On March 4, FBI Director Christopher Wray visited the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to speak with future U.S. Army officers about the Bureau’s legacy of collaboration with the Defense Department.
“The FBI’s special agents, intelligence analysts, and professional staff are motivated by the same sense of patriotism and duty as the Corps and soldiers around the world,” Wray said in his address to the West Point Corps of Cadets. “Like you, everything we do is driven by our mission—protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution. We’ll always have a bond with those in careers of service protecting Americans, and with anyone committed to the values of duty, honor, country.”
He also spoke to the persistence of great-power competition, threats posed by generative artificial intelligence, and counterterrorism.
Finally, he invited the cadets in attendance to consider a career with the FBI once they leave uniform. If they do, he said, they’ll be in good company.
“At the FBI, we’ve got almost 8,000 veterans among our 38,000 employees—including 179 who attended West Point—and it’s easy to see why so many veterans find working at the Bureau a natural fit: It’s a chance to keep serving a cause greater than themselves,” Wray said. “Among those is our Associate Deputy Director Brian Turner, who was Class of ’91. … Brian is now the number-three executive in the Bureau and our second-highest ranking special agent.”
The speech was followed by a question-and-answer session, during which cadets posed candid questions to Director Wray.
Partnering with the Military
West Point cadets should expect to partner with the FBI during their tenures, no matter what career field they pursue once they’re commissioned into the Army, Wray said.
Wray said that examples of the Bureau’s partnership with the military in action include:
- Supporting the Joint Interagency Task Force, South, which detects and monitors the illegal trafficking of human, drug, and weapons trafficking
- Collaborating on trials held at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay
- “Collaborating on emerging technology at the Army Futures Command—where our current FBI detailee is himself a West Point grad”
- Teaming up “on mission areas as diverse as hostage rescue, human intelligence, and special warfare”
And, he added, the partnership works both ways, noting that military representatives serve on FBI task forces throughout the country.
Wray also praised the FBI’s use of teamwork with the military in cyberspace.
“Even within that mission set, we’ve worked together across government to innovate—moving from a defensive mindset to one that’s more offensive,” he said. “That means coordinating with our partners on joint, sequenced operations designed to maximize impact on our adversaries.”
He said the fruits of that collaboration have included an operation that forced the Russian Federal Security Service’s Snake malware to “effectively cannibalize” itself. “We took down Snake in over 50 countries, with the help of our U.S. and more than half a dozen foreign partners,” Wray said.
“Another example: the year-and-a-half-long campaign we waged—with our European partners—to hack the hackers of Hive, a ransomware group targeting hospitals, schools, and emergency services, whose servers and websites we seized and shut down, and whose victims we saved from tens of millions in ransom payments by using our access to decrypt their networks,” Wray said.
And in February, he added, the military helped the Bureau and our international law enforcement partners conduct an operation that evicted Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate from more than 1,000 wireless internet routers and prevented it from getting that access back. As a result, Russia lost access “to a botnet it was piggybacking to run cyber operations against countries around the world,” such as the U.S. and our European allies.
Wray noted that he meets with the dual-hatted commander of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) and director of the National Security Agency (NSA) “just about every other week.”
Counterterrorism
Wray also addressed a recent influx in foreign terrorist threats against the U.S. and our allies from Hezbollah, al Qaeda, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (an offshoot of the main organization), and ISIS stemming from the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict following the October 7, 2023, terror attacks in the region.
“Although we cannot and do not discount the possibility of another coordinated 9/11-style attack by a foreign terrorist organization, our most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home,” Wray said.
Since October 7, 2023, Wray said, the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division has investigated “thousands of reported threats stemming from the conflict.” And while he says those reports are beginning to “level off,” the Bureau anticipates that the situation in the Gaza region “will feed a pipeline of radicalization and mobilization for years to come.”
Great-Power Competition
The FBI is also hard at work ensuring to shield U.S. national security from threats posed by hostile nation-states. Wray also pointed to China’s outsized hacking program and the amount of American data it’s stolen as proof that great-power competition persists.
“The Chinese Communist Party has shown it’s willing to lie, cheat, and steal its way to achieve its ambition of becoming the world’s one and only superpower,” he said.
China’s government poses “the greatest long-term threat to” American ideas and the security of both our country and its economy, by Wray’s estimation.
But, he noted, China isn’t alone in its quest to challenge America’s standing on the world stage.
The FBI’s counterintelligence workforce also spends “countless hours” fighting off Russian attempts to pilfer U.S. “government secrets and sow division through human intelligence operations, sophisticated cyber intrusions, signals collection platforms, and foreign malign influence campaigns,” he said.
Generative AI as a Double-Edged Sword
Wray also addressed the topic of emerging technology, noting that while it can help the Bureau and military achieve its missions, it also comes with risks.
Wray used generative artificial intelligence to illustrate this point. While this kind of AI can help law enforcement more efficiently work with data and detect threats, it’s also helping bad actors—including terrorists and hackers.
“There’s a lot of AI-enhanced or -enabled danger for us to battle already, and more coming down the road—all of which highlights the importance, for both the FBI and our nation’s military, of innovation: finding new ways to be more efficient, more agile, and more resilient to prepare ourselves for five, 10, 20 years down the road,” Wray said.
