I believe that was the case. The 9/11 Commissions Report is actually really, really well written and quite a gripping read. Highly recommended but IIRC that was the reason. And the report is freely available if you don't want to pay for the book: https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf

I would imagine this is a large portion of it. I worked with multiple agencies in the post 9/11 world when I was a govie. We still had a lot of limits and oversight over certain projects. The varying title authorizations exist for a reason. The good sometimes comes with the bad, that dance is delicate.

Then I could understand why FBI—-> CIA would be blocked, but not the other way around.

(If it’s indeed true that the CIA only looks at what’s going on ex-US)

But I doubt the two would play nice with each other if the flow was only 1-way.

Let's preface everything I say here with "on paper" or "theoretically" or "in an ideal world" ...

The FBI's goal is to arrest people, charge them, and send them to jail. Everything they do will be presented to the public, at trial, and examined by the opposing side and presented to a jury. There's not a lot of room for nuance here. There's also not a lot of room for secrecy. The accused has the right to confront their accuser.

The CIA's goal is to "protect the nation" and almost by definition deals entirely in secrets and ambiguity. "Sources and methods" are some of the most closely held and valuable secrets. "A person we kinda trust, sometimes, accused someone of possibly planning to maybe do something nefarious." -- not going to hold up well in court, even if it's totally reasonable to now put that person on some kind of watch list (and yes, at this point, all of us are on some sort of watch list -- see the disclaimer above; we're now at 30,000 days of the condor and counting)

So -- intelligence sharing between the CIA and the FBI sounds great in theory; in practice it may be tricky.

The FBI uses parallel reconstruction a lot to hide how they actually became aware of a suspect. As a jailhouse lawyer it was interesting reading cases where some FBI field agent did something really technical and comparing that with the their public testimony in cases that demonstrated a lack of the technical knowledge/capability needed make those technical jumps.

I got 10 years of free legal schooling with nothing else to do but sit and read case law in my cell. Props to a fellow jailhouse lawyer.

The FBI does more than prosecutions. They have a whole domestic intelligence gathering operation.

Ostensibly their goal is to find criminals and arrest them and in doing so they'll also be preventing foreign spies from spying, or domestic terrorists from domestically terroring; both of which are illegal in some way, I think.

They conduct investigatory operations. It isn't all crime related. The mundane stuff just doesn't get featured in police procedurals.

Oh yes of course; but I'm not sure the FBI would be consulting with the CIA over background checks (overtly).

With the goal of investigating potential crimes. Anything they collect may show up in a public court case someday.

Isn't one of the primary reasons for the FBI counterintelligence? I was under the impression that their other general-purpose law enforcement functions were secondary.

Their primary function is law enforcement. That's why they're under the Dept. of Justice, and the CIA isn't. They're Super-Cops, first and foremost.

The CIA, NSA, etc. aren't allowed to track domestic stuff; they're codebreaking and/or foreign intelligence.

But they sure as hell can share their tools with the FBI, who are authorized to do domestic surveillance.

> 30,000 days of the condor

Love the reference, BTW :-)

I believe the CIA cannot legally operate intelligence gathering on US soil or on US citizens, them sharing info to the FBI might reveal that they did that.

If the CIA accidentally collects intelligence about a US citizen’s overseas business dealings, for example, that shouldn’t be passed along to domestic law enforcement, right?

I was young at the time, but my recollection is that that was my understanding back then, and it seemed sensible. I'm not convinced it wasn't sensible.