Recently I’d been transferred to headquarters at the J. Edgar Hoover building in D.C.; I was a fish out of water. The bureau had only recently started bringing special agents into headquarters and assigning us to various groups or taskforces. Until recently, and still primarily, those groups were populated with analysts. They didn’t know what to do with us. We weren’t assigned any specific roles, so we created our own jobs. But in doing my self-created job I’d seen how terrorists work, and how they measure their success by how dramatic and violent their actions are. And I longed to smash them. I booted up my computer in my windowless office where I could access intelligence files on various people who were intent on destroying America. While I waited to start analyzing all the intelligence that had come in in my absence, my mind drifted to Recklinghausen again. I had known there were neo-Nazi groups in various places. But I’d always thought they were part of the lunatic fringe.
