russia had a 16 percent approval rating and was viewed as an enemy of the United States. Now, Vladimir Putin and Russia have a 56 percent approval rating amongst Republican voters, propaganda works.
Brian Lamb: Let me be more precise. Does the Russia Today, they took Russia out of the title, they call themselves RT.
(Off-mike)
Totally funded by the Russian government. Do they have any impact do you think, that network on this country?
Malcolm Nance: Yes. Absolutely, they do. And if you look at the - if you look at the CIA report and the hearings that we've been having in the House and the Senate, the information that they put out works in almost a complete circle through the fake media process.
There are many, many, many organizations who call themselves news organizations in the United States. And I'm going to focus a little on the conservative side because I design see many on the liberal side and there's a reason for that.
They understand that they operate in an echo chamber, which can go full circle from a Russia Today broadcast, right, to an organization, I won't name a specific organization that is not a news agency right? Through various bloggers and other people and these reports will go completely around and end up in Breitbart and impact the White House.
And then from Breitbart that report will be reported by RT. Almost as if that the White House had come up with it and RT is just reporting on it, but if you read it back, it will come full circle from RT.
A good example of that, you might recall that Donald Trump said on July 27th, Russia, if you're listening, please release Hilary Clinton's 30,000 emails. Well, when we did the analysis for Plot to Hack America, the origin of that story came from a Fox news broadcast where Judge Napolitano said he had read somewhere that Russia had all of Hillary Clinton's emails and was having a debate within the Kremlin to release those emails.
Now, for anyone to know that, for someone in the intelligence community, that means you know the keys to the kingdom. You know things that are occurring within the Kremlin's closed doors. That is the highest level of intelligence that could possibly exist.
So we did a study. We tried to figure out where it originated. It originated with a blogger in the United States who got it from a small article that came off a Sputnik News, which was Russia. And that is the origin of where we have the Hillary Clinton emails came from. And I'm sure it just was passed anecdotally from person to person and got to Donald Trump, because if it wasn't anecdotal, that means at some point there were some collision in someone who knew.
But there's just no way anyone could know what Vladimir Putin and the head of the Foreign Ministry were debating within Vladimir Putin's office. Therefore, it had to have been introduced into the media bloodstream at some point and it was introduced by a Russian source four months before Donald Trump made that statement.
Brian Lamb: From the report you have in your book, RT spends about $200 million a year. I want to ask you, here's a promo that has Americans in it that work for RT. And I just want to ask you why do you think these folks work for this propaganda network of the Russians?
(Video)
Male: The American middle class has been railroaded by Washington politics. Big money corporate interests has drowned out a lot of voices. That's how it is in the news culture in this country now. That's where I come in.
Most people think to stand out in this business you need to be the first one on top of the story or the person with the loudest voice, or the biggest rating. In truth, to stand out in the news business, you just need to ask the right questions and demand the right answers.
You know what? Sometimes you see a story and it seems so whole and complete. You think you understand it. And then you glimpse something else. You hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know. I'm (Tom) (inaudible) welcome to The Big Picture.
We're a frightened society today who turns to our government and says make us safe …
… Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Stay vigilant and question more.
(End of video)
Brian Lamb: Larry King, Ed Schultz, Thom Hartmann, Jesse Ventura and the slogan from RT, question more.
Malcolm Nance: Question more. You know, this is what's brilliant about Vladimir Putin. I'm on the board of the International Spy Museum here in DC. And we have an ex-KGB general, Oleg Kalugin.
Brian Lamb: Kalugin.
Malcolm Nance: Who works there. Who is on the board, a fascinating character. But he lives under the model that Vladimir Putin, once KGB always KGB. What you are seeing is an extremely sophisticated modern take on what the old Soviet Union used to do when they would co-opt Communist Party newspapers, various voices on the left, even some on the right and get them to act as mouthpieces to discredit American democracy.
And that used to be a goal of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin still has that exact same goal. Only, he has money. He has national-level resources. And for a period of time there, Russia was going through a democratization process between in the early 1990s right up to Boris Yeltsin promoting him prime minister, Russia was a fledgling democracy. They are doing NATO's Partnership for Peace, which is the first step to joining NATO. And then corruption set in. And then when Vladimir Putin took over, it became an autocracy led by an oligarchy of the super rich.
Brian Lamb: Why do you think those Americans work for RT?
Malcolm Nance: Because they don't know that RT and Russia is still executing the strategic plan to discredit American liberal democracy.
Brian Lamb: Why don't they?
Malcolm Nance: Because they see it as a benign foreign news entity that allows them to speak what they view as the truth.
Brian Lamb: But these folks they were - we just saw have been around forever.
Malcolm Nance: They're all professionals.
Brian Lamb: They're professionals.
Malcolm Nance: Yes. I mean, Ed Schultz, Jesse Ventura …
Brian Lamb: Larry King.
Malcolm Nance: Larry King. They view these as new media sources, but if you view it as a new media source, like Al Jazeera in English, brilliant analysis, great news, still owned by the government of Qatar. So you are going to have a point of view that will be shaped.
Brian Lamb: But they didn't work.
Malcolm Nance: No. They didn't work. Al Jazeera America didn't work. Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera Arabia, and international works brilliantly.
Brian Lamb: Yes.
Malcolm Nance: I go on there from time to time. But Russia's use of propaganda whether it's cyber warfare and social media, whether it's broadcast propaganda with Russia Today is a component of their hybrid warfare structure. That is where they wage counter-ideology warfare against the west and the ideology that they are against is American liberal democracy. And you don't have to believe me. I mean Vladimir Putin's own personal philosopher, Alexander Dugin, who tweets on - he goes out on Twitter and he puts it out there.
A believer that American democracy is a failure and that the U.S. election and what they talk about is an example of that failure.
Brian Lamb: By the way, Kalugin used to be a KGB general.
Malcolm Nance: General.
Brian Lamb: General. He says, "Once a KGB member always," is he still a KGB member?
Malcolm Nance: No. He's an American citizen and he fears for his life because interestingly, Putin himself when - KGB transitioned to the FSB. And all they did was they removed the border guards, but the organization, the same headquarters, lots more money, intense quantities of more money.
The use of cyber warfare, theft and management of criminals, cyber criminals out in the world as subcontractors to their intelligence agency. They used cyber warfare like we butter bread, right? We don't - the National Security Agency might craft one weapon for launch once every 10 years against something very specific.
The KGB use it like it's sunrise. They do - I'm sorry, see how I use the KGB. The FSB, because there's no difference in the organization, they are just younger, faster, stronger, and they now understand that their job is to discredit the American political system and this attack on the American electorate was a gross example of how they decided they were going to put their hand on the thumb of democracy, on the scale of democracy.
Brian Lamb: There's a lot more in these books that we can't even get to.
Malcolm Nance: Sure.
Brian Lamb: Here is another segment that could point to this? And I just wanted to explain because anybody that gets online on YouTube and listens to ISIS videos will hear this. And I want - there's a reference that it sounds like Gregorian chant in the Roman Catholic Church, but this is called Clanging of the Swords, you say this is the greatest hit. And I just want to run a little bit of it, so people can hear it and you can explain this.
Malcolm Nance: OK. Sure.
(Video)
Brian Lamb: What role does this play in the recruiting of ISIS members? And what were they saying? You speak Arabic.
Malcolm Nance: Yes. Those little songs are called nasheeds. And nasheeds are religious chants like you said, they're like Gregorian chants. They are the only authorized music in ISIS's little cult-like version of Islam.
ISIS and Al-Qaeda and I always clarify this when I speak to groups. They are not a Muslim group. They are a Muslim cult. And there have been five other cults like them in Islamic history. As a matter of fact, they're identical to the first cult, a group called the Khawarij, who believe mass murdering women and children, killing any Muslim that was not part of their group was the way that you spread yourself.
And these nasheeds are these little songs like you heard right there, where they were talking about going out and striking dead the enemy and then in between all of our operations we pray to God and we're more devout.
They emphasize using religious, how can I put it, framing that is super ultra-orthodox Muslim to say that anyone who is less than us is not a Muslim. And if you want to be the best Muslim, you have to be like us. They model themselves on the immediate friends of the companion; they call themselves the companions of the Prophet Mohammad. It would be like a group in let's say Idaho, dressing like the 12 apostles, right, only walking around like the 12 apostles in sandals, but raiding a National Guard armory and killing anyone that dares calls themselves a Christian unless they're in that group. They are a cult. And as a cult, they view the Muslim world as their number one target.
Brian Lamb: I want to ask you in a minute how to rate their ability to use video and all that. And here is one of their recruiting videos with music. It's only about 50 seconds.
Malcolm Nance: Sure.
(Video)
Male: Twelve years ago, a nine-tailed fox suddenly appeared …
If you believe it …
(Music)
(End of video)
Brian Lamb: What's their audience for that?
Malcolm Nance: Kids. Your kids. Any disaffected, mentally defective young person or individual around the world. We have a lot of people who joined ISIS over the last three years who were Christian. Who were not 17, 18 years old. Who suddenly watched these videos and believed that they could be part of something bigger than themselves.
Take a weapon and self-start, what we call self-starting jihad and zero-dollar jihads. The guy who murdered the people in London by driving a vehicle down Westminster Bridge and then stabbing a policeman to death. The individual who took the truck and murdered the truck driver in Nice. We called these zero-dollar attacks. They are inspired by ISIS. And ISIS will take your claim the minute you finish that attack. They don't have to direct you. They don't have to guide you. Everything is laid out there. And in my book Hacking ISIS, which is the most recent book that I have, I call this the ghost jihad. When we - let me tell you, ISIS is in their Okinawa moment. They are about to die to a man in Syria and Iraq. They will not get out of there alive. All that 30,000, 40,000 men who went over there, their children and their wives might survive. And that's another thing that we're going to have to be concerned about.
Brian Lamb: Do they care if they die?
Malcolm Nance: They don't care if they die. I try to explain this and try to show why ISIS is not a Muslim extremist group or Islamic extremist. You can negotiate with Islamic extremists, Hezbollah, right, Hamas. Those groups have political goals to their extremism. ISIS is a death cult. They have no goal but to die in jihad and spread their version of their cultic view of Islam. And until that is eliminated, they're going to continue to spread. Now, we're killing them on these two particular battlefields. But so long as their ideology exists out in the world, they are as virulent as the first days that they rolled into Mosul.
Brian Lamb: So, you are against waterboarding.
Malcolm Nance: Yes.
Brian Lamb: What's the difference between waterboarding and dropping a bomb on somebody's head from a drone?
Malcolm Nance: Well, waterboarding is a war crime. And there is a way to fight this war without violating our ethics. I am big champion of ethics in intelligence. I know where the lines are. We all, as professionals understand where our warfighters should and could push themselves up to that line.
But it is legitimate and it is honorable to carry oneself within war and carry it in such a way that the enemy understands your force and impact. But also there is the force and impact of your morals that are even more. They are a force multiplier. They have none. They kill women, children with impunity. But we do not have to descend to their level in order to be competent warfighters.
Brian Lamb: But what do you think though when we are taking out somebody from ISIS or Al-Qaeda and we kill civilians? We've admitted that we do that.
Malcolm Nance: Well, I mean there is no war that is ever going to be fought where civilians aren't killed. And I know for a fact, we take great care in targeteering.
Brian Lamb: Go back to the waterboarding.
Malcolm Nance: Sure.
Brian Lamb: I don't understand why that's so bad when we are dropping bombs on - from the Predator, whatever and killing civilians.
Malcolm Nance: Well, there is a difference when you're killing individuals on the battlefield, whether you're shooting them, whether you're - like in the first Gulf War, bulldozering trenches over, right? Once they have surrendered or once they have been captured, we, the United States, believe that an individual is no longer a combatant on the battle field. And that applies even to individuals who are non-state actors who may act as terrorists. There are - I mean we helped develop the Geneva Conventions. We are signatories to the Geneva Conventions. We should live as an honorable nation according to those.
And I view this as a standing order. General George Washington when giving standing orders for the expedition campaign in to Quebec told his commanders there will be no mistreatment of prisoners. There will be no summary executions like that happened to the revolutionary forces where the British were just mass murdering officers and his own men.
And he said he would push that to the fore, the ultimate level of the rules of war, which means U.S., generals would have to punish up to death U.S. service members at that time they did that. Those are viewed amongst, as standing orders for the U.S. Army and only recently were they violated.
Brian Lamb: Last question and we talked about it a little bit earlier. If the American people knew what you know, would they be surprised about how much activity there is around the world that's being conducted by Americans, whether it's a SEAL Team or a Delta Force or anything?
Malcolm Nance: Yes. I think they'd be surprised at the level of intensity and the dispersal of the operations. Let me tell you, there are operations that go on that I'm not even read in anymore. And I know they're occurring.
They have to occur. There are things where we may need to maintain continuity of our intelligence knowledge. And, again, there are people sitting at NSOC at socket NSA, the National Security Operations Center and the CIA's National Counterterrorism Center and operation center all around this nation who stand watch day and night as sentinels to keep the nation safe.
And I think it's like that helicopter that we used in the raid in Abbottabad to get Osama bin Laden. People ask me all the time, "Did you know about that helicopter?" I said, "No." And I don't want to know about that helicopter. I want to know about that helicopter when I'm a hostage and DEVGRU or SEAL Team Six or Delta Force comes and kicks down the door and they throw me into that helicopter. That's the only time I want to know. Just know that this nation is prepared to handle its threats and that there are great people devoting their entire lives to keeping you safe.
Brian Lamb: The latest book from our guest is called Hacking ISIS. And our guest has been Senior Chief Petty Officer, United States Navy retired, Malcolm Nance. Thank you very much.
Malcolm Nance: You're welcome.