How does a 21-year-old from Cambridge end up on a U.S. government watch list and living in a Hezbollah-controlled neighborhood of Beirut, making pro-Iran propaganda? That’s the question investigative reporter Jay Solomon set out to solve when he started looking into the disturbing case of Calla Walsh late last year. Her story might not be typical of her generation—thankfully, there aren’t many American teens who become radicalized as fully as Walsh. But the activist’s descent into extremism, and the forces driving it, get at some of the most urgent issues in America today. —The Editors

In the weeks since the U.S. and Israel launched their joint assault on Iran, perhaps no American has more aggressively and publicly rallied behind the Islamic Republic than Calla Walsh. From her new base in Lebanon, the 21-year-old Cambridge-raised activist has taken to social media and left-wing podcasts to incite her fellow countrymen and women to sabotage U.S. and Israeli defense contractors wherever they can find them. On March 3, she mocked four American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike, posting: “They all died fighting for fascism, genocide, pedophilia, and cannibalism.” She attached pictures of the dead Americans. In recent days she reposted a list of missile-production sites inside the U.S.

“We have a duty to escalate,” Walsh told her host on the Psychic Militancy podcast last Saturday from Beirut, noting that “lockdowns” of weapons factories and vandalism alone are “not sufficient at this point.”

She added: “And as the genocide and these wars of aggression continue to escalate, much more is demanded of people in the West.”

Walsh looks every part the art-school hipster, with her thick-rimmed glasses and a mop of curly hair. But she’s a chameleon of terror. Five years earlier, as a 16-year-old, Walsh was fawned over by The New York Times for being a young, social media-savvy activist who was helping to shake up the Democratic Party in Massachusetts. But as a monthslong investigation by The Free Press shows, she’s thrown her allegiance squarely behind the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Axis of Resistance, which includes the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The U.S. government has placed her on a suspicious persons watch list for her expansive dealings with the governments of Cuba and Iran, U.S. officials told me, as well as a spiderweb of U.S.-designated terrorist groups.

Over the past few years, Walsh’s radicalization has played out in real time on X and Instagram. She quickly moved from political organizing for the Democrats to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to conducting guerrilla-style raids on Israeli defense companies in New England, for which she received jail time in 2024. She has regularly called for the assassinations of Israeli officials and their allies in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In October, she formally relocated to Beirut, The Free Press learned, where she has established herself as a regular contributor to Iranian state media, particularly the English-language site of Tehran’s Press TV on which Washington has imposed sanctions. She is actively engaging in propaganda and information-warfare operations on behalf of the Iranian regime and Hezbollah, which is fighting Israeli forces in south Lebanon.

In early February, Walsh traveled to Iran as part of a regime-backed media delegation aimed at galvanizing international support for the Islamic Republic in the face of the looming U.S. and Israel attacks on the country. She was also there to whitewash Tehran’s January massacre of thousands of protesters by framing the regime as a bulwark against imperial and Zionist aggression.

According to U.S. counterterrorism officials I spoke with, any financial or operational ties Walsh has established with blacklisted organizations—whether in Iran, Cuba, or Lebanon—means she could be indicted for providing material support to proscribed groups. Walsh’s latest trip to Tehran places her in even greater legal jeopardy if she ever returns home.

“I’ve never seen someone who’s done jail time so publicly integrate herself into terrorist infrastructure,” a senior national security official told me. “She’s totally exposed now.”

Walsh’s family in Boston, including her three siblings, have expressed growing alarm about a daughter and sister who just years ago appeared to be an emerging force in Democratic politics. “We love Calla deeply and absolutely,” the family wrote in an emailed statement to me. “And we have serious, fundamental political disagreements with her.” They declined to comment further. Neither Calla Walsh nor her attorney, Jeffrey Odland, responded to multiple requests for comment from The Free Press.

Walsh’s story, in some ways, sounds familiar: a Zoomer who became politically active in the years when Covid-19 raged and nationwide protests subsumed college campuses after George Floyd’s death and Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Walsh has written that she initially embraced activism to combat the climate crisis and America’s racial divide.

But Walsh’s rapid turn toward revolutionary agitation is a cautionary tale about how foreign intelligence services, domestic extremist groups, and political grifters are preying on American youth, counter-extremist experts in the U.S., Europe, and Canada told me. At the age of 17, just months after appearing in The New York Times and authoring a 2021 piece in Teen Vogue on the DSA, Walsh was invited to Cuba by an organization the U.S. government long tied to the Castro regime’s intelligence services. She would go on to make four visits to the island nation between 2022 and 2024.

Her radicalization continued after she dropped out of Canada’s McGill University after only one semester. She began consorting with Fergie Chambers, a self-styled millionaire Marxist organizer and heir to the Cox Communications empire. Her left-wing activism then led her into contact with the information warfare departments of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist organization sanctioned by the U.S. in 1997 for terrorism. With every step, her proclamations grew more radical and extreme.

Officials tracking Walsh worry her trajectory could mirror those of other female leftists and self-proclaimed revolutionaries who emerged in the 1970s and early ’80s to fight American imperialism and support the Palestinian cause. These include Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin of West Germany’s Red Army Faction; Chicago-born Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground; and Assata Shakur, a Black Panther who found exile in Cuba after murdering a New Jersey state trooper. Some counterterrorism officials nicknamed Walsh “The Little Drummer Girl,” a reference to the female protagonist in the 1983 John le Carré novel who is brainwashed by Israeli spies into carrying bombs for Palestinian terrorists.

Things didn’t end well for most of these women. Meinhof and Ensslin committed suicide in a German prison, while Dohrn and Shakur spent years on the run and in hiding.

Experts in radicalization told me they fear Walsh may already be at the point of no return.

“To understand her is much easier than to get her off her path, because we don’t have the power to change her realities, her experiences,” Arie Kruglanski, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland and expert on extremism, told me. “She’s extremely strong on this quest for significance, and all that she does is a way of getting this significance.”

Calla Walsh grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the liberal university town on the Charles River sometimes referred to by locals as the People’s Republic of Cambridge.

Her parents are members of Cambridge’s literati. Her father, Chris Walsh, is an associate professor of English at Boston University, and her mother, Mary Sullivan Walsh, teaches fiction writing at Harvard’s Extension and Summer Schools. Chris was a longtime secretary and teaching assistant to the Nobel Prize–winning author Saul Bellow, who spent his last 12 years in Boston. Mary writes novels for young teens.

Walsh said she’d regularly engage in intense political debates with her family on the evils of capitalism and inherent and pervasive racism inside the U.S. law enforcement system. “I think, generally, I’m able to persuade them on issues. Like they vote how I tell them to vote,” she told the Boston magazine writer Tom McGrath in a 2021 interview, a tape of which he shared with me. “They support the candidates because they know I follow closely.”

Walsh studied at two elite Boston preparatory schools, Shady Hill and Winsor, and quickly became a sort of local star for her politicking. At 15, she helped mobilize thousands of young Bostonians to take part in an international Climate Strike at City Hall, and at 17 was one of the youngest delegates at the Democratic Socialist of America’s National Convention.

At one point, in 2022, her younger sister, Cece, was asked by the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School to write an essay exploring both the positive and negative aspects of colonial rule. Walsh would have none of it.

She took to social media to slam the school in a screed that was eventually republished in national media outlets, including the New York Post. “Forcing students into the mental exercise of justifying/rationalizing genocide because of its supposed ‘positive effects’ itself perpetuates genocide and indoctrinates them into supporting an imperial war machine,” Walsh