The Path to Terror: Interviews with FBI Officials
Interviews of FBI officials in 2009 on the Atlanta Jihad case.
The Path to Terror Atlanta Jihad Case: Interviews with FBI Officials
12/17/09
Michael Heimbach, Former Assistant Director, FBI Counterterrorism Division: Two individuals, kind of running under the radar in Atlanta, Georgia, who then have this phenomenal connectivity based on the Internet. And literally sitting in their own homes, under the somewhat careful eyes of their parents, and working through a jihadi network and plotting and planning.
Mark Giuliano, Former Assistant Special Agent in Charge, FBI Atlanta: This case, probably more than any in its time, underscores how easy it is to utilize the Internet to forge relationships with other like-minded radical people.
We’re in Atlanta. One of our case agents had a HUMINT asset (source) who had provided some information about two individuals that he knew as the Taliban brothers.
What we saw is this kind of virtual network with Haris and Sadequee in the United States, with other players in a few other field offices, but more importantly with key nodes of terrorist cells in a number of other countries.
Heimbach: As we started to unravel the network it quickly went from Canada to the U.S. to London to Bosnia-Herzegovenia and multiple countries, even through the Netherlands, Denmark, all throughout, I think probably roughly 10 to 12 countries were involved in this network.
Giuliano: We saw the Sadequee and Haris were talking to a number of individuals in Bosnia. And that group of people was clearly involved in operational planning for some kind of terrorist attack.
It was clear that our two subjects had travelled to Canada in ’05. They had met with individuals who were later known as the Canadian 17.
They discussed operational planning. They discussed going into Pakistan. They discussed getting into training camps. That next month, Haris and Sadequee travelled to Washington, D.C….
Heimbach: …taped some video surveillances of different landmarks, of an oil depot, and appeared intended to potentially be doing this in the furtherance of some type of plotting.
Pre-9/11 we might have been reactive to going in and seeing how we could disrupt under short notice. Today’s FBI, as it evolves into a premiere national security agency, again, first and foremost, is collecting all the valuable intelligence, identifying the entire scope of the conspiracy, the entire scope of the particular group.
Philip Mudd, FBI Senior Intelligence Advisor: And what you see in this case is not just looking at a subject in a place like Atlanta, but as the new FBI looking at a network of people across a region, across a country, and around the globe, and understanding that network before we move.
I know that some people question whether we arrested folks who were only involved, for example, in random videotaping or only thinking about doing things. I think that’s a misunderstanding of what the world of counterterrorism that I live in is all about.
The world we’re about is understanding networks of people who have or who are thinking about committing acts of violence—people who pay for that kind of thing, who are recruited into those kinds of clusters of people. And once we realize that they’re conspiring to commit an act of violence it’s not really in our interest to see how that plot evolves.
Giuliano: It is a fine line between having the wherewithal, the will, and the capability, and as we move forward there’s no doubt that Haris and Sadequee were trying to get into camps, there is no doubt they had the intent to do it. We stopped them before they got the full capability.