This is the story of where the FBI was on September 11th, 2001. This is what they did — and did not — have when it came to counterterrorism and how the tragedy of that Tuesday morning transformed the Bureau. Our guide is Sasha O’Connell, the director of the Terrorism and Homeland Security Program at American University who spent the bulk of her career working for the FBI.
Episode Segments
Transcript
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:00] Hey, there a quick favor. We are conducting an audience survey, and we would be really grateful if you could take just a few minutes to answer it. Please visit Survey.PRX.Org/Civics101 to take the survey today. That survey.prx.org/Civics101. Thanks.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:19] September 11 2021 marks the 20th anniversary of a tragedy that forever and profoundly changed the United States of America. Some of [00:00:30] you who live in the United States and are listening right now witnessed and experienced those changes. Some of you have never lived in a world without them. Over the course of this year, Civics 101 is going to be exploring and interrogating those changes. How did our government, our civil liberties, our security and society pivot following the attacks of that Tuesday morning?
Nick Capodice: [00:00:56] This will be an ongoing series that you'll hear intermittently throughout [00:01:00] the year. After all, the government and societal effects of 9/11 are not isolated to one date or one anniversary. They've been happening for 20 years and will continue to do so. So every once in a while, you'll encounter an episode from this series in your feed. And we also want to hear from you as we work through it. How has your relationship to the U.S. government and its leaders changed, if at all, in the 20 years since 9/11? Send a voice memo to Civics101@Nhpr.org. We hope [00:01:30] to use it in these episodes.
Sasha O'Connell: [00:01:47] And I remember very clearly by the end of that day, there was photographs of all the hijackers around the room, so the airlines were sending us manifests of their of their passengers, whether we had asked for it or not, which is kind [00:02:00] of crazy. And it was just pouring off the fax machine and the banks were sending us lists that they were worried about and it was pouring off the fax machine. So I have this really strong memory of this paper pile behind me just piling up. And with sort of unsolicited information pouring in to one field office, you can imagine what was happening across the country.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:20] I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:21] I'm Nick Capodice,
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:22] And that is the voice of Sasha O'Connell, a woman who spent most of her career in various roles at the FBI because [00:02:30] we're starting this Civics 101 series with a look inside the world of the people on the inside. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an organization so synonymous with government its agents have long been referred to as quote G-men.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:47] I never knew that the G in G-men stands for government men?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:50] Yeah, government men.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:51] Totally new to me.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:52] For those who don't know, the FBI is also now synonymous with counter terrorism. That is the bureau's [00:03:00] explicitly stated number one priority, one of its best resourced missions. But it wasn't always that way at the FBI. So this is the story of how it happened, how four planes hijacked by the terrorist group Al Qaeda, three United States targets and nearly 3000 deaths -- the tragedy of September 11th, 2001 -- changed the FBI.
Sasha O'Connell: [00:03:27] I actually joined right into the counterterrorism program what [00:03:30] was then the International Terrorism Operations section? I joined in '98.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:34] Right now, Sasha is the director of the Terrorism and Homeland Security Policy Program at American University. But in September of 2001, she was working for the FBI.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:45] Before we go any further, Hannah, can you tell me what is the FBI? What do they do?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:49] The FBI investigates federal crimes. Now, the bureau itself lists those crimes in order of priority. We talked about priorities, right? And domestic and international [00:04:00] terrorism is number one. There's also international counterintelligence.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:05] Is that meaning like spies?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:07] Yeah, meaning spies. The FBI is supposed to prevent international spies from doing their job in international cyber attacks from happening. And cybercrime, by the way, is on that list of priorities, as is combating public corruption, white collar and violent crime and protecting civil liberties. They also handle stuff like organized [00:04:30] and drug related crime and health care fraud. And then the FBI works with the attorney general of the United States to get those crimes prosecuted.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:38] You said that the FBI's job is in part, protecting civil liberties.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:42] Yeah, they're supposed to be upholding the Constitution in their daily dealings.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:48] Ok, so the elephant in the room, if we're talking about the FBI and September 11th, it's the degree to which those civil liberties were or were not upheld after the attacks.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:59] This is [00:05:00] a very important point. I'm glad you brought this up. We will absolutely be addressing the rise of surveillance and how the U.S. government impinged on privacy, among other rights, following September 11th, 2001. That will come in other Civics 101 episodes, for example, about acts of Congress that resulted in some fairly carte blanche interpretations of surveillance powers. But today, for the purposes of this episode, we are looking at where the FBI [00:05:30] was on counterterrorism pre-9/11 and how those attacks changed it.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:38] Ok, fair enough. Got it. So back to the place of the FBI in the federal government. It's part of the DOJ, the Department of Justice, right?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:48] Yeah, that's the close work with the attorney general, right? That's who they work with to prosecute these crimes.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:53] Ok, so that makes it an executive branch department, which is run in the end by the president.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:59] And it [00:06:00] is through the Presidential Management Fellows program, which is designed to place grad students in federal jobs. That Sasha O'Connell, our guest today, ended up at the FBI in the International Terrorism Operations section
Sasha O'Connell: [00:06:16] In the years before September 11th, there was a real strong initiative underway at the FBI. Not only was the FBI working terrorism cases with partners, but also there was a restructuring in order to focus on terrorism [00:06:30] and a whole strategic planning process called Max Cap 05. That was ongoing, and I had the extraordinary opportunity, as one does as a young person in government to get to staff the working group that was sorting through, leading, building, assessing the program and building that strategic plan. So I was knee deep in that kind of strategic view of the terrorism program at the FBI on the lead up to 9/11.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:56] So if the FBI was working on this strategic plan to deal with [00:07:00] international terrorism, how does something as big as all the attacks on September 11th get through?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:07] That is the sort of perennial question of 9-11, not just when it comes to the FBI, but when it comes to all levels of government. There was a lot of scrutiny of the FBI following. This tragedy, because the question was, how could this have happened? And can the FBI really have been paying close attention to international [00:07:30] terrorism if this did happen?
Sasha O'Connell: [00:07:33] It couldn't be possible that the bureau was both focused and this happened, right? That couldn't be possible in people's minds. And in fact, it's much more nuanced than that. And that is possible, right? There was a contingent of the government that was extraordinarily focused on al Qaeda, including this program at the FBI before 9/11. But that's not enough, right? And one of the big lessons in my mind of 9/11 is, you know, having a small group looking around [00:08:00] the corner, having a small group, you know, focused on a threat is is not enough.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:05] While we're on the subject of how this all happened. I actually remember reading the 9/11 Commission Report, which is something that Congress and President George Bush requested after 9/11 to figure out what went wrong. It is tremendously well written. I remember that one of the major findings of the report was the FBI and other government agencies were not sharing information, and that likely [00:08:30] contributed to the success of these attacks on September 11th.
Sasha O'Connell: [00:08:33] We obviously had the 9/11 commission, which is an amazing if people haven't read it and you're really interested in what happened and where the gaps were. I mean, they do an incredible job. They did an incredible investigation, and the report is an incredible resource to understand what was happening.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:46] This report takes a look at a 1998 FBI plan to combat terrorism and says, and this is the actual wording here, "The plan did not succeed." The report determines that the FBI [00:09:00] was under-resourced. There were twice as many agents at the time, working drug enforcement as there were working counterterrorism. The training was insufficient. The information systems were lacking. They didn't have enough translators in key languages. The unit that Sasha was working on in 2001, Max Cap 05, was designed to increase FBI counterterrorism capability to maximum capacity feasible [00:09:30] by 2005. In September of 2001, almost every FBI field office was considered to be operating below maximum capacity.
Sasha O'Connell: [00:09:45] It was a Tuesday morning and it was bright and sunny, and yes, it was September 11th and I got married on November 17th in Boston, so we were knee-deep in wedding planning and I had a dress fitting on the South Shore that afternoon, so I was supposed to leave work early. I remember [00:10:00] what I was wearing and so I was pretty much focused on that that day, right? And not on work. I was in the Boston office, as I mentioned, and I didn't know a lot of people in the Boston office because I was up from headquarters and sort of placed in a pod, you know, a cubicle in the corner doing my work. And I just said hello to a few people over the summer, but I didn't really have relationships. So what happened actually in that morning was an agent who was sitting couple sort of rows away from me in the cubicles, had a little tiny TV in his cubicle at the time. [00:10:30] We didn't have what we now have everywhere, right, which is big screen TVs and every every floor of the FBI. And he stood up. I remember and said, something's happening.
News archival: [00:10:40] And I looked up and all of a sudden a plane smashed right there into the center of the World Trade Center.
Nick Capodice: [00:10:46] And Boston was a particularly significant place to be on this day because both planes that hit the Twin Towers came from Logan Airport in Boston.
Sasha O'Connell: [00:10:55] I remember looking out the window once we started to put some of the pieces together because [00:11:00] at the time it since changed. The Boston office of the FBI was actually in a private commercial building, but the federal building was right across the street. And I have a very distinct memory of thinking a plane is going to hit the building across the street, right? That's what's going to happen.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:12] There's some chaos and uncertainty. But eventually, Sasha remembers hearing from headquarters in Washington, D.C., and basically being told to get to work on this. After all, she is on the counterterrorism team,
Sasha O'Connell: [00:11:26] And I walked up to the executive floor and there was the leadership [00:11:30] team was standing in the hallway talking and I said, My name is Sasha. I'm here from the counterterrorism division at headquarters. And they said, Go to the basement, get a car and go to the airport. And I said, I'm not an agent. And they said, Great, get in the command post,
Nick Capodice: [00:11:43] Get in the car, go to the airport. What exactly is supposed to be going on on the FBI agent side of things in a case like this and folks
Sasha O'Connell: [00:11:52] Say, I want to work for the FBI or I want to be an FBI agent, like, what do you think they do right? And the truth is, most of what FBI agents do is talk to people. They interview people. Right. [00:12:00] So a lot of what was happening on that day, and this is when they said to me, go to the airport. They thought it was an agent. It's go start talking to people, right? That's how you collect human intelligence is you talk to people, right? So you talk to people at the airport. What happened, how they got on the plane? You talk to the baggage handlers, right? And you come back. And then there's a process that the FBI called setting a lead.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:19] Sasha is talking about gathering intelligence. I always thought intelligence gathering was the purview of the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:27] It absolutely is. Yes, both the CIA [00:12:30] and the FBI are part of the intelligence community, although the CIA is prohibited from collecting information regarding quote U.S. persons. Did you know that?
Nick Capodice: [00:12:40] No, I did not.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:41] The CIA is also not empowered as a law enforcement agency the same way that the FBI is. But to that point, prior to 9/11, the CIA was the lead against Al Qaeda. And when this attack happens on American soil, the FBI has to prioritize its focus on that terrorist [00:13:00] group as well. And these agents cannot leave any stone unturned in these cases, even in the chaos following the attacks. These agents had to figure out where physically to go, what specifically to ask in order to clarify what happened that day.
Sasha O'Connell: [00:13:18] What happened? Where did this bag come from? Who handled it right? They found the car in the parking lot. You've got to talk to the parking lot attendant, right? You're going to find litter in the car, then you're going to go to the hotel [00:13:30] where the receipt was in that car. All these things happen on 9/11, right?
Nick Capodice: [00:13:33] When Sasha says they found a car in a parking lot. What are they talking about? Was it a suspect's car? Was it like one of the hijackers car at the airport?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:42] Yes. Agents found both the car and the luggage of the individual, later considered to be the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks. And they found these at Logan Airport when they went to the airport. Again, Boston is a central element in the investigation on day one. [00:14:00]
Nick Capodice: [00:14:00] What was the luggage they found?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:02] Mohamed Atta's luggage. That's the ringleader. Just as an aside, his suitcase was only discovered because it never made it onto the plane in Boston after his connecting flight. Totally incidental. I feel like details like this really illustrate the significance of minutia in an FBI investigation. The suitcase and the car were full of evidence. And, you know, once the agents find this [00:14:30] evidence, they have to pass it on. They coordinate. They follow leads and they put the story together. And this is happening not just in Boston or around the country, but around the world.
Sasha O'Connell: [00:14:41] You can literally picture just the world lighting up with people talking to people and. Trying to figure out what's going on. Similarly, using other intelligence methods right to do that, whether that's sort of a digital collection, opportunities, right, but it's information gathering is a huge piece of kind of what's going on. And [00:15:00] then there's a lot of capacity back, whether it's in a field office or at headquarters trying to put those pieces together because this whole world is getting laid up and all this information is coming in and a you have to coordinate all those people and be you then have to coordinate all that intelligence, right? Which is just a fancy word for facts and information that are coming in.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:19] And the coordination part, that is Sasha on September 11th. She's in the command post and evidence is pouring in.
Sasha O'Connell: [00:15:27] We started getting markers and whiteboards [00:15:30] and made sure the fax machine was turned on and someone brought in an extra phone.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:34] Sasha mentioned that today FBI field offices have these big, beautiful conference rooms with loads of screens and resources. But on 9/11, she is in a windowless room with just a phone and a fax machine. This is before this anti-terrorism effort was majorly resourced.
Sasha O'Connell: [00:15:52] And I remember very clearly by the end of that day, there was photographs of all the hijackers around the room that [00:16:00] were printed out and we could see and there was paper all the way around the room. And by the end of the day, my two biggest memories were one that the fax machine was right behind me. So I was sitting at a conference table and the fax machine was right behind my back. And paper was just pouring off the fax machine because airlines and banks. So the airlines were sending us manifests of their of their passengers, whether we had asked for it or not, which is kind of crazy. And it was just pouring off the fax machine and the banks were sending [00:16:30] us lists that they were worried about and it was pouring off the fax machine. So I have this really strong memory of this paper pile behind me just piling up. And with sort of unsolicited information pouring in to one field office, you can imagine what was happening across the country.
Nick Capodice: [00:16:45] What's up at the banks? The airlines thing makes perfect sense, but how are the banks connected
Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:51] At this stage in counterterrorism in this country, U.S. banks were already expected to block any Al Qaeda transactions [00:17:00] and seize their funds. But the hijackers of 9/11 made extensive use of U.S. banks. The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that nothing these attackers did would have tipped off the banks, but still after those attacks, anything is potential evidence anyway. Sasha is processing all of this incoming information.
Sasha O'Connell: [00:17:22] My job is to man that phone and talk to headquarters, figure out, you know, understand what they needed from the Boston office. And that's how we work 12 [00:17:30] hour shifts for the next oh, about eight weeks. And I did leave sort of duty in the command post shortly before my wedding.
Nick Capodice: [00:17:38] The pressure at this moment must have been incredible, especially for someone who, as you said earlier, was quite young and quite new to the bureau. Did Sasha say what it was like for her during those two months?
Sasha O'Connell: [00:17:51] Day one, it was just it's a blessing and a curse, right? You're so busy you don't have any time to think, and it's wonderful because you're busy and you feel like you're contributing. [00:18:00] But I wasn't thinking I was trying to survive and solve problems, right? And find the paper or clean up the fax machine or find George and run down a lead. There was no time to think. We didn't even have a TV in the command post at the time, so it's something I didn't realize. I think I mentioned to you that the first anniversary 9/11, I saw the pictures really for the first time in the video, right? I hadn't seen them. We were too busy just trying to get things sorted out or get agents to the airport, get the evidence back, you know? And again, I'm just trying to keep lists and keep organized. [00:18:30]
Nick Capodice: [00:18:30] It's just you would think that someone who is so closely involved with the investigation would be inundated with images and footage and news the way that we in the U.S. were every waking moment.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:40] You know, I think it would have been different had Sacha been in a modern command post surrounded by televisions and news analysis. Instead, it was her and a phone and a fax machine. And this constant drive to figure out the who, what, when, where [00:19:00] and why of September 11th.
Nick Capodice: [00:19:03] All right. Speaking of the modern command post versus the FBI that Sasha worked for in 2001, can we get into the changes that happened after the September 11th attacks? You had people in the FBI who were pretty clear on the fact that they needed to beef up counterterrorism efforts. So did they?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:22] Sasha left the FBI in 2002 to work for the private sector. She came back in 2007, and when [00:19:30] she did, the Bureau had reassessed its whole approach to counterterrorism. And the lack of resources that was no longer a problem for the counterterrorism effort.
Sasha O'Connell: [00:19:42] The counterterrorism program is resourced, so all the things we were asking for before 9/11 training translation analysis, right when we did that assessment, there were gaps. We knew there were gaps. We were asking for it in the budget and we weren't getting it from Congress, right? It just wasn't coming. And by the time I got back, like amazing, like we have all those [00:20:00] things right that had happened. And then the other interesting thing that had happened and I never worked in the counterterrorism division after, but it was the head of strategy. So I got to work a little bit with all the divisions for a time is that before 9-11, the counterterrorism division operated much like the criminal division in that cases were more decentralized. So a special agent in charge of a field office like in New York, I'm one of the largest field offices. We're really responsible as they are on the criminal side for their cases. And there was sort of programmatic oversight at headquarters. [00:20:30] And, you know, obviously the most sensitive cases got briefed to the director or whoever needed for legal review. But fundamentally, there was kind of this decentralized approach to case management during the time that I was white and really since the counterterrorism program swung the other direction. One hundred and eighty degrees cases are really centrally managed out of FBI headquarters.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:53] Prior to this, FBI field offices were fairly autonomous operations. And that autonomy ended with [00:21:00] 9/11 and this new approach to counterterrorism. A lot of people actually blamed this decentralized element of the FBI for some of the failures that allowed 9/11 to happen. And when Sasha returned to the FBI, de-centralized was a thing of the past.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:19] I heard a lot about Joint Terrorism Task Forces, were these part of the restructuring.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:26] Yeah, but Joint Terrorism Task Forces had been around [00:21:30] since nineteen eighty. They started in New York City on nine eleven. We had thirty five of them in the U.S. These were locally based investigators and analysts who are in various states and supposed to watch out for terrorist activity in the U.S.. Now, after 9/11, the FBI almost overnight nearly doubled these forces. They had 56 forces in the days after 9/11. We now have 104. The FBI also [00:22:00] established a national joint terrorism task force at headquarters in D.C., which coordinates all of these local task forces. Again, this is all part of this big centralization movement. And the bureau also reassessed how it gathered and reported information. Part of the problem leading up to nine eleven was communication and coordination across the bureau itself and with other agencies. [00:22:30]
Sasha O'Connell: [00:22:30] There had been a major initiative called SET, which looked at and then realigned the way the FBI did intelligence intake collection and reporting. So it was really about the business process and the prioritization of intelligence collection and shoring up a lot of those gaps, frankly, that existed before 9/11. So that was a huge kind of it's almost like a strategic change management initiative that Director Mueller ran to shore up that intelligence function of the FBI and [00:23:00] further professionalize the intelligence workforce to be able to drive that to the next level. So that was huge.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:06] And as the FBI is reassessing and reorganizing itself, there is a larger governmental push to think about separating the intelligence gathering and national security mission of the FBI from the criminal investigation and domestic law enforcement mission. But the FBI itself did not want this, and Sasha believes the reason the bureau remained unified is because they [00:23:30] had been attempting to do counterterrorism work before 9/11. The will was in place, even if the resourcing was not.
Sasha O'Connell: [00:23:40] Yes, there was a lot again, as you mentioned, kind of push right at the beginning of holding folks accountable. And part of that led to let's split up the FBI. Some of the work that I had been involved in in terms of Max Cap 05 and explaining that there was a vision for kind of pulling this all together and building maximum capacity. I think and I got this was my sort [00:24:00] of opinion sort of helped turn those tides, and a lot of work was done by a lot of people who are involved in our partner organizations to say that's not the way to go in the United States, right? You don't want a domestic intelligence agency, right? Focus on U.S. citizens, right? NSA is focused externally. CIA is focused externally. We don't want a domestic intelligence function split off from the FBI. We want our domestic intelligence to the extent it happens to be tied closely to our enforcement, which is all governed by the same set of domestic constitution, [00:24:30] laws and everything else, and ultimately the bureau through a lot of work, a lot of people and a lot of folks, for example, on the Hill who got educated and understood this, and the 9-11 commission findings kept the bureau together, and still today the FBI has again that kind of national security, intelligence function and all the traditional criminal responsibilities that we think of with federal law enforcement.
Nick Capodice: [00:24:50] So should we be thinking of the FBI post-9/11 as the ones in charge, the front line of defense?
Sasha O'Connell: [00:24:56] So sort of, yes and no, I would say so. Just to clarify that the [00:25:00] FBI is the lead federal agency right for counterterrorism. There's no question about that domestically, right? There's a lot of work going on overseas because a lot of the threats don't start here, right? And so other U.S. government and foreign government partners are doing that work globally. And then in the United States, you know, there's only I think today around 14000 FBI agents right to cover the world. And they they are global. You know, there's 18000 state local law enforcement organizations, [00:25:30] right? I think there's like thirty six thousand police officers in New York City. So actually, in any instance, it's going to be state and local law enforcement. That's truly the front line, right? There just aren't the number of FBI agents right to to be out doing the interviewing. We're talking about the kind of human intelligence collection that's required to kind of understand what's happening with these threats.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:25:50] Now, as we know, the change that happened after 9/11 is this laser focus on a priority that was just not being sufficiently resourced before the attacks [00:26:00] in two thousand one. But even with that necessary funding and staffing and focus that came out of 9/11, there still aren't enough agents to handle everything like Sasha says. So if you keep thinking of the FBI as this agency that worked to centralize it is the coordinating force among all of these disparate law enforcement agencies working counterterrorism in the U.S..
Sasha O'Connell: [00:26:23] And for the United States, the FBI is kind of the quarterback, maybe, right? You know, at the end of the day, the policy is set by the White House to [00:26:30] right when it comes to strategy. When it comes to investigations, though, that's the FBI's calls today. Like in a lot of programs, the counterterrorism program is run in a task force model where you know you can have private sector organizations, you can have foreign partners, you can have all the different USG federal partners, you can have state and local law enforcement. And the FBI coordinates that task force.
Nick Capodice: [00:26:53] And you explicitly said to me earlier that we are not focusing on a shift in surveillance or [00:27:00] the intense scrutiny the FBI came under in the wake of these changes after 9/11. But I do have to ask, like, did Sasha talk about that at all? Like that the attacks are not going to just change the structure of the FBI, but the whole idea of security in the United States and not just security like civil liberties, surveillance, nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia. Were there any signs to the people on the inside of what was going to come next?
Sasha O'Connell: [00:27:29] I do remember [00:27:30] I don't know how long it was after, but after things were more in routine, it was probably at least a month out. I remember sitting in the command post one day, and one of the things that happened in the command post is that we answered the phone when the public called, and I did some of that too, when the headquarters line was quiet. And I remember taking a call where the caller said, You know, I want to report to the FBI because these people are taking pictures of a bridge. And I don't know what language they're speaking, but it's not English. And I was like, Oh boy, we got a problem, right? And things are going to change [00:28:00] like this is. And so that was when I started to think, Oh boy, what is happening out there, right? And I was starting to think about backlash and hate crimes. I started to think about security and privacy changing.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:28:19] So many people have only ever known the United States as this place of super heightened security, with a hyper focus on terrorist [00:28:30] groups both domestic and international. A place ostensibly under constant threat and an understanding that the government is hyper focused on that threat. And that leaves everyone more vulnerable to government suspicion to surveillance. This is just the way things are in the United States today. But I do think it's important to ask why. I think it's important to scrutinize that [00:29:00] the FBI is the executive intelligence and law enforcement agency in the U.S., and its primary, an overwhelming focus is terrorism. And that focus trickles down to the everyday experience of people in this country and around the world. That is what 9/11 did to the FBI.
[00:29:37] This [00:29:30] episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy, with Nick Capodice. Our staff includes Christina Phillips and Jacqui Fulton. Rebecca Lavoie sees all. If you want a nearly as portable and twice as quiet civics lesson in your back pocket, Nick and I wrote a book on it. It's called A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works. If you [00:30:00] liked this episode of Civics 101, or if you want us to go deeper and do more, consider making a donation to the show at civics101podcast.org. We are supported by You. You are the reason we're able to keep going and do better all the time. And while you're there, you can find our entire backlog of episodes -- we have many -- and submit your own questions about American government. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. [00:30:30]
