INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS

 

Our effort to protect the homeland requires expanding our traditional law enforcement partnerships overseas.

 The FBI is working with international partners in new ways

• Rather than focus on bringing a suspect back to the U.S. to face prosecution, we now offer whatever assistance we can to other governments to support their efforts to fight terrorism, cyber crime, and transnational criminal enterprises. In some countries, we are working together on task forces and conducting joint operations.

• We now routinely deploy Agents and crime scene experts to assist in the investigation of attacks, such as the May 2003 bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco , and the July 2005 bombings in London .  Agents stationed in Iraq and  Afghanistan work directly with our international partners in the global war on terrorism.

Legat expansion

• The Office of International Operations (OIO) and the Legal Attache (Legat) Program support the FBI’s investigative priorities thorough liaison and operational interaction with the FBI’s foreign law enforcement and intelligence counterparts and overseas intelligence community.

• In FY 2001, there were 44 Legat offices with 112 Agent and 74 support employees. Today, the FBI has 57 fully operational Legat offices and 13 sub-offices with 167 agent and 111 support personnel assigned for a total of 278 employees stationed abroad, an increase of nearly 70%.

• Analysts have been placed in eight Legat offices since 09/11/2001 : Amman , Jordan ; Baghdad , Iraq ; Berlin , Germany ; London , England ; Mexico City , Mexico ; Paris , France ; Rome , Italy ; and Tel Aviv, Israel .

• OIO staffing has increased from 12 agent and 27 support personnel in four operational and administrative units to 37 agent and 86 support personnel in 12 operational and administrative units at FBIHQ. In the past five years, the operating budget has grown from approximately $16.5 million to $36 million.

Training and Information Sharing

• The number of international students attending the National Academy at Quantico has increased by 20%.

• We continue to increase our involvement in the International Law Enforcement Academies in Hungary and Thailand .

• FBI personnel have provided basic training to foreign law enforcement entities on how to take viable and identifiable fingerprints that can be used reliably by the Bureau and our partners.

• In accordance with the Attorney General’s 4/11/02 directive for the “Coordination of Information Relating to Terrorism," terrorist fingerprints and biographical data are being gathered internationally from military detainees from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, from cooperative international exchange programs, the Legats, and domestic law enforcement resources. A number of these prints have been collected through FBI international deployments in coordination with international law enforcement agencies interested in a fingerprint exchange. The submitted prints, now numbering over 19,000, are searched against and posted to the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), the national repository for criminal and civil fingerprint records in the United States .

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