Thomas Pickard, the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from June 25, 2001 to Sept. 4, 2001, encouraged students on Monday to pursue a life of government service to help eliminate the global problems which led to the terrorist events of Sept. 11.
Pickard challenged students to pursue a life in public service to help alleviate the economic depravity of failed states, which provide a breeding ground for terrorism.
“We need to help some of these places develop a viable economy,” said Pickard. Without intervention, he said, they will revert to violence.
Pickard recalled the terrorist events which preceded Sept. 11 and described the World Trade Center attacks as an awakening among many Americans who previously considered themselves immune from international terrorism.
“America keeps thinking it’s always ‘over there’,” said Pickard, referring to incidents of terrorism in other parts of the world, such as the bombings of embassies in Africa and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen.
“Sept. 11 changed all that,” Pickard said. “We finally realized how vulnerable we are and how poorly equipped we are in terms of intelligence.”
According to Pickard, the first incidence of international terrorism occurred in February 1993 with the first bombing of the World Trade Center. A team of men drove a rental van containing a 2000-pound bomb composed of TNT, ammonium nitrate and an “old-fashioned fuse,” and set off the device in the parking garage of the World Trade Center. The terrorists underestimated the strength of the building and only six workers were killed, said Pickard.
The FBI identified Ramsey Josef as the chief assailant, and discovered that he had fled to an undisclosed Middle Eastern nation. Pickard said that he was chosen to lead the operation to apprehend Josef, but declined to reveal the identity of the nation. After protracted negotiation, Pickard said that the government of the nation turned Josef over to Pickard.
Pickard recounted the embassy bombings in Kenya, and Tanzania in 1998 and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in the summer of 2001. Pickard described these attacks as evidence of the increasing sophistication, organization and brashness of international terrorists. In contrast to the first World Trade Center bombings, where a team of men constructed a crude bomb on a limited budget, Pickard said, the terrorists in later incidences exhibited increased organization and prodigious financial backing. According to Pickard, this trend culminated on Sept. 11, when 19 well-educated men endowed with “a profound hatred of our way of life” executed an organized, well-financed and deadly attack.
Reflecting on his 27 years with the FBI, Pickard said, “I didn’t make a lot of money, but I have no regrets.”
