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NEW YORK – Officially, the FBI agents who swarmed Donald Ray Morgan at Kennedy Airport this month were there to arrest him on a mundane gun charge. But they whisked him away to their Manhattan office and grilled him for two hours on an entirely different topic: Islamic State extremists.
Over and over, they asked Morgan, a 44-year-old North Carolina man, converted Muslim and author of pro-extremist tweets, whether he had traveled to Syria to support the militant group. More important, they wanted know whether he could identify any fighters with U.S. ties who had left the region to return to America.
The two hours of questioning, recounted in a recent court hearing, offered a glimpse into U.S. law enforcement's intensifying efforts to identify Islamic State sympathizers who could help export the group's brand of violent jihad to the United States.
They come amid a new barrage of U.S. airstrikes against the Islamic State group that beheaded American journalist James Foley. The group called Foley's killing revenge for previous airstrikes against militants in Iraq.
Federal and New Police York Department officials have estimated that at least 100 Americans could be fighting with the Sunni extremists who have seized territory in northern and western Iraq. In April, a Colorado woman and convert to Islam was arrested before she could travel to Syria to marry a fighter she had met online. More recently, a Texas man who was arrested trying to board a flight to Turkey pleaded guilty to terror charges alleging he wanted to join the group.
In a Pentagon news conference, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey called the Islamic State an "immediate threat," in part because of the number of Europeans and other foreigners who have traveled to the region to join the group.
"And those folks can go home at some point," he said.
NYPD counterterrorism officials, long wary of another al-Qaida strike since the Sept. 11 attacks, have increasingly turned their attention to the Islamic State threat and efforts to recruit supporters through social media.
The group used hashtags like (hash)BewareAmerica and (hash)CalamityWillBefallUS to make threats against the United States, NYPD analyst Rebecca Weiner said at a recent briefing for private security officials.
"What we've seen in these hashtag campaigns is a lot of pictures of U.S. cities, including New York," she said.
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