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Robert S. Mueller III
Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation
I had been on the job exactly one week when word came that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. For us at the FBI command center, it was a surreal moment, understanding that this flying bomb was headed our way, yet not knowing where it was going: the White House, the Capitol, or elsewhere in Washington D.C. We knew that our institution would never be the same after that shocking day. Our first thought was to do what we'd always done after a terrorist attack: set up command centers and start managing the crisis from a law enforcement perspective by getting control of the crime scenes and beginning to gather evidence.
At the same time, we realized that we had to conduct this investigation somewhat differently. These attacks were not just an act of terror; they were an act of war. The most pressing issue for us was to find out who we were at war with and to make sure we were not attacked again. The FBI began working in concert with its many partners to find out everything about the hijackers and how they pulled off their attacks. We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on, from flight reservations to car rentals to bank accounts.
What emerged from our massive investigation was a sobering portrait of 19 hijackers who carried out their attacks with meticulous planning, extraordinary secrecy and extensive knowledge of how America works. The plans were hatched and financed overseas, beginning as long as five years ago. Each of the hijackers came from abroad: 15 from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, and one each from Lebanon and Egypt. All 19 entered our country legally, and only three had overstayed the legal limits of their visas on the day of the attacks. While here, the hijackers did all they could to stay below our radar screens. They contacted no known terrorist sympathizers. They committed no egregious crimes. They dressed and acted like Americans, shopping and eating at places like Wal-Mart and Pizza Hut. When four got speeding tickets in the months leading up to September 11, they remained calm and aroused no suspicion. Since none of them were known terrorists, law enforcement had no reason to question or detain them.
The hijackers also left no paper trail. In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper – in the U.S. or in Afghanistan – that mentioned any aspect of the September 11th plot. The hijackers had no computers, no laptops, and no storage media of any kind. They used hundreds of different pay phones and cell phones, often with prepaid calling cards that are extremely difficult to trace. And they made sure that all the money sent to them to fund their attacks was wired in small amounts to avoid detection.
In short, the terrorists managed to exploit loopholes and vulnerabilities in our systems, to stay out of sight, and not let anyone know what they were up to beyond a very closed circle. The investigation allowed us to see where we as a nation needed to close gaps in our security. And it gave us clear and definitive proof that Al Qaeda was behind the strikes.
At the same time, we were taking other steps to track down any potential associates who might still be out there and capable of further attacks. We went to the flight schools to identify associates of the hijackers. We went to those who run a popular travel website that several of the hijackers used to make their flight reservations. With the help of state and local authorities, we interviewed thousands of persons to develop a full picture of the hijackers and their associates. In the U.S., a number of suspects were detained on federal, state or local charges; on immigration violations; or on material witness warrants. Ultimately, these and other actions with our partners around the world, I believe, have helped to prevent future terrorist attacks.
Our investigation moved from the events of September 11 to the anthrax attacks, to the kidnapping and murder of a Wall Street Journal reporter in Pakistan and to the foiled shoe bombing on the flight from Paris to Miami. Through it all, the FBI had become part and parcel of what now is called "homeland security," a government-wide campaign to protect America from further terrorist attacks.
The homeland security effort is being waged on many fronts. The law enforcement component is building cases against terrorists in the court of law. The military component is deploying our armed forces to attack terrorist strongholds overseas. The intelligence component is using information and analysis to anticipate and to prevent attacks, and to better understand the enemy. The diplomatic component is building an international coalition against terror. The financial component is drying up the pool of funds used by terrorists. And the public health component is preparing to save lives and to protect our communities. Today, the FBI is fully integrated in this campaign. We realize that what we do to help our colleagues is every bit as important as what we do within our own agency.
Our role in homeland security builds upon what we have been doing for many years. We're still the lead law enforcement agency for counter-terrorism. We're still assessing threats and issuing warnings and advisories to our law enforcement partners and to the American people. We're still leading the multi-agency National Infrastructure Protection Center. And most of all, our top priority is still prevention.
Terrorists have shown that they are willing to go to great lengths to destroy America. We must be willing to go to even greater lengths to stop them. Our worldwide network must be more powerful, our financial commitment stronger, our techniques and training more sophisticated and our sense of urgency and intensity greater.
Since the attacks, President Bush requires a briefing at 8:30 each morning. Together with George Tenet, the director of the CIA, we go over what we call the "threat matrix" – a list of every threat directed at the U.S., whether here or overseas, and what the FBI has been doing in the last 24 hours, in concert with our partners, to run down each of these threats. He wants to be absolutely sure that we are aggressively pursuing every angle and every lead, so that America never wakes up to another morning like September 11.
George Tenet calls those meetings "galvanizing," recognizing that you simply cannot walk into that briefing without feeling completely confident that your people are on top of every issue. You cannot come back day after day without being sure that your agency is taking every step to make prevention both a priority and a reality. In the bureau, we have taken a long, hard look in the mirror to see how we measure up to this mandate. We see some strong counterterrorism capabilities and additional expertise that has been refined over time and sharpened by experience, but we also see areas where we could do far more.
First, we are putting more resources into the fight, overhauling our counterterrorism operations so that we have twice as many agents focused on prevention. As we hire nearly one thousand new agents this year, we are also recruiting the right mix of skills – computer, scientific and language – that we need to fight terrorism. We are also expanding and improving our analytic capability. We need to have a complete grasp on how terrorists operate. We need to do more strategic thinking that helps us stay one step ahead of those who would do us harm.
Second, we are overhauling our technology. For all the state-of-the-art systems in our laboratory, for all the high-tech services we provide to law enforcement, the bureau has simply not kept pace when it comes to the equipment on our desktops. We have computers discarded by other agencies that we take up as upgrades. We have systems that cannot talk with other bureau systems, much less with other federal agencies. We have 34 different investigative applications, none of which are particularly easy to use and all of which must be integrated. We will put in place new hardware this year and we will overhaul our key applications by the end of next year. Our goal is a near-paperless environment, a development that will put us light years ahead of where we are today. Technology will also help us share information more quickly and effectively outside the bureau. We're working to create a database – one that sits on top of others – that we can use to share information and intelligence with the outside world. We hope to test it later next year.
Third, effective prevention requires strengthening the defensive infrastructure of the country. This means immigration and customs programs that keep terrorists out, airports that are secure, and seaports that are on alert. It also means a national program where the FBI joins with state and local law enforcement to form a national anti-terror network. There are just over 11,000 special agents in the FBI. There are over 650,000 state and local law enforcement officers. An integrated national program that combines our resources and expertise substantially increases the safety of all Americans.
Finally, prevention also means something America has not really focused on before September 11: an aggressive – but rigorously lawful – program of disruption abroad and at home. The September 11 terrorists had the luxury of time and tranquility to put the pieces of their plan in place. From the training camps of Afghanistan to the universities of Germany to the flight schools of America, they were able to assemble the components of their plan and pick their moment to execute it. We cannot afford them this operational luxury again. For America, prevention must include an international offensive capability in which the intelligence and law enforcement resources of the global community are integrated into a program to disrupt and attack terrorist operations in their infancy.
This international component, as much as any other ingredient, heralds a new day for the FBI. In a post-9/11 world, partnerships abroad equal security at home. We are working to build these partnerships through our 44 overseas offices, what we call "legal attachés." They are an important first line of defense against terror, enabling us to build the kind of face-to-face personal relationships we need to track down terrorists around the globe.
Al Qaeda and other international groups have developed networks around the world. We need the same kind of networks to defeat them. Even in this age of sophisticated technologies and techniques, it is critically important that we sit down with a colleague and develop a rapport that will ultimately help us build a national and international coalition against terror.
As we in the bureau move through a period of intense change, and as we adjust to our new role in homeland security, we must be flexible and open-minded. We can never afford to cling to the status quo. Where our capabilities are strong, they must be stronger. Where problems exist, we must acknowledge them, fix them and move on. In the past, the FBI has sometimes made problems worse by ignoring or denying them. We cannot do it that way in the future. We have to acknowledge problems and be ahead of the curve in fixing them. That has been our approach in recent months, and it will remain our approach.
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers