This coming Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the attacks upon America on September 11, 2001. Like most Americans, this was the seminal event in the history of our country. I have been thinking a lot about that date and the anniversary; even more so with the fall of Afghanistan and the evacuation from Kabul. I wanted to do something to commemorate this anniversary, so I decided to do a podcast series featuring the personal stories of persons in the compliance field with their thoughts about what the date of 9/11 means to them, how it changed our profession and their thoughts looking back some 20 years later. The lineup for this week is:
- 6 – Gabe Hidalgo
- 7 – Juan Zarate
- 8 – Alex Dill
- 9 – Eric Feldman
- 10 – Scott Moritz
- 11 – John Lee Dumas
I visited with Scott Moritz for my podcast series Looking Back at 9/11. Scott is now a Senior Managing Director at FTI Consulting, Inc. in their in the Global Risk & Investigations practice. On 9/11 Scott was working in midtown Manhattan. He joined me to talk about how the events of 9/11 impacted the FBI.
9/11 fundamentally changed the FBI overnight. He has some very poignant and moving recollections from that day, from realizing that many of the senior team were in the air that morning, to seeing streams of panicked New Yorkers running down the streets of Manhattan, to his journey home that night. He related how he and some colleagues were walking to Penn Station to catch a train home and as they crossed 5th Avenue, which had a view into lower Manhattan where the World Trade Center, Twin Towers had stood. As they looked down the street, they could no longer see those symbols of America’s financial center.
Scott remarked that for a long time after 9/11, the FBI was primarily focused on the attacks on the World Trade Center. That was the Bureau’s main investigation, and it was being worked on by all the FBI field offices, and virtually every foreign attaché office in the world. He discussed a Harvard Business School study which reviewed the changes made by the FBI in the wake of 9/11. Many scholars, through various organizational studies and surveys, assumed that the FBI would have created simultaneous frontline structures and processes to balance their two competing missions: national security and law enforcement. The scholars also posited that perhaps the FBI would engage in cultural ambidexterity, which would be to refuse to take on the mission of national security altogether. The FBI did something altogether unexpected and tackled both.
Moritz said, “There was this rapid emergence of two clear, but distinct, identities, and eventually, you know, one new unified identity FBI, but some changes were, terrorism cases, were centralized at headquarters… This was a big departure from the way that the FBI normally operated,”
Scott reflected that by staying as a single agency with a dual mission, one of the benefits to the FBI and to the law enforcement mission in general was the FBI had better access to local law enforcement agencies and could take better advantage of cooperating defendants who may have information that could advance the national security mission. He said, “I think that’s proven to be a really effective model. The FBI has significantly improved threat analysis following the creation of the national director of intelligence, the field intelligence group, and probably most notably the addition of embedded security analysts in each of the 56 FBI field offices.” Moreover, the most important part of the FBI’s transformation is how those intelligence analyses were effectively integrated into FBI operations. Finally, he concluded, “the FBI no longer describes itself as a law enforcement agency, although that is clearly part of the mission. Now there is a dual mission with the FBI describing itself.”
I asked Scott to reflect on changes in the private sector in which he was involved. The major change in the private sector post-9/11, especially with respect to financial institutions, was the induction of the Patriot Act which also paved the way for other significant changes. Financial Institutions and broker dealers had to harden the security of buildings and supply chains across the country’s infrastructure. There was also the explosion of no-fly lists, watch lists and terrorist watch lists. Banks, building owners and brokerage companies had to navigate these systems often, and quickly. Scott was very involved in helping these institutions in their anti-money laundering (AML) obligations, as well as their security obligations.
I asked Scott to share some reflections on 9/11, and for the future. He remarked that post-9/11, the country was more united, and people were more compassionate to one another. He spoke about “the tender mercies of strangers who were consoling one another, in the days that followed. My wife was in the grocery store and another customer was just overcome with grief, going through like this mundane task of getting groceries and a complete stranger just came up to her, hugged her and consoled her, and that was playing out all over the place. It was phenomenal, the best of human nature that really was tapped into. I also remember the outpouring of love and compassion to the American people from every part of the world. Finally, as a New Yorker, I experienced some of that outpouring firsthand.”
Moritz concluded, “I hope that we can summon some of that compassion and human kindness that followed 9/11 to heal what’s going on in our today”
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