Terror, spying among threats in Ariz., FBI’s local boss says
Arizona’s technology sector and its international border combine to make the FBI’s Phoenix District one of the most dynamic in the country, according to Special Agent in Charge Douglas Price, who took its helm in April.
There are targets and vulnerabilities aplenty.
Arizona offers an array of opportunities for commercial espionage, terrorism, trafficking and public corruption, among other crimes, Price said during an hourlong interview at his north Phoenix office.
Yet, in accordance with FBI protocol, Price remained vague about potential criminal activity and about the bureau’s efforts to thwart it.
“We’ve got some things going on,” he said. “It’s kind of hard to quantify, because some of the stuff we’re doing is incremental and making strides towards disrupting something internationally or nationally, but I will tell you that we certainly are in the forefront.”
The district office, which serves as the headquarters for the FBI’s operations across the
state, is among the 15 largest of the bureau’s 56 field offices nationwide. It oversees seven satellite offices in Tucson, Sierra Vista, Yuma, Lake Havasu City, Flagstaff and Lakeside in Arizona, plus Gallup, N.M.
The district has hundreds of employees, split fairly equally among agents and civilian support personnel, though Price declined to specify the exact numbers.
Price, 48, took the top spot in Phoenix after a17-year career that featured posts in Las Cruces, N.M.; Los Angeles; Salt Lake City; Baghdad, Iraq; Athens, Greece; and Washington, D.C.
During that tenure, he took assignments that concentrated on gangs, cargo theft, civil-rights violations, organized crime and terrorism. His most recent stop was in Washington, where he oversaw human-resource matters, including senior-executive service appraisals, promotion processes and career-development programs, among other programs.
In Phoenix, he succeeded James Turgal, who was promoted to an assistant-director position in Washington.
Price has kept a mostly low profile since becoming the 41st special agent in charge of the Phoenix District, which was created in 1919.
He has met with science and defenseindustry leaders and law-enforcement chiefs statewide. His one-on-one interview with last week marked his first extensive meeting with the media.
He said that the FBI’s overall mission shifted significantly since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, to focus more extensively on counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations and that the Phoenix Division’s mission shifted accordingly.
“One of the big switches from 9/11was trying to be more proactive and trying to get in front of things, rather than reactive and responding to an incident that happened,” he said.
In Arizona, those initiatives largely involve interaction with an array of hightech, aerospace and defense companies. The state’s science-and-technology sector encompasses thousands of companies, with products ranging from semiconductors to missiles to medical equipment, according to the Arizona Technology Council.
Aerospace and defense firms alone generated $14.9 billion in sales last year, according to council.
FBI agents try to identify threats to those firms and to other potential highvalue targets, such as military installations, Price said.
Threats come from foreign countries, foreign and domestic terrorist organizations, ideological activists and business competitors, among others. There is no shortage of opponents who want to know what U.S. institutions do and how they do it, he said.
“Some of them we consider just your traditional spies, who are trying to get our secrets, and some of them are just economic espionage,” he said. “They want everything we have. They’ve basically made the determination that R&D is hard and expensive. They’d rather steal it.”
FBI agents meet with government, military and business leaders in Arizona to discuss security efforts.
Many industry leaders initially were reluctant to engage with the FBI on counterespionage efforts, said Steve Zylstra, the tech council’s president and CEO.
“It’s like when an individual sees a police car in their rearview mirror and automatically gets concerned,” he said.
More recently though, industry leaders have acknowledged the gravity of potential attacks and are more likely to report suspected infiltration to the FBI, Zylstra said.
“It’s one of the highest concerns of our day — that either their data is going to be tampered with in some way or obtained by others who seek them ill will. It’s a real issue, a huge issue,” he said.
FBI agents monitor the cyberverse to detect threats and potential attacks, Price said. They watch terrorist organizations as well as “hackivists” — computer-savvy activists bent on causing havoc.
So-called insider threats like Army Pfc. Chelsea Manning and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have changed the game in how the FBI and other agencies secure information, Price said.
Manning gave thousands of classified documents about military operations to the website WikiLeaks and was convicted of espionage. Snowden leaked thousands of documents about NSA surveillance operations to several media outlets and fled to Russia.
“Sadly, in today’s world, security is not a fence anymore. Security is people who walk out with thumb drives,” Price said.
The border presents another set of issues for the bureau.
“A lot of people look at the southwest border in terms of immigration. We look at the southwest border a little differently,” he said. “We look at it in terms of threats to the country, people being able to get through that southwest border. What kind of threat are they going to bring to us? We look at how the Border Patrol or other agencies are working on the border. Are there issues there? We look at civil-rights issues. We look at public corruption.”
‘‘ They’ve basically made the determination that R&D is hard and expensive. They’d rather steal it.”
Special agent in charge of the FBI’s Phoenix District, discussing the threat posed by industrial spies
The FBI’s involvement along the border is needed because other law-enforcement agencies give civil rights sparse consideration, said Isabel Garcia, co-founder and co-chairwoman of the immigrant-rights organization Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, which is based in Tucson. “I absolutely welcome that — if it turns out to be truly independent without conflicts of interest,” she said.
The FBI’s toughest job will be monitoring tactics used by other agencies, which increasingly appear to depend on racial profiling, Garcia said.
One of the bureau’s top priories along the border is uncovering public corruption, Price said. The money involved with moving people, drugs, guns and other contraband across the border presents temptations for federal employees who are supposed to monitor the border.
In 2005, an FBI investigation in Arizona called Operation Lively Green unveiled a narcotics-smuggling ring that involved military personnel, prison guards and others. Ultimately, 57 suspects were convicted, including about a dozen soldiers and airmen, some of whom used government vehicles to transport packages they thought contained drugs.
The FBI currently has active programs along the border, but Price declined to specify their purposes or targets. “We have people that are working that from all angles,” he said.
Price earned a master’s degree in public administration from Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., in 1994, and a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, in 1989.