WTF: FBI Translator Who Investigated ISIS Fighter Wound up Marrying Him

Normally, when you hear about Western women who join ISIS, you imagine gullible, young European girls who are seduced into fleeing their homelands, and marrying ISIS fighters. However, sometimes the women who you think would know better, still get lured in by ISIS.

That’s what happened to 38-year-old Daniela Greene, an immigrant from Germany who migrated to the US after marrying an American soldier. By all accounts, she was a smart, hardworking woman who was a top graduate from Cameron University in Oklahoma. In 2011 she became a contract translator for the FBI with a top-secret security clearance.

In 2014 she was assigned to scan the communications of Dennis Cuspert, a former rapper from Germany who had become a spokesman for ISIS, later one of their top fighters and recruiters. During her investigation of Cuspert, she started communicating with him in secret, and fell in love with him.

In June of 2014, she told the FBI that was she was taking leave to visit her parents in Germany, but instead took a trip to Turkey. She made contact with Cuspert near the Syrian border, and was smuggled into ISIS territory where she married Cuspert. Within a few weeks she was having regrets, and sent a message to one of her friends saying “I am gone and I can’t come back. I wouldn’t even know how to make it through, if I tried to come back. I am in a very harsh environment and I don’t know how long I will last here, but it doesn’t matter, it’s all a little too late.”

Though it’s not clear how she escaped, she managed to make it back to the US where she was promptly arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. What’s also a complete mystery is how a highly educated, adult women who was investigating ISIS; and should have been aware of how screwed up they are, was gullible enough to join them.