Exclusive: Enter America's Repository of Pain, 100,000 Weapons of War

Nov. 22, 2013<br>WASHINGTON -- Just outside the nation's capital, amid suburban trappings like yogurt shops and yoga studios, chain sports bars and fast food franchises, sits a nondescript building few could guess contains the legacy of two wars terrorists fought with hidden bombs.

It's the FBI's repository of pain.

Inside the brightly-lit and highly secure warehouse that evokes "Raiders of The Lost Ark", the Bureau has neatly stockpiled a "bomb library" of 100,000 remnants of improvised explosive devices, called IEDs, recovered by the U.S. military from battlegrounds mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They've been collected to examine as evidence and intelligence on IED makers, and also to study in order to design technology to defeat them and keep G.I.s alive.

Inside huge white cardboard boxes stacked up to the three-story ceiling are the bits and pieces, the ball bearings and shrapnel, the wires and circuit boards, the melted cell phones and cordless base stations that made weapons responsible for killing hundreds, if not more than a thousand, U.S. troops who deployed in Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn after the 9/11 attacks.

"When you really stop to think of what's in those boxes, it really makes you pause and think of all the troops wounded... by these devices, and it really is kind of sacred ground," Gregory Carl, director of the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center (TEDAC) at the FBI Lab, told ABC News this month.

ABC News was granted a rare visit inside a secret FBI facility few even know about, whose exact location cannot be disclosed for national security reasons, as part of an investigation into Iraqi bombmakers who had resettled in Kentucky as refugees.

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"We've tried to stay under the radar," said Carl, an FBI supervisory special agent. "Obviously we have to balance not informing our adversaries as to the type of work that we're doing here at TEDAC."

In Afghanistan, IEDs have killed 954 U.S. troops over the past twelve years of war. In Iraq, 2,207 Americans were killed by roadside bombs. Tens of thousands of others were wounded.

The warehouse was set up a decade ago as an archive for the weapons when the FBI teamed up with the military to try to study them and identify individual bombmakers, IED networks, IED emplacers and to help the Joint IED Defeat Organization develop intelligence and high-tech counter-measures for G.I.s to use in the warzones to avoid tripping hidden bombs.

Each IED collected -- a practice not common until the later years of both wars -- is prioritized by specialized military units in Afghanistan and formerly in Iraq. A code red item must be examined, photographed and checked for fingerprints or DNA within five days. Amber cases have to be processed in 30 days and green packages are considered low-priority.

An unexploded IED dug up south of Bayji, Iraq on Sept. 1, 2005 by U.S. soldiers in the 467th Engineers Battalion was labeled green when it arrived at TEDAC's Quantico, Virginia intake center back then. But six years later, FBI forensic scientists responded to a plea from FBI agents in Kentucky to find IEDs from Bayji that might be linked to two Iraqi refugees being probed as possible former insurgents.