Albany FBI gets new top agent
48-year-old father of five continues 20-year career
James Hendricks fulfilled his dream to become a police officer without needing to leave his hometown in western Kentucky.
In 1998, Hendricks wanted a new challenge. The FBI wanted new agents.
That year, Hendricks started a 20-year, award-winning FBI career in which he has battled terrorists, computer crime and thieves trying to ship trade secrets to China in the form of rice seeds. It is a career that has taken him to
Georgia, Arkansas, Washington, D.C. and back to western Kentucky.
And now, the 48-year-old Hendricks is the FBI’S top agent in Albany. Hendricks, who started in August, succeeds acting Special Agent in Charge Janelle Miller and her predecessor, the retired Vadim Thomas, atop the bureau’s Albany field office.
Neither Miller nor Thomas had long stays in the position. Hendricks and his wife, who have three young children, are not looking to go anywhere, he explained.
“I knew that the community — from just reputation, talking to friends that were here — that this would be a great place to raise a family,” Hendricks told the Times Union in an interview in his Mccarty Avenue office. “And I have small children. We want to keep the community safe. We live here. We’re community members and it was
refreshing to come here to Albany because it felt like home.”
Hendricks, also the father of two adult children from a previous marriage, has seen many changes in technology and personnel over his two decades in the FBI. He still gets amazed that many agents were not on the job during the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Hendricks, who speaks with a slight Southern accent, comes off laid back and welcoming.
He brings a “very calm but consistent leadership style,” he said.
Asked about President Donald J. Trump’s public criticism of the FBI, Hendricks simply said, “It doesn’t affect us at all.” He noted FBI Director Christopher Wray recently visited the office.
“The message that he asked us to do is just keep plowing along, keep working and we do that,” Hendricks said. “We just keep doing what the FBI does.”
The Albany field office covers nearly 40,000 square miles, 32 upstate counties and all of Vermont. Hendricks supervises 84 agents and upward of 150 other staffers and analysts.
Hendricks started following a violent stretch in Albany, which experienced seven homicides in June and July alone. The communication between local law enforcement agencies — and absence of turf wars among them — quickly impressed him.
“These are the best partnerships I have ever seen in the country,” Hendricks said.
Counter-terrorism remains the bureau’s top priority nationwide and in Albany.
Before coming to Albany, Hendricks was in Washington, D.C. as chief of the FBI’S Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate’s Countermeasures Operations Section. He led WMD prevention and preparation programs to make sure the FBI responds to any WMD threat or worse.
“What keeps me up at night are the homegrown violent extremists,” Hendricks said. “These are the individuals sitting home online becoming radicalized. Their techniques are they use knives, vehicles. It’s not the traditional, ‘Hey we’ll build a bomb, we’ll blow something up.’”
In 2013, the FBI bestowed Hendricks with a Director’s Award for Outstanding Terrorism Investigation. Hendricks led an undercover operation that took down two al Qaeda members from Iraq who had relocated to Bowling Green, Ky. as refugees. They planned to transport weapons and cash in hidden compartments to Florida to be shipped to insurgents who would attack American soldiers in Iraq. The fingerprints of one of the men was found on an unexploded IED (improvised explosive device) in Iraq. Both were convicted.
While working in Little Rock, Ark., Hendricks noted, his office busted two agricultural scientists who stole rice seeds and tried to pass them to China through a visiting delegation. The seeds were considered valuable trade secrets. In August, the FBI charged Xiaoqing Zheng of Niskayuna, an engineer at GE, with using sophisticated techniques to steal digital files on the company’s turbine technology, possibly to benefit his interest in Chinese firms that are GE competitors.
Hendricks said if any corporations believe they are being targeted, they should contact his office.
“The number of colleges here and research institutions and corporations that do a lot of sensitive development of tools and research, that concerns me a little bit,” Hendricks said. “There’s a lot of folks ...non-traditional collectors of counterintelligence with China particularly. They send students, they send researchers over here to collect this information.”
Hendricks said it was a desire to help people that drove him to law enforcement. His father spent 20 years in the Army before retiring, he noted.
“Even as a small child I always knew I wanted to be a police officer,” Hendricks said. “I had ambitions of the State Police in mind and when I graduated (Murray State University) college in 1991, the Kentucky State Police had a hiring freeze. So I was kind of stuck there.”
Hendricks instead became an officer in his hometown of Henderson, Ky., a small working class city across the Ohio River from Evansville, Ind. He served six years there, the last two as a sergeant. He joined the FBI in 1998, assigned to an office in Savannah, Ga. There, Hendricks investigated a wide range of crime — public corruption, crimes against children, street violence, crimes on government reservations.
Following the 9/11 attacks, Hendricks belonged to an evidence response team. He served as a team leader at the Pentagon site. In 2005, he began his management career in the bureau’s cybercrime division’s executive staff, which battles computer crimes and cyber intelligence.
In 2007, he returned to western Kentucky as a supervisor in Bowling Green. He later worked in Little Rock before landing in the Capital Region.
“I’m from the Southeast. This is the Northeast,” Hendricks said. “Everybody was so friendly and so welcoming here that it just really made me glad that I made the decision to come here.”