Devlin Barrett and Dan Frosch
June 14, 2016
Orlando Shooting Plays Into FBI’s Homegrown-Terror Worries
The gunman authorities say massacred 49 people at an Orlando nightclub had proclaimed he wanted to be a martyr, traveled to Saudi Arabia and alarmed co-workers with claims of links to extremists—troubling hints of a homegrown terrorist but not enough to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conclude he was a clear threat.
FBI Director James Comey, disclosing new details of Omar Mateen’s background Monday, said Mr. Mateen took trips to Saudi Arabia in 2011 and the following year, though Saudi and U.S. investigations found nothing suspicious.
Mr. Mateen is an example of precisely the threat that has vexed the agency in recent years: terrorists living in the U.S. whose self-radicalization is hard to spot. Despite the actions that led the FBI to scrutinize Mr. Mateen, investigators found nothing that compelled them to act.
“This is exactly what we’ve been talking about,’’ said Mr. Comey. Mr. Mateen was radicalized, he said, at least in part on the internet and had no apparent interactions with overseas terrorist groups, links that can alert law enforcement to radicalization.
Mr. Comey defended the FBI’s handling of two previous probes involving the 29-year-old Orlando-nightclub terror suspect, saying there are no indications agents missed clues that could have prevented the massacre.
The director’s comments highlight what is emerging as one of the most vexing aspects of the Sunday shooting. Mr. Mateen left enough hints that the FBI scrutinized him carefully yet ultimately concluded he didn’t represent an immediate danger.
Law-enforcement officials said the sheer volume of people in the U.S. who have expressed some interest in radicalism but don’t pose an obvious threat creates enormous logistical challenges for investigators trying to track them all.
“There’s probably a ton of these guys in the U.S., and we simply don’t have the resources to put someone on them 24/7,” said Deputy Chief Michael Downing, who commands the Los Angeles Police Department’s counterterrorism bureau.
Mr. Comey said FBI agents are combing through every part of the gunman’s life to see if they missed anything in their previous investigations and to determine if there is something they could be doing differently. “Our work is very challenging. We are looking for needles in a nationwide haystack,” he told reporters. “But we’re also called upon to figure out which pieces of hay might someday become needles.”
The FBI first investigated Mr. Mateen in 2013 following complaints by co-workers at a Florida courthouse, where he worked as a security guard, who were alarmed by his claims he had relatives in al Qaeda and was a member of Hezbollah, Mr. Comey said.
He also claimed to have known friends of the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013.
The FBI conducted surveillance, searched public and private records, and introduced informants to Mr. Mateen to see if they could determine if he was planning a crime. When agents questioned him about the statements, Mr. Mateen said he had made them in anger because he thought his co-workers were treating him unfairly.
The investigation found no evidence to contradict his claims, Mr. Comey said. At that time, the FBI also probed Mr. Mateen’s trips to Saudi Arabia.
That investigation led Mr. Mateen’s name to be placed on a terrorist watch list, meaning the FBI would have been notified had Mr. Mateen tried to buy a firearm. His name was removed after the investigation closed.
Months later, the FBI questioned Mr. Mateen again, because his name surfaced in a probe of an American, Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, who traveled to Syria and carried out a suicide bombing. Investigators determined the two knew each other in passing but didn’t have meaningful connections, Mr. Comey said. “I don’t see anything in reviewing our work that our agents should have done differently,” he said.
Islamic State and similar groups have had difficulty carrying out large-scale assaults in the U.S. But a shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., last December was also carried out by apparently self-radicalized killers, and security experts fear such lone-wolf attacks will continue to unfold.
That creates a particular set of challenges for law enforcement trying to monitor potential attackers. Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, said the FBI must “triage” the flood of potential terror-related cases while balancing security with rights. “You don’t want the FBI forward leaning and encroaching on First Amendment-protected activities, but they’re also tasked with prevention and investigation,” he said. “It’s a difficult balancing act.”
Former agents described the difficulty in determining whether someone is dangerous. Numerous variables must be considered, they said, including the prospect that someone who files a complaint might have an agenda.
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, said agents must weigh opaque factors such as the level of extremist influences on someone and the importance of online statements. “They are having to make very difficult decisions every day they haven’t made in the past.”
Speaking with reporters at FBI headquarters, Mr. Comey refused to mention Mr. Mateen by name, saying he didn’t want to feed any “twisted notion of fame and glory” the shooter may have had.
Law-enforcement officials said federal agents are scrutinizing Mr. Mateen’s friends and family to see if any aided in some way, though Mr. Comey declined to discuss that part of the investigation.
The officials said that while the investigation is in early stages, Mr. Mateen’s motives appear to have been muddled, as he was eager to proclaim loyalty to groups on opposite sides.
In a 911 call during the attack, he declared allegiance to Islamic State and said he was acting out of solidarity with Mr. Abu-Salha, who was a bomber for the Nusra Front. Those two groups actively oppose each other.
Law-enforcement officials have said they are also examining the role antigay bias may have played in the attack.
Nothing the FBI investigations into Mr. Mateen unearthed would have prevented him from buying guns in the days before the nightclub shooting, Mr. Comey said.
A U.S. official said investigators believe Mr. Mateen used websites such as YouTube and Facebook to learn about terrorist groups.
Critically, investigators haven’t found any evidence yet that Mr. Mateen used online chat rooms or encrypted smartphone apps to make direct contact with suspected militants or networks of militants the U.S. was monitoring.
The absence of “derogatory information” on Mr. Mateen in either electronic or human-intelligence channels meant law-enforcement agencies had no cause to suspect him in the months before the attack, according to the official.
“If he had communicated more,” the official said, “we might have picked him up on something.”
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