By Steve Neavling
Timothy Waters, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Detroit Field Office, has retired, following 21 years with the bureau.
Waters was appointed to the Detroit office in December 2020 after serving as the deputy assistant director of the Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) in Virginia.
Waters’ career with the FBI began in the Detroit Field Office, where he began investigating white-collar crime in 2000.
In December, Waters sat down with Deadline Detroit, a sister publication of ticklethewire.com, for a wide-ranging interview.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Waters started working counterterrorism and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan to support military and intelligence community operations in 2005 and 2006.
Waters became a supervisory special agent in 2017 and led a section of Detroit’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. One of his investigations included the attempted bombing of an airplane at Metro Airport in Detroit on Christmas 2009.
In 2010, Waters became the legal attaché in Islamabad.
He returned to Detroit in 2011, serving as supervisor of a Joint Terrorism Task Force that focused on al Qaeda and al Qaeda-inspired terrorists.
In 2014, Waters became assistant special agent in charge of administrative matters in Detroit and was reassigned in 2016 as the assistant special agent in charge of Detroit’s National Security Branch, making him responsible for all counterterrorism, cyber, counterintelligence, and weapons of mass destruction investigations in Michigan.
In 2019, Waters began serving as the director of the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, an FBI-led, multi-agency squad in charge of coordinating, integrating, and sharing cyber threat information.
Earlier this year, he was named deputy assistant director of CIRG, where he helped lead the FBI’s response to critical incidents worldwide.
Before joining the FBI, Waters served as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army for eight years. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, earning a bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering. He later earned a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
