Kathleen Puckett, Ph.D.

Dr. Kathleen M. Puckett spent 23 years as an FBI Special Agent, where she was primarily involved in the investigation and analysis of cases involving foreign counterintelligence and domestic and international terrorism.

In the mid 1970s, Kathleen was an officer in the Office of Special Investigations in the U.S. Air Force, where she acquired an early knack for investigations of Soviet and East Bloc espionage. When she left the Air Force, she was heavily recruited by both the FBI and the CIA.

By the mid 1980s she had learned Russian and was working against Soviet Intelligence in the San Francisco Division of the FBI.

Between 1988 and 1994 she was a principal in “Project Slammer,” an interagency espionage study that involved extensive interviews of individuals convicted of espionage.

In 1993 she became a founding member of the FBI National Security Division’s Behavioral Analysis Program (BAP), and was an operational and behavioral consultant to numerous high profile counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations throughout the United States.

Between 1994 and 1998 she was the primary behavioral expert during the UNABOM investigation. She also assisted FBI Inspector Terry Turchie in the investigation of Eric Rudolph in North Carolina in 1998, and received the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service the same year.

In 2000 she completed a research internship that led to the production of a dissertation concerning the prediction of violence and the conferring of a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology.

In 2001 Dr. Puckett conducted a multi-jurisdictional risk assessment study concerning lone domestic terrorists including Theodore Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph for the Counterterrorism Division of the FBI.

Dr. Puckett provides behavioral threat assessment consultation to international corporations and governmental security agencies, and is a law enforcement consultant to the Program of Psychiatry and the Law at the University of California at San Francisco. She is a frequent presenter at law enforcement and mental health community forums on both the UNABOM case and the psychology of terrorism.