Release the Kracken continues in Oregon.
Via The Oregonian
A police operation meant to protect girls working for a pimp ended with an 18-year-old woman partially stripped, talking sex while massaging a naked police detective in a hotel room.
The 2011 episode in a Vancouver, Wash., hotel was an odd conclusion to a long undercover operation run by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The agency for months bought guns and drugs through a phony store in Gresham.
Prostitution wasn’t a target of “Operation Kraken” because ATF doesn’t investigate human trafficking. But federal agents opened the case even as they shut down the eight-month undercover operation.
Their target was Aaron Key, a Portland teenager already indicted in the guns-and-drugs case. ATF officials said they set up a sex sting in Vancouver as a ruse to arrest Key and to get him away from women they suspected had been compelled to work for him.
“There was concern for these girls,” said Cheryl Bishop, an ATF agent and public information officer in the agency’s Seattle regional office.
The agency couldn’t reconcile that stated concern with events in the hotel room, saying it deferred to other local and federal agencies with human trafficking expertise for help crafting the sting. (The agency issued a statement on the case Tuesday afternoon.)
But the incident only adds to the controversy around Operation Kraken. Congressional leaders have pressed the agency to address in detail the undercover operation in Portland and five other locations around the country.
HT 4MNR