Audio Transcript

Mollie Halpern: September 11, 2001 is a watershed moment in American—and FBI—history that continues to cause ripple effects in the present day.

As such, FBI Director Christopher Wray has mandated that all of the FBI’s future special agents and intelligence analysts visit the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City as part of their FBI Academy training. 

The Director explained to the trainees who made the inaugural visit that the experience should reinforce the importance of the FBI’s work and the stakes of that work.

Director Wray: Why we’ve always got to be willing to adapt and innovate—because as 19 hijackers armed with little more than box-cutters showed us, the bad guys never stop innovating. And finally, why we’ve got to be thinking not only about current threats, but also about the threats we haven’t seen yet—and not just in our counterterrorism work but in our counterintelligence work, our cyber investigations, criminal investigations, civil rights investigations, and all the rest.

Halpern: Trainees are also required to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial—both in Washington, D.C. Previous FBI Directors mandated those visits in 2000 and 2014, respectively.

Visit fbi.gov to learn more about this new training. With FBI, This Week, I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau.