Executive Branch: JOHN S. PISTOLE

JOHN S. PISTOLE

Executive Assistant Director for

Coiinterterrorism and Counterintelligence

Federal Bureau of Investigation

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

202-324-3000

The FBI's top official on counterterrorism has spent his 20-year career pursuing mobsters and white-collar

criminals. John Pistole, the executive assistant director for counterterrorism and counter-intelligencejoined 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.