Government officials across the US have taken new security measures because of fears that Iran, or its supporters, may launch attacks on targets in America to retaliate for the US and Israel’s bombing of the country.
Federal and local public officials have announced that they have taken steps such as increasing law enforcement patrols to prevent any attack, which could come directly from the Iranian regime or a lone actor, security experts said.
“If there were ever a time when Iran would want to put into place all the different capabilities it’s built up over these years as off-the-shelf operational planning … now would be it,” said Matthew Levitt, director of the counter-terrorism program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
After the US attacked Iran on 28 February, Kash Patel, the FBI director, posted on X that he had instructed “counterterrorism and intelligence teams to be on high alert and mobilize all assisting security assets needed”.
Donald Trump, asked about the possibility of Iran attacking the US mainland, said this week: “I guess ... We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, Kristi Noem, who was fired on Thursday but retains the role until the end of March, also posted that she was in “direct coordination with our federal intelligence and law enforcement partners as we continue to closely monitor and thwart any potential threats to the homeland”.
Leaders of major American cities including Los Angeles, Miami and New York have announced increased patrols around sensitive locations such as places of worship, cultural centers and schools.
Rebecca Weiner, deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism for the NYPD, told CBS News the city had been in a “heightened threat environment” since June, when the US aided Israel’s attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.
She said the recent attacks on Iran were “definitely an escalation” and that the city would feature “enhanced deployments, patrol resources, specialized resources, the help of partners”.
“They are not telling you exactly what they’re doing, and they are not saying, ‘This is where we are going to be,’” said Richard Frankel, a retired FBI agent and ABC News contributor. “That is good” because “it’s an air of mystery where if anyone wanted to do harm, all they know is that the police are going to be active, but they don’t know how.”
The security experts expressed concern about Iran hiring people to commit terrorism in the US or inspiring people to do so. Law enforcement is investigating whether the Iran war motivated the man who wore a “Property of Allah” hoodie when he shot and killed two people and injured 14 on Sunday at a bar in Austin, Texas.
In 2016, a man describing himself as a sleeper agent with the Lebanon-based group Hezbollah told the FBI that if the US ever went to war with Iran, a sleeper cell would be called upon to act, according to a report authored by Levitt.
Iran could attack through “operatives that they have had here of their own” or “guns for hire from crew organizations or just trying to inspire people to carry out acts of terrorism”, Levitt said.
Iran could also launch cyber-attacks against the US, as it has previously. After Israel and the US, during the Obama administration, deployed a cyberworm, Stuxnet, to delay Iran’s nuclear program, the country started using distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against US banks.
“We could easily see that again, and that of course prevented millions of people from online banking, and we’re only more reliant on that now than we were 15 years ago,” said Jake Braun, executive director of the Cyber Policy Initiative at the University of Chicago and former acting principal deputy national cyber director under Joe Biden.
In addition to banks, Iran could also use cyberweapons to spread election disinformation and attack water and oil infrastructure, Braun said. In 2012, Iran, according to US intelligence, hacked Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company.
“I would be surprised if we don’t see something else that goes after energy markets,” Braun said.
While the US is well prepared for a direct attack from Iran, Braun said, “attacks against our banking infrastructure, or radicalizing individuals to do soft target attacks … are incredibly hard to defend against”.
“We don’t really provide the support for those civilian entities, whether they be a water utility or a bank or election jurisdiction, to protect themselves from a nation state. These attacks, by design, live in this kind of nebulous world between civilian and military existence,” Braun said.
The upheaval at the FBI and the DHS during Donald Trump’s second term could also hurt their ability to address the Iran threat, some of the experts said. The FBI has reassigned almost half of the agents working in the US’s major field offices to aid immigration enforcement rather than work on preventing cybercrimes, drug trafficking and terrorism, the Guardian reported in October.
“There has been a bit of a brain drain from some of the federal law enforcement agencies,” Levitt said.
Days before the Iran attack, Patel also laid off at least a dozen FBI staffers from a counterintelligence unit whose work included investigating threats from the Iranian regime, the New York Sun reported. Patel reportedly fired them because of their role in the investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents found at his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort.
“There is the potential for having lost some constitutional memory and capabilities,” Levitt said. “But overall, I think that we are well positioned to be able to capture the threat. Problem is the counter-terrorism people have to get it right every single time, and the bad guys have to get it right once.”
Still, none of the experts suggested that people should panic.
“I don’t think we have to change everything we do,” Frankel said. “I do think, though, that we have to be aware of our surroundings” and “it sounds kind of trite, but if you see something, say something”.
