The Watch Floor with Sarah Adams

This Veterans Day, The Watch Floor welcomes Chance “Hollywood” Showell, U.S. Army veteran, retired Senior Federal Air Marshal, and founder and president of the Warrior Shield Foundation, for a conversation about a lifetime of service, the challenges facing our veterans, and what it means to continue serving long after taking off the uniform. Chance began his military career at just 17 years old, s...

What can the lessons of Benghazi teach us about the threats facing America today, and what should families be doing now to prepare? In this episode of The Watch Floor , Sarah Adams sits down with Dave “Boon” Benton, a former CIA Global Response Staff (GRS) officer and one of the Americans who fought to defend the U.S. Consulate and CIA Annex during the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya...

What would you do if a terrorist attack or violent incident unfolded around you? Would you recognize the warning signs, know how to respond, and have a plan to protect yourself and your family? In this episode of The Watch Floor , I sit down with Martin "Marty" Castellanos, a retired U.S. Coast Guard law enforcement officer, former Boca Raton police officer, and veteran instructor with 3...

How does the Muslim Brotherhood operate in the United States, what are its long-term objectives, and how much do Americans really understand about its ideology and influence? In this episode of The Watch Floor , I sit down with John Rossomando, President of Viking Research Associates, longtime counterterrorism researcher, and author of The Arab Spring Ruse: How the Muslim Brotherhood Duped Washing...

The Taliban may control Kabul, but the fight for Afghanistan is far from over. In this episode of The Watch Floor , I sit down with Ali Maisam Nazary, co-founder and Head of Foreign Relations for the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF), the resistance movement led by Ahmad Massoud, son of the legendary Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. We discuss how the National Resistance Front was...

The Taliban may currently control Afghanistan, but the fight for the country's future is far from over. In this episode of Resistance Week , I sit down with Lieutenant General Sami Sadat, Chairman of the Afghanistan United Front (AUF), to discuss the ongoing resistance against the Taliban, the growing terrorist threat inside Afghanistan, and what the international community continues to get wr...

The Taliban controls Afghanistan, but that does not mean the Taliban has won. In the first episode of Resistance Week on The Watch Floor, Sarah Adams sits down with Afghan advocate Jazz Cannon to discuss the ongoing resistance against the Taliban, the international flow of money that has helped sustain the regime, and the Afghans who refuse to give up the fight for their country. Jazz shares her e...

What makes someone embrace violent extremism? What does it take to walk away from it? And how do we prevent the next generation from being recruited? In this episode of The Watch Floor, former CIA Targeting Officer Sarah Adams sits down with Mubin Shaikh, a former Islamist extremist who became an undercover counterterrorism operative and helped dismantle one of Canada's most significant domest...

Is Canada doing enough to confront the terrorist threat, and what has the West failed to learn from more than two decades of counterterrorism operations? This week on The Watch Floor , I’m joined by Phil Gurski, a 32-year veteran of Canada’s intelligence community, former analyst with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and Communications Security Establishment (CSE), author, and hos...

How safe are our schools, and are we doing enough to protect the children inside them? In this episode of The Watch Floor , I sit down with Wayne Black, a veteran security expert and author of School Insecurity , to discuss what effective school security actually looks like and where schools are falling short. Wayne brings more than 45 years of experience in law enforcement, protective security, a...

In this episode of The Watch Floor, I sit down with Steven Al Ebadi, a U.S. Army veteran, former intelligence officer, combat linguist, and journalist whose career includes supporting U.S. Army Special Operations Forces, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the FBI. We discuss his journey from Iraq to serving alongside U.S. forces, the experiences that shaped his career, and his work in inte...

What would you do if someone opened fire outside your church? Would you recognize signs of a potential threat? And if your children were in Sunday school when an emergency started, would you know how they were being protected? In this episode of The Watch Floor , former CIA Targeting Officer Sarah Adams walks through the threats facing churches and religious communities, from terrorism and targete...

October 7th was not simply an intelligence failure. Israel had warning, surveillance, military power, and years of experience watching Hamas. What it lost was enough doubt about whether its own assumptions could be wrong. In this episode of The Watch Floor , I look at the lessons from October 7th that go well beyond Israel. We examine how complacency shaped intelligence assessments, how Hamas stud...

I’m doing something a little different on The Watch Floor and sharing what is currently on my reading list. I’m reading Rooftop Korean by Tony Moon now, a firsthand account of the 1992 Los Angeles riots and what happened when communities suddenly found themselves responsible for their own safety. I also have five newer releases on my radar covering Cold War counterintelligence, warning intelligenc...

On September 17, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency released its annual report on foreign efforts to acquire sensitive U.S. technology from the cleared defense industrial base. DCSA received more than 22,000 suspicious-contact reports during fiscal year 2025 and identified roughly 2,900 incidents involving foreign entities seeking U.S. information or technology. The leading method...

Before dawn on September 24, Ecuadorian police launched a major counter-narcotics operation against a cocaine-trafficking network. More than 320 Ecuadorian police took part, but this raid was different. About 50 personnel from U.S. Southern Command and the Drug Enforcement Administration joined the operation, with images showing U.S. personnel wearing Marine Raider insignia. In this episode of The...

The FBI is investigating a breach tied to FBIJobs.gov and the possible exposure of employee personally identifiable information. Hackers connected to ShinyHunters claim they stole terabytes of data covering current and former FBI personnel, applicants, medical information, background investigations, and other sensitive systems. Some of those claims remain unverified. But reporters have already rev...

Utah Valley University released its independent after-action report on September 25, 2026, examining the September 10, 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk. The report identifies a number of security failures, but the biggest lesson is broader than any single missed rooftop or breakdown in communication. In this episode of The Watch Floor , I walk through what the report says about venue selection,...

Writing “See something, say something” leaves out the hardest part: what are you actually looking for? In this episode of The Watch Floor, Sarah Adams explains the behaviors that can appear before an attack, from repeated surveillance and security testing to unusual questions about access, possible preparation near home or work, and warning signs at an airport. She explains why context and pattern...

A Russian intelligence-linked network allegedly recruited people already inside the U.S. to surveil a prominent Russian dissident in the Washington, D.C., area. The price was up to $1,500 for photographs and videos. The offer to carry out the murder was $40,000. In this episode of The Watch Floor , Sarah Adams breaks down how the operation moved from Russia through Cuban and Venezuelan intermediar...

Artificial intelligence is moving from answering questions to taking actions. In controlled tests, advanced AI models have deceived operators, attempted blackmail, concealed information, recognized when they were being evaluated, and taken steps researchers describe as self-preservation behavior. Those findings have produced extraordinary warnings about where AI may be headed. But a warning is inf...

For fourteen years, most of the Benghazi debate has focused on what happened after the attack began. This episode looks at what happened before. In May 2026, Dave “Boon” Benton and I returned to Benghazi, where we were briefed on a completed Libyan investigation into the terrorists and networks behind the 2012 attacks. One part of that investigation followed a German terrorist cell that moved from...

Hamza bin Laden is alive. On September 10, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, al-Qaeda released A Quarter Century After the September 11 Raids, Part One , featuring Hamza in three separate scenes. But the footage was not new. Hamza recorded it on August 13, 2021, in Kandahar, as Afghanistan was falling to the Taliban. Al-Qaeda held that footage for more than five years. In this episode of...

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the House Intelligence Committee went back and reviewed what the United States fixed, what it never finished, and where new intelligence gaps may be forming. In this episode of The Watch Floor, I break down ten of the most important warnings buried in the committee’s new bipartisan report, including unfinished biometric exit screening, counterintelligence stovepipes,...

Oil is back at the center of geopolitics, but the biggest story may not be where everyone is looking. In this episode of The Watch Floor , I look at what is happening around the Strait of Hormuz , why that narrow stretch of water still matters so much to the global economy, and how the pressure on energy markets connects to a very different development much closer to home: Venezuela and its enormo...