![]() ![]() The team’s mission was largely domestic, although it did participate in select operations to arrest fugitives overseas, known in FBI slang as a “habeas grab.” In 1987, for instance, along with the CIA, agents lured a man suspected in an airline hijacking to a yacht off the coast of Lebanon and arrested him. The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team was created in 1983, just before the Los Angeles Olympics.Īt Fort Bragg, N.C., home to the Army’s Special Operations Command, Delta Force operators trained the agents, teaching them how to breach buildings and engage in close-quarter fighting, said Danny Coulson, who commanded the first HRT. ![]() It took more than a decade for the United States to stand up an elite anti-terrorism unit. The FBI realized its response would have been little better than that of the Germans. The attack jolted other countries into examining their counterterrorism capabilities. In 1972, Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, exposing the woeful inadequacy of the German police when faced with committed hostage-takers. Others considered it a natural evolution for the FBI - and one consistent with its mission. “It’s amazing that never happened, that we never lost anybody.” “It wasn’t weekly but it wouldn’t be uncommon to see one a month,” he said. The concern was somebody was going to get killed.”ĭavis said FBI agents were regularly involved in shootings - sometimes fighting side by side with the military to hold off insurgent assaults. James Davis, the FBI’s legal attache in Baghdad in 20, said people “questioned whether this was our mission. Tabb, who now leads the HRT, also had been wounded just months earlier in another high-risk operation. The wounded agent in Iraq was Jay Tabb, a longtime member of the bureau’s Hostage and Rescue Team (HRT) who was embedded with the Rangers when they descended on Ramadi in Black Hawks and Chinooks. As agents found themselves in firefights, some in the bureau expressed uneasiness about a domestic law enforcement agency stationing its personnel on battlefields. The FBI’s presence on the far edge of military operations was not universally embraced, according to current and former officials familiar with the bureau’s role. The bureau’s agents, in turn, could preserve evidence and maintain a chain of custody should any suspect be transferred to the United States for trial. ![]() JSOC used the FBI’s expertise in exploiting digital media and other materials to locate insurgents and detect plots, including any against the United States. With the war in Afghanistan ending, FBI officials have become more willing to discuss a little-known alliance between the bureau and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that allowed agents to participate in hundreds of raids in Iraq and Afghanistan. Less widely known has been the bureau’s role in secret operations against al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other locations around the world. 11, 2001, attacks has been well documented. The FBI’s transformation from a crime-fighting agency to a counterterrorism organization in the wake of the Sept. Who, the relative asked, was this man - the one represented by a blue dot and nearly killed by the suicide bomber?Īfter some hesitation, the military briefers answered with three letters: FBI. In a review of the nighttime strike for a relative of one of the dead Rangers, military officials sketched out the sequence of events using small dots to chart the soldiers’ movements. A third member of the team was knocked unconscious and shredded by ball bearings when a teenage insurgent detonated a suicide vest. Special Operations forces raided several houses in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in March 2006, two Army Rangers were killed when gunfire erupted on the ground floor of one home. ![]()
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