I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

But I will bear true faith and allegiance to the sea that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion and that I will will inflate the lead discharge.

The duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

So help me God, so help me God.

Welcome to the Oath. I'm Chuck Rosenberg and I am honored to be your host for another compelling conversation with a fascinating guest from the World of Public Service.

Our guest this week is Frank Figg-Luzzi, the former head of the FBI Counter Intelligence Division.

Frank grew up in Connecticut, but with his eyes and ears tuned to the nearby New York City Media Market and to enthralling stories of mob-busting FBI agents.

Those amazing tales made a big impression on a young Frank.

As an 11-year-old, he wrote a letter to a senior FBI special agent asking how he could one day join their ranks.

To this day, he still has the personal reply that he received encouraging him to pursue that dream.

Back then, the FBI primarily hired attorneys and accountants to become special agents, and so Frank later went to law school to polish his resume for the FBI.

It worked, and in 1987, after graduating from the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, Frank was assigned to the Atlanta Field Office, where he began a career working among other things, counterintelligence cases.

In counterintelligence work, the FBI tries to identify and neutralize threats from foreign intelligence services that seek to steal our military economic and trade secrets.

Our adversaries also attempt to recruit U.S. persons and to turn them against our own country.

In this episode, Frank describes the vital work he did in counterintelligence, including how his recruitment of a double agent from another country to assist the United States came to a sudden and surprising halt.

When the FBI and the United States were betrayed by one of their own, Robert Hanson, a disgraced former FBI special agent, now serving a life sentence and a federal prison for espionage.

It is an interesting and disturbing story.

Frank's long and distinguished career in the FBI took him to many different places, Atlanta, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, and in multiple roles.

Among the most challenging posts he held was in the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility, where he imposed discipline, including dismissal, on men and women who violated the FBI's strict code of conduct, decisions that were often agonizingly difficult, but necessary to preserve the credibility of the organization.

At the end of his career, Frank ran the counterintelligence division of the FBI, and instituted important changes to ensure that intelligence analysts and special agents worked more closely together to protect our nation from foreign adversaries.

Frank was a thoughtful and principled leader and has written eloquently about his time at the FBI in his new book, The FBI Way.

Frank Figuilusy, welcome to the U.S.

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