Called to Rise: A Life in Faithful Service to the Community That Made Me by David O. Brown & Michelle Burford

Author:David O. Brown & Michelle Burford [Brown, David O.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781524796549
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

FOUNTAIN PLACE

WE SPOTTED THE WORRISOME MESSAGE in a chat room in late 2008. Officers in our department, in partnership with the FBI’s North Texas Terrorism Task Force, had been monitoring the chatter on an extremist blog when they came across a post that raised a major red flag. “Does anyone on here have an expertise in building a bomb strong enough to blow up a building?” a user asked. Our undercover officer, or UC, who was posing as a fellow user, responded and began an exchange. Investigators identified the author of the suspicious post as Hosam Smadi, a nineteen-year-old Middle Eastern youth living in Italy, Texas, a suburb about forty-five miles south of Dallas.

Months before, Chief Kunkle had hired an undercover officer to become part of our terrorism task force, who, from day one, was a hot property in the department: It’s rare to find an officer who speaks fluent Arabic (which, incidentally, is an excellent case for diversity in hiring). Now we learned that our Jordanian UC happened to be able to speak the same dialect as Smadi, enabling us to identify the region of Jordan where our subject probably grew up. We could not have orchestrated a more perfect investigative scenario if we’d tried.

Background checks on Smadi showed that he’d never been on any of our watch lists. He’d never committed a crime. Though he’d declared affection for Osama bin Laden, he hadn’t interacted with a terrorist cell or pledged allegiance to an extremist group. If he was planning to act—and the FBI’s team of behavioral therapists determined, based on additional posts about his intent, that that seemed quite likely—he would do so as a self-radicalized lone wolf. In order to apprehend him, we needed more information. That’s where our UC came in. We decided to set a sting. We’d send in our officer under the guise of an expert bomb maker with no apparent love for the United States.

We knew we had to proceed with the utmost caution. The federal entrapment laws mandate that, when a UC is secretly trying to build a case against a would-be criminal, that officer cannot use coercion or other heavy-handed tactics to push the suspect into committing a crime that he might not have committed on his own. If our UC, for instance, seemed to be leading Smadi to blow up a building rather than simply following along with his plan, Smadi’s lawyers could later claim he’d never intended to act. “It was all just talk,” the attorneys could argue. “Your agent entrapped him.” Around our department, we studied the rules and came up with what we thought would give us an airtight legal case.

Our UC kept in close touch with Smadi—first in the chat room, and then, after he’d built trust with him over weeks, by text, phone, and face-to-face. He had to pull off an Oscar-worthy performance to strike up a friendship that would seem genuine to Smadi, who, like many criminals, was suspicious of everyone and everything. During their in-person meetings, he did not wear a wiretap.

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