After 9/11, this former FBI agent's mission was to learn everything about two of the hijackers

RICHMOND, Va. — As the chief security officer for Dominion Energy, Adam Lee spends his days focused on safeguarding Virginia’s grid.

As the former head of the FBI in Richmond, he oversaw some of the bureau's biggest public corruption cases.

25 years ago, Lee was a young agent with a law degree working in San Diego. Then on the morning of September 11th, 2001, the attack on America changed the trajectory of his career.

“I was in my car and I was driving in, and I heard reports about a plane hitting the tower, the first tower,” said Lee. “And I remember it vividly just because the historical impact tends to etch those things into your memory.”

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Moments later, his phone rang.

“My supervisor called me on my then Motorola flip phone and said, ‘Hey, I need you to just come straight up when you get in,’” said Lee. “By that point, everyone was just watching the news coverage.”

There were a lot of questions and no answers, but Lee and his fellow agents knew they had to think fast, in case an attack on the West Coast was coming.

The first order: get a gun and get upstairs.

“I had just finished my sniper training, so I was a sniper sharpshooter on the FBI San Diego swat team, so they, as they're sort of thinking about security and things, they put me on the roof of our building,” said Lee.

It would not take long until the target of his mission became clear.

As tips began to flood in, investigators learned that two of the hijackers who attacked the Pentagon had learned to fly at San Diego’s Montgomery Field airport… just down the street from the FBI field office.

“It was shocking,” said Lee.

Once it was confirmed the terror plot had hit that close to home, Lee received an assignment from the special agent in charge.

“He said, ‘Hey, you know, you're a lawyer… you’ve done depositions and you know how to do that kind of work.’ I said, ‘Yep, done a lot of them,’ and he said, ‘I want you to do an interview for us,’ and he laid out for me that Abdussattar Shaikh, who was the head of the local Islamic community center, had two of the hijackers living on his floor while they were taking flight lessons,” said Lee.

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A concerning development because, at the time, Shaikh was a confidential source for the FBI.

“So, I partnered up with another agent from my squad, and we went out and sat with the Shaikh, and we were with him three days,” said Lee. “We really went into detail about the life of these two individuals, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, and how they were funded. We learned about all the digital media they accessed, so the computers and things, and we're able to get control of those.”

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The investigation would later find that prior to September 11, a tip about al-Mihdhar had been sent to an analyst at FBI headquarters, but it was never shared with anyone else.

“That's one of the failures that, you know, I think in the 9/11 Commission Report, if you review that, there was sort of a sequencing of events where this should have set off alarm bells,” said Lee.

Lee says the bureau now has much better safeguards and information-sharing systems in place, which he believes has protected the U.S. from another major terror attack being plotted and planned overseas.

“And I can tell you just here in Virginia, when I was the agent in charge of the field office here, we were disrupting plotting and planning happening in our commonwealth, and we were doing it through those mechanisms that didn't exist before 9/11,” said Lee.

Now a quarter century removed from one of our nation’s darkest day, Lee hopes this solemn anniversary reminds Virginians and other Americans that what we have… is still worth protecting.

“If you haven't been overseas and you haven't been exposed to how other folks live and are treated in other societies, and come back and kiss the ground of the United States when you get back home, you're missing the point.”