Бывший спецпредставитель ФБР Кайл Ловен рассказал о 22-летней карьере и работе с медиа

From a small town kid to an FBI special agent. That was a journey Kyle Loven, now living in Ft. Myers, Florida, never anticipated when he graduated from Swanville High School in 1985. He also never foresaw the decision to join would lead to a career of 22 years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Loven said after he graduated from Swanville High, his educational journey brought him to St. John’s University in Collegeville, from which he graduated in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in political science management and a minor in business management. He then went on to study law at William Mitchell College in St. Paul, and later graduated with a juris doctor degree in 1992. It was during his time in law school that a special agent met with a select group of students, explained what the position as a special agent entailed and encouraged them to consider joining the FBI as an option. “It was intriguing enough where I indicated that I wanted to follow up and pursue this vocation,” he said. Before making the career jump, Loven worked as a general attorney in the title insurance industry for about two and a half years. Joining the FBI in 1995, Loven received his appointment to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, in May that same year. Reminiscing, Loven said he enjoyed his time in Quantico immensely. The FBI program consisted of four parts — classroom, firearms, practical applications unit and physical fitness testing. The candidates were required to be proficient in all four areas, Loven said. There were also frequent exams. Loven remained in Quantico from May to September in 1995. Upon graduation, he was assigned to the San Diego Field Office in California, where he remained for four years. “San Diego was a beautiful, beautiful city. I worked the violent crimes major offenders program, so we were responsible at the time for bank robberies, federal crimes of violence, U.S.-Mexico border crimes — anything along those lines from a federal aspect we had,” he said. That included attempted murder for hire. Loven recalls one case involving two South African expatriates, where he traveled to South Africa for two weeks in 1996 to investigate the origins of this assassination attempt. At that time, it was shortly after the apartheid ended and as a result, many local authorities weren’t familiar with the FBI. Nevertheless, he found working with the South African Security Forces eye-opening and had to both assist the investigation and answer many questions from them, he said. Loven’s next assignment was at the Minneapolis Field Office, where he worked white collar crime cases, such as fraud against the government and internet fraud. Although he liked San Diego, moving to Minnesota was great in that it brought him closer to his family. After working at the Minneapolis Field Office as a special agent for several years, he was appointed chief division counsel for the Minneapolis Field Office. As such, because of his law degree, he acted as the general counsel and legal adviser for the division until he retired in Sept. 2017. In 2005, Loven took over the InfraGard program in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which is a public and private partnership between the FBI Minneapolis Field Office and local private-sector members. The program, Loven said, gained momentum after the 9/11 attacks as the belief was that U.S. critical infrastructure would be the focus of future attacks . As such, the FBI partnered with the owners and operators of U.S. critical infrastructure to make sure that the security was strengthened at water plants, power plants and other types of critical infrastructure throughout the country. Loven ran the InfraGard program for about two years. As part of his job, he also served as the legal attaché to Singapore in 2009 for a couple of months. “Singapore was clean and efficient. It’s immaculate, because the founder of the island, Lee Kuan Yew, believed in cleanliness, so there was no public spitting. You could be fined for that. There was no gum chewing. You couldn’t buy gum on the island, so the streets were immaculate. There was very little crime. I was there working with Singaporean Security Services on terror investigations, but there was very little street crime in Singapore to speak of. It’s a very safe and tidy island,” he said. When Loven was assigned to the Minneapolis Field Office, FBI had a separate public information officer, who managed media relations, responded to inquiries, issued press releases and educated the public on criminal threats and major cases through the local field office. In 2011, after having worked as the chief division counsel for six years, it was decided Loven would assume the role of the public information officer in addition to his other duties. It was a role he was familiar with as he had served as the backup public information officer in San Diego. He remained in that position until he retired and is still remembered by many as the face of the FBI on television. “I believed in transparency and so did the FBI, so I was very willing and eager to get out in front of a lot of stories and share with the media. And I would tell my media partners, ‘if there’s something I can’t tell you, I’m not going to lie to you. Obviously, I’m just going to say I can’t tell you that, but I will when I can.’ We seemed to have a very good relationship for the six years or so that we worked together, meaning other media members from across the Twin Cities primarily,” he said. Serving as a public information officer required Loven to continuously balance the information he could share, while protecting sensitive information during active investigations. Loven said the media partners he worked with at the time knew that there was usually very little information he could share pending the investigation and they accepted that. He recalls one case in North Dakota where a family in a small town was shot to death in their home by an unknown intruder. Because of the public consternation, Loven said he knew it needed to be addressed without saying too much. “We always wanted to put the public at ease as best we could, that we were going to apprehend this person sooner rather than later. That’s one example of how the media partners that I worked with understood the situation and they didn’t ask the questions they knew I couldn’t answer, and yet still provided the information he could to try to help assuage public fears,” he said. The home intruder was caught by the FBI a couple of days later, Loven said. Some cases have had a lasting impact on Loven. One was the case in San Diego where one South African national was hired to kill another South African national and it brought him to South Africa. “I guess that was really the biggest case I had worked because of the international aspect,” he said. Another was when he worked on an internet fraud case in Minneapolis in the early 2000s. Loven said it wasn’t until he worked on that case that he realized internet fraud was going to become a lot more prevalent in the future and the impact it would have on the people defrauded. Investigating violent crimes, especially those extremely vicious, have stayed with Loven, too. As FBI is often portrayed in a certain one the movie screen, Loven said it isn’t the reality of the FBI, yet it has led to a few misconceptions among the public. For example, in movies the FBI is portrayed as coming in, railroading the local authorities in that they’re taking over the investigation. The reality is that the FBI commonly works side-by-side with the local authorities, including offering assistance while the local law enforcement department is running the investigation. Another misconception, Loven said, is that criminals often think they can fool the FBI. The reality is that the FBI is like a dog with a bone and will not let go. “My guess is that they don’t adequately capture the tenaciousness of the FBI when it comes to these investigations. Typically, the FBI will spare no expense and never stop if they believe that a criminal violation has occurred. They can prove that violation. My experience was that we would move heaven and Earth to make sure that we followed up on an investigation to its logical conclusion and made certain that the bad guy was behind bars. People think they can fool the FBI and you can for a while at times, but eventually the FBI will overwhelm you with their personnel and their resources. That’s one thing I took away from it,” he said. With some of the cases the FBI worked, the agency brought in a counselor to debrief the personnel, because of the impact they had on the team. Loven recalls one case he worked in San Diego in the mid to late 1990s, where a father was sexually assaulting his daughter and posting photos of it online. “This was early on in the child exploitation world when it came to online exploitation. We conducted a search warrant at this man’s house… it was traumatic. Most of us on the team had never seen anything like this before and I remember the FBI brought the counselor to talk to us to make sure that we were processing this as we should, so at that point I knew that, ‘OK, if I ever have issues with some of these investigations, I know that the FBI will have somebody you can speak to’ and that was important to know,” he said. Loven’s primary way of handling stress and trauma remained going for a run just about every day. It was a way to simply decompress. Following retiring from the FBI in September 2017, Loven worked for three years with a digital forensics firm in Minneapolis, primarily consulting with high-profile clients about internet safety, online presence and cyberware attacks. He also later worked as a security director at the Radisson Hotel Group for the Americas for a couple of years and then at Hugo for a year when Loven decided amidst some restructuring it was a good time to fully retire. Now he enjoys running and traveling. Looking back at his career, Loven said sometimes one never knows where life will take a person. Initially planning a career as an attorney, life brought him a different adventure, one he embraced fully.