Hey, Alphabet Boys listeners, this is Trevor Aronson. I'm here to tell you about a new series from me and Western Sound, Pulse the Untold Story. It's an eight episode investigation of the Pulse night club shooting that will leave you wondering if anything you've heard about this case is true. The series is available exclusively on Audible. In a gay night club in Orlando on June twelfth, twenty sixteen, Omar Matin murdered forty nine people in wounded fifty three others.
The attack was the deadliest act of violence against the LGBTQ plus community in US history, and the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since nine to eleven. But there's a story you haven't heard. The FBI had a secret history with the shooter and his father. To obscure that history, the FBI pushed a false story that the media dutifully carried, that the attacker was a secretly gay Islamist extremist who had chosen to target Pulse and plan
the attack for weeks. In Pulse the Untold Story, I uncover the volatile relationship between the shooter and his father and how their troubled interactions with the FBI lead to one disturbing question. Could the FBI have prevented the massacre? You're about to hear the first episode. To listen to all eight episodes, search for Pulse the Untold Story on the Audible app or go to audible dot com slash Pulse the Untold Story. Start listening today when you sign
up for a free thirty day trial. Here's episode one. On June twelfth, twenty sixteen, Omar Matine calls nine to one one and speaks with an operator Emerson.
I want this is DOCTA. Line's very recorded.
Listen.
What's that I'm working out of?
Stood in there?
I want to let you know I'm in Orlando.
Then I did the shooting.
What's your name?
My name is I pledge of allegiance to Adakhadaddy of the Islamic State.
Okay, what's your name.
I've pledge my allegiance to Abu Baker al Daha. Daddy has to do law on behad of the Islamic State.
Where are you at in Orlando?
Where?
In Orlando?
Omar is inside a bathroom at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Just minutes earlier, he'd slaughtered dozens of people with an assault rifle and a handgun.
Two forty eight am.
Police are now desperately trying to call Omar. There are people trapped inside the bathroom with the shooter. Some are dead, they're blood pooling on the tile floor. Others are alive but wounded. The survivors are motionless, pretending to be dead.
Hellas, hello there, Hi, there, this is Orlando police. Who am I speaking with police?
You're speaking as the person who toasted allegiance to the Islamic state of the Ember aboudity put.
As Omar talks to a hostage negotiator, he reveals his.
Motive to do is prevent anybody else the US air strikes.
They need to stop the US air strikes.
Okay, I understand.
You need to stop the US air strikes. You have to tell the US governments to stop bombing. Are killing too many children, are killing too many women, and they stand that. I feel the pain of the people getting killed in Syria.
In all over than in the pas. Okay, So so I've just done something about that. Yes, I tell me what you did? Please you already know what I did. Well, I'm trying to.
Figure out Omar matein murdered forty nine people and injured fifty three others. His horrific rampage ended with his own death. A police officer shot him in the head three hours after his attack began. You like know about this, You've heard the story. Most people are familiar with the Pulse nightclub shooting. But the story I'm about to tell you here is different because most of what you've heard about
Pulse is wrong. I'm Trevor Aronson from Western Sound. This is Pulse, the Untold Story, an audible original episode, One Needle and a Haystack.
It was a beautiful nightclub with two sections in it. You know where the dancers were and a DJ in one section and the main dance floor DJ there.
This is a man named Orlando Taurus, and he knows the Pulse Nightclub well. Orlando has been going to the club for more than ten years and he's become a promoter of Latin Night. The night Omar Matine walks into Pulse, It's Latin Night, It's Orlando's night, his event. Just before last call, Orlando and a friend head to the bathroom. They take a backway. Not a lot of people know.
About because, as I'm well known, I gotta always say hello everybody, or you know, it's just never got to get to the bathroom. You ain't got time to say hello hello. Everybody stops show. You haven't seen one for a while while you've been you know, so I took the backway.
Orlando goes into the lady's room. The bathrooms that pulse are marked men's and women's, but the signs don't really mean anything. Anyone can use either bathroom.
All of a sudden, you know, I'm hearing pop pop pop. You know, sounds very sharp and clear, crisp, crispy clear.
Orlando and his friend rush into a bathroom stall and close the door. The two men climb up on the toilet, hoping not to be seen.
If it was a gunman shooting out there, he wouldn't see our feet.
Orlando props his butt on the toilet and then presses his feet against the door in front of him. His friend sits on the side of the toilet and lifts his feet up. Orlando hears more gunshots. They're getting closer. He also hears people running into the bathroom looking frantically for a place to hide. Another clubgoer inside the same bathroom calls nine one one.
Hello, God, this.
Is Arnest with their Land Police department on a record a line you've phoned on nine one one? Is everything?
Okay?
No, no, no, no, please of the poll p U L s E in Orlando for the shooting that he give me how many people? How many people are shooting?
I think it's too I don't know how.
I'm in the bathroom a bunch of people and he's shooting at everybody is leaving everywhere. Okay, from what you can see, did you see the description and as see white reppers, Hispanic you can pay, sant can home.
Okay, We're gonna go some hills for you.
Can you tell me anything that they weren't wearing.
Nona's am with you now stand A'm gonna do this.
Sus on the phone with us.
Don't hang up, stay on the phone.
The shooter enters the bathroom an assault rifle in his hands. Orlando quietly pulls out his phone and I started recording.
I pressed my video record.
You can't know.
You can hear Orlando breathing as Omar in the background speaks to the hostage negotiator. Omar says he's planted a bomb, but he's bluffing away inside the bathroom. Cell phones are ringing, the shooting has just hit the news, and concerned family
and friends are calling their loved ones. The attack at the Pulse nightclub has been described many ways the deadliest terrorist attack since nine to eleven, the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, which it was at the time, but is no longer lest attack on a gay community in US history, which it still is. I've been working
as a journalist here in Florida for two decades. For much of that time, I've been covering with a critical eye, the Federal Bureau of Investigation the FBI, the agency tasked with the very difficult job of preventing terrorist tax and
mass shootings. I remember waking up that June morning at my home in Saint Petersburg, Florida, just a two hour drive from where the murders occurred, and seeing the images on the news, police and emergency vehicles, their lights ablaze, Patrons bloodied and shaken sitting on curbs and in nearby parking lots, bodies on the ground covered with drapes to give the deceased final dignity.
There are more than a list of names. There are people who loved and were loved. There are people at families and friends and dreams.
The tragedy becomes a national news event, with CNN's Anderson Cooper on the scene hours after the attack. He reads out the names of the victims.
Juan Ramon Gyerrero, his cousin, said, Juan came out to his family just this year. I was afraid they might not accept him, but they did.
He was twenty two.
Christopher Andrew, known as Drew.
He was Jan's boyfriend.
Well.
The shooter has been identified, of course, as Omar Mattein.
Journalists quickly framed the shooting as an act of terrorism.
In one of the early press conferences around seven am this morning, you had an FBI official say that early leads suggest that he was motivated by jihadist ideology.
But terrorism was only one motive. Were soon told Omar also suffered from an intense internal conflict.
Our team, with new reporting as well on the gunman's secret life.
Reporters and law enforcement broadcast that the shooter was also secretly gay.
A former classmate is now coming forward. Also, patrons of that Orlando nightclub, saying he'd been there many times before and that he'd been on gay dating apps, and the question now was he hiding a life at odds with his strict faith.
This narrative took root because it seemed to make this senseless tragedy makes sense. Several news organizations bring forward men claiming to have had relationships with Omar, including one man disguised with prosthetics and makeup his voice altered.
You had a relationship with Omar Martin?
Yes, I have a relationship with Oma Martin.
Did you have sex with him?
Yes, I do.
It all begins to add up. Attacking a gay nightclub in Orlando allowed Omar to end the war inside of him. Loretta Lynch, then the Attorney General, also endorses the narrative that Omar had targeted Pulse because it was a gay club. I cannot tell you definitively that we will ever narrow it down to one motivation. People often act out of more than one motivation. This was clearly an active terror
and an active hate. A flood of reports followed, claiming that Omar was secretly gay and had been to Pulse in the past.
Well sources, including the hometown newspaper here, The Orlando Central, are now reporting that this was no the shooter's first time at the Pulse nightclub. The Central reports that at least four regular customers had seen him there before one of the.
Cities, but none of this is true. Omar Matin, the shooter, wasn't secretly gay. The FBI knew a lot about Omar Matine for years before his mass shooting at Pulse. Federal agents had investigated Omar twice based on concerns that he might be a security threat, and the FBI promptly closed both investigations. And that's because Omar Matin's father was a confidential informant for the FBI. Sadik Matin secretly provided information
to federal agents for more than a decade. Sadik's work was supposed to help the FBI identify potential terrorists, and then his son kills forty nine people and claims to pledge allegiance to a terrorist organization. Omar becomes the very type of terrorist the FBI pays his father to fined.
For Sadik, this has the potential to threaten his livelihood after his own son commits the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since nine to eleven, So Sadik takes action just hours after the mass shooting, Omar's father starts the false narrative that his son hated gay people and targeted Pulse because it was a gay club.
Did he ever talk about homosexuality except one time that we were in Miami we saw the behavior.
Of one couple and he got a little.
Bit ticked off.
What did he say?
Nothing, just look at this, and what did you say?
Well, there are two guys work kissing each other in front of the family and the kids.
And this false narrative has a convenient effect. It allows the FBI to avoid accountability. The day after the attack, FBI Director James Comy claims the bureau has done nothing wrong.
I don't think so.
I don't see anything in reviewing our work that our agents should have done differently. But we'll look at it in an open, an honest way and be transparent about it.
The FBI has never been transparent about its failings, and the bureau has never explained how federal agents let a mass murderer slip through their fingers, not once, but twice. As a journalist, I've covered the FBI's pursuit of alleged terrorists for over fifteen years. My focus has been on the FBI's use of sting operations, in which the FBI, using an undercover agent or a paid informant, pretends to be a terrorist and offers the opportunity for a would
be terrorist to move forward in an attack. The FBI provides everything the targets of their stings need, money, transportation, prop guns, and fake bombs, sometimes even the ideas for the attacks. Since nine eleven, the FBI has napped more than three hundred and fifty people in aggressive terrorism stings. The overwhelming majority of these people didn't know an actual terrorist, only the FBI agent or informant pretending to be one, and many of the accused were easily manipulated due to
financial desperation or mental illness. The primary way the FBI finds targets of these stings is through informants, and there are more than fifteen thousand FBI informants today. They work for the bureau in exchange for leniency on criminal charges or to make money. FBI informants can make inexcess of six figures a year. That's what Omar Matin's father, Sadiq, was doing for more than a decade, providing information to
the FBI for counter terrorism investigations. The FBI has maintained publicly that terrorism stings are necessary to keep Americans safe to take off the street would be terrorists before they have an opportunity to meet a real terrorist who might help them launch an attack. The FBI's argument is plausible, but hypothetical. It's never really happened. There's never been a case of a would be terrorist with no connections, no money, no weapons, suddenly happening upon an ISIS or all kind
of operative who provides all three. Hey, there would be terrorist. How about a bomb? So I've wondered if the FBI's counter terrorism strategy actually makes us less safe by distracting federal agents from real threats. It's a theory that's difficult to prove, but I started thinking more about this following a trip to Chicago in February twenty twenty. This was only a few years ago, but now seems like a
different time. What I didn't know then, what no one knew then, was that in just a month's time a pandemic would put much of the United States in lockdown. And what I also didn't know then was that I'd be here telling you about why I was in Chicago in February twenty twenty. That's because I never expected to report on or write about any of this. I was in Chicago to attend an event hosted by the Muslim Legal Fund, a nonprofit that funds legal defenses in cases
of abuse of prosecutions under anti terrorism laws. At this event, I'd soon meet the person authorities said could have stopped the Pulse shooting but didn't. Two years earlier, in twenty eighteen, Nor Salman, the widow of the Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Matin, won an acquittal at trial. The Justice Department alleged that Nor assisted with the planning of Omar's attack and provided
misleading statements to investigators. Federal prosecutor's evidence included a lengthy and detailed confession written by an FBI agent and signed by Nor less than twelve hours after the shooting, but a federal jury rejected the confession as coerced and false, along with the rest of the evidence the Justice Department presented.
Nor's acquittal was extraordinary. In the two decades after the nine to eleven attacks, Muslims charged with terrorism in the United States have faced daunting odds before juries of their Peers. Nearly one thousand people have been charged under anti terrorism law since nine one eleven, and just three people, including Nor, have been acquitted at trial. Just three people. Tonight, nor Selman leaving the courthouse without a word.
Outrage from victims' families.
Nor's acquittal made national news, with much of the coverage focused on the gay communities, outrage that she had not been held accountable.
She knew that her husband was doing what he was doing, and shame on her.
I am in this belief is to feel like we've been slapped in the face.
At this conference in Chicago, Nor was scheduled to speak what was to be her first public comments since her acquittal. There was a reception beforehand, and people were milling about talking to old friends and colleagues. I saw Nor off to the side at a table with her son. She looked uncomfortable, so I walked over and introduced myself. She was wearing a black d that matched her long black hair.
We exchanged small talk. She told me about her son, who was just a couple of years older than my daughter, and she confessed that she was nervous. I've never given a speech before. Nor told me blur out the crowd in your mind, as if you're looking into a camera that's out of focus. I suggested, that's what I do. I don't know, she said softly. I just don't know how to do any of this. As Nor confided in me, I looked over to see her son sitting at the table,
his head stooped over a Nintendo switch. He was playing Fortnite, what was then and continues to be the world's most popular video game. In the game, you battle other players with an arsenal of weapons handguns, shotguns, machine guns, rocket launchers. Nora's son, Omar's son was sitting there, navigating the video game, with his character firing round after round from a gun very similar to the one his father youth. I found this moment simultaneously confusing and enraging. How could he play
this game here? How could she allow him to play it? I was thinking all this as Nor stood there next to me, vulnerable, describing how she was so nervous about what she needed to do, but how she was shy, how she lacked confidence, and how she wasn't sure if she just freeze up when placed in front of people. I realized then that I was being unfair Nor in her son didn't kill anyone. They weren't responsible. Against extraordinary odds,
the federal jury acquitted her. I also realized that I allowed my assumptions about her and what happened to color my opinion. But I wasn't the only one. Many Americans did this, assumed that she was somehow responsible and had gotten away with it. Wife should have known. Many of us were guilty of thinking that. A part of me, deep down wanted to blame Nor. A little bit later that evening in Chicago, I took one of Nor's lawyers aside.
Charlie Swift was dressed in a suit, his tie not slightly loosened, and he stared at me intensely through his glasses. Charlie leaned in toward me, uncomfortably close. He has a habit of doing this. He's a close talker.
About a month in they turned over and we located inside the discovery Omar matined and Nora Solomon's cell phone.
Records, Charlie's describing how the Justice Department gave him the evidence in Nor's case. Nor's supposed confession made a few specific claims that Omar targeted Pulse in advance, that she and Omar had previously surveiled the club and that she was aware of his plans for the attack, But data transmitted by Omar's phone and Norris phone didn't support any of that.
We'd identified that tower by the pulse. It's pretty close, and we went and looked for that tower in either of their cell phone records and it didn't exist, not until the night of the shooting.
The phone tower closest to Pulse had communicated with Omar's phone only on the night of the shooting, and it had never communicated with Norris phone. So Charlie hired an expert to analyze data from the tower and the phones.
He was able to tell beyond that, okay, which direction is it receiving. He was able to tell the speed at which they were traveling. He was able to find fragments inside it on directions and searches that were there from that night. And he calls us back a week later and he goes, he did never search for the pulse, and he drove by it at random. And I go, Richard, that's a provocative statement. Can you prove that? He goes
come to Florida. So I got on a plane and I flew to Florida, and he put up the first of a PowerPoint that would be admitted at trial, perfected, and I go, oh my god, wow.
What Charlie and his defense team discovered was completely at odds with the public's understanding of what happened. The cell phone data revealed that Omar took a random route to Pulse and suggested that he chose the club as his target at the last minute. The data also appeared to prove that there was no way that Nor's confession could be true. Omar may not have even realized Pulse was a gay club when he walked in with an assault rifle.
Why has the false narrative that Omar was secretly gay and specifically targeted Pulse persisted because that narrative has been useful for the government.
They had excuses, it's part of an ongoing investigation, blah blah blah. But they would allow facts that were they knew to be false to continue to circulate in the media because it hit their narrative. It's an easy narrative. When you first heard it, you heard there's been a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and they led with gay nightclub. Your immediate part was somebody who hates gay and lesbian persons. Perhaps your first picture
was not of a Muslim. Perhaps your first picture was of some right wing militia that thought gay people should die. Because there have been so many of that in the news, so you're putting together the facts for it. Then you hear, oh, he's a Muslim. Well, okay, they hate gays too. Your mind flashes to these reports that Muslims in extremist countries have executed, killed, murdered gay people.
That night in Chicago, Charlie told me that I needed to look into the case, that this was really a story about FBI accountability.
The FBI is extraordinarily sophisticated when it comes to pr and it is months, sometimes years, before we learn of malfeasance in many cases, or problems on it. They hide it brilliantly.
At the end of the conference, nor stood up in front of everyone to speak. Through tears. She was able to read a few lines from notes as Charlie stood beside her.
There are my case. My family suffered so much. My mother's he hell disoriented, my uncle who was here with me, lost so much weight, and my sister was bullied at school, but they stood by me, just as all of you are staying with me today.
A year or so after the Chicago conference, I started reviewing the government's case against Norsalman, pouring over transcripts and exhibits, and I was examining other cases too, the local investigations the FBI was conducting when agents weren't investigating Omar Matin. Through an examination of the Pulse nightclub shooting and what the FBI did and didn't do, I was coming to realize that the Bureau has had a very good reason
for wanting to hide behind a false narrative. The FBI's entire program to identify and thwart would be terrorists actually makes us less safe. The Pulse nightclub shooting happened not in spite of the FBI's efforts to stop such attacks, but because of those efforts.
So there's like twenty five people that are Yeah, this is like the biggest mass shooting fucking way worse.
This is from police body camera footage in the minutes after the Pulse nightclub shooting, the responding officers are comparing this mass shooting to one that happened seven months earlier in San Bernardino, there's just twenty five people.
Done you ever prere shoppy people dying in that?
One?
Can never any nice? Nine nine.
When the Pulse nightclub shooting happened in June twenty sixteen, it was the deadliest mass shooting in American history. That distinction only lasted for a little more than a year until October twenty seventeen, when a gun ma on the thirty second floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas fired more than one thousand bullets into a music festival below, killing sixty people in wounding more than four hundred.
We live in an age of mass shootings, and the agency task with a difficult job of preventing them is the FBI. That isn't just because the FBI is the nation's top law enforcement agency. Following the nine to eleven attacks, the FBI's top priority became counter terrorism, including stopping high
casualty incidents like mass shootings before they happen. It's an understandably difficult job, but the FBI has vast powers meant to make that job possible, specifically, a post nine to eleven power known as an assessment, that allows the FBI to investigate anyone for just about any reason, so long as agents believe that person might be a security threat.
In other words, if an FBI agent comes across an anonymous social media post claiming that a specific person is planning a mass shooting, that's all that's needed to launch an investigation, no reasonable suspicion required. As is typically the case for opening criminal investigations, FBI agents are looking for what they term leakage, when would be shooters intentionally or
unintentionally reveal clues about their murderous plans. But based on cases we know details about, the bureau doesn't have the best track record. After the mass shooting at Marjorie Stone and Douglas High School in Florida in twenty eighteen, in which seventeen people were killed and seventeen others injured, the FBI acknowledged that agents had received a tip reporting that the future shooter was planning such an attack that our
agents ignored the tip. More recently, in twenty twenty two, you a mass shooting in Colorado Springs drew comparisons to the one at.
Pulse just before midnight last night in Colorado Springs, at a nightclub known as one of the safest places in town for the LGBTQ community. At first, people on the dance floor thought the gunshots were part of the music, stunned to realize it was gunfire and I'm hearing about The.
Club Q gunman was tackled by a patron, preventing what would have otherwise been a deadlier attack. Five people were killed. The murderer ran a neo Nazi website, and he was motivated by hatred for gay people. In that case, the gunman's family had reported to the FBI the previous year that he was building a bomb and making death threats. The FBI opened an investigation of the man, but closed
that investigation less than a month later. Instead, the FBI in Colorado Springs ran sting operations against racial justice activists.
I'm Brandon Kimpball with Drew Rosen and the detective Love and at the FBI Colorados Brings Out office.
In a recorded conversation with one of the activists just a few months before the Club Q shooting, an agent acknowledged what the FBI was doing and then said this as if predicting the future.
We want to keep everybody safe. It's just obviously our we'd like to say, our successes generally don't make the news is and we screw up, it's because something went boom or there is a mass shooting.
So what's unique about Pulse, beyond the scale of the tragedy, is that it was a mass shooting that the FBI made promises about. The bureau promised that agents would give us a full accounting of what happened and whether the attack could have been prevented.
All right, good afternoon, everyone, and thank thank you all for being here today.
The day after the pulsnight club shooting, FBI Director James Comy joined Sally Yates, the Deputy Attorney General, in a press conference.
We're here to discuss the Justice Department's response to this stunning and unconscionable acts in Orlando.
Comy makes clear on the first day of the investigation that federal agents view the attack as an act of terrorism.
There are strong indications of radicalization by this killer and of potential inspiration by foreign terrorist organizations. We are spending a tremendous amount of time, as you would imagine, trying to understand every moment of this killer's path to that terrible night in Orlando. To understand his motives and to understand the details of his life.
Here for the first time in public, Director Comy admits that the FBI had previously investigated Omar Matine.
Our investigation involved introducing confidential sources to him, recording conversations with him, following him, reviewing transactional records from his communications, and searching all government holdings for any possible connections, any possible derogatory information.
The FBI knew Omartin very well and long before he walked into Pulse. But Komy assures the American public that the FBI will continue to investigate what happened in Orlando, and he promises the bureau will be transparent about its own failings.
We will continue to look forward in this investigation and backward. We will leave no stone unturned, and we will work all day and all night to understand the path to that terrible night. We're also going to look hard at our own work to see whether there is something we should have done differently. So far, the honest answer is I don't think so. I don't see anything in reviewing our work that our agents should have done differently. But we'll look at it in an open and honest way.
And be transparent about it. Our work is very challenging. We are looking for needles in a nationwide haystack, but we're also called upon to figure out which pieces of hay might someday become needles. That is hard work. If we can find a way to do that better, we will.
But agents could have done things differently. They'd already found Come's needle and a haystack. The FBI won't release any information about this to this day. The bureau claims that Omar Matine's file remains part of an open investigation, preventing its disclosure to the public. So over the next seven episodes, I'm going to lay out what I've discovered about Omar Matine and the Pulse nightclub shooting, and why the FBI doesn't want what's in their files to be revealed.
There's a relationship, a long relationship, two decades long relationship between the FBI and Almarmantine's father.
I'll introduce you to people who knew Omar and his father.
He could be full of rage, especially if he spoke to that.
So there were times where he would get into a fight with his dad and then come take it out on me.
This is the story of a father and son and their relationship with the FBI. His father was an FBI informant, and it is possibility that Omar may have known that and maybe a way to get back at his father and how a false narrative was created which covered up that relationship.
They start to ask me a questions. I start to wondering, Nai, we won all your accounts from grind there, and also they start to say, are you sure you meant Ohmar? I say yes, I'm very sure.
This is the narrative that people are living with that this man went out and slaughtered forty nine people and wounded fifty three others because they were gay, which is utterly false.
This is Pulse the Untold Story. All eight episodes are available now on Audible. Search for Pulse the Untold Story on the Audible app, or go to audible dot com slash Pulse the Untold Story. Start listening today when you sign up for a free thirty day trial. For more on Pulse the Untold Story, Alphabet Boys, or my other reporting, subscribe to my newsletter at Trevor Aaronson dot substack dot com. Subscribers receive news and updates, as well as promo codes to access new releases,