They used the Fast & Furious handbook.

Via The Oregonian

The 25-year-old meth addict stepped into Squid’s Smoke Shop toting a wadded sweatshirt concealing a pistol.

She probably gave little attention to the hundreds of students streaming out of nearby H.B. Lee Middle School, excited for a weekend that promised snow.

She was intent on trading with “Squid,” the long-haired man behind the Gresham smoke shop’s counter, or his crew. They paid her $520 in cash and two cartons of Marlboros for the Makarov semi-automatic pistol.

Roughly a month later, in March 2011, she learned Squid was no underworld buyer of guns and drugs. He was a special agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

He and his team ended their elaborate eight-month undercover sting in March 2011 by arresting 48 people who sold drugs and guns to Squid’s. But now the $150,000 operation — which recovered only 10 stolen guns, none traced to a crime — is itself being investigated for its methods, including targeting mentally impaired individuals.

Congress recently called for probes into how ATF conducted undercover operations in Oregon and elsewhere across the country. The U.S Justice Department has tasked its inspector general to review ATF’s conduct. And the ATF already has had to reform some of its tactics because of a recently completed internal review.

“Operation Kraken” was ATF’s part of police efforts to tamp down gang violence and drive-by shootings plaguing East Multnomah County in 2010.

The Oregon operation was spotlighted last month in an investigative report by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The Wisconsin newspaper reported that ATF operations in six states snared mentally impaired suspects, staged illegal trades with juveniles and lured underworld figures to operations set up near schools and churches.

The Oregonian’s investigation of the Oregon operation found that Operation Kraken had many shortcomings, based on court records, previously confidential ATF reports and interviews with agents, prosecutors, defendants and defense attorneys:

* Agents didn’t discover until they had leased space in a strip mall that a middle school was nearby. The operation was so high risk that surveillance teams were posted outside the store to protect the undercover agents.

* Although experienced federal agents didn’t initially spot the school, state prosecutors later charged 16 people under a stiff state law against trading drugs near a school. Federal prosecutors opted not to make the school an issue in their charges.

* None of the 80 guns confiscated proved to have been used in a crime. Just 10 of the guns were stolen. That hardly puts a dent in the 14,000 guns still outstanding as stolen in Multnomah County alone.

* Following their arrests, four suspects were determined to have diminished mental acuity, including one woman diagnosed with mental retardation.