That’s the rather startling finding of a Fortune investigation. The basic thrust is that for the most part, the ATF didn’t deliberately allow criminals to buy guns; instead, agents weren’t able to interdict weapons and make arrests because prosecutors told them they lacked probable cause. The only actual incident of gunwalking the investigation turned up, apparently, was allegedly the brainchild of John Dodson, one of the whistleblowers who now says he resisted the tactic. This use of the tactic was approved by an ATF supervisor, but it was not part of Fast and Furious. 
 
 All this is backed up by six months’ worth of reporting and numerous quotes from various sources, though many important figures were not available for comment. The investigation does confirm some comments that a source of mine made — it’s very, very difficult to prosecute people who buy guns with the intention of handing them off to someone else, and sometimes agents simply aren’t able to stop actions that are obviously illegal. It’s hard to explain away several key pieces of evidence that this was not the full extent of the problem with Fast and Furious, though. 
 
 For starters, several ATF officers, including Dodson, have come forward saying that they were told to let guns go when they could have interdicted them. (Fortune presents this as the result of grudges among ATF staff.) Also, while the Justice Department denied in February of last year that “gunwalking” had happened in Fast and Furious, it retracted the claim in December — it’s hard to imagine why they’d concede something like this if it isn’t true, especially when the administration is expending so much effort to fight the congressional Fast and Furious investigation in other ways. (Fortune says the administration is trying to avoid a fight over guns in the run-up to an election.) Further, there is an e-mail exchange between Justice officials about Fast and Furious containing the lines “It’s a tricky case given the number of guns that have walked” and “It’s not going to be any big surprise that a bunch of US guns are being used in MX, so I’m not sure how much grief we get for ‘guns walking.’” While the wiretap applications from Fast and Furious are not public, those involved in the congressional investigation say that they, too, discuss “reckless tactics.” 
 
 And gun dealers who cooperated with the ATF report a shift in policy that coincided with Fast and Furious — from stopping sales and questioning customers, to telling store owners to just go ahead and sell the guns. While Fortune reports that the ATF had no chance to interdict the guns that might have killed Border Patrol agent Brian Terry — the shop that sold the guns informed the ATF that the transaction was suspicious, but it was a holiday weekend and the fax wasn’t seen for days — the gun store’s owner has said he was told in advance to go ahead and sell guns to people he normally wouldn’t. The entire Fortune piece seems to neglect the distinctions between probable cause for an arrest, the act of at least questioning people who are trying to buy guns illegally, and the ATF’s advice to store owners that they refuse to make any sale that they “doubt” is legal. A big part of Fast and Furious is that store owners were told to make illegal sales when the ATF couldn’t follow up on them or chose not to. 
 
 The Fortune investigation dug up a treasure trove of new information, and presents and entirely different side of the story. But it’s far from the last word on Fast and Furious. 
 
 UPDATE: A spokesman for the House Oversight Committee sends along this response to the story: ||||| The controversy over the Fast and Furious anti-gun-trafficking operation upended the careers of two Justice Department officials Tuesday as the interim head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was transferred to an obscure, new post and the well-connected chief federal prosecutor in Arizona resigned. 
 
 ATF’s current acting director, Ken Melson, will move to Justice’s Office of Legal Policy this week to become a senior adviser on forensic science, the Justice Department said. Dennis Burke, the U.S. Attorney for Arizona who oversaw prosecutions in that state related to the Fast and Furious operation, stepped down and left the federal government. 
 
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 Neither Attorney General Eric Holder’s statements nor one from Burke made direct reference to the high-profile congressional investigation or a separate Justice Department probe into the ATF-led operation, which was aimed at reducing the flow of guns to Mexican drug gangs but allegedly allowed as many as 2,000 firearms to pass into the hands of criminals. 
 
 However, Holder and Burke — a prominent figure in Arizona politics — both made vague allusions to distractions currently facing federal prosecutors in Arizona. 
 
 “I am grateful to Dennis for his dedication and service to the Department of Justice over these many years and commend his decision to place the interests of the U.S. Attorney’s office above all else,” Holder said. 
 
 “My long tenure in public service has been intensely gratifying. It has also been intensely demanding. For me, it is the right time to move on to pursue other aspects of my career and my life and allow the office to move ahead,” Burke said in a statement confirming that he’d submitted his resignation to President Barack Obama. 
 
 At a House hearing in June, ATF agents complained that their efforts to seize weapons and arrest alleged traffickers were impeded by the unwillingness of federal prosecutors in Burke’s office to intercede immediately after suspicious gun buys. The agents said prosecutors blamed judicial rulings about the evidence needed to prove gun trafficking or other crimes. 
 
 Sources in Washington and Arizona said Burke was summoned for an interview on Aug. 18 by the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). Burke quickly became the focus of heated questioning and ire from Republicans, a source close to Burke said. 
 
 “My understanding is it did not go well,” the source said. “The bottom line is someone’s head needed to roll. … No one at the Justice Department wanted to back him up.” 
 
 Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the committee, said in a statement that Melson and Burke both acknowledged to the panel that “mistakes were made and that Operation Fast and Furious lacked adequate protections for public safety. Fresh leadership will allow ATF to move forward and focus on its vital mission of enforcing our nation’s gun laws.” 
 
 A lower-ranking prosecutor who dealt with the Fast & Furious operation, Emory Hurley, was also reassigned from criminal cases to civil litigation, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said. The change, which took place Monday, came at his own request, the spokeswoman said. 
 
 The White House had no comment Tuesday on the personnel moves. 
 
 Holder offered no reason for Melson’s reassignment, but simply noted his long tenure at the department and his expertise in forensics. 
 
 Melson, a veteran federal prosecutor, took the top spot at the ATF on an interim basis in 2009 and oversaw the execution of Fast and Furious, an effort that was aimed at rooting out gun smugglers selling weapons to Mexican cartels. Investigators say the ATF lost track of as many as 2,000 guns that were sold during the operation, including two that were found near the scene of the killing of a Border Patrol agent last December. 
 
 In July, Melson gave a lengthy interview to congressional investigators outside the presence of — and without advance notice to — DOJ’s legislative affairs team. In the interview, Melson said he had objected to aspects of DOJ’s plans for handing the legislative inquiries and that he had been told not to tell Congress why mid-level ATF officials with responsibility for the Fast and Furious operation were reassigned.
– The shorthand version of the Fast and Furious scandal goes something like this: ATF agents purposely allowed illegal guns to get into Mexico, then lost track of them, leading to horrific results. But a six-month investigation by Katherine Eban of Fortune magazine comes to a surprising conclusion: That so-called "gunwalking" strategy never existed. "Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal," she writes. "Five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn." How the story morphed into its current version is the result of "distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies." Read the full Fortune piece here. At the National Review, Robert VerBruggen is skeptical about some of the conclusions.