Scary Iran Plot: FBI Had No Need to Investigate Arbabsiar’s Corpus Christi Past

So imagine this scenario.

A DEA informant calls up his handler out of the blue and says,

Omigod! Some crazy Iranian just approached me to arrange some kind of hit on behalf of this Iranian terror organization. He asked about explosives (I bragged about my C4 expertise.) He found me through my aunt in Corpus Christi. She says she knows him from when he used to be a used car salesman.

The DEA calls the FBI. What’s one of the first things the FBI would do?

Maybe look him up in the FBI’s own files (they find he doesn’t have a federal record). And just after that, you’d think they’d start investigating him in Corpus Christi, where Narc knew him to have connections. Maybe call the cops there and see if they knew this crazy Iranian. Which, since Arbabsiar has a pretty consistent record of petty arrests and lawsuits, they do.

Which is why it’s sort of odd that the FBI never contacted the Corpus Christi cops–they first talked to them the day after Arbabsiar was charged.

Arbabsiar had previous arrests in Nueces County during nearly 20 years living in the area.

That meant arrest records and personal details were on file in the county’s warehouse. But no one from any federal agency ever asked for the folder, Kaelin said.

“From an intelligence-gathering standpoint, even the tiniest bits of information could have a connection to something bigger,” he said. “They never asked to see it.”

In fact, FBI agents never contacted the sheriff’s office or the police department about their investigation into Arbabsiar.

That’s all the more weird given that some of the criminal files on Arbabsiar were on dead tree files in a warehouse from back in the day when the FBI itself didn’t really use computers (you know, like last year).

Now, my scenario sounds weird, almost impossible, particularly in the age of information sharing between local cops and national counterterrorism investigators.  Even if they were worried about keeping Narc’s identity secret–which I’m sure is particularly critical so close to the border in South Texas–you’d think they’d at least go and make discreet investigations about Arbabsiar (particularly given the claims that, by the end of the investigation, FBI officers seemed to be going out of their way to make their presence known.

Neighbors, however, said it had been years since Arbabsiar lived in the stucco house he once shared with his wife on a suburban cul-de-sac. They said it appeared that as many as 10 people were living in the house, and lately there had been some signs of suspicious activity: When residents looked for available Wi-Fi networks, networks with names like “FBI Van 1” would pop up.l

Unless …

Unless they didn’t need to do that background research on Arbabsiar when Narc purportedly came to them out of the blue to tell them about this crazy Iranian seeking an assassin purportedly out of the blue.

The FBI’s seeming disinterest in learning about Arbabsiar from the law enforcement officials who ostensibly knew him best suggests they already knew about him when he approached Narc.

(As a number of media outlets have reported, the Grand Jury has indicted the plotters, a mere nine days after the Administration started making an international incident about this. I’ll update or do a post once the indictment is in the docket.)

image_print
17 replies
  1. MadDog says:

    I’m particularly amused with the WiFi network name of “FBI Van 1”. Real National Security-ish.

    Though I don’t use WiFi myself, I’d guess that for those that do, you can probably find out if the FBI is tracking you with their use of names like this.

  2. orionATL says:

    “…Neighbors, however, said it had been years since Arbabsiar lived in the stucco house he once shared with his wife on a suburban cul-de-sac. They said it appeared that as many as 10 people were living in the house, and lately there had been some signs of suspicious activity: When residents looked for available Wi-Fi networks, networks with names like “FBI Van 1″ would pop up…”

    i read a very similar paragraph in a news report recently but it did not contain anything about the fbi.

    instead, it reported that neighbors said that about 10 people appeared to live in the house and that the house had a steady stream of visitors in their 20’s and was, therefore, considered a place for drug sales.

  3. quake says:

    you’d think they’d at least go and make discrete investigations

    Minor pointof spelling, but you mean “discreet.”

  4. orionATL says:

    and this similar paragraph from the hpuston chroniclr:

    “…While Arbabsiar lived in the Corpus Christi area for a while, he is believed to most recently have lived in Round Rock.

    Neighbors, however, said it had been years since Arbabsiar lived in the stucco house he once shared with his wife on a suburban cul-de-sac. They said it appeared that as many as 10 people were living in the house, and lately there had been some signs of suspicious activity: When residents looked for available Wi-Fi networks, networks with names like “FBI Van 1″ would pop up…”

  5. emptywheel says:

    @MadDog: I’d say that’s the single best piece of evidence–aside from the really crappy trade craft–that thsi was meant to be found by whomever orchestrated it.

    Or at least, evidence they wanted people to believe it was a law enforcement investigation as opposed to an intelligence op.

  6. orionATL says:

    @orionATL:

    here are the two paragraphs from the nytimes:

    “…Television crews were parked outside Mr. Arbabsiar’s house in the Austin suburb of Round Rock on Wednesday. No one answered the door of his home. But neighbors said Mr. Arbabsiar, who lived there with his second wife and her children, was something of a pariah in the area, where he rarely greeted or spoke to anyone.

    “Very creepy,” said Bree Tiumalu, who lives two doors down from Mr. Arbabsiar. “We thought of it as ‘the scary house.’ ” There were always lots of people coming and going from the house, mostly in their 20s, she said, but they did not socialize with people on the street. That led some in the community to suspect that drug deals were going on…’

    cf houston chronicle article.

    drug users or fbi?

    i am baffled

    at every turn of this screw-

    up.

  7. jerryy says:

    Well, if this yarn continues to fall apart then wait awhile, the TSA is getting ready for the next ‘plot’ to marinate and hatch into something:

    http://www.newschannel5.com/story/15725035/officials-claim-tennessee-becomes-first-state-to-deploy-vipr-statewide

    “Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate,” said Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons.

    Agents are recruiting truck drivers, like Rudy Gonzales, into the First Observer Highway Security Program to say something if they see something.

    “Somebody sees something somewhere and we want them to be responsible citizens, report that and let us work it through our processes to abet the concern that they had when they saw something suspicious,” said Paul Armes, TSA Federal Security Director for Nashville International Airport.

    Uh huh.

  8. MadDog says:

    @emptywheel: And no local police file checking isn’t exactly buttressing a claim of operational seriousness on the part of the Feds as you point out either.

  9. Ken Muldrew says:

    @MadDog:

    That’s funny. Just last month there was a news story about people in Alberta getting tricked into letting fake mounties use their wifi. The lede from one of the stories:

    Mounties in Alberta are warning homeowners about a fake wireless network claiming to be from the RCMP.

    Police say there have been two incidents in the Calgary area in which people with wireless routers noticed an unauthorized computer connection which identified itself as “RCMP Surveillance.”

    from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2011/09/20/calgary-rcmp-fake-wireless-network.html

    Apparently people are fooled by this kind of thing.

  10. orionATL says:

    @jerryy:

    thanks, jerryy

    i can see it now:

    it’s four in the morning and a hopped up trucker calls the state patrol –

    hey, an eighteen wheeler just passed me going 88. the guy was wearing full arab dress, white sheet and all. honeest to god!

    headed west on i-40.

    didn’t get the license, but the side of the trailer said: u.a.r. moving or, wait, was it r.u. moving?

    notify tsa. notify tsa.

    over.

    “hey, you $&^*$%#, get your #(%^@^* truck off my tail.

    ^*^$#(&^$^!!!

    over.

  11. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Why, it’s almost as if the FBI knew he wasn’t a credible threat that required fully investigating. Compare its work here with its background research into, say, the Va. Tech. shooter’s background. Not quite the same thing.

Comments are closed.