Staying Afloat: NCITE Speaks with the NYPD's Meghann Teubner

By Erin Grace
NCITE Director of Strategic Communications and External Relations

You have to wonder how Meghann Teubner stays afloat.

As division director of counterterrorism intelligence analysis for the NYPD — America’s largest police force in a city targeted by terrorists — she must not only keep her head above an ocean of information, she also has to buoy herself and a staff with myriad weights on their ankles — varied, evolving threats involving disparate often lone actors, AI and other emerging tech, a politically divided America reacting to fierce global conflicts.

Here she must swim, sometimes against the current, to objectively assess and address intelligence that might thwart an attack. Her division is one of the city’s life preservers – quite literally.

So, it was hardly surprising that, during a briefing in New York on NCITE’s work studying threats to public officials, Teubner didn’t have much time to talk about her career. But she did catch up with NCITE later for the interview, below, that has been edited for clarity and length.

In 2019, the CTC Sentinel interviewed you and Rebeccca Ulam Weiner (now deputy commissioner of the NYPD Counterterrorism and Intelligence Bureau) about how the threat landscape had changed over the past two decades. In that piece, you described how threat actors were externally (i.e., internationally) motivated between 2001 and 2011, but in the subsequent years, actors were more internally (domestically) driven. Five years later, what does the threat landscape look like?

Same trajectory - lone actor - but where we are headed and what we keep seeing more and more of – and what recent attacks, arrest/disruptions in the city are a good representation of – is this concept of a combination of personal grievances and ideological grievances that are not clearly defined in buckets. Maybe someone is an accelerationist. They may want pure chaos. Or there’s an antigovernment side. I would say we’re lone-actor driven, but that the ideology behind radicalization and mobilization is much more diverse. 

As I look at our caseload, we have a solid mix, we still tend to see extremists as ISIS/Al-Qaida supporters/lone actors, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis. They may find their close-knit group. Group names and or affiliations fluctuate, and who they partner with changes a little bit, but the driving ideology stays the same. 

A trend we’re at the beginning of is, ideologically, a little bit of this, little bit of that. Pulling from a lot of different ideologies. 

Tell us about your background. How long have you been at NYPD?

Almost eight years. I was at NCTC (the National Counterterrorism Center) for 10 years before that. I had been the NCTC Rep assigned to the northeast region. I was asked to come aboard at NYPD to help fuse the strategic big-picture threat analysis and what we’re seeing from intelligence reporting and how that impacts New York with investigative analysis. For the first two years, I was building up strategic analytic capabilities, breaking down barriers.

Was there a formative life event that put you on the path you’re on now?

There were three. First, my dad. He had been drafted for Vietnam but had taken computer classes. He was pulled right out of boot camp for the Pentagon. He used to tell bits and pieces of stories of his time there but stop short and say he couldn’t tell us anything more because it was classified. I was always driven by the fact that I wanted to be the person who knew additional information. 

Second, obviously, 9/11 happened, and that was a moving motivator for me.

Teubner was 22 at the time, a recent college graduate.  

I remember spending the day on the phone with Dad most of that morning. My dad was actually very sick at the time. On that day, he went into the hospital for what would end up being a month and a half. So, I would talk to him to pass the time and ask (him) questions: What was happening in the world? Why had this attack happened?

Teubner enrolled in graduate school in London and, while there, the U.S. invaded Iraq.

I went over there with the impression everybody in the world would be supportive of us. Instead, there were just mass protests in the streets of London. They were burning effigies. It forced me to think critically of U.S. foreign policy. I credit that time in my life as really pushing me into intelligence and analysis. I was forced to check assumptions about my U.S.-centric understanding of the world.

Then, when I was getting ready to graduate, I applied to every single government job that was available. And because I had taken econ classes, I applied to financial jobs as well. I just wanted to get into government work – something international that would allow me to think critically about what our role in global geopolitics is. 

Teubner got hired by the U.S. Treasury Department, but two months in was contacted by the FBI and recruited to join. During FBI training at Quantico, Virginia, she received notice she was going to a then-new federal intelligence agency, the National Counterterrorism Center.

In typical government, bureaucratic fashion, there was no conversation about it. But it was the best thing that could have happened. I love the National Counterterrorism Center, and to this day I truly fully believe in their mission and the importance of having an organization that is an honest broker of information, not just a collection agency. They can look at information very critically and get it to the widest possible audience so people can have the clearest picture to address their threats.

She started as a shift worker, working 12-hour shifts looking at intelligence reports coming in from all over the world, tracking credible threats and updating an NCTC threat stream. She then became a specialist on Al-Qaida threats to the homeland.

The third driver for me was (the 7/7 attack) in London.

This was the July 7, 2005, coordinated bombing of the London transit system that killed 56 people and injured hundreds more.

I could not reach two of my very dearest friends — it took 24 hours for one, maybe a couple of days for the other. One of my friends was on a train that was targeted, and thank God she was two cars back and uninjured. That attack – and not knowing where my friends were, not knowing the details behind it, and knowing there was so much more behind what we were hearing at the time – affirmed that I was headed in the right direction.

Who were mentors in your career? What were they like and how did they help you?

I had incredible mentors and bosses at NCTC. One of my first mentors was a senior analyst in Al-Qaida Sunni Extremists Americas group. This woman went on to have an incredible career, was at the White House. She just had such a way of encouraging you to take on new challenges. She was really good about helping you as a new analyst understand threat reporting and put it into the broader context and not kind of cherry-pick intelligence to support an assessment you have formed in your head. It’s very easy to make an assessment on something without considering the entire body of reporting. 

I had another boss who also just recognized that it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been at a job if you’re working hard and you understand the subject matter and are willing to learn and have an open mind. He gave me opportunities at a relatively junior stage of my career. 

I would say that the former NCTC directors Mike Leiter and Matt Olsen were incredible leaders to work for. They were encouraging and would recognize the value of lifting up the analytic cadre – bring a couple of us into very high-level meetings and discussions to understand what was happening at high-level.

What challenges you today?

I would say the throughline across all of the challenges is the abundance of information that is available to everybody at all times that is either misinformation, disinformation, malformation. There is this polarization and acceptance of this idea that everybody has to be in the extremes. The challenge becomes, as intelligence analysts, to kind of constantly push through that noise to get the unbiased, unemotional threat assessment out there.

A lot of times that involves very nuanced discussions, but people have to recognize that two things can be right at the same time. Hamas can be a terrorist organization that carries out a terribly brutal terrorist attack on Oct. 7. And at the same time, Palestinian people deserve to be heard and have a seat at the table and not face the kind of extreme response that we’ve seen from Israel. 

You can have these nuanced conversations and recognize both sides of the story, and they can both be right at the same time, but people don’t want to say that – you either support Palestine or you support Israel and there’s no in-between. 

The real challenge in the intelligence analysis mission space is continuing to give that clear and concise comprehensive message that is free from emotion and bias. Maybe it includes dissent from another agency, and that’s great. You should have these kinds of assessments out there but getting that to the right audience is a struggle. As law enforcement or as intelligence a lot of people don’t see us as credible voices.

What keeps you up at night?

What keeps me up at night is the challenge we face now in law enforcement and intelligence in finding the signal in the noise. There are so many people that are just kind of the online trolls, the keyboard warriors. Finding the person who is going to mobilize to commit a violent act is hard. After Oct. 7, the throughline of antisemitism across the ideological spectrum, the volume online made it very hard to sift through and suss out if somebody is kind of caught up in the movement or truly looking to commit a kinetic act. That is going to be a persistent challenge. It’s become harder as more people fall into their own choose-your-own-adventure extremism. That’s a challenge because you’re looking across different platforms and chatrooms. 

What gives you hope?

You see people wanting to work together from the local all the way up to the federal to figure out the answer. I do get a sense of people really wanting to work together to tackle the problem, which is great. I also love to see – I am absolutely inspired by and empowered to see women like the director of NCTC, Christy Abizaid, Avril Haines, DNI, women in these powerful and impactful positions having such a loud, large voice at the table in policymaking related to national security.

So, how do you stay afloat? What shameless hobby or activity do you have to keep your spirits up?

Celebrity gossip. It’s like brain candy. 

Marvel movies. Something you can just watch, it’s enjoyable, you don’t have to think through. Plus, I’m a sucker for a good ending. I love good defeating evil always.