Reuters/Tribune News Service/San Bernardino, California

As Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) divers continued to paddle the murky waters of a San Bernardino lake on Saturday, the federal investigation into the massacre at a county health department party was reaching a critical juncture: Who were the two shooters talking to?
Officials have described Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, as “self-radicalised terrorists” who killed 14 people in the December 2 attack.
But several federal law enforcement officials, speaking confidentially on Friday and Saturday because the investigation is continuing, are also concerned that the two shooters were jointly or independently in direct contact with members of one or more foreign terror operations.
Whether Farook and Malik were ordered to carry out a terrorist attack, though, may well depend on what the divers bring up from the bottom of Seccombe Lake.
On Friday, several undisclosed items were retrieved and the divers went back into the water on Saturday in search of the couple’s computer hard drive and other electronic components.
They wrapped up their search yesterday.
The divers have retrieved objects from Seccombe Lake, Laura Eimiller, a FBI spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.
She declined to describe the objects or say whether they appeared to be tied to the mass shooting.
The FBI was working on a tip that the shooters hurried to the lake and park area on the day of the attack and disposed of personal items there.
In addition, agents have recovered two smashed cellphones from a dumpster, and are examining those and other items from the couple’s Redlands home at the FBI’s crime lab in Quantico, Virginia.
In all, these items are surfacing as key pieces of evidence in what is hoped to eventually unravel the mystery behind the worst terror attack in the US since the morning of September 11, 2001.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week, FBI Director James Comey was asked whether a foreign terror network arranged the couple’s introduction and eventual marriage in order for Malik, a Pakistani by birth related to several radical Islamic militants, to enter the United States from Saudi Arabia after Farook, himself self-radicalised, combed the Internet and travelled abroad in search of a wife.
Evidence of involvement of a terror group in the San Bernardino plot would be a significant game changer.
“Somebody had to put these two people together,” said one FBI source. “It’s a big world for them to just find each other.”
Farook and Malik were separately radicalised before they started courting and married, Comey testified.
Farook escorted Malik to the US in July 2014, two years after he allegedly discussed an earlier terrorist plot with a local friend.
That friend, Enrique Marquez, has told investigators that he provided the couple with two semiautomatic assault rifles used in the San Bernardino attack, federal sources said.
Comey also has noted that the couple sent a joint digital message pledging their allegiance to the militant group Islamic State (IS) on the day of the San Bernardino attack, either just before or after they entered the holiday meeting in camouflage with guns blazing.
Like the 9/11 hijackers who were recruited, trained and financed by foreign terror organisations in their airplane attacks, were Farook and Malik directed to carry out some kind of an assault before deciding on the Inland Regional Centre and killing 14 people in San Bernardino?
Or, as in other smaller terror attacks in the US, were they simply so caught up in the social media vitriol from such groups that, after stockpiling firearms, ammunition and pipe bomb components, the couple decided to act on their own?
“At the least they were inspired to do this,” said one federal law enforcement official. “At the worst, they were not only told to do something, but got help. We’re working toward the worst.”
Said another: “This could end up either way.”
But, the source added, “it’s likely we’ll find some other hands involved, some way.”
Finding those answers will not be not easy. Officials cautioned that it could take weeks or months.
And it is often something difficult to prove even after someone in the US has been in contact with a foreign terror operative.
The difference between inspiring and directing someone to act, the sources said, can often be a very fine line.
In the days before the 2009 attack at Fort Hood, Texas, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen turned Al Qaeda recruiter, sent Army Major Nidal Hasan at least two direct e-mails.
In the attack, Hasan killed 13 people.
Afterward, Awlaki posted on his blog: “Nidal Hasan Did the Right Thing.”
He hailed Hasan as a “hero” and a “man of conscience”.
Hasan was court-martialled and sentenced to death; Awlaki was killed in a 2011 US drone strike in Yemen.