Instantly after the assaults, the FBI’s high job was to determine the attackers and forestall one other incident. Consultants in terrorism, proof assortment, and different specialties labored feverishly to find out what had occurred and who was accountable. The FBI additionally coordinated with its companions in regulation enforcement and the intelligence group domestically and overseas because it launched its most formidable investigation ever.
Inside minutes, officers at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., activated the Strategic Info and Operations Heart. By the top of the day, the FBI had established command posts for every of the three crash websites.
1000’s of brokers interviewed witnesses and sources. They tracked down clues and ideas worldwide to find out what had occurred, who did it, and the way future acts may very well be prevented. The FBI began figuring out the 19 terrorists inside hours.
Then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, III broke with routine and primarily based the huge investigation out of FBI Headquarters as an alternative of a subject workplace. The PENTTBOM Group—quick for Pennsylvania, Pentagon, and Twin Towers Bombing—coordinated the investigation out of a basement workplace, the place dozens of brokers would construct a case in opposition to these accountable.
The case, which stays open, revealed extraordinary acts of braveness and selflessness among the many spectrum of responders. And it ceaselessly modified the way in which the FBI works with regulation enforcement and intelligence group companions to maintain People protected within the U.S. and overseas.
“Due to that horrible day, beginning in 2001 beneath the management of Director Mueller, the FBI remodeled itself in ways in which have made us stronger and higher—and our nation safer,” Director Christopher Wray mentioned in 2019 throughout a go to to the Nationwide September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York Metropolis.
