OIG report exposes FBI “Known Wolf” failures

A recent report by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General reveals serious failures in FBI’s procedures regarding the investigation of so-called “Home-Grown Violent Extremists.” Home-Grown Violent Extremist (HVE) is the U.S. government-approved euphemism for individual jihadists operating in the United States who have no known ties to an existing foreign terrorist group. According to the FBI, attacks by “HVEs” represent the single greatest terror threat facing the United States.

The FBI had previously launched a review and proposed procedural changes after several terrorist attacks -including the Boston Marathon Bombing, and attacks on the Pulse Night Club and Fort Hood- were carried out by individuals the FBI had previously investigated and cleared as not terror threats. According to the IG report,

Following these attacks, the FBI conducted reviews and determined there were weaknesses in its HVE assessment processes. However, we found that the FBI has not taken sufficient action to address these weaknesses. Additionally, in 2017, the FBI conducted an enterprise-wide review and identified potential terrorist threats that may not have been adequately assessed during calendar years (CY) 2014 through 2016, which amounted to 6 percent of the total assessments reviewed. We found that the FBI did not take adequate action on nearly 40 percent of these assessments for 18 months.

Repeated examples of persons investigated by law enforcement later committing terror attacks ledinvestigative journalist and counterterrorism researcher Patrick Poole to coin the term “Known Wolf.”

Poole has long argued that U.S. government’s overreliance on social science models, purge of training on identifying terrorist ideology, and tendency to blame mental illness for terror attacks played a key role in missing cues.

Confirming Poole’s assessment, the report notes that the growing conflation between terrorism and other “threats to life,” alongside inadequate training on differentiating threats may play a role,

We believe that without proper training and guidance, there is an increased risk that if a counterterrorism threat or suspicious activity incident is categorized incorrectly in the Guardian system, the FBI may miss the opportunity to adequately assess a potential HVE.

Additionally, training continues to favor conflating and identifying similarities between multiple threats, rather than emphasizing their differences and distinctions, which hampers the ability to classify potential threats, and assign them to the appropriate taskforce or department, potentially causing agents to miss warning signs. The most famous example of this when Fort Hood Shooter Nidal Hassan engaged in multiple messages with Al Qaeda leader Anwar Awlaki, but the content was identified as “consistent with a research project”.

The report also confirms previous Center for Security Policy recommendations emphasizing aggressive use of traditional law enforcement tactics. The FBI notes:

because HVEs are U.S. citizens or legally reside in the United States and do not have a direct nexus to an FTO but can also quickly mobilize to violence, the FBI must use traditional and resource intensive investigative techniques to mitigate these threats. For example, these techniques may include deploying undercover agents and confidential human sources, surveillance and technical coverage, conducting community outreach, and liaising with domestic and international government agencies.

Unfortunately, “conducting community outreach” and traditional investigative techniques are often mutually exclusive, in part because Muslim community organizations remain dominated by Islamists who make participation in community outreach conditional on law enforcement agencies limiting their investigative tactics to those approved by Islamists.

The FBI would do well to take the OIG’s report seriously, but ultimately the threat requires a far broader overhaul of the nation’s approach to counterterrorism. While the Trump administration has largely done way with “Countering Violent Extremism” language in favor of “Terrorism Prevention”, the program has not fundamentally changed. It continues to emphasize community partnerships over aggressive investigative techniques and conflate different types of threats. The FBI and other agencies continue to utilize generic euphemisms such as “Homegrown Violent Extremist” instead of more accurate terminology.  Until it does, the threat of “known wolves” will continue.