CBRNeWORLD
Assistant Special Agent in Charge Ron Hopper, from the FBI Tampa office, talks to Gwyn Winfield about putting the lessons learned from the Pulse shooting to good use
Taking the Pulse F
orthose with short memories the Pulse shooting was the worst terrorist attack in the US since
9/11. Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and wounded nearly 60 others in his attack on a gay nightclub, Pulse, in Orlando. It is still the largest mass killing event in the US where the individual did not kill himself. On 12 June 2016 he pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, claimed that he had placed explosives around the venue, and finally died in a firefight with responding officers. While it was a conventional incident,
and on face value not particularly CBRN, many of its features would be encountered in a CBRN attack, and as such are worth studying. Primary among these is an operation that started off as one thing and became another. The Pulse incident started as a mass shooting, became a barricaded suspect, hostage negotiation with a simultaneous EOD mission, and finally a hostage rescue. It is unlikely that any CBRN attack would be immediately identified as such, most likely it would start off as a ‘gas explosion’ and then, depending on the attacker’s agenda and capability, move through similar stages before apprehension. It is these gear changes as the scenario moves up and down the threat ladder that make it interesting. Firstly, I would highly recommend
the official Department of Justice (DOJ) and Police Federation after action report (AAR), which manages to combine clarity and detail in equal measure
https://incidentreviews.org/orlando/. There is also information of value in the Federal Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) AAR; http://www.
mynews13.com/content/dam/news/ static/ cfnews13/documents/ 2017/ Orlando%20Shooting%20AAR_ Redacted-fdle.pdf. As is often the case the jurisdiction moved from one force to another, during Pulse it moved from OPD, who just happened to have officer Greuler outside the club when the
Even prior to the Pulse attack Orlando had been running complex MCI exercises ©CBRNe World
shooting took place, to the FBI. The big change between those two
agencies would presumably be the FBI, as it takes over any case of a terrorist nature, which is potentially what would have happened when Mateen pledged his allegiance. Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) Hopper stated that it wasn’t that straightforward, but only
because the relationship between the FBI and other local law enforcement (LE) is so strong. “A lot of the success in our response on that night, and I mean that collectively to include the PD, the sheriff and the FDLE, was due to the relationships that we enjoy here as a result of strong liaison. I was woken shortly after 02.30 that morning
www.cbrneworld.com CBRNe Convergence, Orlando, USA, 6-8 November 2018
www.cbrneworld.com/convergence2018
February 2018 CBRNe WORLD
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