Adam Lee has seen all the gallons of black ink at work about a proposed new FBI headquarters. To him, the headlines miss the point. As special agent in charge of the FBI’s Richmond Division before retiring in 2018, he recalls frequent road trips over the course of a decade to the home base on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. And he recalls they were a slog.
Many aspiring field program managers, program executives and agency leaders, he said, must make a tour of duty through the FBI headquarters for their careers to progress. The day-to-day work also means numerous meetings with the Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Agency, Pentagon and other intelligence and counterintelligence agencies — meetings that can’t be done over email or a Zoom call, he said during a recent interview. “The face-to-face interaction is critical.”
“I haven’t really heard what I consider to be a threshold issue, is how much would the placement — whether it’s Maryland or Virginia — impact the mission of the FBI?” Lee, a 22-year agency veteran who’s now chief security officer for Dominion Energy, a prominent employer in Virginia that’s based in Richmond. “There are a lot of political considerations, but the FBI belongs to the taxpayers.”
The distance issue to other intelligence agency locations has become more of a driving factor in the contentious race to win a new home campus for the FBI, one Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland are heavily vying against one another for as a potential economic development coup. The three potential landing spots on the General Services Administration’s revived short list, as they have been for a decade, are Landover and Greenbelt in Prince George’s County and Springfield in Fairfax County.
