Original subtitles

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Downloaded from YTS.MX

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♪ intense music plays ♪

Good evening, my fellow Americans.

First, I should like to express my gratitude

to the radio and television networks

for the opportunities they have given me over the years

to bring reports and messages to our nation.

♪♪♪

We annually spend on military security alone,

more than the net income of all United States corporations.

In the councils of government,

we must guard against

the acquisition of unwarranted influence,

whether sought or unsought

by the military-industrial complex.

President Eisenhower used the term

military-industrial complex in his farewell address,

and what that referred to is this increasing alliance

between our industrial capacity

in the United States and the military.

War is fought on the battlefields

with kinetic energy and kinetic weapons,

but also, it's fought in the mind.

It's fought in public opinion.

It's fought through public relations and propaganda.

The military-entertainment complex,

as a term, is playing off of that.

It's suggesting that a similar kind of alliance is forming,

not with industrial powers, but with entertainment powers.

The really powerful storytelling mechanism

that is Hollywood,

speaks to a different part of us.

It speaks to an emotional register.

It is the most powerful storytelling mechanism

ever devised by human beings.

In the invasion of Iraq,

we found out a lot about how the military massages

and manipulates those industries

to get its message out.

We must stop the terror.

Now, watch this drive.

Do you trust this person?

Yes, I do.

Combat boots and fatigues,

mingled with stilettos and bling.

Good evening, Achmed.

Good evening... infidel.

But, if you can get history written

in Hollywood celluloid,

then you've really done your job in selling the public

on the story that you wanna tell.

In the battle of Iraq,

the United States and our allies have prevailed.

There are large dominant

military-entertainment complexes out there,

but there's a lot of small ones too

that are vying for attention and brain space.

And ISIS is one of them.

♪♪♪

ISIS has released

a new propaganda video.

This production displays glossy camera work

and high-level production techniques.

The ISIS PR machine

is constantly making sure

the world is aware.

Denis Cuspert is his real name,

a former German rapper,

a notorious ISIS fighter and recruiter.

Allahu Akbar.

He was the face of ISIS.

There were no celebrities in ISIS except for him.

They would put him on YouTube.

They would put him everywhere, all the time.

They were constantly broadcasting Denis.

Denis Cuspert had, you know, basically

rock star status in ISIS.

This individual had a relative free rein

to encourage and recruit others online.

When I met Denis the first time,

I could see he was very charismatic.

I could clearly see this is somebody

who was gonna become a leader.

Denis Cuspert having his own social media accounts,

creating propaganda, and just trying to make it

more personalized for people back home.

If I'm the FBI, they've seen the videos.

They know he's a player.

It makes sense to target Denis.

Daniela Greene was hired by the FBI,

as an FBI linguist,

a skill set they desperately needed.

Allahu Akbar.

Allahu Akbar.

Allahu Akbar.

The FBI thought, "Let's take this young woman

and let's put her up against him."

But communicating gives you their thoughts

and their motivations,

and it gives you kind of a window into their soul.

Honey Trap operations, they come with risks.

Humans all have vulnerabilities,

and there's no greater vulnerability than sex,

and romance, and love.

Allahu Akbar. Allahu.

Allahu Akbar.

I had heard of Denis during my teenage years.

He was a figure who hung out with people from my high school.

He was very charming.

There were girls who had a crush on Denis,

but he was well-known as someone who had a spectacular

kind of criminal past in terms of very violent crimes

that he'd gone to jail for repeatedly.

Denis came out of prison from a longer stint,

and he came out and decided

that he was gonna do gangster rap.

♪♪♪

In Kreuzberg, the kind of most famous gang

was "36 Boys,"

which was a gang of mostly Turkish

and Arab and Kurdish youth.

Denis was a member of the gang.

He hung with them.

Denis grew up in West Berlin,

which was occupied by American soldiers.

♪♪♪

In 1945, the US liberates Germany

from Nazi rule.

Liberated, occupied.

It's important to always add that.

When the US Army occupied Germany,

the US Army was still segregated.

Black American soldiers were fighting

in a segregated US Army,

and occupying a country where they were told,

"This is an enemy population. "

There were non-fraternization rules.

But they were starving

and living in bombed-out cities.

Black American G.I.s were particularly

friendly and generous.

Within a year, you have children

born who are biracial kids.

So, that was part of what was associated

with Blackness, was America.

Denis' mom was a young woman in the 70s.

She was living in Kreuzberg at the time

in an unheated apartment

with no warm water, that kind of thing.

She would go to night clubs

where American G.I.s would hang out.

Then she met this DJ one night at a night club

from Ghana, who was playing there.

Denis' biological father was deported back to Ghana.

And she never saw him again.

She said she had one photo of him somewhere.

Denis was born then, very premature.

Denis had no relationship to his biological father.

She actually showed me an outfit,

the first outfit that she dressed him in.

She had it pinned to the wall in her apartment.

It was a Woolworth teddy bear that she dressed him

in the-- in the teddy bear's like overalls.

They were really very tiny.

A couple of years later, when Denis was three or four,

she met Benjamin Cuspert

who was an American soldier in Berlin,

and they married, and had a second son, Jermaine.

It's kind of interesting that Germany's

most well-known terrorist

carries the name of an American soldier.

♪♪♪

♪♪♪

The media, which contains journalism,

which contains Hollywood, and entertainment,

people have called that the fourth branch of government.

Part of the storytelling is how Muslims

are understood by Hollywood

and the American political system.

Frequently, it's so hard to get away

from the casting of the characters

like Denis as the Muslim boogeyman.

Now, what I find interesting is how that story

can open us up to talking about stories

that operate as propaganda

to consent to military action.

From the earliest films,

there's been quite a long history

of representing Arabs,

the Middle East, Muslims in a certain kind of way.

In terms of the representations

of Middle East --

If you went to the Middle East, you will find

incredible diversity, like all human beings.

And yet, if you looked at Hollywood films,

which for a long time was the main propaganda

that was representing American state power

and American corporate power,

you'd find a very, very narrow range.

You'd better be able to pay for that.

Do you know what the penalty is for stealing?

There is a scholar called Jack Shaheen.

He went through Hollywood films and documented

how Arabs were represented.

Very, very dehumanizing.

So you're sitting like I am, for example,

watching Back To The Future--

Why does Hollywood inject Arabs

and/or slurs demeaning Arabs

in movies having nothing to do with the Middle East?

Who? Who?

Who do you think?

The Libyans!

We have thrillers, we have True Lies,

we have Executive Decision.

In some of these Hollywood films,

you see a white woman stripped down,

her clothes taken off, tied up,

and she's being sold at an auction block.

You have a series of films

called The Delta Forces.

American marines killed many of my friends

when they bombed Beirut.

This also coincides with the obsession

around the alleged proliferation

of Arab hijackings of planes,

which happens decontextualized,

with these absurd cartoonish characters

instilling fear in white female stewardesses.

We even have these benign films

that have nothing to do with Muslims or Arabs

portray cartoonish characters.

-What key? -That key.

Who's taken the key?

The negative portrayal of Muslims

in Western countries and how Muslims are treated,

it's "us against them."

Muslims are unfortunately viewed as a monolith

by people who may not understand,

and their only exposure might be through shows like 24.

Stories are at the center

of social cohesion.

We're gonna have to come up with an alternative.

This is alternative.

Hollywood doesn't happen

or create images in isolation.

There is a triangle of politics, pop culture, and public opinion

that are at work.

They have dynamic relationships.

We better wake up and smell the falafel.

Islam is taking over our country.

No, ma'am. No, ma'am.

He's a-- he's --

he's a decent, family man.

You see,

there's no shades of gray in this war against terror.

Either you're with the United States

or you're not with the United States.

When you decide to destroy Iraq,

for example, then you've got to prime a population.

If you look at the propaganda following 9/11,

there is two years

of intense propaganda

trying to convince people

that 9/11 was connected to Saddam Hussein.

So that by the time the Iraq invasion happens,

you have something like 83% of the population

in support of the war.

With horrible disastrous results

and a power vacuum created

into which ISIS was thrust.

If you look at the propaganda, you pick on the most powerless

people in the society

and you turn them into scapegoats.

"These people aren't really human.

They don't love their kids like we love them . "

If you believe that, then these are not real people.

These are not real human beings.

And therefore, you can do anything to them.

♪ dramatic music plays ♪

The invisibilized dominant power

is the American military.

It's the American empire,

how it pervades and influences

every part of his

and his community's understanding

of what is just and unjust.

In 2006, he was meant to tour

with DMX in the US

after touring with him in Germany and Europe.

So whoever the fuck gets on this stage tonight,

real dudes, we're doing real fucking things, baby.

Denis flew to LA to perform there with him,

but he wasn't allowed to fly in.

He thought they didn't let him in

because he had like a kind of knockoff Adidas shoe

with a plane flying in,

that was supposed to look like the Twin Towers.

♪ dramatic music plays ♪

Denis kind of jumped around

from subculture to subculture in a way.

He went from rap to trying to be an MMA fighter.

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♪♪♪

Denis challenged Ismail Cetinkaya.

He sort of very publicly challenged him.

Fight!

The main guy in the German context

who was recruiting Germans

to join the Salafist movement,

and many of them went to ISIS,

was this guy called Pierre Vogel,

who's a white German guy,

who was a boxing champion.

I do think that there was a correlation

between Denis losing

and being humiliated in that fight,

and then having this meeting with Pierre Vogel,

where he was given an out.

There's a video of Pierre Vogel

where he's sitting with Denis,

and it's the video where he convinces Denis to give up rap.

Denis is very humble and moved.

♪ dramatic music plays ♪

♪♪♪

People thought it was kind of ridiculous,

but he was serious about it.

♪ dramatic music plays ♪

♪♪♪

Do you wanna just introduce yourself?

Mm-hm. My name is Souad Mekhennet.

I'm the international security correspondent

for the Washington Post.

For nearly 20 years,

journalist Souad Mekhennet

had-- has covered some of the world's

most dangerous conflicts.

She's gained rare access to the inner circles

of groups like the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS.

In 2015, she co-wrote the blockbuster Washington Post

article that unmasked ISIS killer Jihadi John

as British citizen, Mohammed Emwazi.

Her latest book, recounts some of her

most dangerous reporting assignments.

The last book I published is called

I Was Told To Come Alone:

My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad,

where I also wrote about Denis Cuspert.

I met Denis Cuspert before he joined ISIS.

A young imam from Berlin contacted me one day and said,

"Souad, there is somebody

who I think you should meet.

He's someone who comes to my mosque

and I'm a bit worried about him."

I went to Berlin

and I entered the office of the imam,

and there was this young man sitting

who then stood up when I entered the office,

which I found very interesting, to show his respect.

And we greeted each other in Arabic

with, you know, As-salamu alaykum,

and that was Denis Cuspert.

We had a very long conversation

where we spoke about how he felt as a child

growing up with, you know,

a lot of discrimination and racism.

I could relate to that a little bit

because I grew up in Germany as well

as the child of so-called guest workers.

He was looking for an identity like,

"Who am I? Where do I belong? Where's my home?"

He felt like somebody who was really looking for a path,

but he was also looking for

being able to talk to somebody.

Now, you have to understand,

in Germany or in Europe,

very often when young men want to discuss these things,

imams feel a bit-- they're very careful

about having such political debates

in their mosques because they are afraid

that the intelligence services would say,

"Wait a second, you're allowing these--

this is extremism.

You're allowing people to talk-- discuss this

and to have anti-Western views there."

This is where recruiters understand

they can actually step in and recruit somebody.

When I met Cuspert in-- Cuspert in--

at the mosque in Berlin,

he was still somebody where I felt

there could have been a chance to not lose him

into the hands of extremism,

but there was no one there

who would have these conversations with him.

A gunman fired shots

at US military personnel on a bus

outside Frankfurt Airport, Wednesday.

Two Air Force airmen are dead and two more wounded.

I'm saddened and I'm outraged by this attack

that took the lives of two Americans.

I want everybody to understand

that we will spare no effort

in learning how this outrageous act took place.

And in working with German authorities

to ensure that all of the perpetrators

are brought to justice.

US and German officials say

they have a better idea now

who the suspected gunman

Arid Uka might be.

He apparently was a prolific Facebook poster.

He visited a lot of Jihadi websites.

When asked about the shooting of the airmen, he said, simply,

"They're at war with us."

Which tells us something about

his mindset and possible motive.

I learned that there was an attack in Frankfurt.

I went to see Arid's family after the attack happened.

I asked them if they would speak to me,

and they said he was a quiet

but sometimes also very depressed young man

who had also issues

trying to find his way in the world.

His brother told me,

Arid told him that he was following on Facebook

somebody who posted a video.

The video showed an Iraqi woman

was raped by US soldiers.

We're searching for evidence.

We're looking for, what?

Weapons of mass destruction.

You ready? Here you go.

Here you go. Come here, Salazar.

Come here. Take her fucking hand.

And a message from the person who posted it,

"We need to defend the honor of our sisters."

And I asked him,

"Do you remember who posted the video?

Like, who was the person your brother was following?"

He said, "I think it was somebody,

something like Dogg, Deso, Deso."

And I said, "Deso Dogg?

You mean the former rapper?"

And he said, "Yes, yes. He was a former rapper."

And I was actually in shock.

We see here is a video he posted.

This young man, followed him, watched the video,

and was emotionally so upset about this,

thinking it was reality.

We know now today it wasn't.

I spoke to Cuspert about it later.

I said, "Did you know that the video was not reality,

that it was actually from a movie?"

And he didn't know that,

but he actually felt

that what Arid Uka did was right.

And he congratulated "the brother"

as he called him and said,

"Because you know, those--" he said, "Those servicemen,

they were on their way to-- you know,

they were killing-- they would have killed Muslims,

so they were not innocent."

When the thing with the video happened,

I understood, "Okay.

He actually crossed that bridge

into the extremism."

My name is Kevin Gallagher.

I'm a special agent with the FBI's

Washington Field Office.

My particular squad

focused primarily on what we refer to

as terrorist use of the internet,

which heavily relies on investigations

into terrorist media organizations

and their radicalization and recruitment

of people in the United States.

Denis Cuspert was an individual

who I was aware of probably in about 2011,

2012 timeframe.

Yes, he was a terrorist,

but he was also a cult of personality.

This is an individual who's had contact

with, you know, American rappers.

The types of rappers that I grew up in high school

and college listening to.

The FBI is interested in--

what are his communications

with people in the United States?

Does he have followers here

who might have a sleeper cell here?

At the FBI, we broke up the world

into various areas of responsibility.

The German language radicalization movement

was one of those efforts,

and that is why the Detroit Field Office

had the investigation of Denis Cuspert.

Daniela Greene was assigned to the Detroit Field office

as a contract linguist.

Her job was to accurately translate information

as it was recovered related to communications

that Denis Cuspert was having,

not only with people in the United States,

but all across the world.

In the FBI, our translators' perspective

and their professional opinions is highly important

to the investigative team.

So she was part of that investigative team,

and her information and her input was vital

to tracking Denis Cuspert.

Tracking is just following their online chatter,

looking at their propaganda releases

in various online spaces,

and also just observing,

kind of just being like a fly on the wall.

She was assigned to the case involving Deso Dogg.

Her goal was to lure him out of Syria into Turkey

so he would be subject to arrest.

But I have seen situations in ISIS chat rooms

where individuals seem to begin to very strongly

emotionally bond with one another.

And it does recall more normal circumstances

like online dating.

I have seen that type of relationship

resulting in people being willing

to make really bad, awful decisions

because of the social bond that they create online.

I've seen the tabloids that

lend to Daniela Greene being a honeypot.

That couldn't be further from the truth.

To say that Daniela was not a traditional

honeypot operation is very true.

But the reality is,

I think it was very deliberate

to use Daniela

to communicate with Denis Cuspert.

When people are running intelligence operations,

they're always thinking about

what is gonna be the best tactic.

And I think that in this particular case,

they recognized that maybe Denis Cuspert

had a weakness for women.

♪ upbeat music plays ♪

♪♪♪

He's likely to respond to her

and wanna chat with her, and Skype with her,

and maybe send her pictures and tell her secrets.

He's not gonna do that with a dude.

It's just human nature.

Everybody conducts honeypot operations.

The FBI, the CIA,

the Russian Intelligence Services, the Mossad.

Now, I should be clear about that, because the--

often, there's confusion about what a honeypot operation is.

A honeypot operation is one

where typically a woman

targets a man,

plays upon his male vulnerabilities,

flirts with him, seduces him.

♪ With nothing but a piece of rope ♪

And gets him to tell her secrets.

♪ Dreaming every night of you ♪

As an operative, it was easy for me

to go up and talk to a foreign man

and to express interest.

It is strictly forbidden for CIA officers or FBI agents

to have romantic relationships with their targets.

But that does happen.

It's happened throughout history.

This was not the first time it happened

and it certainly won't be the last.

But we have to keep in mind that Daniela

was not a trained CIA operative,

not a trained recruiter,

nor was she a trained FBI agent.

She was really conscripted as a translator.

This is an FBI contract employee

with a top secret security clearance.

There's a lot of trust that the government puts

in the people that it hires.

These individuals are granted access

to some of the United States government's biggest secrets.

What is always the risk in that case

is that there's going to be some real romance

that emerges from that.

So the investigative team

was aware of two Skype accounts

that were being utilized by Denis Cuspert

to communicate with his associates.

Daniela Greene created a third Skype account

and had direct communication with Denis Cuspert

that was unknown to the investigative team

and that's where she went off the rails.

It's probably...

the most concerning part of that case

is how do we defend ourselves from our own?

You know, other aspects to think about in this case,

her marriage to her first husband

who was a US military officer.

How does someone go from an FBI linguist,

to a military wife,

to joining a foreign terrorist organization?

That's a hell of a radicalization path.

I first met Daniela when she was a student

here at Cameron in Lawton, Oklahoma.

She was extremely intelligent, a hard-worker,

and kinda quiet and very attractive,

which I normally wouldn't mention,

but I think, you know, she seemed out of --

this guy that she hooked up with,

she was way out of his league.

I'm an Air Force wife.

And Daniela was an army wife.

She is married to my brother-in-law, Matt.

Being married to a military man, in my view,

that's like an honor, you know?

Matthew got married to Daniela,

who was from Germany, because Matthew was stationed

over in Germany, in the army at the time.

Got this American soldier stationed in Germany,

meets a German girl, and I hope it was true love,

but he must've been her ticket out of Germany.

And I don't mean to be critical or negative of him.

That was just an impression I had.

She's young but she's already married.

She's not from around here.

So she gets here not knowing anyone.

I'm sure it was still hard on her,

for her to leave her family.

The military life for the wife, you know,

it's not an easy lifestyle.

Not everybody can handle it.

I met Matt when she graduated.

It didn't seem like a happy couple.

There was kind of a sadness about her.

She just didn't seem happy.

We didn't know what happened to her after that.

And, of course, we found out later

she'd gotten hired by the FBI.

I don't think they cared about her master's degree.

They liked the fact that she was fluent in German.

They had her talking to this recruiter of ISIS.

And with her talking to him, I think she may have started

getting feelings for him.

Because that happens to people, you know?

When you talk to people online,

you hear about it all the time.

I don't know if she's having problems

with my brother-in-law,

but I think just with her talking to him,

she may have seen him in a different light

than what we see him.

I would never have imagined her doing something like this.

I think she's a traitor to our country.

After the terror attack in Frankfurt,

Denis took part in a demonstration

against the Danish cartoons.

Demonstrations that got violent.

And a policeman was stabbed there.

But it's a very well-filmed

and well-produced video.

And Denis is sort of like the star of it.

That was the last thing that happened.

And because a policeman was injured,

he disappeared then.

One of the interesting aspects

of the German state's role in ISIS

is that German intelligence encouraged German Salafists

to go to Syria for a while.

They encouraged and they facilitated it.

So they encouraged people to leave,

sort of to export the problem of these people

like, "Oh, they're gone now.

Let them terrorize people somewhere else."

And he, in fact, resurfaced in Syria.

Which was, I think, surprised a lot of people

because he'd always basically been in Berlin.

He was this boy from Berlin, this guy from Berlin

who we've all known about

through these various episodes of his life.

When he joined ISIS,

they wanted you to do something.

You could either be a soldier

or you became a member of the propaganda team.

He became a member of the propaganda team.

Denis Cuspert becomes one of the most

prominent ISIS influencers.

But something happened over time.

The propagandists of ISIS

were deeply influenced by Hollywood.

Isis had been producing these videos

terrifying people.

Their videos got more and more extravagant,

better production values.

You see a kind of cinematic creativity.

What ISIS did was a totally different level.

I mean, ISIS created videos

that really looked like

professionally-made Hollywood movies.

ISIS has released a new propaganda video.

This new and very glossy recruitment video

which looks professionally shot

and edited as though ISIS were taking cues

from Hollywood films such as Zero Dark Thirty

and The Hurt Locker to maximize the terror.

ISIS' media production facilities

take a direct cue from what has been going on

in the United States for a long time.

They've watched all the war movies.

They view the military entertainment complex

as kind of the tail end or the final maturation

of what scholars call "the mediatization of war."

The US government is into our media sphere

in every possible way.

The DOD, in 1949, set up

the Entertainment Media Production Office.

And if you wanna make a movie that involves military equipment

or personnel, there's only one place to get it.

You have to hand in your script.

Have them look it over. Review it.

And the Pentagon responds with script change requests.

You make those changes and you get

a sort of clean bill of health from the military

and you get access to the stuff.

And that's the core of this relationship.

But, you know, this is sort of industry-wide.

Really, when we started digging in,

we had to make official requests to the US government.

You do this through the Freedom of Information Act.

And so we started doing this by the hundreds.

It's happened, by our account,

2,500 to 3,000 times that we can confirm.

My expectation was it's gonna be a bunch of war films.

And it's not. Maybe 10%.

Pitch Perfect 3,

the military gave them access to bases

and access to troops

and pretty much gave them the whole set.

The military went into sci-fi.

So you see a lot of Transformers and Iron Man.

There are, you know, some hardcore representations

in Iron Man of Afghani terrorists

who are antagonizing Iron Man

and killing children and things like that,

that are, you know, DOD-sponsored.

Iron Man and Transformers become this way of talking

about the war, but not really being a war movie.

My turn.

There's an entire apparatus at work.

Not just one individual pulling the strings,

an interaction between two large institutions.

You know, Hollywood's driven by money

and they want the biggest bang for their buck,

and obviously, they're gonna go for this relationship.

And the US government is in it

to fill the recruitment quotas.

The military entertainment complex

is going to wanna maximize recruitment.

Top Gun is a good place to go

if you wanna talk about recruitment.

Top Gun completely turned the set of images

about what the military is on its head.

You know, it's not wading through the jungle muck

and watching your friend die.

It's about being encased

in this high-tech tube of steel

and rocketing through the atmosphere

and high-fiving your friends.

And ISIS' very powerful and high-production value...

image making factory,

they very well understand that, you know,

this empire over here is doing that very, very well.

Our little empire might try to, you know,

take a cue from them and try it as well.

ISIS' military equipment, it's not F-22s,

it's little white pickups with a bunch of AK-47s.

But they've got stuff.

They're using established genres,

they're using established storylines.

Even though they were against the West,

they were, in many ways,

deeply influenced by the West.

So you'll see an ISIS video, if you look at,

like, there's a bunch of horses,

and you slow the video down and you broaden up,

and you see that they're the Riders of Rohan

from Lord of the Rings.

Almost you can say that they were fans.

You can say they're wannabe Tarantinos,

taking this all in,

having it influence them,

and then wanting to put it back

in their own variation

of what they were taking from the West.

But obviously, doing things that Hollywood can't do,

which is actually killing people on-screen.

I spoke to one of the people who--

he was responsible for ISIS' media.

He said sometimes, when they were planning

a beheading, and I'm sorry I have to speak about this,

but I mean, it was unbelievable

that even when they had planned a beheading,

they would bring in the camera team.

And the camera team, while this person was kneeling,

while this man was kneeling in front of the person

who was supposed to behead him, they would tell this guy,

"Okay. You have to hold the knife this way.

You have to, you know, wait, turn this way

because the sun is better, the lighting is there."

ISIS propaganda films evolved to a place

where they had a story and a plot.

In some films, they would force their captives

to be actors. They would perform reenactments.

And the prisoners would play themselves

right up to their execution.

ISIS realized that

"media is more than half the battle."

You have these incredible videos

released before the fall of Mosul.

You could say an extensive propaganda campaign,

kind of information operations by ISIS,

to prepare the ground

for the taking of the city of Mosul.

And we know for example that the ISIS force

that took Mosul was outnumbered ten to one or more.

They just melted away

in terror that these guys were in the city

and that they were coming to get them.

The ISIS propaganda apparatus

saw that you wanted not one approach,

but many approaches.

So, you know, for example, we in the West often focus

on "the slaughter videos"

and those certainly got a lot of eyeballs,

a lot of attention, a lot of controversy.

But actually, the slaughter videos

are only a small part of what ISIS produced.

ISIS produced lots of other types of videos.

The utopian version of ISIS,

the version they put on their propaganda

and things like that, is they're basically

pitching an American dream, ISIS version.

We'll give you a white picket fence and the house,

and we'll build this great society.

Fifty-three thousand men, women, and children

joined the Islamic State from over 80 countries.

That's a big number.

ISIS' real goal

was this state-building project.

They took over large swaths of territory

in Syria and Iraq.

A lot of their propaganda that they were doing,

their videos, their magazines,

was a lot of state-building propaganda.

They collected taxes, they ran the police force.

Come to Syria and Iraq,

we're gonna build a society

and we need you to join.

And you had these charismatic leaders.

Denis is a great example of that.

I don't know what was going on in her head.

I don't know if it was part of her job

to pretend that she was interested

in that part of the messaging of the caliphate.

It was definitely something

Daniela was fascinated by,

how equal everything was.

That's what I was told

by somebody who was close to her.

Daniela Greene knew what ISIS was.

She knew what ISIS was trying to achieve

and perhaps part of it had to do

with her relationship with Denis Cuspert

and her wanting to explore that.

But there's wanting to explore that,

and there's wanting to travel to Syria

to join the Islamic State to explore that with someone.

June 11, 2014, Greene told her supervisor

her intentions to travel to Germany

to visit her mother.

There's a normal form that the FBI requires

everyone who's traveling with a top secret clearance

to fill out.

She fills out the form, says she's gonna go to Germany

to see her family, and clearly doesn't.

Daniela Greene fell for him

and really wanted to go and live there in Syria.

The FBI had not realized that she had gone rogue.

I was at home with my family and I received

a phone call from my supervisor at the time.

He informed me that Daniela Greene

had never had any intention to travel to Germany,

but in fact to travel to Syria.

So at the time we started the investigation,

we didn't really understand why she left.

When the investigation really got into it

and we were able to review the Skype conversations

that she was having with Denis Cuspert,

what we saw was not just the communications

between one individual and a terrorist,

but the communications between Daniela and another human.

There were pet names that were provided

to one another throughout these conversations.

We don't know if she was, like, genuinely in love with him

or just kind of lost and decided

that she would take certain risks.

And maybe she was a rogue agent

who thought she was gonna get a promotion

for doing really dangerous work

of being a honey trap.

At that time when Daniela went to meet Denis in Syria,

Turkey was the obvious place to go as a conduit.

You get to Istanbul,

you go down to the border towns,

you kind of wait until someone vouches for you.

In this case, she already had an in.

She had Denis to vouch for her.

So that pulls a lot of weight.

And so instead of waiting weeks at a time,

which we saw a number of cases,

you know, she was able to cross very quickly.

Daniela Greene traveled over to Syria

and married Denis Cuspert within a matter of days.

Daniela came to Syria the same day I arrived.

My name is Kim

and I went to Syria

from 2014 until 2020.

And I just got out of jail in August--

the 1st August, this year.

The first time I met Deso, so it was here in Germany.

He was handsome and the people knew about him,

everybody knew about him.

I didn't see it like, "Oh, I know Deso Dogg.

I talked with him."

So I was not like, "Oh, my God.

Deso Dogg is in town..."

Throwing my bra at him. No.

But the men were, like, groupies on him.

It was very weird.

I don't know why.

I was over there in ISIS area

with my ex-husband because... problems in Germany.

Here, we have only a lot of problems and shit around,

and the people called my ex-husband also

and told him, "It's great here.

Come over. You'll get houses

and everything will be fine."

They talked about it like it's a fairytale over there,

so it made the decision very easy.

And it wasn't-- it wasn't the real life.

So when I arrived over there, I was completely shocked

because it wasn't like this.

The foreign people,

they were more harsh than Arabic people.

German people,

yes, they were very harsh to the --

to the local people.

They were weird people with not a lot of friends.

In Syria, they got power.

In the beginning when I met Daniela,

she seemed like a nice, polite person,

very quiet and calm.

But also a little bit weird

because I asked her about how long she is in Islam

and she said, "Not that long. Maybe few weeks, few months."

And she doesn't know how to pray.

Daniela, she was doing a lot of stupid shit, dumb shit,

and she was putting her ass in danger.

ISIS was at the height of its power

when Daniela Greene showed up in Syria

to marry Denis.

But it's not like a stable environment

to have a honeymoon with your boyfriend.

People like Denis were going back and forth

between the front in Iraq and then back to Syria.

And so she's left with a bunch of other women

who aren't particularly well-inclined toward her

because she's sketchy.

She wanted to know everything about everybody

and she was checking on the window.

She was looking inside of the room,

in the cupboards, and she was, like, spying around.

It got very dangerous for her.

I don't understand why she put herself in more trouble.

He helped her because I think he didn't want

to get her killed if ISIS catches her.

The fact that Daniela Greene

was able to leave is very, very interesting.

If the version of what the people

who were close to him--

what they told me is true,

he was able to get her out

even though so many people were suspicious of her.

People say that he loved her as well,

which is why after she told him, supposedly,

that she worked for the FBI, he still allowed her to--

or helped her to-- to return

to Turkey-- to cross into Turkey

because he didn't want her to get killed.

My name is Volkmar Kabisch.

I am working for the German public broadcaster, NDR,

and I was quite often in Syria, Iraq

since 2014.

I was interested in what happened

to people joining ISIS.

I made films about this.

Fared Saal was pretty much involved

in the German Islamist scene for quite a long time

before joining ISIS.

And Denis Cuspert did the same and they met in Syria.

And Denis was, like, the big shot

and Fared was

not that famous as Denis.

But Denis wanted him to be more famous,

so Denis planned

a public relation act,

which was filming very brutal ISIS video.

There was a video full of dead bodies,

Syrian bodies.

And Fared Saal was standing just next to them,

and he was there together with Denis

who filmed him.

So he was the director.

And it was all about public relation.

Denis was still important.

The propaganda team had quite a lot of power.

They were seen as important as the fighters for ISIS.

But it didn't mean that you wouldn't have to also

kill somebody if they asked you to.

I believe the fact that he stayed there for so long

is that he-- if they would've asked him

to kill somebody, he would've killed somebody.

Yeah.

I've had a lot of FBI cases come across my desk

and I've seen quite a lot in the 15 years

that I've worked at the FBI.

But I had never seen something like this.

I remember meeting her at Dulles Airport

upon her arrival

and her being placed in custody.

I introduced myself to her,

said, "My name is Kevin Gallagher.

I'm a special agent with the FBI."

And she looked me in the eye and she said, "I know you."

I came to learn that her and I

are actually in a training course in 2012.

My name is Shawn Moore.

I was the attorney for Daniela Greene.

I was a public defender

doing cases here in DC ,

and it was in the courtroom that I first met her.

They kept her at a hotel near Dulles

for a couple of days, interviewing her.

It wasn't as if I met her immediately upon her arrival.

The prosecutors approached me and said,

"Look, she's facing a considerable amount of time,

she could help herself if she could help us."

The charges against Daniela ,

it involved making a false statement

to the government, but there was an enhancement

because the false statements also involved terrorism.

Initially, when she started doing the translating,

she was following the line

in trying to help lure him to a place

where he could be arrested.

Now, aside from the romantic conversations with Cuspert,

I don't know too much about that

and whether that was true or false or what.

But my impression was that

because it wasn't working,

she became frustrated

and she decided to take things into her own hands

and she got into something way, way over her head.

You have a high-ranking FBI employee

who had knowledge that would've been restricted

and that right there is enough to be criminal

in terms of the Espionage Act.

That law was passed

for the sake of chomping down on people

who walk away with secrets.

The Espionage Act does not require you

to go online and distribute information.

It's enough to make information available.

And her knowing information

and going to ISIS-held Syria

would've been a slam dunk court case.

And these are, like, stiff sentences.

It's, like, ten years per count.

After she was arraigned and brought to jail,

we immediately went to an offsite.

We spent with her over the course

of the next 24 hours, probably about 12 hours,

interviewing her,

triaging that with focusing on any potential threats

to the United States.

At no point did we feel that she withheld information

from the United States government.

And based on the information that we received

in the sentencing memo,

the Assistant United States Attorney

identifies that Daniela Greene came very close

to skirting the line of far more serious charges.

Ultimately, she pleaded guilty

and was given a sentence of two years.

She was obviously relieved.

But it's almost as if she was

still kind of in a state of shock

about what everything that had happened.

But that said, throughout this, she was always concerned

about how much of this was going to get out

and if so, when.

I've been in the hotel business

for approximately 30 years

and there was a great opportunity

for me to transfer to a big brand new hotel

in downtown Syracuse as director of sales and marketing.

Each night after work,

I would go to the concierge lounge

and kind of unwind a little bit,

have a nice cold beer and eat some dim sum.

And Daniela was the hostess there.

When I first met Daniela,

she was quite an attractive woman

with European characteristics, straight blonde hair

and a slight little German tint of an accent

to her voice.

She was well-poised and was obviously in quite command

of the job that she was doing.

She was a person that I saw as immediately overqualified

for the position she had.

So right away, I started thinking,

"Gee, where can she fit? Where does she want to go?"

I walked into the lounge one day

and Daniela was obviously upset

and she was really very shaken.

I knew that she was previously married.

She was separated from her husband, Matt.

It was really very tough.

She was going-- obviously going through a transitional period

in her life.

I asked her what the problem was

and she just blew it off a little bit and said,

"Gee, it's just something that happened

in my previous life that I'm really sorry about

and I really regret."

It's preposterous to me that she only spent

two years in prison.

The fact that she went rogue in this fashion,

that they had no idea where she was,

that she was essentially

operating against the Bureau

without their knowledge of it,

it's very embarrassing for the FBI.

The US government and the FBI,

they don't want the press questioning Daniela.

They don't want her side of the story to get out.

The FBI would have preferred if no one knew about this case,

if it just kind of got brushed under the carpet.

♪♪♪

A bizarre story that really does sound like something

straight out of Homeland or a terrorism movie.

It's an FBI translator

who was investigating an ISIS fighter in 2014

and then fled the United States for Syria

and married him.

Love can make us do strange things.

The story of an FBI translator

who married an ISIS terrorist.

It's a story almost too preposterous to be true.

The FBI translator who runs off to the Middle East

to marry the terrorist she was tracking

from the Detroit FBI Field Office.

Drew, this is an incredible story.

What's the FBI saying about how it happened?

Greene, who still had an American husband

at the time, wrote an email...

You know, was having an affair with an ISIS operative.

Given that Cuspert knew she worked for the FBI.

The case got zero publicity for months

because the records were sealed by the court

and critics say Greene got off with a light sentence,

two years and probation,

because she cooperated with the FBI.

And like we said in our report, most people facing

these type of charges are getting

much more severe sentences than this former FBI employee.

Daniela got a great deal.

It seems that the government is protecting itself

by protecting her.

She's back in the US with her ex-husband,

Sergeant Matthew Greene,

and after serving a short sentence,

she's now working at the Home Depot.

So in 2014, you have to remember,

our intelligence on ISIS was good,

but it wasn't great.

We knew the top leadership.

We could have a general sense of the structure,

but anyone who could light up the network,

who goes where, what do you do in there,

that is immensely valuable.

Her cooperation was extensive.

It provided information about ISIS

that we hadn't seen to date

and we had eyes on the ground.

While that was not our intention,

it was a byproduct of the situation

that we were presented.

Maybe she's savvier than we all think

and she was able to negotiate that deal

by providing very specific information.

The FBI agents, they were very interested

in locations of houses, where he stayed.

She provided as much information as she could

about what Cuspert was doing,

led me to believe that they were trying

to get information to target him.

Last night on my orders,

America's armed forces began strikes

against ISIL targets in Syria.

Wars succeed by this drumbeat of propaganda,

to feel people encouraged,

to inspire, and to terrify, has real meaning.

To move the heart is power.

Thank you.

Thank you too.

-That's good? - That's great. Yes.

-Thank you. -Thank you. Thank you.