Terrorist Recognition Handbook ─ A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities

Written by a 20-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community, this second edition reflects the latest geopolitical factors affecting global terrorist incidents and regional insurgencies. A new section includes an analysis of transformations within Al Qaeda, coverage of the modern insurgency, and new global and regional terrorist groups. Completely updated, the section on terrorist tactics reveals the latest trends and attack methods and includes a new chapter on previously unseen suicide bombings. This book is an invaluable training tool on how to identify an attack; how to mitigate damage from successful attacks; and how to recognize the various stages of developing terrorist plots.

Malcolm W. Nance is a 32-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community’s combating terrorism program. He is a combat veteran who has served as a collections operator, analyst, and interrogator in Naval Intelligence and a specialist in antiterrorism and survival, evasion, resistance, and escape (SERE). He has spent 17 years deploying on antiterrorism and counterterrorism intelligence operations in the Balkans, Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa in direct support to the principal agencies of the U.S. intelligence community. Mr. Nance has witnessed and investigated numerous terrorist incidents and participated in response operations from the two American embassy and U.S. Marine barracks bombings in Beirut, Lebanon; the TWA 847 hijacking; the Achille Lauro "marjacking;" the Libyan air raid; the first Gulf War; the War in the Balkans; the millennium bomb plot; the attack on the USS Cole; the September 11 attacks; and hundreds of suicide bombings and terrorist attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the Arabian Peninsula.

As a master SERE instructor, Mr. Nance ran the al-Qaeda simulation group for the U.S. military’s advanced terrorism, abduction, and hostage survival school from 1997 to 2001. On the morning of 9/11, he witnessed firsthand the attack on the Pentagon and became a rescuer at the crash site. In the response to the September 11 attacks. he has trained hundreds of U.S. Special Operations personnel operating in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and sub-Saharan Africa in terrorism intelligence. An internationally recognized expert, author, consultant, and scholar on the al-Qaeda global terrorist organization, terror-based insurgencies, jihadist philosophy and tactics, and counter-extremist ideology and strategies he provides regular commentary for the global media including the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, and lectures for the International Spy Museum. He lives and works between the Middle East and his home in New York.