Legal Beat
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ATF ‘Fast And Furious’ Operation: Inside The Controversial Gun Trafficking Investigation
PHOENI X -- Ten days before Christmas, ATF agent John Dodson awoke, got his morning coffee, switched on the TV news – and heard the words he had dreaded every day of every month he had been a member of the gun-trafficking investigative team called the Group VII Strike Force.
A Border Patrol agent had been shot dead in a gun battle with suspected bandits. The agent was 40, only months older than Dodson himself, another ex-military man who chose to serve his country by working for the U.S. government.
An all-too familiar feeling returned to the pit of Dodson’s stomach, an awful mix of panic, fear and disgust that flowed from one haunting question: In allowing guns onto the streets in hopes of knocking off a big arms-trafficking ring, had ATF’s Group VII been unwitting accomplices in the death of a fellow federal agent?
Dodson had come to Phoenix to carry out a key component of ATF’s mission: To stop gunrunning to Mexican drug cartels. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had stepped up efforts to dam the “Iron River” flowing south, and Group VII was supposed to be leading the way with an operation aptly called “Fast and Furious.”
The focus was a group of individuals alleged to have bought more than 1,500 weapons in 15 months from Phoenix-area gun dealers on behalf of the cartels.
Some days, dozens of AK-47 variants would be purchased at once. The same buyer might return to the same store days later to buy 20, 30, 40 more weapons. Dodson and the Group VII team often observed these buys from inside unmarked cars in the parking lots of the shops. But from the very beginning, he and other agents realized their mission in Phoenix wasn’t to stop the guns at all.
“Stand down,” the investigators were told whenever they sought permission to make a stop and attempt to retrieve the weapons. “Just surveil.”
At times, agents followed buyers to their homes or drop points, but they would eventually be instructed to leave. They saw guns being transferred from one car into another, but then watched as that car drove away with the weapons.
In law enforcement parlance, the practice was known as “walking” guns. And the many hundreds of guns sold during Fast and Furious walked far: To border towns in Arizona, to El Paso and San Antonio, to remote reaches of Mexico – places like Tamaulipas, 1,400 miles from Phoenix, and Guerrero, 1,700 miles south.
On Dec. 14, two of them somehow found their way to a swath of Arizona desert called Peck Canyon, where Brian Terry and three other U.S. Border Patrol agents came upon a crew of border outlaws.
Gunfire was exchanged, and Terry, his wrists decorated with bands that read “Honoring the Fallen,” was shot in the back. He died amid the mesquite.
It didn’t take long that next day for confirmation to reach Group VII: Two Romanian-made AK-47 type rifles had been found at the shooting scene. Both had been purchased nearly a year earlier. And the buyer was a known Fast and Furious suspect who was, immediately after the shooting, finally arrested though he’d been watched for months.
“I just felt sick,” Agent Dodson says. “I still do.” Worse, he knew that hundreds more weapons sold as part of Fast and Furious were still out there in the hands of criminals who wouldn’t hesitate to use them.
It was supposed to be the big case – the one that went beyond the buyers, the drug cartels’ equivalent of pawns in a game of chess. Taking them out alone doesn’t assure victory.
Fast and Furious had far loftier goals: To go after those directing gun buys on behalf of the cartels. Maybe bring down an entire trafficking cell. Or even cripple a cartel itself.
To try and capture a few kings. A different kind of strategy was developed and put in motion. It went like this: Instead of working to interdict the many guns that were bought, ATF agents allowed weapons to move through the trafficking network in an attempt to identify additional conspirators and, ideally, build a bigger, stronger case.
It was a risky proposition for a typically risk-adverse agency, a strategy in which the consequences may not have been entirely thought through. But this puzzle had many more pieces that came together to complete the final picture: Gun laws that make curbing arms trafficking challenging. Several unsuccessful prosecutions. A government faced with a deadly, and growing, problem – and the need for a solution, no matter the hurdles.
By the time Fast and Furious was launched in the fall of 2009, gun violence in Mexico was clearly out of control. Daily news reports described bloody shootouts as drug
