When Omar Mateen took out his rage on 49 souls at an Orlando, Fla., nightclub earlier this year, there were again questions about why he was flying under the radar after having been investigated by the FBI.
Then there were Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who shot 14 in San Bernardino, Calif., and Micah Johnson, who gunned down five Dallas police officers. These instances demonstrate not only the distance our intelligence apparatus has to cover to gain necessary ground, but also the difficulty in stopping attacks from these so-called lone wolves and determining who will turn from angry and disenfranchised to radicalized killer.
The lone wolf by definition is one who acts without any co-conspirators — one who either becomes self-radicalized and acts alone or, increasingly, follows the online preaching of groups like ISIS.
In many cases, they leave a trail of clues that could indicate radicalization or a shift in that direction. But it’s difficult to know what clues portend danger, as was the case with the Boston bombers and Mateen.
Known or Unknown?
“First of all, I don’t like the term ‘lone wolf,’” said Malcolm Nance, an intelligence specialist and former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school. “ISIS themselves actually use the term ‘lone jihadi.’ They like that.”
The Boston Police Department had four members within the local Joint Terrorism Task Force, which, led by the FBI, investigated Tsarnaev. The task force acted on a tip from the Russian government that the elder brother was engaging in radical behavior.
But after the FBI concluded the investigation, it left the four Boston Police members in the dark about Tsarnaev and any possible threats. The former Boston Police commissioner was highly critical of the FBI, saying there should be some sort of mandate requiring federal authorities to share with local law enforcement to protect the community.
The same appears to have happened with Mateen, who was investigated by the FBI after telling co-workers about ties to terror groups. But again, the FBI appears not to have been very aggressive about keeping local agencies updated.
Then there are the unknown wolves, those who self-radicalize, “operationalize whatever plan is in their head and execute it without ever communicating with anybody,” Nance said.
Both are hard to stop, but the known wolves, as Nance refers to them, at least provide a trail. That’s because they don’t usually have the wherewithal to act out before dropping hints along the way, said Scott Decker, Arizona State University’s director of the Center for Public Criminology. “It requires a lot more discipline than most of these young men are capable of,” said Decker. “The idea that they are true lone wolves is difficult for me to get my arms around. Most of these guys are not good at keeping secrets, and they’re not very well disciplined.”
They often leave behind blogs and messages on social media indicating their extremist views, but it’s difficult to know when a viewpoint will cross over into violence.
Decker said most of the time the motivation for an attack comes from an external focus, whether it’s the Internet or interaction with other people, and is rarely, if ever, intrinsic to the individual. The Internet also eliminates that need for face -to-face contact with others, changing the game and making it difficult to track without Internet-based surveillance.
A Sign of Weakness
The term “lone wolf” is nothing new, but is being treated as if it were, said Michael German, a former FBI agent specializing in domestic terrorism and now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program.
German joined far-right groups as an undercover agent in the 1990s, and those groups had a lone-wolf manual. When authorities tamped down on these groups they were powerless, forced into a situation where they had to rely on encouraging outsiders to commit violent acts and credit their cause.
“Part of the problem is every time a new terrorist group emerges, policymakers and analysts tend to suggest this is a brand-new phenomenon,” he said. “And it’s done somewhat to avoid having to look at how these instances have played out in the past.”
Treating it as a growing problem tends to suggest that more aggressive policies will be effective, which was shown not to be the case in the past. “The indiscriminate use of violence by terrorist groups is an indication of weakness,” German said. And when we attribute acts of violence to these groups we give them recognition, he said, which is counterproductive.
German cited as an example the Colorado movie theater shooter who claimed he was Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, yet no meaning was attributed to that, whereas when Mateen cited ISIS, it received a lot of attention. Attaching some meaning to their actions gives those who may be “misguided, angry, contemplating suicide,” a chance to go out like a soldier for a cause, said German. “The recognition is an incentive to commit violence, and we want to remove that.”
He said the solution is to focus on violence and not ideology. In its information analysis role, the FBI had investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev and ultimately found him not to fit the profile of someone who might commit a terrorist act. But the elder Tsarnaev had prior acts of violence, including domestic violence, and was implicated in a triple homicide. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was cooperative with the FBI and even offered to help in the investigation.
“The FBI has transitioned into a domestic intelligence agency,” German said. “If you look at that investigation, it wasn’t designed to determine whether his violation of criminal law was true or not. Instead they were trying to assess whether he was a threat based on his ideology and response to the FBI inquiry.”
If investigators would focus on violent crime, German said, they would be more likely to stumble onto someone like Tsarnaev rather than looking at huge numbers based on ideology. “What we have to do first is recognize that mass shooters or bombers who don’t have links to a wider conspiracy are, in methodology, no different from other mass shooters or bombers,” he said. “If we look at the data, these mass killings are only a small fraction of the violence that is perpetrated in American society on a daily basis, and we have to recognize that we have to address the violence.”
Just Get Better
Matt Mayer, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said there should be a debate in Washington about how to reform intelligence operations and how to better deal with the small-cell or lone-wolf threat.
Part of that discussion involves the FBI, which after 9/11 took on the task of information analysis, whereas it had always been in the business of compiling evidence for prosecution. It is with mixed reviews that the agency continues on in this role, where improvement is necessary.
Should the FBI continue doing both analysis as a domestic intelligence agency and also conduct investigations for the purpose of obtaining prosecution?
“I believe so, because if they don’t, it puts us in a position where we are housing that function in two separate places, which makes me nervous about the information getting to the right places within the FBI,” Mayer said.
Mayer said that both procedural and substantive improvement needs to happen and that a cultural change is still necessary. “They just have to get better at what they do.”
It’s been said the old guard of the FBI won’t change, but as new, younger agents emerge, efforts to change the agency’s culture will improve and so will intelligence analysis and information sharing.
But the message from the top, including the president, has to be consistent, and that hasn’t been the case. Mayer said it started with the development of U.S. Department of Homeland Security-funded fusion centers. “It seemed to cause a competition between homeland security and the FBI over who would ‘own’ state and local information and intelligence.”
That sent a message, according to Mayer, that the FBI shouldn’t share because it was competing and not coordinating. Mayer advocates eliminating the fusion centers and consolidating those with the FBI’s joint terrorism task forces, which he said are where the bulk of the activity happens anyway.
“It just doesn’t make sense to have two different pipelines where information could be lost, held [or] not shared.”
He said in the case of the Orlando shooter, Mateen, local law enforcement had information and sent it to the terrorism task force, but “it doesn’t appear that there was much of a partnership going on.”
What should have happened in that case and others, Mayer said, is that the information is shared with multiple partners across the spectrum of local, state and federal agencies to get the best results. “It’s not just an FBI case, not just an FBI activity. You have to figure out who has the best resources in that situation and who has the most contacts and penetration points and use them accordingly.”
Decker also thinks the fusion centers have missed the mark, failing to really partner with local law enforcement, and thus underutilizing a valuable resource. “It’s really unfortunate because there’s so much that local law enforcement knows and can do and yet they’re still left on the sideline in this.”
He said the “trifurcated” federal, state and local justice systems have been bad at sharing information and, especially, using one of the most valuable resources of all: the cop on the beat who sees and interacts with locals and knows what “normal in the neighborhood looks like.”
Decker added that some of these attacks are preventable, but that it would take levels of surveillance and security that Americans may not be ready for. “If you travel and go through TSA, people mumble and complain about being stopped and going through a metal detector, whereas in European countries and certainly Israel, you get in line and you wait and you come to expect that.”
