Last year, Mexican law enforcement, neck-deep in a war with drug cartels, noticed a strange trend and started documenting it. The data confirmed their suspicions: An alarming number of guns turning up at violent crime scenes were being traced to gun dealers in Arizona. They talked to the agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (atf) who were assigned to Mexico, who checked into it.

Soon the scandalous truth came out. It was so shocking that the atf agents couldn’t believe it. When it proved out, they were profoundly embarrassed about their country. They were deeply apologetic to their Mexican counterparts. They scrambled to distance themselves from what had happened. “I hope they [the Mexican police] understand that this was kept secret from most of the atf, including me and my colleagues in Mexico,” said Darren Gil, the atf attaché to Mexico.

He was talking about Operation Fast and Furious, an appalling and indefensible federal investigation that purposefully put hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of high-powered weapons in the hands of the most dangerous drug criminals in Mexico.

It’s an astonishing glimpse at an American government’s willingness to use corrupt and even deadly means to achieve its goals. Culpability is stretching to the highest levels in Washington. And it raises some chilling questions about the future, given the consequences of having such poisonous thinking in such powerful offices.

Between September 2009 and December 2010, U.S. authorities dumbly watched—sometimes on a live video feed in Washington—as “straw buyers” patronized Phoenix-area gun stores. It’s a felony to buy weapons for someone else, but the atf knew that’s exactly what these people—a total of 20 of them—were doing. These individuals purchased an arsenal of over 2,000 assault weapons, sniper rifles, semi-automatic pistols and other deadly firearms. And frustrated atf agents were ordered to just let the weapons go as they then crossed the border into Mexico.

Supposedly, the plan was that this flow of gun traffic would lead authorities to drug cartel honchos. However, no effort was made to track the movement of the guns.

So what was the point? This fact seriously calls into question the real motives behind the program.

A much smaller but somewhat similar program during the Bush administration tried to track weapons that made it into Mexico, but canny gun buyers found ways to defeat the system. Once weapons began getting lost, the program was considered a failure and shut down. Apparently the lesson wasn’t learned though, as Fast and Furious multiplied the mistakes of that previous effort many times over.

Today, the whereabouts of about half of the Fast and Furious weapons are unknown. Hundreds of them went to drug smugglers and violent gangs and turned up in bloody shootouts all over Mexico, from Acapulco in the south to the Gulf in the east and Baja California in the west. Thugs used these guns to unleash an untold amount of crime and carnage throughout the country.

Hence the humiliation of the atf officers in Mexico who knew nothing of the program. Mr. Gil told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in July that he found it “inconceivable” that an atf agent would purposefully lose track of such weapons. The atf’s acting attaché in Mexico, Carlos Canino, angrily told the committee that “never in my wildest dreams” would he have thought atf agents would do such a thing.

Nevertheless, they did—and on orders from high up. To make matters worse, apparently, the loss of life in Mexico was considered an acceptable cost. It wasn’t until last December, after 15 months, that the program’s architects were finally forced to admit failure and stop it—when an American was killed and the story went public. On Dec. 14, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered by a Mexican smuggler with a wasr-10/63 assault rifle illegally purchased under U.S. federal supervision at the Lone Wolf Trading Co. in Glendale, Arizona.

It was the highest-profile of at least a dozen violent crimes within America tied to Fast and Furious weapons.

What were the instigators of this program thinking, really? The “botched sting operation” logic just doesn’t add up. The murky situation has become a playground of speculation.

Efforts to get to the bottom of what happened and why have been unfolding for eight months, and the plot is only getting thicker. Evidence is mounting of intensive cover-up efforts at various levels. Every last manager involved in Fast and Furious was reassigned elsewhere. The former acting director of the atf says the Department of Justice told him to keep those individuals and the reasons for their being moved quiet. Last May, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that he’d only heard about Fast and Furious “over the last few weeks,” but recent reports say he had actually been receiving briefings about it since early last summer. A couple weeks ago the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subpoenaed the Department of Justice, and chairman Darrell Issa said that top doj officials including the attorney general “know more about Operation Fast and Furious than they have publicly acknowledged.” Recently it was released that White House staffer Kevin O’Reilly, a member of Obama’s National Security Council during the time of Fast and Furious, had had extensive communications with Phoenix atf Special Agent in Charge Bill Newell. When the House Oversight Committee said it wanted to talk to O’Reilly, the White House announced he’d just been shipped to Iraq on a special mission and couldn’t be reached. An American journalist found O’Reilly’s phone number there, as part of the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Bureau for Iraq, and left a message. After that, though, the number, which had been in service for years, was deactivated.

It all certainly has the stench of a cover-up. If that’s what it is, then what is being covered up? Some observers suggest that Fast and Furious was deliberately designed by anti-gun leaders to inflate the statistics of how many American guns are in Mexico in order to provide momentum to gun control legislation in the U.S. Some point to evidence that the American government has actually taken sides in the Mexican drug gang war and is helping the Sinaloa cartel to rise to the top. Such possibilities become harder to discount in light of purely what is known about this program, let alone what further facts haven’t yet come to light. A cbs News reporter has found allegations of similar “gun walking” programs in at least 10 American cities in five states. Who is now in possession of these guns? How might such dangerous, corrupt activities come back to haunt us in the future?

Fast and Furious raises many chilling questions. With the Bible prophesying of barbaric violence overtaking America’s cities, the potential dangers posed by a government that—whether out of stupidity or outright malice—is patently aiding and arming some of the world’s most brutal criminals become far more disturbing to contemplate.