Terry D. Turchie – was the firs Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division of the FBI, between March 2000 and May 1, 2001. His leadership was the driving orce behind the capture of two of the most elusive and solitary domestic terrorists in U.S. history.
In his early years in the FBI, Terry chased timber thieves in the Oregon forests. By the 1980s, he was chasing Soviet spies at the United Nations in New York. On one memorable occasion, depicted in New York Magazine, he and his partner wrestled Soviet spy Gennadiy Zakharov to the ground at a subway station.
After a tour a GBIHQ in Washington, D.C., he took over counterintelligence squad in San Francisco, and within a year his Squad disrupted two major Eastern Bloc espionage operations.
Betwwen 1994 and 1998, Terry directed the UNABOM Task Force (UTF) that identified and convicted Theodore Kaczynski for an 18-year long string of terrorist bombings. Robert Graysmith, an author who wrote about the case in a 1997 book UNABOMBER-A Desire to Kill, called Turchie ” the heart and spirit of the investigation.”
After Kaczynski pled guilty to the UNABOM crimes in 1998, Turchie was promoted to Inspector, and was immediately tapped by FBI Director Louis Freeh to direct the Southeast Bomb Task Force in North Carolina to hunt for Olympic Park bomber Eric Robert Rudolph. His interagency coworkers admiringly described him as the “FBI's Ace.”
In 1999, he was called to Washington, D.C. as Deputy Assistant Director of the new Counterterrorism Division of the FBI. Between 1999 and 2001, he testified before Congress and traveled extensively overseas with former FBI Director Louis Freeh to facilitate joint investigations of international terrorism in the Middle East, Asia and the former Soviet Union.
Turchie is a recipient of the FBI Director's Award as well as the Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service. He served as the Director for Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism at the University of California- managed Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 2001 through 2008. Between 2008 and 2020, he has authored five books, co-produced several documentaries, two of which earned the CINE Golden Eagle Award for Best Documentary in Los Angeles, CA. He has appeared on CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, many times as a guest commentator on topics related to the FBI, terrorism, counterintelligence and criminal investigations regarding current events.
His most recent book, In Their Own Words, the Democratic Party's Push Towards a Communist America, published in February 2020, spent several weeks on Amazon and Barnes and Noble Best Seller Lists.
