Director says FBI agent helped rescue Americans

FBI director Robert Mueller, while speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC, on Monday, said the FBI and British agencies helped Indian investigators trace the 26/11 masterminds.

He said the agents “recovered data from damaged cell phones, in one case by literally wiring a smashed phone back together”.

Mueller praised FBI special agent Steve Merril, a legal attaché in the bureau’s New Delhi office. “Steve was taking a day off and was on his way to Jodhpur to play cricket on the US embassy team in the maharaja’s annual tournament” when he heard of the Mumbai strikes, Mueller said. “All he had were the clothes on his back, his BlackBerry, and his cricket gear.”

He said Merril helped police and commandos rescue Americans trapped inside the Taj hotel and set up lines of communication with the FBI and other global intelligence agencies.

He said the agents “collected, analysed, and disseminated intelligence” to their “partners at home and abroad” to “ensure that if a second wave of attacks was in the offing, we possessed the intelligence to stop it”.

He sad the 26/11 attacks “remind us that terrorists with large agendas and little money can use rudimentary weapons to maximise their impact”. The attack also “raised the question” of whether a similar attack could happen in a US city, Mueller said.

The FBI director said the “primary threat” to the US continues to come from the “tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan”.