PORTLAND — Ten years ago this week, as holiday revelers congregated in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square for the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony, FBI agents stood nearby with a 19-year-old aspiring terrorist and a van full of explosives.
The explosives weren’t real. And the 19-year-old, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, thought his companions were fellow extremist Muslims helping him carry out a plot to kill thousands of Oregonians. But as Mohamud activated a cell phone to trigger the explosives, he was arrested.
One of the first journalists to learn about the arrest was Bryan Denson, then a reporter for The Oregonian/OregonLive. He ultimately wrote more than 60 articles about the Mohamud case, which became the foundation for the third title in a true-crime series for kids. Denson’s four-book FBI Files series for middle-grade readers – roughly ages 8 to 12 – launched in 2019 and wraps up in 2021.
Denson credited his literary agent, Tamar Rydzinski, with suggesting that he write the series given his experience covering cases that often involved the FBI. One such case was that of Jim Nicholson, a CIA agent-turned-Soviet spy who trained his son to follow in his footsteps, as detailed in Denson’s book “The Spy’s Son.”
Rydzinski said she came up with the general concept of “can you explain to kids what the FBI does” and Denson “totally took it and ran with it,” coming up with the ideas for the individual books. “He did a fantastic job,” she said.
Denson said each book represents a different component of the FBI.
“The Unabomber” showcases what Denson called “the long memory of the FBI – they never give up.” Ted Kaczyinski got away for nearly two decades with making bombs that killed or injured 26 people before the FBI caught up with him.
“Catching a Russian Spy” tells the story of Aldrich Ames, a CIA agent who made millions of dollars selling U.S. secrets, including the names of Soviet sources, to the KGB. Denson opens the book with an FBI agent having a terrible day as his team fails repeatedly while trying to obtain evidence of Ames’ treachery. The book’s theme, Denson said, is that “the FBI and CIA don’t always get along very well and they sometimes make mistakes, but when they work together they will catch the bad guy almost every time.”
Denson’s favorite book in the series is “The Diamond Thieves,” coming in May, which has an Oregon connection. Here’s the opening of a 2014 article he wrote about the case: “Purported members of a jet-setting band of diamond thieves that struck jewelry stores from Portland to Vero Beach, Fla. — once using a Chihuahua as a diversion, another time making a getaway on Jet Skis — appear to be throwing in the towel.”
“That book was to show how the FBI helps local police departments coordinate and analyze data in real time,” Denson said. He credited two Portland Police Bureau detectives with ultimately cracking the case through “really good gumshoe work.”
Then there’s “Uncovering a Terrorist,” which is about a “classic domestic terrorism sting,” Denson said. It’s the book about Mohamud.
“That was a really sad case to write about because Mohamud was just 19,” Denson said. When Mohamud was arrested, he had recently dropped out of Oregon State University, where he’d enrolled following his 2009 graduation from Beaverton’s Westview High School. He was sentenced in 2014, when he was 23, to 30 years in prison.
Writing “Uncovering a Terrorist” was “a real high bar and a really heavy lift because you don’t want kids to think that Muslims are all terrorists,” Denson said. And he felt for Mohamud’s mother and father, whom he described as “wonderful parents who did really heroic things to get to the United States from Somalia at a time when Somalia was in complete and utter chaos.”
“They found safe harbor here in the United States. They found community,” Denson said. “This would have been a crushing blow to any family, and I feel really, really bad for them.”
Both appear in the book, as loving parents so concerned about the path their son is on that his father calls the FBI to report him.
During Mohamud’s trial, the defense argued that his case was one of entrapment by the undercover FBI agents who befriended him. Denson refutes that argument in the book.
“Even though they were sort of at times seemingly goading him into it or at least finding out where he was going to go next … no matter how many times they offered him ways out, he was always, ‘No, I’m boots on the ground, I’m going to do this,’ ” Denson said.
Denson said the book performs “almost a civic duty” in showing kids the danger of extremism, not only on the part of Islamic extremists but also on the part of others willing to “pervert their faiths in the name of God to kill people.”
Ten years after Mohamud’s arrest, Denson said, the case remains relevant. “There have been many dozens of Mohamed Mohamuds rolled up by the FBI in these types of cases,” Denson said. “The FBI is not going to stand down anytime soon.”
