J.J. Green, wtop.com
WASHINGTON – Staring out a window in his downtown Detroit office, FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Andrew G. Arena scanned the skyline of his boyhood home and pondered this question: Why Detroit?
His gaze instinctively followed the Detroit River in the direction of Detroit Metro Airport, the scene of a bungled attempt to bring down Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009.
That question has lingered in the minds of many intelligence experts with competing answers.
Some say al-Qaida chose Detroit to show its strength because it’s home to the nation’s largest concentration of Muslims. Critics say that would be foolish because Muslims would have been among those hurt or killed if the bombing had succeeded. Others say it may have been because of the killing of Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, who was shot and killed in Dearborn, Mich., by FBI agents in late October 2009.
Regardless of why the attack was ordered, almost a year after Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to ignite a bomb in his underwear, Arena remembered the shattered tranquility of that day, the many hours of anxiety that followed and he revealed a key fact the general public may have overlooked.
“I don’t know if we ever really realized it was just him until a couple of days later when we got some other intelligence streams coming in. At that point, you’re not really clear what is the truth and what he’s making up, whether this is a story they gave him to tell us,” Arena said.
“You just don’t know.”
In separate interviews, Arena, along with Joint Terrorism Task Force Supervisor Ron Reddy and Asst. Special Agent-in-Charge Brian Young, spoke candidly on what happened that day. They all agreed it was a pivotal moment in the U.S. war against al-Qaida.
As soon as Flight 253 touched down, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the Transportation Security Administration and Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms joined FBI agents to swarm the flight. They off-loaded the passengers, scanned bags and asked questions.
In the meantime, 524 miles to the south on that Christmas Day, Young, aware of the gravity of what had occurred, scrambled to get to Detroit from his home in D.C.
“I literally had the clothes on my back and a few things in what I call a ‘go-bag’ — things that I need to do my job and I was on a flight in about 40 minutes.”
Arena had raced to the scene in time to see Mutallab being taken to the hospital for treatment of the burns he suffered. But Arena was looking past Mutallab.
“What I was more focused on was what did he say, what did he have on him and what did he do?”
Arena said that’s when his focus turned from a criminal investigation to an intelligence gathering exercise.
“We had an opportunity exploit a weakness in your enemy. Here we had a guy in our custody who was sent here basically to martyr himself to kill U.S. citizens and he failed. So, I knew we were going to have evidence, we were going to have the bomb, we were going to have other things on his person. We had him. I can’t really go into other devices he had on him or other information. But I just knew at that point we need to exploit it,” Arena said.
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