To Catch A Bomb-Maker

In April 2009, an Iraqi refugee arrived in America ready to make a new life. No one suspected he was an Al Qaeda operative. This is the story of a little-known FBI forensics lab and how it changed the war on terror.

- Clay Dillow

The insurgent began with a cordless phone— one of the knockoffs of a Chinese-built Senao so popular in northern Iraq. Hunched over a worktable somewhere near the refinery town of Baiji, about 241.3 km north of Baghdad, he methodically worked through a series of steps by now both familiar and frighteningly simple.

Loosen the screws on the base station. Remove the plastic casing, rip out the power cord, and replace it with a battery. Rewire the phone’s page function to an external relay switch, then connect the relay to a battery and any mix of violent chemistry—plastic jugs full of diesel and fertilizer, a pressure cooker packed with homemade explosives, one of the many artillery shells available in post-invasion Iraq. When complete, pressing the page button on the phone’s handset—even from kilometers away—will flip the relay and trigger the bomb.

During the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) became the single deadliest weapons on the battlefield. In Iraq alone they accounted for between half and two-thirds of all U.S. wartime casualties and killed tens of thousands of civilians. They have now become a staple of insurgencies worldwide. But back in 2005—when the bombmaker sat poring over his Senao—the U.S. military was only beginning to understand the threat they posed.