Stretched FBI braces for Islamic State holiday terror attacks
By John Solomon
The Washington Times
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
In the wee hours of July 4, FBI counterterrorism agents in the Boston area scrambled to thwart the last of a string of Islamic State terror plots they feared could be conducted during the patriotic holiday or soon after.
Just weeks earlier, an agent and Boston officers had shot and killed an ISIS sympathizer on the same streets, right before he boarded a bus armed with a military-style knife and plans to attack cops and behead a woman.
Now, an undercover operative set up a weapons buy on the streets with a young Massachusetts man, the son of a respected cop but now someone who had been radicalized by the Islamic State. Agents believed he was plotting to shoot or blow up students at an out-of-state campus with bombs laced with Styrofoam, which sticks to skin and worsens the burns.
The buy went down, the young man was arrested and a search of his apartment quickly confirmed agents’ fears.
The harrowing ending to the two Boston cases this summer seemed ripped from a Hollywood movie script — except the threats were real and the consequences of stumbling could have been lethal.
With another round of holidays fast approaching in the shadows of last Friday’s Paris attacks, FBI officials on the front lines of the war on terrorism see a new round of threats rising and worry they don’t have all the tools to cope, according to interviews with The Washington Times.
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