CLEVELAND — FBI Agent Christine Oliver’s introduction to Cleveland, where she would play a significant role in the biggest public corruption case in Ohio history, began inauspiciously.

Before graduating from the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., Oliver and the rest of the class of 1997 participated in the traditional listing of preferences for their first assignments, ranking the nation’s FBI offices from one to 56. A lifelong resident of the East Coast, Oliver ranked the Cleveland office 39th. No classmate received a lower-ranked assignment.

“The only thing I knew about Cleveland was that it was cold and I had never been there,” Oliver recalled last week. “I wanted to work closer to home.”

Oliver feels much differently about the city now as she prepares for an out-of-state transfer. This past week, her last in the Cleveland office, she agreed to talk about her 15 years in Northeast Ohio and her work on the region’s highest-profile investigations of corruption in Cuyahoga County government and elsewhere.

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Dean Bryant/fbi

Dean C. Bryant is taking over the St. Louis FBI office.

Bryant, the chief of the Critical Incident Response Group’s Hazardous Devices Operations Section near Quantico, Va., was the senior FBI executive and chairman of the Joint Program Office responsible for coordinating with the interagency and the White House’s National Security Staff.

He started with the FBI in 1991, and was assigned to the Miami division, where he worked public corruption, violent crimes and fugitives.

In 2000, he transferred to the Mobile Field Division’s Monroeville Resident Agency.

In 2003, he was promoted to supervisory special agent in and assigned to the Counterterrorism Division at FBI Headquarters.

He was als deployed to Qatar and Iraq in support of the FBI’s mission.

In 2005,  Bryant became the supervisory senior resident agent of the Springfield and Joplin, Missouri Resident Agencies, which are part of the Kansas City Field Office. He was responsible for FBI investigations of all violations in 32 counties within Missouri and Kansas. During this assignment, Mr. Bryant served as the FBI’s deputy on-scene commander in Iraq in support of the Counterterrorism Division.

In 2008, Byant was promoted to assistant special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office, where he supervised the Aviation, Surveillance, and Technical Programs.

Shooting at Quantico/fbi photo

QUANTICO, Va. — Call it a playground for Bambi and G-Men, where imaginary criminals are hunted and deer are the spectators.

The 547-acre FBI Academy, where some of the nation’s best marksmen fire off more than 1 million bullets every month, happens to be one of the safest places for deer during hunting season.

The property on the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., is home to some of the FBI’s most elite forces and training programs as well as a de facto wildlife refuge where deer, fox, wild turkeys, groundhogs and vultures roam fearless and free.

In recent years, a black bear was spotted running across a parking lot, and a groundhog cornered an FBI agent coming out of the cafeteria, hoping to score some human food, FBI spokesman Kurt Crawford said. Turkey vultures are often seen perched atop the 500,000-square-foot national crime lab where the FBI analyzes evidence, including the remains of the former al-Qaida leader in Iraq.

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WASHINGTON — The man sitting in front of Mary Ellen O’Toole was, she says, a well-mannered guy. “He was low-key. He was nice. He didn’t swear.” He was very proud of his work, which he described in polite, pleasant tones.

His name was Gary Ridgway. His other name was the Green River Killer. His work was killing at least 49 women in Washington state throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He did it all while maintaining marriages, parenting and church-going, and he seemed very much the word neighbors often use to describe men who turn out to have headless torsos in their freezers. Which is to say, he seemed very, very nice.

The niceness paradox. O’Toole worked as a profiler for the FBI for 30 years, headquartered in Quantico. She interviewed the Unabomber. She worked on the Polly Klaas abduction, the Red Lake school shooting and the investigation of David Parker Ray — the Toy-Box Killer who tortured women in a high-tech homemade dungeon. What she found was that the most dangerous criminals were often the ones who came across as the most harmless. That’s how they were able to continue harming people.

“Over the years, I used to hear this all the time.” Other investigators would explain to her why they had disregarded suspects: “I just looked at him, man to man, and I could tell” that he was a good guy.

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istock photo

An FBI presentation at Quantico, Va., to agents that negatively portrayed devout Muslims, has been discontinued, the Associated Press reported Thursday.

AP, citing a federal law enforcement official, said the lecture was given for just three days in April.

One part of the lecture contended that the more devout Muslim are, the more likely they were to be violent.

FBI spokesman Christopher Allen said changes have been made since the lecture to better comply with FBI standards, AP reported.

The online publication Wired.com first reported on the issue.

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The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”

At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”

These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity.

“There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology,” one FBI presentation notes. “The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.”

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The FBI has a mystery on its hands: Who the heck keeps shooting at buildings overnight in Northern Virginia?

The latest came either late Monday or early Tuesday when authorities discovered that someone had shot at a U.S. Coast Guard recruiting center in Woodbridge, Va., the Washington Post reports.

Authorities are trying to determine if it’s linked to a recent series of shootings at U.S. military facilities in Northern Virginia, the Post reports.

Authorities have linked the same gun to shootings at buildings at the Pentagon, Marine Corps recruiting station in Chantilly and the Marine Corps Museum near Quantico. All have taken place since mid-October.

No one has been hurt.

The FBI believes that the shooter has a gripe against the Marine Corps.

The FBI behavioral unit at Quantico has had its hand in many cases over the  years. Sometimes it has been right on and other times — not even close.  It may be a science, but it’s impossible to be right all the time.

BY JENNIFER SINCO KELLEHER
Newsday
Before they ever made an arrest, Nassau police used the help of a small, highly trained FBI behavioral unit to work up a psychological profile of an arsonist they say started a fire that killed four in Lawrence last month.

Later, they arrested Caleb Lacey, the volunteer firefighter who investigators now say set the blaze to gain glory as a hero.

Police departments nationwide and around the world have used the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Va. It has helped in other arson investigations as well as serial rape and extortion cases, among others, FBI officials said.

James McNamara, a supervisory special agent in the unit, said 60 percent of cases come from local and state police. Eight agents handle all adult crimes in the United States and abroad, he said. Because the Lawrence probe is ongoing, he would not provide specifics on how his unit helped Nassau police.

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