Clint Watts,
Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Research Institute,
and NBC News National Security Contributor
Clint Watts is the author of the book Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News.
His research and writing focus on terrorism, counterterrorism, social media influence and Russian disinformation. Clint’s Tracking of terrorist foreign fighters allowed him to predict the rise of the Islamic State of al Qaeda in 2014. From 2014-2016, Clint led a team of researchers who tracked and modeled the rise of Russian Influence operations via social media leading up to the U.S. Presidential election of 2016. This research led Clint to testify before four different Senate committees in 2017 and 2018 regarding Russia’s information warfare campaign against the U.S. and the West.
Clint’s writing has appeared in a range of publications to include the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, Politico, Lawfare, War on the Rocks, World Politics Review and the Huffington Post.
Before becoming a consultant, Clint served as an U.S. Army infantry officer, an FBI Special Agent, the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC), a consultant to the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division (CTD) and National Security Branch (NSB), and as a counterterrorism analyst on a range of programs supporting the U.S. Intelligence Community and U.S. Special Operations Command.
