PHOENIX — They came from all over the country — agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, brought here in a bold new effort to shut down the flow of U.S. guns to Mexican drug cartels. It was called Operation Fast and Furious, after a popular movie about street-car racing.
But from the beginning, much of the fury was inside the agency itself.
On his first day undercover, John Dodson, who had been an ATF agent for seven years in Virginia, sat in a Chevy Impala with Olindo Casa, an 18-year veteran from Chicago. They watched a suspected gun trafficker buy 10 semiautomatic rifles from a Phoenix gun store and followed him to the house of another suspected trafficker. All of their training told them to seize the guns.
The agents called their superior and asked for the order to “take him.” The answer came back swiftly, instructing them to stay in the car. The message was clear: Let the guns go.
This was all part of an ambitious new strategy allowing Fast and Furious agents to follow the paths of guns from illegal buyers known as “straw purchasers” through middlemen and into the hierarchy of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.
Dodson and Casa were confused and upset. ATF agents hate to let the guns “walk.” Yet it happened again, day after day, month after month, for more than a year.
They feared the worst, and a year later it happened: A Border Patrol agent was killed in an incident Dec. 14, 2010, in which Fast and Furious guns were found at the scene.
And it was later revealed that the operation had allowed more than 2,000 weapons to hit the streets.
A Capitol Hill donnybrook
What began as a mutiny inside ATF’s Phoenix office has blown up into a Capitol Hill donnybrook that is rocking the Justice Department.
“This is a mistake that could have and should have been prevented,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is investigating the operation.
The battle has hobbled Fast and Furious, a case that individuals inside ATF say held the promise of becoming one of the agency’s best investigations ever.
“We have never been up so high in the Sinaloa cartel, the largest and most powerful drug cartel in the world,” said a federal official involved in the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “This is an open, ongoing investigation. It is so unfair.”
Fast and Furious began with a noble goal.
On Oct. 26, 2009, the directors of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and ATF and the top federal prosecutors in the Southwestern border states met with the deputy attorney general at the Justice Department to plot strategy for combating Mexican cartels. A key problem: the tens of thousands of guns coming from the United States to arm the drug traffickers.
Agents along the border had long been frustrated by what one ATF supervisor later called “toothless” laws that made it difficult to attack gun-trafficking networks. Straw buyers — people with no criminal record who purchase guns for criminals or illegal immigrants who can’t legally buy them — are subject to little more than paperwork violations.
At the meeting in Washington, a new strategy was proposed. Instead of emphasizing the seizure of weapons in individual cases, the strategy focused on identifying and eliminating the pipelines that moved the weapons. The goal was to bring down the trafficking network, not just the people on the lowest rung.
The plan was risky. In drug-trafficking cases, investigating agents, by law, cannot let drugs “walk” onto the street. Since gun sales are legal, agents on surveillance are not required to step in and stop weapons from hitting the streets and must have probable cause to make an arrest. But the danger in letting guns go is obvious.
In November 2009, agents in Phoenix began following a particularly busy suspected gun trafficker. In 24 days, he bought 34 firearms. The next month, the man and his associates bought 212 more.
The case began to grow exponentially, with more than two dozen suspected straw purchasers. But a mutiny was brewing. Dodson, Casa and two other agents were furious about letting the guns walk. Each time they called in to supervisors, they were told to stand down.
ATF agents stationed in Mexico were also raising objections, according to a congressional report released Tuesday. Darren Gil, ATF attache to Mexico, and his deputy, Carlos Canino, were alarmed by the large number of weapons being recovered at bloody crime scenes in Mexico and being traced to Phoenix.
ATF and the Justice Department didn’t tell Mexican officials about the 15-month operation until it became public, according to the report.
Death of agent the last straw
The Dec. 14, 2010, killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was the last straw for Dodson. Dodson said he tried to contact ATF headquarters, ATF’s chief counsel, the ATF ethics section and the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. When he didn’t get an immediate response, he and other agents reached out to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
At the same time, word was leaking out on the Internet. Outrage among agents and officials grew. Grassley soon teamed with Issa, the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who had the subpoena power that Grassley lacked.
On March 31, 2011, Issa subpoenaed the Fast and Furious documents. Two and a half months later, Issa and Grassley released a scathing report calling the operation “ill-conceived” and “abhorrent.”
On Tuesday, William McMahon, the head of ATF’s Western region, testified that the agency had good intentions when it launched Operation Fast and Furious in 2009. But McMahon said that looking back, there are things ATF would have done differently. McMahon, the highest-ranking ATF official to testify publicly about the operation, said he failed to keep close enough track of the investigation in Arizona. He apologized.
Some ATF officials still insist that Fast and Furious is a success, saying the case will soon lead to the indictment of as many as two dozen high-level traffickers.
Altogether, the straw purchasers bought 2,020 firearms during Fast and Furious, according to law enforcement officials. Of those guns, 227 were recovered in Mexico; 363 have been recovered in the United States.
An additional 1,430 remain on the streets.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
