By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
Ryan T. Young will serve as the assistant director of the Directorate of Intelligence at FBI headquarters in Washington D.C., the bureau announced Monday.
Young is leaving his position as special agent in charge of the Counterterrorism Division in the Los Angeles Field Office.
Young’s career as a special agent with the FBI began in 2001, when he was assigned to the Miami Field Office to handle counterintelligence matters. In 2007, he was promoted to supervisory special agent in charge of the Cuban Counterintelligence Squad before becoming the chief of internal policy in the Resources Planning Office at FBI headquarters in 2012.
In 2014, Mr. Young created the Syria-Iraq Task Force in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division and led a 72-member inter-agency task force whose mission is to combat ISIS in Iraq and the Levant. In 2015, he became assistant special agent in charge of the Intelligence and Administrative branches in the Dallas Field Office.
In 2016, Young began serving as the section chief for the Directorate of Intelligence’s Strategic Technology Section, where he “was responsible for providing enterprise technology to operational entities addressing the FBI most challenging threats,” the bureau says. He also commanded a team embedded with the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Media Exploitation Center.
In 2018, Young began serving as special agent in charge of the Counterterrorism Division of the Los Angeles Field Office, where he was in charge of the bureau’s second largest Joint Terrorism Task Force and weapons of mass destruction investigations in the Los Angeles region and in Southeast Asia. Young also took charge of all crisis management and response assets, which ranged from the SWAT Team and Evidence Response Team to bomb technicians and other programs.
Before joining the FBI, Young earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a master’s degree in criminal administration and counseling from Western Oregon State University.
Young also served as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. In 2010, he was awarded the FBI Director’s Award for Outstanding Counterintelligence Investigation “for his work on the case of a Department of State employee and his wife who provided classified U.S. information to the Cuban government for 30 years,” the bureau says.
