FBI agent ran off with ISIL jihadist she tracked
An FBI agent with the highest security clearance travelled to Syria to marry a fighter with an Islamic terror group she had been assigned to investigate, it has emerged.
Daniela Greene, who worked as a translator for the agency, had used social media to spy on Denis Cuspert, a German jihadist and former rapper who went by the name Deso Dogg.
Cuspert was a prolific online recruiter for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), who gained a reputation as one of its most brutal foreign fighters. He featured in ISIL videos threatening the then-U.S. president Barack Obama and holding a freshly severed head.
But in a twist that mirrors the plot of the U.S. television series Homeland, the two became close and Cuspert convinced Greene to join him in Syria.
She left in secret in late June 2014, according to Federal Court documents seen by CNN.
Greene, 38, contacted Cuspert on Skype and they arranged a plan for her to travel to Istanbul, where the two would meet and marry before crossing the border into Syria.
At the time of her departure, she was married to a
I WAS WEAK AND DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO HANDLE ANYTHING ANYMORE.
U.S. soldier. She told him that she was going to visit her parents in Germany.
Two weeks later, the agent sent emails from inside Syria to an unidentified person in the U.S. showing she was having second thoughts.
“I was weak and didn’t know how to handle anything anymore,” she wrote on July 8. “I really made a mess of things this time.”
In another, she said: “I am gone and I can’t come back. I wouldn’t even know how to make it through, if I tried to come back. I am in a very harsh environment and I don’t know how long I will last here, but it doesn’t matter, it’s all a little too late...”
Greene, who was born in Czechoslovakia and raised in Germany and later the U.S., only spent a short time in Syria before realizing she had made an error and returning to America, where she was arrested on terrorism charges. She received a relatively lenient two-yearsentence and was released last summer.
Cuspert is believed to have been injured in a U.S. air strike in October 2015, but is thought to be alive.
The incident, which was only brought to light after a judge unsealed some of the court documents, will be a major embarrassment for the security services.
“It’s a stunning embarrassment for the FBI, no doubt about it,” said John Kirby, a former State Department official.