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GCN Home > 09/11/06 issue

Zalmai Azmi | From New York City to Afghanistan to the FBI

Azmi is CIO of the FBI

By Wilson P. Dizard III, GCN Staff

The terrorist attacks in 2001 put many federal CIOs into the role of managing new systems developed for homeland security and law enforcement.

Zalmai Azmi, now CIO of the FBI, is one of them.

But soon after the New York and Washington attacks, he was inserted into Afghanistan as a member of a special operations unit reporting to the intelligence community’s National Counterterrorism Center.

Azmi was CIO of the Justice Department’s Executive Office of the U.S. Attorneys on the day of the attacks. He was in his office at 600 E St. N.W. in Washington at the time.

The Justice Department agency launched its continuity-of-operations plan within hours, he said in a recent interview in his office at FBI headquarters.

“On 9/12, I was at Ground Zero with my staff, bringing up offices,” Azmi said. “I spent about a week in New York bringing up offices.” The Justice Department quickly deployed new desktops and other systems to revive its New York operations.

“At the same time, while I was there, I got a call from some of my friends in the Marine Corps, and they asked me if I would be interested in inserting in Afghanistan with a special ops group. I said, fine, so I was detailed to the counterterrorism center at the [CIA], and I spent the next year working there,” Azmi said.

Azmi, who emigrated from Afghanistan with his family as a teenager, brought his fluency in five languages—Dari, Farsi, Pashtu, German and English—as an asset to the special operations work. He carried out two tours in Afghanistan during the year after the 9/11 attacks and also worked with NCTC in the capital region.

He returned to his previous Justice Department CIO job in 2002, but within months was plucked again for a counterterrorism assignment. Donna Bucella, director of the Terrorist Screening Center, asked him to help build the center’s

At that point, FBI director Robert Mueller III tapped Azmi for the job of evaluating the bureau’s computer systems.

He was a special assistant to Mueller for two months and acting CIO for six months. Azmi rose to permanent CIO in May 2004.

“When I became acting CIO, I started in-house evaluation of the Virtual Case File program,” Azmi said. Later, he hired contractor Aerospace Corp. of Columbia, Md. to size up the troubled case management system.

In March 2005, the FBI walked away from the VCF program at a cost of $104 million [GCN.com, Quickfind 675].

Subsequently, the bureau launched the Sentinel case management project in May 2005.

Azmi noted that the anti-terrorist mission the FBI now has adopted has changed the face of the bureau’s IT, even if some projects have carried over from before 9/11.

More news on related topics: Homeland Security, IT Management



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