WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration's top intelligence, counterterrorism and law enforcement officials are divided over which terrorist group poses the biggest threat to the U.S. homeland: the Islamic State or al-Qaida and its affiliates.
The split reflects a rising concern that the Islamic State poses a more immediate danger because of its unprecedented social media campaign, which uses sophisticated online messaging to inspire followers to conduct attacks across the United States.
But many intelligence and counterterrorism officials warn that al-Qaida operatives in Yemen and Syria are capitalizing on the turmoil in those countries to plot much larger "mass-casualty" attacks, including taking down airliners carrying hundreds of passengers.
The decision will influence how the government allocates billions of dollars in counterterrorism funds and how it assigns thousands of federal agents, intelligence analysts and troops to combat a multipronged threat that senior officials say is changing rapidly.
The issue already has prompted a White House review of its counterterrorism policy toward the Islamic State. And the National Counterterrorism Center has diverted analysts working on longer-term extremist threats to focus on the Islamic State, intelligence officials said.
In June, the FBI had so many people under surveillance in terrorism-related investigations -- mostly related to the Islamic State -- that supervisors reassigned criminal squads to monitor terrorism suspects.
U.S. officials say this is not a black-and-white debate between those who worry more about al-Qaida as the main threat to the homeland and those who say it is the Islamic State. Both are worrisome. It is more a shift in emphasis. The FBI, Justice Department and Homeland Security Department are concerned more about the rising risk from the Islamic State, while the Pentagon, intelligence agencies and the National Counterterrorism Center are more anxious about al-Qaida operatives overseas.
The White House seems to be leaning toward the Islamic State, increasingly alarmed by what Lisa Monaco, President Barack Obama's homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, recently called the group's "unique threat" to the United States.
The debate is evolving in real time, so there have been no large shifts in money or personnel in one direction or the other. But it marks the first time that senior U.S. officials have spoken so openly about the evolution.
For all the concern, there have been no al-Qaida attacks in the United States in 14 years although some were thwarted or fell apart. Most of the Islamic State-inspired plots so far have been unsophisticated but increasingly difficult for authorities to detect in advance.
How much the United States spends on counterterrorism is difficult to pinpoint because many of the main actors and agencies -- U.S. troops, CIA analysts and FBI agents, to name a few -- carry out other functions, as well. But senior U.S. officials say counterterrorism programs employ roughly one-fourth of the more than 100,000 people who work at the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and account for about one-third of the $50 billion annual intelligence budget.
The debate was brought to the surface about two weeks ago when James Comey, the FBI director, said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado that the Islamic State posed the greatest danger to the homeland.
Senior leaders of the Islamic State -- unlike those of al-Qaida -- have not made a priority of organizing strikes on the West. Instead, the Islamic State has encouraged individual Westerners to carry out such attacks on their own.
"It's currently the threat that we're worrying about in the homeland most of all," Comey said.
Comey said the group was focusing on how to "crowdsource" terrorism, by having thousands of its promoters reach out and screen potential adherents on Twitter and other open social media, then switch to communicating on encrypted apps or email programs that U.S. intelligence officials say they have difficulty cracking.
"They're just pushy," Comey said. "They're like a devil on somebody's shoulders saying, 'Kill, kill, kill,' all day long."
A few days later, Attorney General Loretta Lynch weighed in on ABC News, saying of the Islamic State, "It's as serious -- if not more serious a threat -- than al-Qaida."
U.S. analysts say the Islamic State is replacing its combatants in Iraq and Syria as fast as the United States and its allies are killing them, and the group still maintains as many as 31,000 fighters.
Unlike al-Qaida, the Islamic State controls territory, provides civil services and has infrastructure. It remains well funded -- earning close to $1 billion a year in oil revenue and taxes, according to Treasury Department estimates -- and has expanded to other countries, including Libya, Afghanistan and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.
Current and former counterterrorism and intelligence officials who closely monitor risks overseas say that although the risks of the Islamic State are real, the overall threat is more complex and requires a nuanced strategy.
"ISIS is all about the quantity of attacks," said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, using an acronym for the Islamic State. "Al-Qaida, on the other hand, is focused on the quality of the attack. For that reason, al-Qaida still, in that respect, very much concerns me even more than the quantity of ISIS attacks."
Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the Pentagon's Special Operations Command, said at the Aspen forum that the Islamic State is "much more prominent right now" but added that al-Qaida "remains a very, very significant concern for us."
Nicholas Rasmussen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in an interview: "There's a greater likelihood of ISIL being linked to attacks in the homeland right now. That said, we still look at AQAP as more capable of carrying out larger-scale attacks against the homeland, including against aircraft coming here." AQAP is the al-Qaida affiliate based in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen.
In July 2014, the Transportation Security Administration banned uncharged cellphones and laptops from flights to the United States that originated in Europe and the Middle East after picking up intelligence about the collaboration between al-Qaida operatives in Syria and Yemen.
"I wouldn't put it on a matter of scale as significant as what we faced 10 years ago from al-Qaida, or even now from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula or the Khorasan Group, to carry out more significant, perhaps catastrophic, attacks," Matthew Olsen, a former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said of the Islamic State threat, citing al-Qaida groups in Yemen and Syria.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said at the Aspen forum, "To say one is of greater magnitude than the other, at least for me, is hard."
Yet there is no doubt that the threat from the Islamic State has seized the immediate attention of policymakers and intelligence officials in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.
John Carlin, the assistant attorney general for national security, said at the Aspen forum that authorities have made more than 50 terrorism-related arrests in the past 18 months, mostly involving the Islamic State, in the jurisdictions of 20 U.S. attorneys nationwide. Eighty percent of those arrested are younger than 30, and 40 percent are under 21, he said.
In early July, Comey said authorities had thwarted multiple attacks being plotted for the Fourth of July by the Islamic State and its sympathizers in the United States, although he did not say what the plots entailed or how many people had been arrested. The FBI has hundreds of investigations pending into such cases across the country, he said.
Twitter accounts affiliated with the Islamic State have more than 21,000 English-language followers worldwide, Comey said, and thousands of them may be U.S. residents.
"We are facing smaller-scale attacks that are harder to detect, day to day to day," Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said at the Aspen forum.
A Section on 08/05/2015