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After President Trump left the G7 summit in Canada a day early last week, it was learned he had received a message from Iran that if the U.S. attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities, the regime could activate sleeper cells in the U.S. to launch terror attacks.
The FBI says “assets are fully engaged” to prevent an attack, and Homeland Security is warning of a “heightened threat environment,” but saying little else.
When a reporter asked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about the sleeper cell threat, she answered, “I can’t necessarily share that with you, but I will tell you that we are continuing to evaluate every single threat and to proactively go after them before they do anything or take any activity.”
This week, federal immigration agents arrested 11 Iranians here illegally. One arrested in Alabama was an Iranian Army sniper. Another in Houston was carrying a loaded pistol.
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Counterterrorism expert Barak Seener of the Henry Jackson Society in London says Iran, defeated on the battlefield, may see a sleeper cell attack as the only way it can hurt the United States.
“The entire identity of Iran is as a terrorist state,” Seener said. “The reach is global. It attempted to conduct a proxy attack in the UK, in Sweden, in Argentina, Cyprus, in Thailand.”
And he believes Iran took advantage of the Biden Administration’s open border policies, in which millions of illegal migrants entered the U.S.
“Hundreds, if not thousands of Iranian nationals passed through the doors of the United States,” Seener said.
CBN’s Chuck Holton has reported from Panama’s Darien Gap, where migrants had to cross on their way to the United States, and says he encountered many Iranian men.
Holton said, “Every Iranian that I met in the Darien Gap was military age male, and I didn’t meet any Iranian women at all. They mostly spoke English, so they were well-educated. And none of them were with their families.”
Last year, the Justice Department uncovered an Iranian plot to kill Donald Trump before the election.
Washington also knows that a Hezbollah sleeper cell called Unit 910 is operating in the United States, ready to carry out Iran’s orders.
Iran, though, may also take a different route – a cyber-attack.
The Commission on the National Defense Strategy warned senators last year that the United States is “unprepared” for a “devastating” cyber-attack that will bring life in towns and cities across America to a standstill.
Commission Chair Jane Harman told senators, “The public is essentially clueless about the massive cyber-attacks that could be launched any day by our adversaries. Not just nation states but rogue actors as well.”
Iran in the past has hacked into water systems in several states, and could use what it has learned to attack America’s critical infrastructure, including internet, power, transportation, and financial systems, in an effort to make almost everything from phones to gas pumps to cash machines to traffic lights suddenly stop working.
Cybersecurity expert Shawn Waldman of Secure Cyber says many of America’s municipal water systems are also at risk
Waldman said, “We’re in a cyber cold war today. We’ve got vulnerabilities with our radar systems and our air traffic control. We’ve got vulnerabilities in our 911 systems.”
The potential targets for Iran are numerous, and defending everything will be difficult.
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