Mehtab Syed has an impressive resume that includes working for the FBI in some of the nation’s biggest cities and the department’s most important divisions.
That’s not bad for a woman who was born in Pakistan, moved to the United States when she was 17 and was working as a financial analyst for a restaurant chain.
“Never in a million years did I ever plan to be an FBI agent,” she told KSL.com this week.
In February, Syed was named as the new head of the FBI’s Salt Lake City field office, which also includes Idaho and Montana.
Syed’s unexpected career change and rapid rise within the FBI began in 2001 after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City.
“I was perfectly fine with my degree in finance and doing financial work. But after 9/11, I just wanted to do something different and wanted to be part of a solution instead of part of a problem,” she said.
Syed, who is Muslim, was living in New York at the time of the attack.
“You feel shame first because you’re Muslim, (and) you see someone doing something so bad, and it kind of reflects who you are. But then I got angry, and I was like, ‘Uh-uh, that’s not happening.’”
She decided to start applying for jobs at FBI field agencies.
“I just wanted to do something,” Syed recalled.
But after initially not getting any return calls, Syed actually forgot about her application to the FBI. It wasn’t until she came home one day and her son told her the FBI had called. Syed called the number they had left.
“They said, ‘Hello, FBI.’ I hung up,” she recalled, with a laugh.
Syed initially didn’t believe the FBI had actually called her about her application. But after talking to her son again, she called them back a second time and before she knew it, she was entering the FBI Academy at age 35.
She began working as an agent in the New York field office in 2005 and worked on counterterrorism investigations, was a member of the crisis negotiation team and the rapid deployment team.
In 2008, Syed was sent to Islamabad, Pakistan, as acting assistant legal attaché.
“She was responsible for conducting extensive coordination between law enforcement, intelligence, and security services of multiple governments,” according to her bio. In 2015, she was assigned to a similar position in Amman, Jordan, as assistant legal attaché.
After Pakistan, she returned to New York, where she was the supervisor of a counterterrorism task force that investigated such groups as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, she said. Then, in 2012, she was asked by her supervisors to work at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.
“I really didn’t want to. But I was being pushed and was told that I need to go and do something different,” she said.
Syed continued her counterterrorism work in Washington, but on a more global basis.
By 2020, she was working in the Newark, New Jersey, field office as the assistant special agent-in-charge of cyber and counterintelligence. In 2022, she was promoted to section chief of the China Operations II Branch of the Counterintelligence Division at the FBI’s headquarters in Washington. By 2023, she was moved to the Los Angeles field office to once again oversee cyber and counterintelligence.
Syed also spent some time in Utah for “survival training” in 2013, she said. And after working for years in some of the nation’s biggest cities, she recently requested to return to the Beehive State to fill the job as the special agent-in-charge at the Salt Lake office.
“I like change. I like (a) challenge. I’d never been to Montana before. I’d never been to Idaho, so I came here. And I’m so glad that I did because I’m really enjoying my time here,” she said.
She describes her job now as making phone calls to headquarters to make sure her agents in Utah, Idaho and Montana get the resources they need. But she admits that the job in Utah is much different than working in New York or Los Angeles.
“Until I came to Utah, I had no idea how different the Utah territory is than being in New York, LA (and) Newark, because we cover here three different states,” she said. “So, just the time to go from one resident agency to another takes hours and hours. And don’t get me wrong, I’m used to driving for hours. Only 30 miles can take two hours in New York. But it’s a different kind of traveling. I have a whole new appreciation for my agents here in Utah and Montana and Idaho. It’s different challenges here.
“I think what we need here is more resources, more agents, more professional staff, more intel analysts,” she continued. “My goal is to bring more resources back to Utah … and Billings and Idaho. We need more agents here.”
Rather than counterterrorism, she said some of the main priorities in Utah are going after gangs, cartels and drug traffickers and protecting citizens, while also lending technical support and intel to other federal and local agencies to assist with their investigations.
“Whatever the priority is do, that’s what we do,” she said.