Who is Malcolm Nance? Former analyst joins fight in Ukraine

Malcolm Nance announced that he has joined Ukraine’s legion of foreign fighters and is on the ground to help the country resist the Russian advance. He gave a very special interview to MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Monday 18th April and it’s gone viral.

Photos: Getty(Inset: Twitter @MalcolmNance)

Speaking from a secure location in Lviv, Nance said he was fighting for Ukraine after friends in the Ukrainian army told him, “We’re not going to survive tonight.”

Photo: MSNBC

“The more I saw of the war going on, the more I thought, ‘I’m done talking, all right? It’s time to take action here,’” he said. “I am here to help this country fight what essentially is a war of extermination.”

He added, “This is an existential war, and Russia has brought it to these people, and they are mass-murdering civilians. And there are people here like me who are here to do something about it.”

“They are destroying infrastructure, and then you find they go to the cities and they massacre men, women and children, and that is the fundamental reason everyone is here.”

“I’m DONE talking,” he tweeted with a black-and-white photo of himself in western Ukraine, after the interview to restate his point. Nance has a huge social media fan base with 1 million followers on Twitter.

Photo: Twitter @MalcolmNance

But there are many who may not know who Nance is and why his move to fight is attracting attention from all over the globe. We investigated.

Malcolm Nance, according to his publishers Simon & Schuster, is a globally recognized counterterrorism expert. He is a part of the Intelligence Community and has been deployed to intelligence operations in the Balkans, Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa.

In fact, one of the world's leading experts in his field speaks fluent Arabic. It was these skills that took him overseas with the Navy working in cryptologic intelligence. Nance also studied Russian, Chinese, Spanish and French in grade school.

He is the author of The Plot to Hack America, a fascinating non-fiction piece about the ‘Russian interference’ in the 2016 United States elections. The book’s sub heading is, ‘How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election’. Nance is certainly not afraid to speak out.

So Malcolm Nance has already received attention from the Russians. After he accused them of orchestrating a disinformation campaign during the 2016 presidential election, they wrote articles about him and sent out social media attacks against him.

Hacking Isis. Nance joined forced with Christopher Sampson to create a cyber warfare book that depicts the exploitation os intelligence found on ISIS dark web operations. Sampson is a cyber-terrorist expert.

A New York Times bestseller. Looking at the tactics the group has employed; their threat to the West; the control of Islam and an insider’s view of the origins of this cult group. ‘Defeating Isis: Who They Are, How They Fight, What They Believe’.

He appeared regularly for NBC News and then for MSNBC as a terrorism analyst. The latter have made a statement about his decision to join the Ukraine legion, stating that his contract with MSNBC had finished before he signed up.

Photo: MSNBC

In 2014, he founded and became the executive director of the Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies (TAPSTRI). It is a non-profit organisation that seeks to advise governments and policymakers on counter-ideology programs to defeat radical extremists. Needless to say, his webpage is now taken over with news they are on the ground in Ukraine, covering the unfolding war.

Nance started out working in civilian intelligence. In fact, the Ukraine war is particularly close to home for him as, in his early days of work, he researched into the history of the Soviet Union - snore, more so, its spy agency, the KGB.

Nance served in the U.S. Navy for 20 years from 1981 to 2001. He openly discussed his experiences being black in the intelligence community to spymuseum.org, saying: “I come from a very old US military family. And for African-Americans, that's sort of an achievement.”

Since his Navy years he has worked as an analyst, author and counterterrorism expert, aiding and supporting governments. He is also an expert on torture techniques. He said “I know waterboarding is torture—because I did it myself." Nance said he witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people, according to The Independent in 2007.

Nance lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and has had a tough personal journey over the last few years. His wife sadly passed away in 2019.

Malcolm was married to Maryse Beliveau-Nance. Her death was cause by complications of stage 4 ovarian cancer. She had been married to the MSNBC analyst for 15 years.

“She was a brilliant landscape architect, devoted mother, fierce patriot, a proud Navy wife and the one great great love of my life,” Malcolm wrote on Twitter when he announced her death in 2019.

Photo: Twitter @MalcolmNance

Nance has an autobiography, ‘Thinker, Sailor, Black Man, Spy’. In it, he remembers some funny - as well as thought-provoking anecdotes about his early life and the challenges of joining his area of work in a generally white community.

Malcolm Nance has become a world-leading expert in his field and was named a Genius for the Third Annual MSNBC and 92Y "7 Days of Genius" Festival in March, 2016.

Nance said to MSNBC that his sole purpose was “to protect the innocent people of Ukraine from this Russian aggression.”

Photo: MSNBC