access to awlaki himself.e tells us the cia sent him on this dangerous spy mission october 2008, a month after the embassy attack. to see awlaki, now hiding in a remote part of yemen. >> he's worried about security, but he's also worried about people following me. >> the mission, give awlaki a laptop, solar panels, night vision goggles he'd requested. some secretly implanted with spy software. then storm says he gives awlaki one more cia gift. $5,000 cash. >> he looked at me, and he tapped his chest pocket where the $5,000 were, and he said, can we buy bullets and weapons? i said, yeah, of course you can. my handler, cia handler in denmark, he said, you know what, you've just been tested and you just passed it. because if i said no, he knew, anwar, that this money was from intelligence. and he knew they were not allowed to sponsor or to pay for weapons and bullets. >> storm is loving his 007 life, but as he drives away from this meeting with awlaki, he is worried. >> the tables have turned. >> awlaki has grown

the fact al awlaki was killed, she said, quote, instigated a deeper passion for his teachings.uote. online teachings from al awlaki and dozens like him, the focus today of a heari ing held by th senate homeland security committee. the former jihadi took the question of the day from new jersey senator cory booker. >> we have a government that's spending millions and millions of dollars on old school forms of media and, as you said, very crude social media efforts. what do you imagine could be done if we were going to do an effective social media online countermessaging effort? >> thank you very much. you know, in some kind of defense to the center for strategic communications, they have a strong group of people. they're trying to contest the space. and they're trying to do something. and i get that. yes, crude is a very polite statement. look, at the end of the day, if you want to fight back against recruitment of 15-year-old kids, you need to work with 15-year-old kids. when i see my own kids showing examples of what affects them and what motivates them, it tells me that this i

soofi sent his mother dvds of the american-born al qaeda preacher anwar al awlaki. the fact that awlaki was killed says sharon soofi, instigated a deeper passion for his teachings. meanwhile, in new york authorities say they are home-grown would-be terrorists two women who allegedly planned to set off a bomb in the united states appeared in federal court today. they pled not guilty. the criminal complain accuses the women of supporting violent jihad. prosecutors say they researched and bought materials to make bombs. the threat of homegrown terrorists is becoming an increasing concern for authorities here in the u.s. let's get some more perspective. joining us tom fuentes. our cnn law enforcement analyst, former fbi assistant director. phil mudd is a cnn anti-terrorism analyst. former cia. and mubin shaikh former jihadist counterterrorism operative who testified before the senate panel just a little while ago today. let's talk about these two women in new york. what is the attraction of these young american women to a group like isis? >> i think for a lot of individ

significantly this next tweet shows in the upper left the face of the american cleric, anwar al-awlakiilled in a cia drone strike in 2011 and to this day he remains the face of a new digital jihad. we are expecting a readout from the u.s. intelligence community about this isis claim of responsibility. but at very least it is always seen as opportunistic. the bottom line is, that there really is an evolution going on in this discussion of whether an attack is directed by a foreign terrorist group. what we're seeing increasingly is these individuals kind of have what amounts to a standing order to launch a plot when they see the best opportunity presenting itself and they already know, that they have the blessing of the group and that may be in fact what happened here. sandra? >> catherine, thank you. open it up to the couch. dr. keith, considering what we now know about simpson that there was an open fbi investigation on him the fbi was following his comments on social media both facebook and twitter. he had he had been posting on their for quite some time. we know that soofi was not ac

we know famously anwar al awlaki was using the internet to reach out to people like nadal hassan the ft. hood shooter. what isis is doing is in a different scale. al qaeda would insist on a long conversation. they would insist on sort of micro managing a terrorist attack. isis is saying to people go and do your own thing. you don't need any instructions from us. go and wreak havoc, sow chaos where you can, all we're asking you is to acknowledge before the event you're pledging your allegiance to us. we don't want any sort of close control of what you're doing, go and do it. that's very, very dangerous because it means in the absence of long conversations on-line between let's say a recruiter in isis and potential terrorist in the u.s. it doesn't give the nsa or fbi the opportunity to listen in to catch this conversation half way, and then take action to prevent a terrorist attack which has happened in the past. isis is saying you're free. we don't really need to have a long conversation. >> and it's a fair point, general, because as you know as a result largely of this threat coming

it got worse with anwr awlaki in yemen.ut today the entire way of messages recruiting motivating and fundamentally mobilizing people to violence is now through social media. that makes their challenge hugely difficult on a number of fronts. >> the fbi director was quoted in "the washington post" saying this, senator feinstein, "it's almost as if there is a devil sitting on the shoulder saying, kill, kill, kill, kill, all day long." the fbi director said the old paradigm between inspired or directed when it comes to what isis is doing, he thinks there is no distinction that it's irrelevant. do you see it the same way? >> well, i see it the way the director said it. i think it is kill, kill, kill. and it is putting the lone wolf in a position that that's never happened before, that has never been in before, and that is you know, you do it and we take credit for it. the evil, the beheadings, the individual doesn't see. so you make the contact and you pursue that contact and then the individual goes out and puts forth an attack

he had a photo of anwar al awlaki and he started tweeting about the women of paradise. he was in touch directly with isis members and terrorists overseas and then 25 minutes before the attack he tweeted that he was about to carry out an attack. so i think that we have to ask the question whether this was an intelligence failure. >> so daveed let's talk a little bit for the about what mubin said. mubin said we've been playing a semantics game here whether it was inspired or they were acting directly what have you? does it really matter? because there are people in the united states believe they are acting on behalf of isis. that's enough isn't it? >> i think it matters in one way and not in another. i agree with what mubin is saying is part of what isis wants to do is to inspire people and they've given a general order to all of their followers to carry out attacks, and in that sense, all of these attacks are quasi-directed. it's a technical question. you have people like us who follow this stuff in excruciating detail. it matters to us whether it was directed or inspire

if you look at anwar al awlaki, his message to american muslims is that america is at war with islamic. america will never accept muslim. obviously, that's not correct, but that's exactly the message that pamela geller is putting out. and every time she gets on tv with that message, every time someone defends her, even defends her from a principled standpoint, they give life to that idea. they make that idea seem real. and that's exactly what we see. and this is not the first time that someone, a homegrown extremist, has looked to target someone like geller for exactly this reason. and i would say to geller, look, you have the right to do this. but you also have a responsibility. freedom of speech is a very serious right and it comes with a responsibility. you have a responsibility to act in a way that is restrained, according to fact. and simply yelling at someone and saying terribly nasty things at someone, look, and then to complain about the fact that someone reacts violently to that, to me, that's like lighting something on fire and complaining your fingers got singed. you cannot

it's not like anwar al awlaki being in touch with nidal hassan. it's not like people have been given either instructions or funding or support. this was basically two people who were acting again, incorrectly and in a horrific way but against an equally horrific act which was intended to inspire people to be angry. i mean she's done this before. and, in fact as you may know the mayor of garland has actually accused pamela geller of deliberately placing his police officers and his residents in harm's way. this wasn't the first time she did it. she tried this after "charlie hebdo" in january and nothing happened in garland so if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. >> so let's talk about the fact that these two guys lived in arizona. i mean it's not like they were living very nearby that they just saw this was happening, i don't know across their neighborhood and decided to react. i mean they clearly had to have had some planning some information that, first of all, as you say, that this event which was shocking to them was occurring in garla