An FBI translator with high security clearance travelled to Syria in 2014 and married a key ISIS operative she had been assigned to investigate.
Daniela Greene travelled to Syria where she was wed to German national Denis Cuspert, who rapped under the name Deso Dog in his homeland, before changing his name to Abu Talha al-Almani in Syria.
Greene, 38, contacted Cuspert on Skype and they arranged a plan for her to travel to Istanbul, where the two would meet and marry before crossing the border into Syria.
At the time of her departure, she was married to a US soldier. She told him that she was going to visit her parents in Munich, Germany.
Videos featuring the one time musician ,whose primary role is to attract Germans to the terror group , shows him threatening former President Barack Obama, including one in which he was holding a freshly severed human head.
Within weeks of marrying Cuspert, Greene realised that she had made a terrible mistake. She fled back to US, where she was immediately arrested and agreed to cooperate with authorities. She pleaded guilty to making false statements involving international terrorism and was sentenced to two years in federal prison. She was released last summer.
“I was weak and didn’t know how to handle anything anymore,” she wrote on July 8. “I really made a mess of things this time.”
In another, she said: “I am gone and I can’t come back. I wouldn’t even know how to make it through, if I tried to come back. I am in a very harsh environment and I don’t know how long I will last here, but it doesn’t matter, it’s all a little too late…”
Greene, who was born in Czechoslovakia and raised in Germany and later the US, only spent a short time in Syria before realising she had made an error and returned to America, where she was arrested on terrorism charges.
Cuspert is believed to have been injured in a US air strike in October 2015, but is thought to be still alive.
The incident, which was only brought to light after a judge unsealed some of the court documents, will be a major embarrassment for the security services.
“It’s a stunning embarrassment for the FBI, no doubt about it,” said John Kirby, a former State Department official, who said
that he suspected Greene’s entry into Syria had required the approval of top Isis leaders.
Most outsiders trying to get into an Isis region in Syria risk “getting their heads cut off,” said Kirby. “So for her to be able to get in as an American, as a woman, as an FBI employee, and to be able to take up residence with a known Isis leader, that all had to be coordinated.”
The FBI had no reason at the time to suspect Greene, who was hired for her fluent German and had been extensively vetted.
Greene, who now works as a hostess in a hotel lounge, said in a brief interview that she was fearful of discussing the details of her case.
“If I talk to you my family will be in danger,” she said.
Shawn Moore, Greene’s lawyer, described her as “smart, articulate and obviously naive”.
“She was just a well-meaning person that got up in something way over her head,” Moore said.
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