FBI Sends In Ace for Bomb Probe : N.Y. bureau chief Fox is a workaholic with training fighting espionage and terrorism.

A career as an FBI agent was not exactly what James Fox’s father wanted for his son.

The elder Fox, a bus driver and avid baseball fan, had, after all, named his offspring in honor of Jimmy Foxx, the legendary home run king of the 1930s and ‘40s.

“He wanted me to be a professional ballplayer,” Fox said. “But when he realized that I couldn’t hit a curve ball but I could shoot straight, he said: ‘Maybe you should consider a career in the FBI.’ ”

Thirty years later, that career choice has led Fox to the national spotlight. As assistant FBI director and chief of the bureau’s New York City field office, the largest in the nation, he is responsible for guiding the vast interagency investigation of the World Trade Center bombing.

In addition to agents from his own 1,100-person New York office, the team includes FBI agents from New Jersey and Washington, members of the New York police bomb squad and agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

By all accounts, Fox has the kind of grit and training that the job requires.

Described as a workaholic who combines a straight-from-the-shoulder New York-style brusqueness with a large measure of charm, Fox was born in Chicago, graduated from the University of Illinois Law School in Champaign, then studied Chinese at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif.

After his first assignment in New Haven, Conn., he was transferred to Chicago’s Chinatown district, where he concentrated on counterintelligence--the FBI’s efforts to thwart espionage and terrorism directed at the United States.

That continued to be his primary specialty throughout his 30 years with the FBI. Between his stint in Chicago and his promotion five years ago as chief of the Manhattan office, he also served in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington.

While working in Los Angeles, he helped coordinate security measures for the 1984 Olympic Games, a task he said taught him the value of thorough planning.

Fox said that he has learned “you can never be too thorough,” and that his espionage training is proving useful as police and FBI agents pursue evidence that the trade center explosion may be linked to terrorists.

“From my own experience I know many of the names and causes of foreign groups that we’re looking at in this investigation,” he said.

Fox, 55, gets generally high marks from most of those under his command, associates said. The gray-haired chief, sometimes called “the Silver Fox,” still likes to get away from his desk and onto the street or, in recent days, into the trade center’s underground garage to oversee the painstaking collection of chemical residues that could strengthen the case against chief suspect Mohammed A. Salameh or others.

“He’s a very patient guy and thoughtful and sensitive to others,” said Thomas L. Sheer, whom Fox replaced in late 1987. Fox and Sheer began their careers together in 1962 in New Haven.

One of Fox’s first acts as the New York bureau chief was to lobby FBI Director William S. Sessions to raise the pay of New York-based agents on the grounds that living costs there were higher than elsewhere in the country. Sessions eventually agreed.

As an administrator, Fox “really concentrates on casework,” one colleague said. “He thinks things out logically.”

And he brings to the job a powerful appetite for work, colleagues say. Always accustomed to long workdays, he has lengthened his hours since the bombing.

“I still arrive about 6:30 a.m.,” Fox said. “But now I only go home about every other night. Many times I just sleep in the office.”

Chatting recently with a visitor to his 28th-floor office in the southern tip of Manhattan, Fox sat in his shirt sleeves while munching a slice of cold pizza between phone calls from other law enforcement officials. He exuded the air of a man who had found his niche.

Talking of the mix of espionage, terrorism and organized crime that has figured in his career, he said: “I joined the FBI to work just this kind of stuff.”