Whether it’s a terrorist attack or Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency of the United States: how do you feel about being the user who predicted a catastrophic event?
Ali Soufan on September 11
In October 2000, Ali Soufan, a 29-year-old Lebanese-American FBI agent, was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge when his pager rang. More than 7,000 miles away, off the coast of Yemen, suicide bombers aboard a fishing boat had hollowed into the appearance of the USS Cole, a guided-missile destroyer, which killed 17 U. S. sailors.
Soufan summoned the office, where his mentor John O’Neill, head of the FBI’s national security division, would update him on the investigation. O’Neill and Soufan were rare voices within the FBI and beyond sounding the alarm about the magnitude of the risk posed to the United States through al-Qaeda.
“It was all for me in 1997 when I wrote a memo for the FBI to warn about this guy, Osama bin Laden,” says Soufan, who had just finished a master’s degree in foreign relations before submitting his resume to the FBI, in part because he liked The X-Files. “This memorandum has become more vital after the East African embassy bombings in 1998. And the rest is history. “
A team led by Soufan and O’Neill flew to Yemen, where they temporarily connected the attack on the USS Cole, al-Qaeda to the bombings of the U. S. embassies in Tanzania and Nairobi, which killed more than two hundred people. More importantly, Soufan connected the USS Cole conspirators with a lame al-Qaeda lieutenant named “Khallad” and two meetings in Thailand and Malaysia.
While building a trail of other people and money, Soufan suspected that something bigger was brewing, and that the meeting in Malaysia was of specific importance. “The risk matrix was flashing red,” he says. But when he asked the CIA about the set-up, the firm said it had nothing. In fact, the firm still knew about it to save its intelligence. Above all, he would not tell the FBI that two other jihadists in Malaysia had flown. to California, where they enrolled in a flight school without arousing suspicion.
Soufan grew up in Beirut, where his father was a journalist and his mother a teacher. He was 16 when the family circle moved to Pennsylvania to escape the war. American virtues seduced the adolescent: freedom, opportunity, justice. ” It was the American dream,” he says. But as a young agent, his idealism and skill clashed with more mundane subjects. A culture of mutual suspicion and rivalry blocked data sharing between the CIA and FBI. It probably didn’t help that Soufan thwarted the CIA in a separate investigation in Jordan and then rejected their attempts to recruit him. (He uncovered a box of evidence the company had overlooked, which included a map of proposed jihadist bomb sites and led to the conviction of 22 conspirators. )
Back in New York in late August 2001, Soufan said goodbye to O’Neill, who left the FBI. O’Neill, who had been a father figure to Soufan, about to start a quieter life, as head of security at the World Trade Center. Soufan returned to Yemen to stick to some of the tracks on the USS Cole. He was at the U. S. Embassy on Sept. 11. “When I saw the moment the plane crashed, I knew it was al Qaeda,” he said.
The FBI ordered Soufan and his team to return home the next morning. Moments before takeoff, Soufan ordered a call to the CIA. He ordered her to return to the embassy, where an officer passed Soufan an envelope. It contained images and reports of vigilancia. de the assembly in Malaysia. “It contained all the answers to the questions he had been asking me since November 2000,” he says. “I literally went to the bathroom and vomited. “
It is possible that Soufan simply does not succeed in O’Neill and assumes, correctly, that his mentor is dead. that al-Qaeda official. ” Honestly, I don’t think I know how I felt at the time, and I still don’t know,” he says. “I didn’t have time to think. “
Working sleepless for days, Soufan questioned one of the USS Cole conspirators, who spoke about a jihadist who had met one of the Sept. 11 hijackers and in Yemen. After days of interrogation, Soufan received the guy to identify the terrorists.
Soufan’s notoriety made his life complicated and he left the FBI in 2005. Now in his 50s, he runs Soufan Group, a global security consultancy. It’s been the subject of books and TV shows, known as “the guy who can just stopped on September 11. “”I don’t need to put that burden on my shoulders. . . that maybe I stopped him,” he said. “But sometimes I think about those things, it’s anything I have to do. “deal with. “
Since Sept. 11, Soufan has warned the world of emerging threats, adding national white supremacy and its “disturbing parallels” with the rise of al-Qaeda. “When I warn about threats, I think other people say, ‘You know what?These guys tried to tell us about al-Qaeda before and we ignored their warnings, so maybe we deserve to be careful now,” he says.
Robin Marantz Henig on Covid
In 1990, Robin Marantz Henig began researching an e-book on viruses. A year earlier, more than two hundred virologists gathered at a convention in Washington DC to brainstorm long-term threats and counter the complacency that seemed to exist in the face of the imaginable emergence of viruses. A virus that can cross oceans and cause a pandemic.
Henig recalled the early terror of AIDS, first noticed in 1981 in New York, where his brother was running as a doctor at the time. In 1983, Henig, who was 29 years old and already a talented science writer, published an AIDS magazine article in the New York Times, weeks before scientists knew HIV was the virus responsible. So my editors said, ‘Okay, now we’re going to put them on the pace of AIDS and they’re going to figure out which lab is working. to cure it, and we’re going to be there on the floor,'” says Henig, now 69 and living in New York City. “And I thought, ‘That’s not how it works!’ AIDS to prevent it from being a death sentence. “
Henig says the postwar progression of antibiotics and vaccines, perhaps especially opposed to polio in the ’50s, had turned a blind eye to the risk of viruses and the difficulty of containing them. arguing that this was something we still needed to pay attention to an uphill battle, even in the context of AIDS,” she says.
In his 1993 e-book A Dancing Matrix, Henig tested how aviation and the proximity of developing human populations to wildlife, adding bats and rodents, created fertile ground. We’re going to have a pandemic in the not too distant term and we weren’t in a position to deal with it,” he says.
A year later, Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone and Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague were the best-selling books with similar themes. “I like to say I wrote the prequel,” says Henig. Henig also blames prejudice for a collective failure of imagination. In his book, he quotes an anonymous and tired scientist: “Ask a box virologist what constitutes an epidemic of courage and he will answer with the characteristic cynicism: ‘The death of a white person.
The subsequent risks, which added Ebola and SARS, were limited to fast spaces in the south. AIDS had struck in the center of major Western cities, but even this disease was, as Henig says, “easy to compartmentalize,” at least for those not directly affected. “All of this fueled our worst instincts to think we weren’t facing existential risk and we can just forget about those diseases,” she says.
That denial remained intact when the coronavirus pandemic broke out in early 2020. Henig recalls a feeling of “vertigo” when he saw how the crisis unfolded. “My daughter said, ‘So how does it feel to look at this and know that you predicted everything?'”And I didn’t have it in my brain that way, yet it was as if everything I had described was what we were experiencing now.
In 2020, Henig phoned Stephen S Morse, a virologist who chaired the 1989 convention and featured prominently in his book. He was horrified that the world ignored his warnings. He shared with Henig his favorite quote, from a control guru named Peter Drucker, who once asked, “What’s the worst mistake you can make?According to Morse, Drucker responded, “Being right prematurely. “
Allan Lichtman on Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US elections
A few days after the U. S. presidential election. UU. de 2016, Allan Lichtman won an envelope. Inside, the history professor discovered a publication of an interview in the Washington Post, in which he predicted a victory for Donald Trump. Trump had mailed the coin to Lichtman, scribbling on it with a thick marker: PROFESSOR – CONGRATULATIONS – GOOD DECISION – DONALD TRUMP.
“I leave it on my wall,” says Lichtman, at his home in Washington, D. C. , where he teaches at American University. Speaking Zoom, it holds the framed article. ” My wife sought me out to burn him. “
Lichtman, 75, has little time for Trump’s politics. But as a famous predictor of the US presidential election, he has not been able to do so. In the U. S. , which has predicted the popular vote since 1984, the well-dressed professor was thrilled to get a score from a winner. to receive a message from Joe Biden in 2020,” he says regretfully.
Lichtman says 2016 was his toughest decision in 10 elections in nearly 40 years. “I was pretty much alone among professional meteorologists and you can believe that didn’t make me popular in DC, which has over 90% Democrats,” he says. “I tried to tell other people it wasn’t an endorsement. “He was willing to take risks, he says, because his research told him to. Before each election, review the same thirteen true or false statements. His prediction formula “Keys to the White House” (also the call for an e-book he published in 1984) includes points such as “when there is no serious festival for the nomination of the party in power and “that there is no sustained social unrest during the term. “”. Only two keys are directly similar to a candidate’s character. The statements, which also relate to the effects of the midterm elections and foreign policy, are largely designed to gauge the strength of the ruling party. “True” answers favor re-election But if Lichtman considers six or more answers to be “wrong,” he calls her on the other side.
The “keys” go back to a fateful encounter with a Soviet seismologist. In 1981, Vladimir Keilis-Borok discussed with Lichtman his ambition to apply the popularity of mathematical tendencies to politics. Since democracy is rare in the Soviet Union, he advised a joint approach in the United States. “I think the guy is nutty or he’s from the KGB,” Lichtman says.
The Russian, who died in 2013, formed a partnership with Lichtman. His paintings included a study of presidential elections dating back to 1860. “In seismology, they look at patterns related to stability and earthquakes in the physical world,” Lichtman says. We take a look at what patterns are related to political stability and earthquakes. “
History has told men that a sitting president has greater merit over a new candidate from the same component, making the end of a current term complicated (the United States has a two-term limit for presidents). That part of his Clinton reckoning in 2016, which also followed Obama’s midterm elections. The educational career for Al Jazeera in Doha when it saw the effects of 2016 coming.
The tension to be right increases with each success. “If I’m wrong, a ton of bricks will fall on my head because so many other people are eager to make me wrong,” Lichtman says. His detractors have included pollsters, of whom he withers: “Polls are never used for prediction, they are just snapshots at any given time. “
It’s too early to call 2024, but Lichtman says Biden’s ability to run for a moment is vital. With the problem of a fight to choose a new candidate, as well as the lack of a unifying heir, he says Democrats would be two keys. far away even before they start the campaign. ” They have to lead Biden,” he said.
Leon Charles on the crisis
In the 1990s, Leon Charles was working as a geography instructor in Grenada, the Caribbean island where he was born. I was tracking the weather and hurricanes, and I was worried. ” The rhythm of the seasons was changing,” he says. And in some positions, other people would point to a position in the sea and say, “This was the land 20 years ago. “
Sign up for Inside Saturday
The only way to spend the scenes of our new lopass magazine on Saturday. Sign up to get the story of our most productive writers, as well as all the must-have articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.
After newsletter promotion
In 1999, after a stint as an entrepreneur, Charles, 65, was tasked by the government to coordinate Grenada’s role in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the framework whose last annual meeting COP27 in 2022. It swallowed the clinical literature and the first reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Charles didn’t expect the climate crisis; For more than a century, scientists have warned the world about the effect of carbon dioxide emissions on global warming and the role of industrialization. Global role in scaling the crisis for coastal populations everywhere, if the world did not take enough action.
Charles is involved in what already gave the impression of a blind pursuit of a 2°C target to restrict the rise in global temperatures above pre-industrial degrees. Still, scientists predicted that such an increase could increase sea degrees by almost a meter. 2100, among other calamities, the game is over for places like Granada.
In 2004, when Hurricane Ivan devastated the island, the climate crisis was to be ignored. Charles’s early paintings had been faithful to awareness, adding further training in schools. “We were starting from scratch,” he says. But awareness at home may not do much; Small islands are doomed by emissions that occur far beyond their shores.
The most vulnerable countries had begun to organize themselves into the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis). When Grenada assumed the presidency in 2006, Charles saw an opportunity. In 2008, he travelled to Poznań, Poland, as Grenada’s chief negotiator at COP14. proposing a target of 1. 5°C as an achievable and less catastrophic target. He hoped to make a crusade for adoption in Copenhagen the following year. “But the countries with the highest evolution did not take us seriously,” he recalls. “We were told 2C was enough. “
A few weeks before COP15 in Copenhagen, President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives organized an assembly of the underwater cabinet with diving equipment to control the risk and turn Aosis into a formidable negotiating force. The delegation from Grenada arrived in Denmark with high hopes, and that of more than a hundred countries. But in heated negotiations, China tried to remove any mention of 1. 5C. “How can you ask my country to disappear?”Nasheed fought back. In the end, the Copenhagen Accord included 1. 5°C as a long-term goal to be reviewed until 2015, if another science corrects it. “We were glad it wasn’t thrown away,” says Charles.
Undeterred, Aosis has worked hard to promote additional examination and support. At the 2015 Paris climate conference, Grenada was again a key component of the negotiations that resulted in the legally binding Paris Agreement. “, while “continuing its efforts” to reach the 1. 5°C target. The UN has also asked the IPCC to report on the effects of the decline target. The report, published in 2018, details how the half-degree difference would save more than 10 million other people the worst effects of emerging sea levels. A 1. 5°C target was not only preferable, he said, but could also be achieved with pressing action. “That’s when the ground changed,” says Charles. We treat it as a victory. “
When I first spoke to Charles in November last year, I was under the sun in front of Cop27 in Egypt. A year earlier, in Glasgow, countries agreed once and for all to focus on 1. 5C, the purpose for which it has been struggling. for 15 years. While good fortune still hangs in the balance (the UN said in October that “there is no credible trail of 1. 5°C in place”), the geography professor-turned-negotiator, who has an adult daughter, looks so as not to think too much about the fate of long-term generations in Grenada. “You have to be pragmatic to do what I do,” he says. “But when I look at where we have been since 2008, when we had nothing, it tells me that there will continue to be progress. “
Meredith Whitney on the 2008 currency crisis
Meredith Whitney’s life turned upside down in an instant on Halloween 2007. He was 37 years old and had built a career forged as a Wall Street analyst specializing in banks and stockbrokers. Beyond occasional appearances as a television specialist, he added one in which he met a champion. A fighter turned money advisor whom she would later marry, she operated under the radar as (in her words) “a studio nerd. “
But Whitney, 53, was smart in her studies and increasingly worried. The global currency crisis was brewing, largely due to the industrial-scale flagellation of subprime mortgages and the ripple effect on the banks that had invested in them. Even worse, Whitney dug deep into a bank and didn’t like what she saw. Its 2007 market report explained how Citigroup had made a massive takeover and a final split frenzy without raising capital. Unless it reduces the final division or sells assets, it would sink. As Michael Lewis wrote in The Big Short, his e-book on the currency crisis: “At the end of the negotiation, a woman hardly anyone had heard of . . . had reduced Citigroup’s inventories by 8% and the price of the U. S. stock market by 8%. U. S. $390 billion.
“I used to make a call, listen to locusts and realize it later,” Whitney tells me from her home in Washington DC, where she lives with John Layfield, the wrestler. “I didn’t expect this to cause a rapid global eruption. “. . . I was watching TV on my desk the next morning and this reporter ignored him and said, ‘I’ve never heard your calls. ‘
But Whitney, who also predicted danger for other banks and added Lehman Brothers, is right. Within days, Citigroup’s chief executive resigned and dividends were cut. A stranger had sown doubt in the center of the monetary system. Wall Street” and blue-chip clients bought his wisdom for $100,000 an hour.
In the summer of 2008, Whitney feared the worst. ” I feel like I’m in the midst of the biggest currency crisis in history,” he told CNN. She wasn’t the only one predicting catastrophe. Michael Burry, the investor played by Christian Bale in the film adaptation of The Big Short, had bet on a loan crisis as early as 2005. But Whitney has established herself as an analyst in a world ruled by male egos. “I was a relatively young woman, and the only woman doing what I was doing, and I was challenging the total system,” she says. (Interestingly, she played a central role in Lewis’ book; there was no position for her in the film. )His reaction to the paintings was incredibly harsh — he remembers sleeping a maximum of 3 hours a night — and turning it into a virtue.
Whitney had grown up outside Washington and excelled as a history student at Brown University in Rhode Island. A few weeks after appearing on the cover of Fortune magazine for “calling the credits crisis,” he returned home to make a stopover at the home of his mother, a former executive recruiter, when fate turned culminated in the dramatic collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. “I knew it was going to get worse but. . . when you see it in front of you, oh my God, it’s so,” she says.
Notoriety can be misleading. In 2010, Whitney surprised markets by predicting on live television that city bonds, which she had been researching for months, were the next debt bubble that was about to burst. as it must be to stick to Whitney’s prognosis, the reaction was severe. “I probably didn’t realize I had such a goal on my back,” she says.
Whitney overcomes the general claims she made in 2010, but the episode was difficult. Stricter regulations on Wall Street have also given him less to chew. After running his own consulting firm for several years, he has since worked for start-up companies. She looks back on 2008 with a sense of sadness that justifies. “None of this has made me happy,” he says. People have lost everything. “
Paul Miller on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
In March 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told CNN, “Russia is certainly our number one geopolitical enemy. In a televised presidential debate six months later, Barack Obama quoted Romney’s words and said: behind his foreign policy, because the Cold War ended 20 years ago.
The Democrats won the zinger well, but not everyone was impressed. As a foreign policy adviser to the Romney campaign, Paul D Miller, then 34, contributed to his assessment of the Russian threat. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 was, in his eyes at least, quite transparent in intent.
“And there were seeds even before that,” Miller, 45, says from his workplace at Georgetown University in Washington, D. C. , where he is a professor of foreign affairs. In 2000, at the beginning of his first term as president, Putin resurrected the Soviet national anthem. In 2007, it suspended a key Cold War arms deal. “And then, after 2008, it became transparent what their grand strategy was,” Miller adds. I challenge their authority. “
Shortly before the 2012 Romney/Obama debate, Miller cited Putin’s invasion of Georgia as saying the world deserves to “look for a sequel in Ukraine. “His eyebrows raised as Obama gave the impression of joking about Putin. to say something very derogatory,” Miller says. I think Obama’s crusade welcomed a wise comeback. And then, two years later, Russia invaded Crimea.
When Putin invaded Ukraine last year, Miller did surprise many other supposedly well-informed observers. “People said, ‘He wouldn’t dare do that. ‘Take a look at history!A dictator invades a foreign country? This is surprising.
The fall of the Berlin Wall is one of Miller’s earliest memories of global events. “My dad sat me in front of the TV and said, ‘You’ll never do this in your whole life. ‘”He studied government at Georgetown and Harvard before joining the U. S. Army Intelligence School. He was stationed in Arizona, where he was stationed. On September 11. “They mobilized me 3 days later,” he said.
After a stint as an Army intelligence analyst at the Bagram military base in Afghanistan, Miller worked for the National Security Council and the CIA. He believes that the allies’ failure in Afghanistan, culminating in a troop withdrawal in 2021, has only emboldened Putin. Yet for more than 20 years, world leaders have sought an end to Cold War politics.
In 2001, after Putin’s first meeting with President George W. Bush at Bush’s ranch in Texas, a reporter asked the two men if Russia could be trusted. “I can ask the same question [to the United States],” Putin said with a smile. . Bush followed without delay: “I looked the guy in the eye, I discovered him very direct and reliable. . . I was able to get a concept from his soul. “
“After the Cold War, triumphalism was widespread,” Miller says. “People thought Russia was in transition to a liberal democracy. after it was true, but it wasn’t.
Miller is now focusing on China, where he is far from alone in predicting what he calls “some kind of militarized crisis” over Taiwan or Korea in the next five to ten years. this is to recognize the risk of Russia 10 years ago,” he says. “And that’s what can prevent that from happening, which is the point. As a precaution of something, I hope to be in my prediction.