On SpyCast: From intel officer to White House adviser
Chris Costa describes what it was like to work on counterterrorism inside President Trump's White House in 2017.
Chris Costa is a veteran intelligence officer and the Executive Director of the International Spy Museum. As the museum celebrates 23 years this week, we took this SpyCast episode to go beyond Chris’ 25 years inside the intel community, where he earned two Bronze Stars, to revisit his time in the White House. During the first year of President Donald Trump’s first term, Chris served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism.
We spoke about the immediate problems he faced: A serious threat to commercial aviation, hostages held abroad, and ISIS’ so-called caliphate. In one of his first decisions at the National Security Council, Chris recommended an operation against al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula, which led to the death of Navy SEAL Ryan Owens — a man he actually knew.
Chris described the human cost of policy decisions, reflecting on not just the mechanics of national security but the ethical burden carried by officials in positions of power. “Behind policy decisions, military decisions, there are human beings and families,” he said. “I was haunted by what I knew was playing in the background.”
We discussed how few Americans know, or remember, that the 2018 National Counterterrorism Strategy was the first to explicitly address threats of racially motivated extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism. Chris described how he tried to keep politics out of the office.
We also spoke about why there was no time to focus on de-radicalization, how U.S. drone policy changed, and what the Trump administration could (and should) be taking away from those early days — especially in the shadow of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
Our conversation ended on Syria, a country at the nexus of change in the Middle East. Trump’s meeting with Syria’s former jihadist-turned President Ahmed al-Shara was strategic, he said. “Syria itself is a microcosm for great power competition and counterterrorism.” If al-Shara pushes back against Iranian and Russian influence, Syria could become an important counterterrorism parter. “There are some indications that al-Shara and the U.S. government have shared intelligence on a potential terrorist attack that was going to take place in Damascus.”
Episode length: 30 minutes
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