11 Years Later, An FBI Agent Recalls Responding To The Mumbai Terror Attacks

Eleven years ago this week, FBI Special Agent Steven Merrill was headed to play cricket in the Indian city of Jodhpur. Stationed in New Delhi, he was looking forward to his first day off in months. But on his way there, Merrill got word of an unfolding terrorist attack in Mumbai, hundreds of miles away. He jumped on a plane, and when he arrived at one of the hotels under attack, he was the first American federal agent on the horrendous scene. Over the course of the next few days, nearly 200 people would be killed in 12 shootings and bombings across the city, orchestrated by an Islamic terrorist group based out of Pakistan. Merrill now works at the Boston-area FBI field office and lives in Massachusetts. He spoke with WGBH's All Things Considered Host Arun Rath. The transcript below has been edited for clarity.

Rath: When you got to Mumbai, describe what happened from there?

Merrill: Upon my arrival, the first thing I did, I left the airport, got a ride to my hotel. From the hotel, I traveled to the Oberoi Trident Hotel.

Rath: And what was happening at the hotel at that point? And what did you know about Americans that might have been involved, might have been victims?

Merrill: Right. So I knew very little, quite frankly. I had no access, really, to media reports. All I had was information I was able to get on the telephone from the embassy in New Delhi, which wasn't much. So when I arrived, it was just chaos outside the hotel. There were thousands of people standing outside. I didn't know whether there were any American victims or even foreign victims.

Rath: Tell us about about your own personal involvement going forward.

Merrill: Basically, the story at that hotel was that the two attackers came into the lobby and opened fire with an aim of killing as many people as they could.

And after that, they went door-to-door to the guest rooms and knocked on the doors. And if the guests opened the door, then a lot of them were killed by the two terrorists.

Guests would contact the FBI or the U.S. embassy or my foreign partners and let us know that they were trapped in the hotel. They were being victimized, they didn't know what to do, they were being attacked. So all this information was being funneled to me on site, and I would collect that information — for instance, a person's name, a room number — and I would give it to the on-scene commander who I was meeting with on a regular basis at the hotel and pass that information to them.

I didn't get a firsthand look at the inside of that hotel during the attack. These attacks went from Wednesday evening to Thursday afternoon. I came back on Saturday and I saw firsthand the carnage, for lack of a better word, in the hotel, where the entire lobby — all the windows were broken. It was all wet because of the response to the fires that had been in the hotels. There were dozens of dead bodies lying on the hotel lobby floor.

What made the Oberoi Trident of particular interest to the FBI was that six Americans in these attacks were killed, and three of the American victims in Mumbai were killed at the Oberoi Trident Hotel in the lobby where they were having dinner.

Rath: I remember, you know, for our own country on the day of 9/11, it felt like we were hearing from the intelligence community, by the end of the day, they were talking about Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. In this situation, was there a sense right away of who might be responsible? Or how long did that take to settle in?

Merrill: Yeah, you know, that's an interesting question, because at the time there was just so much confusion. I learned later what had been broadcast on the Indian media and the television, and international television as well. And there was a host of guesses and conjecture. But at the time, I don't believe really anyone truly knew who was behind the attacks.

And to make matters worse, we know now that the 10 terrorists that came to Mumbai to commit these attacks carried with them a few weapons, but they also carried with them IEDs, improvised explosive devices. And these devices were used in some ways to create more chaos. And on at least two occasions the terrorists left these IEDs in the taxis that they took to the attack sites, set timers on them, and the taxis drove around Mumbai hours later and these bombs exploded in the cabs, creating a whole new set of attacks. So for anyone to get a true picture as to what happened or what was going on at the time, I can't say anybody truly knew.

Rath: I keep thinking about these pretty horrific scenes that you describe. You're a trained FBI agent, you know about terrorist groups and how they operate. But I'm still wondering with all that, were you prepared at all to see a horrific scene like that?

Merrill: It's nothing I could have expected. Upon seeing the scope of the attacks, my hope was just that I could do something to try to help some of the victims because there were so many. I was just trying to do whatever I could to work with the Indian police, the Indian first responders, to protect as many people as we could during the incident, get the incident over so we could conduct an investigation and figure out what had happened, why this happened, and what can we do to pursue justice for the victims.