Michael Hirsh was national editor for Politico Magazine from 2014–2016.

If Omar Mateen was a disciple of “radical Islam,” as Donald Trump angrily described him, and “one of the soldiers of the caliphate,” as the Islamic State approvingly deemed him, he wasn’t a very impressive one, ideologically speaking. Mateen didn’t observe Islam terribly faithfully or seem to know much about what Islamists call the “true path.” According to FBI Director James Comey, in the past few years Mateen confusingly expressed support for both the Islamic State and Hezbollah—even though the latter group is an avowed enemy of the Islamic State and is fighting against it in Syria on the side of Bashar Assad. The night he slaughtered 49 people in Orlando on Sunday, Mateen swore allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at the last minute and with apparent self-doubt. Mateen called 911 twice, hanging up at first before finally fulfilling ISIS’s injunction to self-starter terrorists to declare allegiance to the group publicly before they act.

Based on the accounts of his aquaintances and family, Mateen also appears to have been a deeply conflicted and possibly self-loathing homophobe who drank heavily, took drugs, dated men, frequented the same club he later attacked, Pulse, and used a gay dating app—not the sort of behavior one would expect of a faithful soldier of Islam.


Yes, Mateen was a terrorist—but what kind of terrorist? He had no known ISIS or Al Qaeda connection; he wasn’t getting operating orders from abroad; he hadn’t gone overseas to be trained; he followed no predictable course of radicalization. Mateen appears, in fact, to have been less a soldier than yet another deeply disturbed American (born in Trump’s own home borough of Queens), who was full of hatred and uncontrollable anger—an example of what law enforcement officials describe as an aspiring violent criminal searching for a larger justification for the acts he’s desperate to commit.

Could Mateen have been caught? It’s unfair to expect that U.S. law enforcement can track and stop every would-be terrorist. But perhaps the toughest thing to explain about the worst mass shooting in U.S. history is how a man who was interviewed three times by the FBI ended up buying, unnoticed, an entire arsenal and then gunning down, unsurveilled, more than 100 people. He’d been on the FBI’s radar because he had made comments sympathetic to terrorists and attended the same Florida mosque as a suicide bomber named Moner Abusalha, who had gone to Syria to blow up Syrian government soldiers in 2014. But Comey said this week that ultimately the FBI determined that there were "no ties of any consequence" between the two men. That’s one reason why the FBI stopped inquiring about him: no known “connections.” Comey indicated that the FBI’s concerns about Mateen were eased after a witness told the bureau that Mateen got married, had a child and found steady work.

The bureau’s approach was somewhat the same with Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was interviewed but dropped by the FBI, which left instructions to notify the bureau if he went abroad—as if that would be the only trigger they needed to worry about. (As it turned out, U.S. Customs might have failed to do even that.)

Comey, asked whether FBI agents should have done anything differently in the case of Mateen, responded: “So far, the honest answer is, I don't think so.” But some law enforcement experts strongly disagree, and there does seem to be substantial evidence that the FBI has been slow to grasp the changing nature of terrorism—and to counter the Islamic State’s skill at recruiting or exploiting vulnerable individuals. These critics say the tally of missed clues from Boston to Orlando is evidence that to a disturbing extent the FBI and intelligence community are still fighting the last war, one in which “radicalization” follows a predictable path (e.g., growing a beard, praying more frequently) and the telltale signs of a terrorist in the making are organized links to terrorist groups and plans to travel abroad.

Lorenzo Vidino, director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber & Homeland Security, says it’s “in the FBI’s DNA” to pursue such criminal links to terrorist groups and build a case in the way law enforcement traditionally does, with questions like: Who did you meet with? Who did you talk to? Can you account for your actions for such-and-such period of time? “There’s an overemphasis on operational links,” he says. “It’s easier to put into a box—a paradigm the FBI is more used to.”

True, over the past few years the FBI has begun to alter its approach to this homegrown terrorism. According to John D. Cohen, who from 2009 to 2014 was counterterrorism coordinator at the Department of Homeland Security: “It’s different from only two or three years ago when the FBI followed a more traditional path of determining whether they were in danger of becoming terrorists—and they weren’t looking at more behavioral aspects, like their school record or evidence of a violent divorce, as they are now.”

But the changes don’t appear to be fast enough. What Mateen’s attack, and the FBI’s failure to track him, suggest is that the terror threat appears to be evolving more quickly than U.S. authorities can keep up with it. Al Qaeda was the prototype, luring young men to its training camps in Afghanistan and Yemen, enforcing rigid discipline and operational control. But in the age of the Islamic State and nonstop social media, the whole process of radicalization—especially for psychotic lone wolves—is very different from what it used to be for the Mohamed Attas and Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds of the world. And it is rarely related to what the FBI trained itself to look for.

Unlike Al Qaeda, ISIS operates on several dimensions at once. It’s got an army at home in Syria and Iraq, and around the world it features an evanescent, twilit army of quasi-recruits who behave somewhat like quantum terrorists; they are neither one thing nor another but both somehow, Americans with unblemished records one day, remorseless murderers the next. Or as Comey somewhat awkwardly described it, the FBI must not only find “needles in a nationwide haystack” but also figure out “which pieces of hay might someday become needles.”

The task is far harder than it used to be. It’s unreasonable—and perhaps undesirable—to expect that the FBI and counterterrorism officials should be tracking intent rather than action, in effect predicting possible future crimes like the psychics in the movie Minority Report. But their problem is that the main sign of radicalization is something that no longer happens in a training camp or a mosque or even “through the Internet”—as Comey claimed of Mateen. Instead it occurs “between the ears of the individual,” as another longtime critic of the agency, former FBI undercover agent Michael German, puts it. Often these individuals search out causes to legitimize what they already intend or want to do; in that respect, some law enforcement experts say, Mateen was little different from Dylann Roof, who began associating with white supremacists only shortly before he attacked an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, exactly a year ago Friday, killing nine.

“It’s the same exact phenomenon,” says John Cohen, who now teaches at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice. “In the months before he killed those people in the church, Dylann Roof began gravitating toward the white extremist cause. We may find with this guy too that the closer he got to acting, the closer he came to an interest in ISIS.” German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, agrees that Mateen and Roof are of the same ilk. “Like Dylann Roof, this was someone who had anger building up and wanted to find some hook that would justify it, or find a community that would accept this as righteous,” says German.

“That was his ‘radicalization.’”

***

How do you get inside a would-be terrorist’s head? Until now, the FBI hasn’t felt it really had to, as opposed to investigating plots. Though the bureau famously failed to piece together the multistate plot of the 9/11 hijackers before they acted, it has been fairly effective since then in rooting out complex terrorist schemes—piecing together clues from contacts and communications between would-be terrorists and the travel plans they make (though there have been objections to the FBI's plethora of "sting" operations). But the lone-wolf phenomenon is different. It’s not that this is new when it comes to domestic terrorism or hate crime; in the 1980s, the Ku Klux Klan touted what it called “leaderless resistance,” and even drew up a lone-wolf manual for white supremacists. But in confronting lone-wolf terrorism of the Islamist variety, NYU’s German argues, it’s time to throw out the old investigative playbook entirely.

Personal ties and travel abroad don’t seem to mean much; and even the notion that a person with a steady job, wife and child is unlikely to be radicalized should be junked as well: Both Mateen and the husband-and-wife killers in San Bernardino, 28-year-old Syed Rizwan Farook and 27-year-old Tashfeen Malik, who had a 6-month-old daughter, appeared to be somewhat successful, integrated, family-oriented people and had everything to live for—and they still committed mass murder.

Jessica Stern of Harvard, who has studied the process of radicalization around the world for years, says it’s long past time to recognize that Mateen and his ilk do not fit into the pigeonholes that Trump and others want to put them in—the threat of organized, outwardly directed terrorists “pouring in” to America, as Trump puts it. What’s far more important is a suspect’s immediate environment and personal motives. “Concrete ties don't seem to be important for a mass shooting or attacks that can be carried out by a single individual,” she says. “From what we know now, he [Mateen] seems to be a homophobic wife-beater, confused about his own sexuality, who found justification for terrorism in a seemingly confused idea of Islam. How could he not know the difference between Hezbollah and ISIS? What his father said about God punishing homosexuals seems very important—it would be awful to be gay, or even confused, with such a father.”

Criminal justice experts say the FBI is only now catching up to this new, murkier kind of radicalization, but progress is, again, slow. “Part of the problem is that the FBI and intelligence agencies remain very wedded to this flawed concept of radicalization that describes a mythical process that is discernible and identifiable,” says German. “It is not. Unfortunately what we know from scientific studies is that individuals come to the decision to engage in terrorism for any number of reasons. There is not a predictive path that people follow.”

German adds that the FBI has “put forth any number of simple linear trajectories of radicalization. In 2006, they went from conversion to jihad and suggested increasing religiosity, praying more often, wearing religious garb, joining a mosque, were increasing indicators of danger. Whereas social science research shows that is wrong, it is always more of an internal mental process.”

Some experts say there is in fact a solution and model for doing a better job of tracking this new threat—the one used by the U.S. Secret Service to keep the president safe. “It’s going to take adopting an approach used by Secret Service for years, a combination of law enforcement, risk assessment and then intervention, even if there’s no arrest,” says Cohen. For decades, the Secret Service has gone further than simply investigating and prosecuting threats to the president. Even if agents don’t arrest a suspect who, say, posts something threatening online, the Secret Service will take additional steps to assess if that person poses risks of committing a crime in the future based on psychological and behavioral characteristics—for example like the threatening and Islamist-sympathizing statements Mateen was said to have made to co-workers in recent years. They’ll also try to connect the individual with mental-health, educational and religious authorities from the community.

As Politico Magazine reported in March, the FBI has sought to develop these community intervention models—using a relatively new concept called Shared Responsibility Committees—but they are still largely in their infancy, and they are somewhat controversial because of their intrusiveness and stigma of ethnic profiling, especially within American Muslim communities. But Cohen says U.S. officials have no choice after Orlando. “This is what we’re not seeing in any of the reporting about Orlando. Everyone is acknowledging that homegrown extremism is huge, but fighting it is not just about building relationships with Muslim communities, or developing a ‘counternarrative.’ It is about bringing in a multidisciplinary approach. ... If a family member or friend calls early enough and this person gets into process, some acts can be prevented. But there needs to be that process to start with, like the Secret Service’s.”

The FBI did not respond to several requests for comment on this story, but some authorities say there is little risk of racial or ethnic profiling if such strategies are not targeted only at the Muslim community but all troubled, potentially violent individuals that can be located, and if arrest is not the only option. “Family and friends are going to be much more likely to call law enforcement to report troubling behavior if they know that it’s not going to result in an arrest, but an intervention instead,” says Cohen.

Meanwhile the Islamic State is likely to continue to be adept at using social media to target vulnerable individuals. Often these are younger people in the midst of an identity crisis, who feel socially disconnected or on the margins of Western society—the society that Mateen described in one of his Facebook posts as “the filthy ways of the west.” Such vulnerable people tend to come from dysfunctional family environments; they usually have underlying mental health issues, and they are simultaneously searching for some sense of life meaning. Islamic State propagandists appeal to such confused and rootless people with a sophisticated and constant stream of simplistic messages, including dynamic, shareable videos of Islamic State fighters scored to hip-hop music.

“As an ideology, ISIS provides existential fast food, and for some of the most spiritually hungry young Westerners,” a collection of psychological experts wrote last year in a much-noted article in The Psychiatric Times. “Even superficial Internet exposure (much less direct marketing) can convince the young that they too may participate in a world-historical narrative in which the enemy of America is a beacon of hope for solidifying their emerging self. This may evolve into a counterphobic attitude toward the society in which they feel helplessness … ”

Whether the culprit is a jihadist or white supremacist, both the inspiration for these acts of violence and the acts themselves often are blended together in a strange and toxic stew on the Internet. If he was initially inspired by what he saw on the Internet, as Comey suggested, Mateen also began posting on Facebook while he was shooting people during his four-hour siege of the nightclub, and checking to see if he’d made the news yet. Dylann Roof, a loner who closeted himself in his room and absorbed the “Internet evil,” as his family called it, hurriedly created a “manifesto” not long before the Charleston murders (“Please forgive wrote any typos,” he wrote. “I didn’t have time to check it”) in what authorities say was a rush to make history. Roof wrote that he began Googling for “black-on-white murders” after the killing of Trayvon Martin and came upon the website for the Council of Conservative Citizens, a leading white supremacist group he’d never heard of before but swiftly embraced.

The FBI needs a whole new model of behavior to keep pace with this new threat. At the time when both Tsarnaev and Mateen were first interviewed, the bureau was still relying far more on its older approach of investigating concrete connections, and it was more willing to drop a suspect cold if there was no evidence of criminal behavior. That has begun to change. In the new era of terrorism, telling personal details like evidence of domestic violence or erratic and aggressive behavior (both of which came up in the case of Mateen, including his numerous visits to gun shops, one of which actually refused to sell to him, according to ABC News), are far more determinative.

Says Cohen: “Over the last two years the Behavioral Analysis unit [of the FBI] has started taking hard look at people exhibiting such behaviors, and what we found is they tend to share a series of common psychological characteristics, and they are easily influenced by or susceptible to social media campaigns of the kind that ISIS conducts.”

***

Little of the debate inside the law enforcement and intelligence communities is being reflected on the presidential campaign trail, where Trump, Hillary Clinton and finally President Obama engaged in a kind of definitional war of words over Orlando this week.

Trump, in his usual over-the-top way, declared that if Obama didn’t call the enemy by its true name, “radical Islam,” he should just resign; Trump also hinted that Obama was sympathetic to the terrorists. Goaded into responding, Trump opponent Clinton said she’s now willing to ID the enemy as radical Islamism but dismissed the term as unimportant. “It mattered that we got bin Laden, not what name we called him,” she said. Obama, clearly outraged by Trump’s attacks, went one step further, saying the term makes no difference at all—except that it’s probably harmful. "Not once has an adviser said, 'Man, if we use that phrase, we are going to turn this whole thing around,' not once," he said Tuesday. "So someone seriously thinks that we don't know who we are fighting?

“We are starting to see where this kind of rhetoric and loose talk and sloppiness about who exactly we are fighting, where this can lead us,” Obama said. “We now have proposals from the presumptive Republican nominee of the United States, the Republican nominee to bar all Muslims from immigrating into America.”

Trump—and before him Marco Rubio—were correct in saying that the Obama administration and Clinton have avoided calling the terrorists “Islamists.” But on the whole, when it comes to homegrown terrorism, the experts who know the issue the best would tend to side with Obama’s view that it is fruitless, and even counterproductive, to simply identify the enemy as radical Islamism rather than recognizing we are mainly dealing, in most suspects, with mental illness and dysfunction.

Because the enemy, based on statistics, has not been mainly radical Islamism. Over the past quarter century the fight against domestic terrorism has been focused less on Islamist forces than on far-right extremists, according to a DHS-sponsored study. From 1990 to 2014—excluding the mass victims from 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing—62 people were killed in 38 ideologically motivated incidents committed by extremists associated with Islamist terrorists while four times that many, 245, were killed by far-right extremists in 177 ideologically motivated incidents. There have been, in other words, a lot more Dylann Roofs than Omar Mateens.

According to GW’s Vidino, there are currently about 1,000 terrorist investigations open nationwide, and many more have been closed. He says U.S. authorities would probably do well to keep many of those cases open if they involve troubled or violent individuals, and to reopen others—at least to seek to intervene in time. But to do that the FBI, which is not comfortable “operating in this pre-criminal space,” says Vidino, will have to push itself out of its comfort zone.

That of course could mean entering a potential danger zone at the same time, at least for society. Law enforcement has erred in the past by slip-sliding into the practice of trying to identify offenders before they do anything—or profiling and targeting certain communities according to theories of the “broken-windows” type. “As I would hope the American people would want,” Comey himself said this week, in justifying the earlier closing of Mateen’s case, “we don’t keep people under investigation indefinitely.”

But that is how the Omar Mateens of the future may well be detected.