FBI Director Christopher Wray has named Rafael Riviere as the special agent in charge of the San Juan Field Office in Puerto Rico. A native of Puerto Rico, Mr. Riviere most recently served as the chief of the Leadership Development Program at FBI Headquarters in Washington.

Mr. Riviere joined the FBI as a special agent in 1998 and was assigned to the Dallas Field Office, where he worked drug investigations targeting Mexican drug trafficking organizations. In 2001, he transferred to the Fajardo Resident Agency of the San Juan office. In Puerto Rico, he worked cases involving police corruption, organized crime, drugs, domestic terrorism, and violent crime. He also served on the SWAT team and deployed to Haiti to support kidnapping investigations.

Mr. Riviere was promoted to supervisory special agent in 2008 and transferred to the Counterterrorism Division at FBI Headquarters. He held several different positions in the division, including as the unit chief managing all the international terrorism investigations run by the eight FBI divisions on the West Coast.

In 2014, Mr. Riviere transferred to the Washington Field Office as a supervisor, leading the squad responsible for the initial assessments of all possible terrorist threats in the region. In 2017, he was promoted to assistant special agent in charge for the Washington Field Office Counterterrorism Division Response Branch.

Mr. Riviere was named section chief in the Human Resources Branch at Headquarters in 2018, where he oversaw the Leadership Development Program.

Before joining the FBI, Mr. Riviere was a commissioned officer with the U.S. Air Force for 12 years, including time as an experimental laser physicist. Mr. Riviere has a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Puerto Rico and a master’s in electrical engineering from the University of New Mexico.