On the front lines of terrorism: An interview with Thomas Locke

Locke

After 32 years battling terrorists with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), retired agent Thomas Locke knows more about the past, present and future threats the United States confronts in the global war on terror then most.

Now serving as the managing director if BGR Government Affairs – a bipartisan lobbying firm – Locke sat down to talk exclusively with GSN: Government Security News about the evolution of terrorism in the 20^th century and how America can defeat the threat in the 21^st.

Locke joined the FBI after graduating from Catholic University in Connecticut in 1970 and, less than 10 years later, became the New York office supervisor for the Criminal Terrorist and Fugitive Squad. His primary duties were protecting foreign officials, catching fugitives in the metro area and investigating bombings and other types of terrorist attacks -- of which there was no shortage at the time.

“Back then, we had a variety of groups that were active in the New York City area,” Locke tells GSN. “And, unlike today, we had all these groups that didn’t get a lot play outside New York, like anti-Castro Cubans, the Jewish Defense League, the Serbs and the Croatians, just to name a few. Then, there were the more well-known ones, like Black September. It wasn’t until we really got into the investigation, and it took some time, that we were able figure out what group we were even dealing with.”

Terrorism was a real problem for New York back in the 1970s. But one lesson that was learned from this period of civil unrest, was the importance of inter-agency cooperation. As an FBI agent in Manhattan, Locke worked closely with the New York Police Department (NYPD) in solving many crimes. Having established a relationship with the police force working on bank robberies, Locke told GSN, “the bank robbery task force was working really well, so we moved on from there.”

“In April of 1980, I wrote the original memo of understanding with the NYPD that created the very first Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF),” Locke noted. “Prior to that, we had teamed up my agents with their detectives, and we were all working in our space at FBI headquarters. But we wanted to formalize it.”

“I didn’t know then that the JTTF was going to turn out the way it did today,” he added. “We were working really hard and there was no time to sit back and think about what we were creating. But it has become the real shining star of the fight against terrorism across the country. Now, we have hundreds of agents working the task force in New York and they are doing a fabulous job at it, and they have been for quite some time.”

But it was around the same time that the JTTF was created that Locke began to notice a new set of “bad guys” staking their claim and making a name for themselves overseas.

“We started to see elements of Islamic fundamentalism moving around the world,” Locke said.

In 1975, the Lebanese Civil War broke out and by the 1980s the United States was intimately involved. With boots on the ground -- a result of an interim cease-fire brokered by America -- Locke too would soon find himself intimately involved with civil unrest in the Middle East.

“The day after my honeymoon,” Locke reminisced, “the director of the FBI called me into his office and asked me if there was any reason why I couldn’t leave for Beirut in the morning. I left with a diplomatic passport, under the auspices of the CIA, with two of their agents.”

It was April 18, 1983 and a then-lesser known Islamic terrorist group by the name of Hezbollah sent a suicide bomber to the American Embassy in Beirut. Sixty Americans were killed, mostly Marines and sailors, but as Locke notes, “The CIA operation over there was totally wiped out.”

“They were devastated,” he says of the Agency. “And they called us and said the CIA doesn’t do investigations; we do intelligence. You need to get over here.

“We made quite a few trips and wound up with a massive report that pinned the attack on a bunch of individuals,” Locke said. “But the FBI had absolutely no jurisdiction over there, so I went to the legal counsel and I asked him if we couldn’t do something about it. I asked him, ‘Isn’t it our Embassy, the land for which America’s blood and soil stands? Based on this, can we use the American legal parameters?’

“And we did,” he added. “The destruction of federal property, killing American officials, anything we could pin on them, we did. It wasn’t until two years later that Congress passed laws allowing us to go anywhere we wanted in the world. But at the time, we were feeling our way through it all. There was really no precedent. The FBI had never investigated a terrorism incident overseas.”

But, even though he had seen the future threat of terrorism first-hand, up close and personal, Locke admits he did not see what the future held.

“Islamic terrorism was always someplace else,” Locke told GSN. “It was always overseas. Back then, we didn’t see 9/11 coming. Back then, we were investigating so many hijackings, they were happening all the time. They were nothing new. We always believed that somehow we would always be able to negotiate with the terrorists, if we kept the plane on the tarmac.

“Never did we think about terrorists using a plane as a weapon. We thought it would never happen. But, looking back now, maybe we should have.

"After 9/11, it spelled a new era, the whole world had changed. Every field office had a hijacking plan, and the plan was to keep the plane on the ground and negotiate.

"On 9/11, I changed the plan."

Read part two of the Locke interview series in Tuesday’s Insider, in which Locke discusses being in charge of the FBI effort on September 11, 2001, and for the first 30 days thereafter.