Top national security officials will head to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to describe what they think are the biggest threats to U.S. interests at home and around the world.
The annual worldwide threats hearing is a showcase of major security challenges, from nuclear proliferation to cyberwarfare. It has become a forum for the nation’s top intelligence officials to draw attention to emerging threats that haven’t captured as much of the public’s attention, such as the global security implications of climate change.
Last year, leaders focused much of their remarks on Russia, unanimously concluding that the country was trying to interfere in the 2018 midterm elections by sowing discord and confusion via social media, as it had two years earlier in the U.S. presidential race.
Russia is likely to take center stage again this year. Last week, the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, emphasized in a national intelligence strategy document that U.S. spy agencies were turning their main focus away from fighting global terrorist networks toward countering Russia and other state adversaries seen as geopolitical threats to the U.S.
The United States will be challenged in coming years, the strategy concluded, by nations that exploit “the weakening of the post-WWII international order and dominance of Western democratic ideals” and “increasingly isolationist tendencies in the West.”
Coats will testify at Tuesday’s hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He will be joined by CIA Director Gina Haspel, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and other top officials.
In remarks last September, Haspel said the CIA would spy more aggressively on hostile governments.
The CIA’s spies and analysts will “invest more heavily in collection against the hardest issues,” Haspel said. She didn’t name specific countries, but the agency has set up new centers to collect intelligence on Iran and North Korea and has been focusing its assets on major powers, including Russia and China, according to intelligence officials.
This story was originally published by Washington Post
via USAHint.com
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