How to Save a Government: Remember 9/11 – and ‘Join the Team’ 

By Julie Ferringer

Julie Ferringer has served more than two decades in the U.S. Intelligence Community, where she currently leads—and is led by—a team of extraordinary intelligence analysts. Julie spent two years studying collaboration, teamwork, and inclusion in the Intelligence Community as a Research Fellow at National Intelligence University’s Ann Caracristi Institute for Intelligence Research. Her most recent publication is The Science of Teamwork in the Intelligence Community.  

OPINION — Where were you two weeks after September 11th? No one ever asks this question, but it’s the one I answer in my mind when I hear people talk about 9/11.  

Two weeks after that terrible day, I was traveling from Washington, D.C. to my hometown on Long Island for the first time since the attacks. I passed through Penn Station in midtown Manhattan, walking the familiar path to the Long Island Railroad terminal. I had always loved this part of the trip: the home stretch, the muggy pulse of the terminal at peak travel. Forgetting for a moment where I was—forgetting when it was—I skipped down the stairs, but then glanced up, and skipped a breath. The terminal bustle receded into the background as I realized I was surrounded by missing persons posters. 

At 25 years old, I found myself standing in an open wound, a gaping middle ground for those families feeling their way through the before and after. Thousands of mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children and friends had sorted through albums looking for a suitable photo. They wrote the words MISSING across the top and added identifying details, noting where their loved one had last been seen (104th floor, 2 WTC, and so forth). They grabbed tape, traveled to the train station, and claimed their eight-and-a-half-by-eleven space on the wall. In one glance, I felt the knee-buckling loss shared by thousands of New Yorkers, grieving in desperate unison, hanging posters because that’s what you do when someone you love disappears.  

Lessons for the Intelligence Community 

Fast forward two decades. I have spent the last few years researching how the Intelligence Community (IC) has changed since 9/11, focusing on how collaboration protects the nation—and how a failure to share information makes us more vulnerable to attack. Twenty years ago this fall, Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, legislation which pushed the IC to adopt a more community-driven culture after the 9/11 attack. Two decades later, the IC has evolved into a coalition of 18 organizations, each with unique capabilities that are integrated to ensure a unity of effort in protecting the country from complex threats. 

But before 9/11, the IC was configured to fight the Cold War, with a culture that prioritized protecting secrets over collaboration. As part of my research, I mined the government’s post-9/11 reports, looking for collaboration failures associated with the attacks.  

The main problem, one post-9/11 report observed, was what it called “the Wall,” described as “a series of restrictions between and within agencies constructed over sixty years as a result of legal, policy, institutional, and personal factors.” Every time I read about this “Wall,” my mind drifted to a different one: that wall in New York’s Penn Station, plastered with the missing persons posters.  


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Convening the Community 

An attack from the outside tends to have a unifying effect on even the most splintered groups. After 9/11, Congress convened a bipartisan and independent team—the 9/11 Commission—to investigate the circumstances relating to the attacks and recommend a way forward 

The 9/11 Commission’s final report offered unprecedented transparency into the high stakes work of intelligence professionals. At the time of the report’s release, many of those professionals—devastated by the attacks and working around-the-clock to protect their country from terrorism—received it as a painful reproach. Viewed from the distance of two decades, the 9/11 Commission Report reads less as a scold and more as accountability in the form of a pep talk; the Legislative Branch saying to its Executive sibling, “Let’s do better.”   

Finding a Way Forward 

The 9/11 Commission Report symbolized the government coming together for the good of the community; but that’s not how the story began. In their 2006 book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, co-chairs Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton detailed the false starts, frustration, and partisan politics that threatened to derail the Commission’s work.  

Kean and Hamilton credit the Commission’s unlikely success to two key factors. One factor was the Commission’s bipartisan approach. The co-chairs made early efforts to ensure members were united around their common cause—protecting the country—and not around party lines. Kean and Hamilton hired an integrated, non-partisan staff to support the Commission, which included an equal number of Republicans and Democrats. They hosted an introductory social dinner, at which they asked commissioners to share why they were serving on the commission. Kean also insisted that Republicans and Democrats sit, staggered, next to each other, both in private meetings and public gatherings. Despite initial grumblings about the seating arrangements, these efforts fostered camaraderie and modeled unity for the nation.  

Another, more crucial factor was the relentless advocacy of the 9/11 victims’ families, whose search for answers did not stop at missing persons posters. Looking back, Kean and Hamilton remind us that the 9/11 families were the driving force behind the creation of the Commission and its ultimate success. Grieving family members asked questions, held rallies, raised their voices, and made demands. As is characteristic in any functional democracy, there was frustration, devotion, hope—and participation. Citizens kept the government accountable to the country and forced politicians to create connections across party lines. In a 2004 interview with case study researcher Kirsten Lundberg, Commissioner Timothy Roemer reflected that the 9/11 families were “what the Founding Fathers had in mind for constituency groups making the government work.” 

A new generation

While these grownups were finding their way forward, children were making decisions about their future. As part of my research, I interviewed current intelligence analysts who were students or young professionals then, and asked about their experiences collaborating on intelligence and law enforcement teams. The first question I asked was: why did you choose to work in this profession?  

Without skipping a beat, Annie*, an early career FBI intelligence analyst from rural Virginia, said, “I was raised in the shadow of 9/11. I remember being in the classroom—I was in second grade. They did an overhead announcement and called all the teachers into the library … it’s just something you never really forget.” 

Later that day, I spoke to Ryan, another early career analyst, and asked him the same question: what was his “why?” Ryan responded, “I was in fourth grade when 9/11 happened.” A 10-year-old in Michigan at the time, Ryan had the same experience as Annie, his 8-year-old future colleague living 700 miles away.  

Others I interviewed gave similar answers: 

9/11 happened, and I changed my major. 

I was in high school on 9/11. 

I joined in 2002 after 9/11. 

I decided I wanted to work for the FBI after 9/11.  

How many children lived this same experience at the same exact moment? The same moment that found first responders digging through the dust of collapsed buildings, United 93 passengers making final calls home, fighter pilots scrambling to intercept a hijacked plane, and families watching the news in detached terror, about to mobilize on a pleading search to find their lost loved ones? Children across the nation watched the day unfold and decided: When I grow up, I am going to protect my neighbors. 

This solemn motivation sits quietly in the background today, as intelligence professionals conduct their work, build relationships, and share information. It is an important anchor. In the day-to-day business of managing crises and competing priorities, it can be easy to forget that we are on the same team.  

Though we still have work to do, we’ve come a long way in 20 years as an Intelligence “Community.” But in recent years, a portion of our larger society seems to have drifted toward a more discordant narrative—one of tribal divisions and conspiracy theories, where expressions of power, not community, are the social currency. 

The influence of those who share this mindset can be seen in our current culture. As a second grader in the 1980s, I remember doing duck-and-cover drills to prepare for a nuclear attack from a foreign adversary. In 2024, my children started their school year with lockdown drills to prepare for an attack by a member of their own community. Meanwhile, the shared experience that connected us after 9/11 grows more distant with each year.  

Perhaps shared experiences like those lockdown drills—and the horrifying tragedies that necessitate them—will galvanize generations of Americans to serve their community in the same way 9/11 did. Maybe these experiences will be catalysts that connect communities in Connecticut to those in Texas, Florida, Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, Georgia and Washington DC.  

It is a path embedded in the muscle memory of American democracy. 


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Back to the wall

In all these years of remembering that moment in Penn Station, there was one detail I had forgotten. I recently found an old journal with an entry dated September 10, 2002. On that date I described stumbling upon the wall with the missing persons posters, exactly as I remembered. But I also described something else on the wall: tributes from visitors to New York City: “New York we love you! From, Texas” and “New York is the greatest city in the world! – Montgomery, Alabama.”  

Neighbors from across the country (and no doubt the political spectrum) had stepped up to the wall to offer connection and community. I wonder what those tributes meant to the New Yorkers who walked by them every day. They certainly meant something to me when I saw them. Writing a year after the attacks, my younger self felt these connections were something worth mentioning—something worth remembering.  

Democracy often brings with it a tension between independence and community, and a tension between transparency and trust, in one another and in our institutions. In a strong democracy, these tensions manifest as compromise. Such compromise is only possible when we remember what connects us to each other; when we trade our divisions—our walls—for community.  

The 9/11 Commission—and the citizens who demanded it—showed us what it means to be a strong democracy. Much like the challenges we face today, America’s response to 9/11 was characterized by competing impulses: the urge to fight, to protect, to cast suspicion, to come together as a country. The 9/11 Commission wrestled will all these impulses, but it was the urge to come together that ultimately prevailed.  

All these years later, my request for my fellow citizens is that we follow their lead: Participate. Ask questions. Include people who think differently. Build the conversation. Protect your neighbors.  

Join the team. 

*Names changed to protect privacy.

Views are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the policy or opinion of the FBI, the ODNI, or any U.S. Government agency. 

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. 

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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