Larry Mefford

n November, Larry Mefford was put in charge of all FBI activity related to the prevention and investigation of terrorist attacks against the United States and its citizens worldwide. His predecessor, Pasquale D'Amuro, was promoted to executive assistant director and became Mefford's boss.

Mefford's job is a tough assignment because of the difficulty of finding a needle of intelligence in the haystack of information available to the FBI. He told The Washington Post late last year that the "No. 1 priority in the FBI today is to detect and uncover terrorist sleeper cells" in the United States. In January, President Bush announced that the FBI's counterterrorism division would move to a new Terrorist Threat Integration Center located at CIA headquarters in Virginia. The center also will house CIA counterterrorism analysts.

Mefford has plenty of experience in combating disorganized and murky threats, including terrorism. Before moving to his new post, he spent seven months as the first chief of the FBI's Cyber Division, which fights crimes related to computers and networks, as well as intellectual property thefts.

Mefford came to Washington from California, where he headed the bureau's field offices in San Diego and then San Francisco. During a three-year assignment as an agent in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, he formed and supervised the interagency Bay Area Joint Terrorism Task Force. At that time he worked on interagency contingency planning related to threats posed by terrorist acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. He also played roles in crisis management for the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City in 2002 and earlier Olympics in other cities.

Between 1989 and 1992, he was a supervisor in the Terrorism Section at FBI headquarters. He spent seven years with the Washoe County Sheriff's Department in Reno, Nev., before joining the FBI in 1979.