CIA: Terrorist attack on Taylor Swift's show should have cost thousands of lives

The foiled terrorist attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna earlier this month aimed to kill “huge numbers, tens of thousands of people,” including Americans, the CIA's deputy director said today.

David S. Cohen also revealed in his speech at the Intelligence Summit outside Washington DC that the information that the Austrian police used to thwart the attack on August 7 was provided to the authorities by the CIA.

“They planned to kill a huge number of people at this concert, tens of thousands, certainly many Americans,” Cohen said, according to the New York Times, NBC and other news outlets. “The Austrians were able to make these arrests because the agency and our intelligence partners gave them information about what this ISIS-affiliated group was planning to do.”

Swift canceled three concerts at Vienna's Ernst Happel Stadium after being informed by Austrian authorities of a bomb attack by four people with links to the Islamic State. At least three people were arrested.

The Eras Tour superstar called the cancellations “devastating,” writing in a social media post: “The reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear and enormous guilt because so many people had planned to come to these shows. But I was also so grateful to the authorities because thanks to them we were mourning concerts and not live performances.”

More than 170,000 people were expected to attend the concerts in Vienna. Cohen did not reveal how the CIA obtained the information that prevented the planned bomb attack.