"Our Northern Stars" speaker shares the real life story of women in the FBI

Pierce is currently contributing to a leadership course on women in the public sector in the St. Kate's Leaders of the New Millenium program.

Writer Kristen Rainey sat down with Pierce at the Coeur de Catherine coffee shop before class one evening to talk about how a self-described former cocktail waitress and educator with a Master’s degree in sports psychology built a successful career in the FBI.

Q: What or who influenced your decision to enter the FBI? How did you make the leap from civilian life to government employee?

DEBORAH PIERCE: From 1974 to 1979, I taught junior high and high school phys–ed in Cleveland and made a minimum salary. I worked as a cocktail waitress to make ends meet. It was a time of enrollment drops and teacher cutbacks, so each year I was given a pink slip at the end of the school year and was never sure I would be hired back the next year. I was low man on the totem pole.

One of the ladies that I cocktail-waitressed with became an agent, I didn’t know it at the time. But she and I had been friends, and she sent me a letter that said, “I became an FBI agent and I think you might like this.”

I had never considered law enforcement, but when my girlfriend who sent me the letter talked about the FBI and introduced me to some agents, I was hooked. The pay tripled my teaching salary and the job was steady – good motivators. It still took me two years to get in, 1977 to 1979.

Q: Tell me about your career path with the FBI.

PIERCE: It took two years to process and in 1979 I was offered a position. I went to the FBI’s training facilities at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia. I had 16 weeks of training, and there are major areas of training – physical fitness, firearms and academics – with interview techniques and forensics thrown in.

At the end of that 16 week period, I was assigned back to the Cleveland office and was given a training agent, who was Don Pierce. It took me five years to get him to marry me! He was transferred to Washington, to our headquarters, so I got what they call the “ride-along” transfer – I was transferred along with him, but to the Alexandria field office.

I became involved in a very high-profile Pentagon procurement investigation. It was called “Ill Wind” – everything had code names back then – “‘Tis an ill wind that blows no man good.” I did some undercover work with it, and I was the co-case agent, the No. 2 in charge of the case.

Ultimately, after three years, we ended up arresting the former assistant secretary of the Navy, the current deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force and a number of individuals who had left the military and had hung up shingles as consultants – we called them “beltway bandits.” They were basically buying and selling inside information from the Pentagon so that major corporations like Boeing and Burroughs could get [military] contracts.

In 1988 I was promoted to headquarters, to a supervisory position in our undercover unit. I became a supervisor over undercover operations that were worldwide, primarily in the areas of white-collar crime, drugs and organized crime.

Over the next several years, Pierce continued to progress up the ladder at the FBI. From Washington, she and her husband were transferred to the Sacramento field office where, as a supervisor, Pierce worked on medical fraud cases and corruption at the California state Assembly. She was then named assistant special agent in charge of the Milwaukee field office. Another promotion made her an inspector–one of only eight bureau-wide – with responsibility for conducting exhaustive audits of field offices in the U.S. and abroad. Then the FBI as Pierce knew it changed radically.

PIERCE: 9/11 happened. I was an inspector during that time. As an inspector, then, I was put in charge of our night shift after 9/11 for our Strategic Information Command Center. That was where we were pulling data in from overseas at night, matching with the data that we had during the day. Then the director would come in every morning very early, usually around 6 a.m. We’d brief him on stuff that had come in during the night and then he was going straight to the White House and briefing the president.

I wasn’t knowledgeable of the actual terrorists or the terrorism program, but I made sure I had the right people in there that could put this briefing book together, could brief the director, answer his questions, and make sure he had the answers for the president. It was very, very high level and very intense. I did that for two months and then the director called me in and said that he had decided that I was going to be in charge of our Minneapolis field office.

[Zacarias] Moussaoui was a huge issue for the Minneapolis office, so I got very involved in that. I became very involved with our local chiefs and sheriffs and the state system. We created the Joint Terrorism Task Force executive group. We had the JTTF in place prior to 9/11…what we didn’t have was a way to brief the chiefs and the sheriffs on what was going on and that was the function of the executive group. They met in my office every Monday morning for at least two years and I gave them classified briefings of what our investigations were all about, at the secret level.

Q: You were promoted to deputy assistant director of the criminal division in Washington, D.C.– the first woman to hold that post. What did that role entail?

There were three of us in charge of criminal division–an assistant director and two deputy assistant directors. We really covered for each other even though the assistant director was the face of the criminal division. I had about 2,500 agents; I had drugs, gangs, major theft, organized crime and criminal intelligence on my side of the house.

I had 500 criminal intelligence analysts and my job was partly to make sure they were sharing criminal information with law enforcement and finding ways for us to do that electronically because the FBI system is a closed system. It’s not connected outside, so hackers can’t attack it and so our information is secure. Finding ways to lift information out, put it into stand-alone databases that local law enforcement could access–that was our challenge.

I traveled overseas a lot–to Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangkok, Hong Kong; mostly the Far East. It was information sharing, sitting down and saying, “We have Vietnamese gangs, we have Vietnamese organized crime, we need to know where they came from, we need to know where they’re sending their money back to, will you work with us?”

I actually had the U.S. ambassador in Vietnam sit next to me during one of these meetings. He said, “You’ve accomplished more in the last hour than I’ve accomplished in the last year.” It was just so heady! Periodically during my career I would have these moments where it was like an out-of-body experience because I’d be sitting there talking to these high-level officials and think, “I was a gym teacher from Buffalo, New York–what am I doing here?” But it was just great.

But it was high pressure, high intensity. And after almost two years, I was living in Washington, my husband was here in Minnesota, so we were apart. I was only getting home for a few days every month and it just was time to go. So I retired in June 2006.

Q: Retirement must be such a change from your previous routine.

PIERCE: I’m enjoying retirement. But I got bored! You know that six months after I left the bureau, I needed it. I pulled weeds and I needed to decompress. I didn’t realize how really obsessed I was; I can really get driven. My husband said, “You know, you’re obsessed with this job.” And I said, “I am not…” But I guess I was.

It was consuming, and when you’re in it and doing it and putting in tremendously long hours during the day and weekends, you know, I let go. And then right around November I started getting really bored. Okay, the flowers died, the garden’s gone, now what am I gonna do? I had all kinds of things lined up around the house–I want to put a back door in, paint the family room. I didn’t do any of them! I missed people.

Q: What was it like to hold such high-ranking positions in a male-dominated institution like the FBI?

PIERCE: You know, a lot of people over the years have asked me about being a woman in a male-dominated occupation. I never had a problem with it. I never had harassment issues. It’s what you bring to the table and if you’re confident, if you’re sure of yourself and who you are and you listen to what’s going on around you and recognize and learn.

I used to tell guys who came onto my squads as new agents, “Keep your head down, look around you, learn from the people around you and then figure out where you fit in.” And it always worked for me. I didn’t intend from Day One to be an FBI agent or to be the deputy assistant director, criminal division.

As I would feel that I had accomplished a role–I have a theory, I guess. Your first year, you’re learning; your second year, you’re tweaking; and your third year, you’re benefiting from the changes that you’ve made.

Your fourth year, you can now sit back as kind of the expert and that’s when you start saying, “Okay, what else is out there? Where else should I be going? Is this where I want to end?”

And until I hit deputy assistant director, I really kept thinking, Okay, I can do the next step. I have said I didn’t just touch the bases–because it’s a very structured, quasi-military operation–I didn’t just touch the bases, I sat on the bases.

Q: In what ways did the institutional culture at the FBI change during your tenure?

PIERCE: The institutional culture of the FBI is constantly changing, and some of the biggest changes came after 9/11 when terrorism became the highest priority. Other changes included shifts in the criminal element such as the emergence of gangs and the evolution of organized crime from Italian to Russian, Chinese and others. It involved the emergence of Cyber Crime and the movement in foreign counter-intelligence from military spies to economic spies.

As far as women were concerned, there were more and more women proving we could do the job and do it well. There was greater and greater acceptance of women as equals and leaders on the job – similar to the shift in attitude in local law enforcement. So, the changes were not only in the areas of investigation which also were dictated by changes in the law, but also in the area of acceptance.

I do have to say that the Bureau may have been a little ahead of police departments because from the first woman agent in 1972 to today, all women had to do almost exactly the same things the men did in training school. The only physical training difference was the way women do pull-ups. All activities on the shooting range and in the classroom were the same. By the time you graduate from training school, everyone sees everyone else as equal which carried over to the investigative work in the field.

Q: The topic of the “Our Northern Stars” event mentions the concept of a “glass ceiling” – tell me about that theme and how you experienced it in your day-to-day work at the bureau.

PIERCE: I never felt like I crashed through a glass ceiling. That partnership we had at [the FBI’s criminal division] was phenomenal. We could cover for each other, I was absolutely, totally an equal. There was no question, even from the director. I never, ever got any feeling of, “Well, you’re a woman so you can’t do this.” But again, I think it’s what I brought to the table.

There were women that worked for me, there were women who worked with me who were my equals, who had problems. But they weren’t my problems. And I always felt very strongly about mentoring men and women.

In the world I was in, I would really have–I don’t want to say sidelined–but I would have really labeled myself I think if I had said, “I’m only going to mentor women.” That’s just not what it’s all about.

Law enforcement is to lock up the bad guy. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, you have to have basic skills. And if I see guys, or girls, that have management leadership capabilities, then I’m going to encourage them, I’m going to work with them, it doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman.

Q: What would your advice be for young women interested in pursuing careers in law enforcement, in joining the bureau, or even more broadly, for women interested in “non-traditional” fields?

PIERCE: If you’re competent, if you’re confident, the ceiling doesn’t exist. And you know, the other thing that I will add into that is that you really need to have the ability to talk to people. You have to have interpersonal skills that will allow you to talk up the chain of command and down the chain of command. If what you’re bringing to the table is your confidence, your competence and your ability to work with people, I think if you’ve got those things, you can be successful.

To register for "Our Northern Stars," please visit the Leadership Institute.