International Operations

	Legats Opened Since 9/11 Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates Algiers, Algeria Baghdad, Iraq Beijing, China Dakar, Senegal Doha, Qatar Freetown, Sierra Leone Jakarta, Indonesia Kabul, Afghanistan Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Phnom Penh, Cambodia Rabat, Morocco San Salvador, El Salvador Sana’a, Yemen Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina Sofia, Bulgaria T’bilisi, Georgia The Hague, Netherlands

Our work to protect the U.S. requires expanding our traditional law enforcement partnerships overseas.

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 2010 bombings in Uganda and the 2008 bombings in Mumbai, India. Agents stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan work directly with international partners to combat terrorism.

Legat Expansion

• The Office of International Operations (OIO) and the legal attaché (legat) program support the FBI’s investigative priorities thorough liaison and operational interaction with the FBI’s foreign law enforcement and intelligence counterparts and the overseas intelligence community.
• In fiscal year 2001, there were 44 legat offices with a total of 112 agent and 74 support employees. Today, the FBI has 62 fully operational legat offices and 13 sub-offices with 182 agent and 107 support personnel, for a total of 289 employees stationed abroad—an increase of nearly 55 percent.
• Intelligence analysts have been placed in six legat offices since 09/11: Amman, Jordan; Baghdad, Iraq; Berlin, Germany; Kabul, Afghanistan; London, England; and Tel Aviv, Israel.
• OIO staffing has increased from 12 agent and 27 support personnel in four operational and administrative units to 40 agent and 111 support personnel in 13 operational and administrative units at FBI Headquarters Since 2001, the operating budget has increased from $16.5 million to $74 million.

Training and Information Sharing

• The number of international students attending the National Academy at Quantico has increased by 20 percent.
• The FBI continues to increase its involvement in the International Law Enforcement Academies in Botswana, El Salvador, Hungary, and Thailand.
• FBI personnel provide a number of basic and advanced training programs to foreign law enforcement entities on multiple topics, to include kidnapping, fingerprinting, and corruption.
• In accordance with the attorney general’s April 11, 2002 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 and 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 90,000, are searched against and posted to the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, the national repository for criminal and civil fingerprint records in the United States.

August 2011