Taylor Swift nearly dodged a massive terrorist attack as earlier this month as the singer cancelled three of her Eras Tour shows in Austria.
At the time, authorities arrested three suspects, teenage boys aged 17, 18 and 19, but now, more details of the attack were revealed by a CIA agent, which would have led to a massive loss.
“They were plotting to kill a huge number, tens of thousands of people at this concert, I am sure many Americans,” CIA Deputy Director David S. Cohen told reporters on Wednesday, via The New York Times.
“The Austrians were able to make those arrests because the agency and our partners in the intelligence community provided them information about what this ISIS-connected group was planning to do,” he further explained.
Cohen went on to that they “do occasionally make progress” and he wanted to share this in a bid to highlight some of the “successes” in counterterrorism efforts that sometimes go overlooked.
The Grammy-winning singer was scheduled to perform August 8-10 at Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna for an estimated 170,000 fans. But the shows were called off after Austrian police revealed just a day before that a planned terrorist attack had targeted the concerts.
When the shows were cancelled, Swift issued a statement sharing her “new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many people had planned on coming to those shows.”
However, she was grateful that they were only “grieving concerts and not lives.”
“I was heartened by the love and unity I saw in the fans who banded together. I decided that all of my energy had to go toward helping to protect the nearly half a million people I had coming to see the shows in London,” she continued. “My team and I worked hand in hand with stadium staff and British authorities every day in pursuit of that goal, and I want to thank them for everything they did for us.”
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