Arthur Balizan Named Special Agent in Charge of Portland Division

Arthur Balizan has been named special agent in charge (SAC) of the FBI’s Portland Division. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, III appointed him to this position to replace SAC David Ian Miller, who will retire at the end of June. Most recently, Mr. Balizan served as an inspector in the FBI’s Inspection Division.

Mr. Balizan entered on duty as an FBI special agent in 1981. Upon completion of training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, he was assigned to the San Francisco Division, where he worked general criminal and drug matters. In 1983, he was transferred to the San Juan Division, where he investigated terrorism matters.

From 1988 to 1992, he investigated a variety of criminal matters in the Albuquerque Division’s Las Cruces Resident Agency. Thereafter, he was promoted to supervisory special agent (SSA) and assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Colombia as the assistant project director for the U.S. Department of Justice International Criminal Investigative Training and Assistance Program. In that role, he provided training to Colombian law enforcement entities. Later that year, he was designated the FBI SSA assigned to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota under Resolution 6, an initiative created to streamline the collaborative anti-narcotics efforts among government agencies.

In 1996, he was promoted to field SSA in San Francisco’s San Jose Resident Agency, where he first supervised the violent crime squad and later served as the senior supervisory resident agent for the office. He was designated as Inspection Division team leader in 1998, and served for a year in that role, overseeing Inspection Division teams during inspections of FBI Headquarters divisions, field offices, and legal attaché offices.

Mr. Balizan returned to San Francisco’s San Jose Resident Agency in late 1999, where he supervised white collar crime and civil rights matters. In 2000, he was named assistant special agent in charge (ASAC) of the FBI’s Sacramento Division, where he served for two-and-a-half years. In that capacity, he managed all investigative programs and had primary responsibility for administrative management.

In 2002, Mr. Balizan was named ASAC of the San Francisco Division, assigned to the San Jose Resident Agency. For more than three years, he had oversight responsibility for the division’s cyber and civil rights programs, the Silicon Valley Regional Computer Forensics Lab, and all criminal and terrorism investigations in the San Jose Resident Agency territory. He was appointed to the Senior Executive Service in 2006 and served as one of eight inspectors at FBI Headquarters. During that time, he led inspection teams during inspection reviews of FBI Headquarters, field, and legal attaché operations.