John Dodson, the ATF agent who blew the whistle on the the Justice Department’s blood-soaked gun-trafficking operation known as Fast and Furious, told the Arizona Republic in an interview, Thursday, that the FBI played a key role in events leading to the 2010 murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. His comments to the paper, augment what he wrote in his new book, The Unarmed Truth – My Fight to Blow the Whistle and Expose Fast and Furious.
Dodson claims that the bandits who killed Terry were working for FBI operatives and were tipped by the DEA to be in the area to do a “drug rip-off.”
“I don’t think the (FBI) assets were part of the rip-off crew,” Dodson said. “I think they were directing the rip crew.”
Terry belonged to an elite Border Patrol tactical team sent to a remote area known as Peck Canyon, roughly a dozen miles northwest of Nogales, where violence had escalated because criminal gangs were stealing narcotics from drug runners known as mules.
He was slain in a shootout with several bandits. Two assault-type rifles found at the scene were subsequently traced to Fast and Furious.
The operation, based in Phoenix, was launched in 2009 to identify and prosecute drug lords, but instead allowed guns to be “walked” into the hands of Mexican criminals.
ATF agents encouraged licensed firearms dealers in Arizona to sell more than 2,000 weapons to known “straw buyers” who were working for cartels. Instead of arresting suspects immediately, surveillance agents took notes and let them disappear with the guns.
After the Terry slaying and an attempted cover-up within the Justice Department, Dodson provided evidence and testimony to Congress. His revelations, later verified by an Office of the Inspector General’s report, ignited a national scandal over Fast and Furious that resulted in a congressional contempt citation against Attorney General Eric Holder and the replacement of top ATF and Justice Department officials.
The reason he said the FBI would have told criminal informants from a cartel that the shipment was “theirs for the taking” was to “increase the clout of the FBI informants in the cartel organization they had penetrated” in order to lead to better intelligence in the future.
In a recent interview with Cam Edwards, Dodson said that he believes the purpose of Operation Fast and Furious was to facilitate gun crimes in order to substantiate the DOJ’s claims of an “iron river of guns” flowing from the US into Mexico.
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