John S. Pistole

he FBI's top official on counter-terrorism has spent his 20-year career pursuing mobsters and white-collar criminals. John Pistole, the executive assistant director for counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence, joined the bureau in 1983 as a special agent in the Minneapolis field office, where he investigated organized and violent crime. In just two years, Pistole was transferred to the New York Division-which, coincidentally, later became the hub of the FBI's counter-terrorism activities-where he worked to break up La Cosa Nostra, the nationwide alliance of organized-crime families also known as the Mafia.

That work might have given Pistole the best possible training for his new job. Investigating organized crime and drug rings is the closest work the FBI has ever done to penetrating networks of terrorists. Counter-narcotic and anti-racketeering units at the bureau, long based out of New York and nearby cities, have developed investigative techniques for connecting members of crime syndicates to each other, and FBI undercover agents have infiltrated some of these groups.

Following the September 11 attacks, the FBI made counter-terrorism its top priority. Just two months earlier, Pistole had taken a new job in the Inspection Division at FBI headquarters. There, he led teams conducting evaluations and audits of FBI field offices-hardly thrilling work, compared with his old job.

But that year, Pistole led a team investigating the FBI's dramatic security weaknesses exposed by the arrest of Robert Hanssen, the agent who spied for the former Soviet Union.

The Hanssen case was an epochal event for the FBI and its agents, and it reinvigorated the bureau's focus on counterintelligence, the practice of rooting out and disrupting spies and moles.

Pistole's cloak-and-dagger background has led to what is easily the biggest assignment of his career. He already was serving as assistant director for the Counterterrorism Division when he was given the top job in counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence in December 2003. His experience in combating terrorism includes directing the National Joint Terrorism Task Force, which oversees more than 50 such groups in the FBI's field offices, and the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force.

Pistole is a graduate of Indiana University Law School.