The mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., was the third time in recent years that someone who had been under FBI scrutiny carried out a terrorist attack, raising questions about whether the agency is equipped to stop escalating threats in the digital age, experts and former federal officials said Tuesday.
The deadly assault at the Pulse nightclub followed the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, and last year’s shooting at a Texas exhibition of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. While the circumstances of each case varied widely, they were united by a common thread: The FBI had looked at one of the accused assailants, including an intensive 10-month probe of Orlando gunman Omar Mateen.
Yet each remained free to inflict damage, leaving federal investigators to wonder on Tuesday whether their long-held fear of a series of ‘‘lone wolf’’ attacks on US soil was coming to fruition. ‘‘Clearly, Orlando in particular represents one of the FBI’s great nightmares: someone they looked at who ultimately goes out and carries out a successful attack,’’ said John Cohen, a former counterterrorism coordinator for the Department of Homeland Security.
Few in Washington’s tight-knit homeland security community faulted the bureau, saying FBI agents are swamped with terrorism cases, bound by constitutional and privacy restrictions, and facing threats from the Islamic State. ‘‘The country might expect the FBI to have a perfect record, and they strive for that,’’ said Sean Joyce, a former FBI deputy director. ‘‘But today we are facing a new and different threat, and the challenge is to find every needle in the haystack. That’s an incredibly difficult task.’’
But others said the carnage in Orlando, where 49 people were killed and more than 50 injured, should prompt a reevaluation of the balance the government has been trying to strike between security and civil liberties since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. David Gomez, a former senior FBI counterterrorism official in Seattle, wrote in an online posting titled ‘‘How Did The FBI Miss Omar Mateen?’’ that ‘‘perhaps it is time to revisit’’ the basic legal standard that the FBI requires probable cause of a likely crime to open full-scale investigations.
And James McJunkin, who once headed the FBI’s counterterrorism division, said that if agents didn’t dig deep enough in Orlando, it was probably because they were hampered by FBI guidelines. He said in preliminary investigations, for instance, there is a cap on the number of hours agents can conduct surveillance.
“Those are rules or guidelines that were written by lawyers who don’t have the responsibility or accountability for doing thorough investigations,’’ McJunkin said. The agents probing Mateen, he added, ‘‘ran out of leads based upon the tools that they applied. But if they had more tools, would they have found more leads?’’
Experts who study terrorism said that the FBI might require more agents and analysts to fight a metastasizing terror threat in which potential recruits are flooded with information online. FBI officials have said they have nearly 1,000 open investigations involving the Islamic State in all 50 states.
FBI Director James Comey said this week that the bureau has enough resources. But the FBI has repeatedly moved hundreds of agents from its criminal division to assist in counterterrorism when there is a spike in threats.
