Professor Fair, the Georgetown expert on Lashkar, said the group has set up sophisticated networks throughout Asia to train dozens of sleeper operatives for attacks in India.
For those who don't know, "The Rickchurian Mortydate" is a riff on the Manchurian Candidate, a book and two movies about a conspiracy to get a Russian sleeper cell operative elected president.
Though it will still take time for more precise details to emerge, nothing so far definitely shows that the Paris attacks differ significantly from prior failed plots involving sleeper cells operating in Europe -- including returned foreign fighters in their ranks -- with suspected links to low to mid-level ISIS operatives in Iraq and Syria.
The group that he led, until then relatively marginal with no real support base and only a few hundred members, was portrayed as a sprawling global terrorist organisation, with obedient "operatives" and "sleeper cells" on every continent, and an ability to mobilise, radicalise and attack far beyond its real capacities.
The show's premise – CIA operatives battle terrorist sleeper cells on US soil – suddenly looked absurd.
It's also worth noting that, since 9/11, there have been only two terrorists apprehended under military law on United States soil: Jose Padilla, the American accused of plotting to set off a "dirty bomb," and Ali Saleh al-Marri, a Qaeda operative accused of being a sleeper agent.
Since we can't seem to get enough of sleeper spies, let's look in on Louis Morgon, the retired C.I.A. undercover operative who figures in Peter Steiner's sweetly sane novels of international intrigue.
It was a war without regular combat, waged by clandestine operatives: spies and saboteurs, bomb-makers and bomb-planters, commandos, sleeper agents, and assassins.
Getting there Caledonian Sleeper Train (sleeper.scot).scot
