Timothy Waters, head of Detroit FBI (Deadline Detroit photo)
Timothy Waters (Photo: Deadline Detroit)
Timothy Waters, who started with the FBI in 2000 in the Detroit Division, is finishing his bureau career as head of the office.
Waters, a northern New Jersey native and West Point graduate, tells Deadline Detroit he'll retire as the special agent in charge of the Detroit office at the end of the month to join a private company. He did not disclose its name.
Waters, 53, who was named head of the Detroit office just one year ago, says he has mixed feelings about leaving what he calls his "dream job."
But he says "an opportunity presented itself in the private sector that I think fits well with my background and experience, and I've decided to take the opportunity."
The mandatory retirement age in the FBI is 57, though some agents get extensions.
Waters, the son of a New York City firefighter, started his career in Detroit in 2000 working white-collar crime. After the 9/11 attack, he worked counterterrorism, noting that he lost friends he grew up with during the attack. In 2005 and 2006 he deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan to support military and intelligence community operations.
In 2007, he was promoted and led a squad on Detroit’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) that focused on domestic terrorism, which included the Christmas Day "Underwear Bomber" in 2009. In 2010, he was named the FBI's legal attaché in Pakistan. He returned to Detroit in 2011 as supervisor of a JTTF unit focused on al Qaeda.
In 2014, he was promoted to assistant special agent in charge for administrative matters in Detroit. He was reassigned in 2016 as the assistant special agent in charge of Detroit’s National Security Branch, which was responsible for all counterterrorism, cyber, counterintelligence and weapons of mass destruction investigations in Michigan.
In 2019, he was named director of the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, which focuses on coordinating, integrating, and sharing cyber threat information. In 2020, he was named deputy assistant director of the FBI's Critical Incident Response Group, and helped lead the FBI’s response to critical incidents worldwide.
He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York with a bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering, and later earned a MBA from the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
