Advisory Board
Fred Burton
Advisory Board Member
Fred Burton is a former police officer, special agent and New York Times best-selling author. Burton is also a Life Member of the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad, having joined in 1975. He credits the rescue squad for his career in public safety. During his special agent career, he was involved in many high-profile investigations including:
- The capture of Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
- The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
- The New York murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane and al Qaeda’s pre-9/11 New York City bomb plots
- Libyan-backed terror attacks targeting diplomats in Sanaa and Khartoum
- The deaths of U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphel and Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq
Burton is the author of four books, including the best-selling memoir, GHOST: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent (Random House, 2008), in which he tells the story of his role in the fight against the burgeoning terrorist threat in the 1980s and beyond. His second book, Chasing Shadows: A Special Agent’s Lifelong Hunt to Bring a Cold War Assassin to Justice (Palgrave, 2011), follows his 37-year quest to solve the case of an Israeli diplomat assassinated in Burton’s childhood neighborhood. His third book, Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi (St. Martin’s, 2013), was a New York Times best seller and provides the first detailed account of the infamous assault in Libya. HBO purchased the rights to create a film based on the book. Burton’s current book is Beirut Rules, a true story about the kidnap and murder of a CIA station chief and Hezbollah’s war on America, published by Berkley in 2018.
Burton is routinely featured as a terrorism and security expert in numerous media outlets, and has appeared on WTOP, KLBJ, KVUE, ABC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Morning Joe, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Glenn Beck at The Blaze, NBC’s The Today Show, CBS’s The Early Show, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, NPR, Al Jazeera English, and FOX News.