Albert F. Watters retired from the FBI after a twenty-seven-year career. He is a graduate of Duke University (BA, History, 1963) and the University of Pennsylvania School of Law (JD, 1966).
After routine assignments as an FBI agent in the New Orleans and Washington field offices, he served as a supervisory Special Agent at FBI headquarters between 1972 and 1983. There, he dealt with counterparts within the Department of Justice in evaluating the FBI's domestic and foreign intelligence gathering programs during the 1960s and early 1970s and in developing what eventually became the Attorney General's Guidelines governing all future operations in that very sensitive area.
Between 1977 and 1979, he served as the first FBI Agent ever assigned to the staff of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). This involved responsibility for representing the FBI on interagency committees, which oversaw foreign intelligence and counterintelligence activities, conducted under the auspices of the DCI. Together with a representative of both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense, he conducted the first national level counter-intelligence assessment for the Office of the President’s National Security Advisor. This was a critical review of the missions and performance of the various military and civilian agencies having counter-intelligence responsibilities, and it offered numerous recommendations for improvement of interagency arrangements. Since this initial effort, national level counterintelligence assessments have become an important feature of interagency coordination in the area of counterintelligence policy.
Following a two year assignment to the FBI’s Office of Inspection, which conducts very thorough performance audits of the FBI's operational components, he was assigned in 1981 to another special interagency assessment project relating to the role of the FBI in the drug enforcement area. This project involved extensive coordination with officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in posts throughout the United States and abroad. The result of that assignment was a series of recommendations to the Director of the FBI and the Attorney General regarding oversight responsibilities for the proper coordination of Justice Department agencies within the drug enforcement area.
From 1983 until his retirement in 1993, he served in the New York field office with supervisory investigative responsibilities in the area of foreign counterintelligence operations for countries in both the Asian and East European regions. Following the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the democratization of former communist states in East Europe, he was assigned by the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Office to develop recommendations for the reassessment of the intelligence threat posed by foreign nations and for the revision of counter-intelligence priorities in the post-Soviet era. He developed a series of recommendations, which the FBI Director adopted, both for the purpose of a national counter-intelligence budget justification and as a redefinition of the FBI's counterintelligence mission.