Malcolm Nance

Military career

Nance served in the United States Navy from 1981 to 2001. As a U.S. Navy specialist in Naval Cryptology, Nance was involved in numerous counter-terrorism, intelligence, and combat operations. He garnered expertise within the fields of intelligence and counterterrorism.

He was an instructor in wartime and peacetime Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE), training Navy and Marine Corps pilots and aircrew how to survive as prisoners of war. There, Nance helped to initiate the Advanced Terrorism, Abduction and Hostage Survival course of instruction.

Post-military career Intelligence and counterterrorism expertise In 2001, Nance founded Special Readiness Services International (SRSI), an intelligence support company. On the morning of 9/11, driving to Arlington he witnessed the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

Between 2005 and 2007 Nance was a visiting lecturer on counterterrorism in Sydney, Australia at Macquarie University's Centre on Policing, Intelligence, and Counter-terrorism (PICT) and at Victoria University of Wellington in Wellington, New Zealand.

Nance now directs a think tank that he founded, the "Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies", which analyzes counterterrorism. Terrorist Recognition Handbook, The Terrorists of Iraq, Defeating ISIS, The Plot to Hack America, and Hacking ISIS. In 2018, he published The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West. In 2019, he published The Plot to Betray America: How Team Trump Embraced Our Enemies, Compromised Our Security, and How We Can Fix It.

Opposition to waterboarding In 2007, Nance wrote an article criticizing waterboarding for the counterinsurgency blog Small Wars Journal titled "Waterboarding is Torture... period." Nance wrote: "I know waterboarding is torture—because I did it myself." Nance said he witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people.

Republished in the Pentagon Early Bird, it set off a firestorm as the first credible description of the torture technique as used in SERE. The article strongly swayed the Pentagon against the use of the waterboard because its misuse would damage America's reputation worldwide. Nance argued that using the torture techniques of America's former enemies dishonors the memory of U.S. service members who died in captivity through torture, and that torture does not produce credible intelligence. Nance elaborated, "First, you start off as a useful idiot, right? Next is unwitting assets... a person who doesn’t know that there was an intelligence operation around him. The next progression is a witting asset. I have never said the next step. I have never said Donald Trump was an agent of Russia."

Joins Ukrainian Foreign Legion following Russian invasion On April 18, 2022, Nance revealed that he had joined the Ukrainian Foreign Legion in March 2022. In an interview with Michael Harriot of The Guardian, Nance likened African-American military aviator Eugene Bullard's service in the French Foreign Legion to his own service in Ukraine, hoping to inspire "African Americans and young Americans who have been in the military", and describing the International Legion as "the pantheon of the defense of democracy in the defense of Ukraine".

Personal life Nance was married to Maryse Beliveau-Nance, who died from ovarian cancer in 2019.

In the 2024 United States presidential election, Nance endorsed Kamala Harris.

Filmography Torturing Democracy, 2008 (panel commentator). Dirty Wars, 2013 (interviewee). Trump: The Kremlin Candidate?, 2017 (interviewee). Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump, 2020 (interviewee).