Highflying Dreams Lead Pilot to Both the Military and FBI

Alex Ford is talking about his boyhood dreams, and everything that’s happened since the days when he began to see flying as a way to escape the Nebraska cornfields.

First he was a Marine Corps aviator, then a pilot for the FBI. And now, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, he is both flying for the FBI and training a new generation of pilots for the Marines.

He’s in his flight suit, strolling past a row of F/A-18 Hornet attack jets on the runway at the Marine Corps Air Station at Miramar. This is where he’s been spending many of his days lately, sharing everything he knows with young Marine pilots still six months or so away from possible combat duty.

His call sign as a Marine pilot is Spud, and it suits him as an FBI agent, too. He’s built like a fireplug. A boxer back in college, he likes to mix it up as an agent. And just hanging out at Miramar seems to pump him up.

“I love being a Marine,” he said. “I love putting on the uniform. I love being able to say, ‘Hey, I was a part of it.’”

He loves the FBI work, too. In addition to his work as a pilot, he’s also a street agent with a knack for catching fugitives and a taste for fast action. “He’s one of the best,” said his boss, William Gore, head of the FBI’s San Diego office.

Chris Nelson, another FBI pilot in San Diego, says Ford is one of the most skilled pilots he’s ever flown with, and an agent with so much energy that it makes Nelson tired just watching him.

“Alex is very aggressive, very smart and he loves to have 20 million things going at once,” Nelson said. “Most people couldn’t begin to do what he’s been doing since Sept. 11, but it suits him perfectly.”

Ford’s parents bought a small Cessna when he was a senior in high school in Grand Island, Neb., and that’s when he started flying. Then it was on to the University of Nebraska, where he joined the Marines officer candidate program.

As a new Marine pilot, his training took him from T-34 turboprops to Harrier attack jets, with stops in Pensacola, Fla.; Beeville, Texas; and Cherry Point, N.C. In the following years, he was deployed to Japan, Korea, the Philippines, the southern Atlantic, then back to Cherry Point as a flight instructor.

Then, in 1992, Ford was assigned to Twentynine Palms. There he helped develop the Pioneer, a remote-piloted vehicle that was a forerunner of the unmanned Predators operated by the CIA in Afghanistan.

In 1994, Ford resigned his commission and applied to the major airlines to be a commercial pilot. He didn’t find a job there, but did at Aeronautical Systems, the San Diego company that developed the Predator. Ford was a project leader, and he operated the Predator out of Albania during the Bosnian war.

He became an FBI agent in 1996. He had applied two years earlier--about the time it often takes for FBI applicants to get hired. He was still a pilot, but now he was a door-kicker, too. And he loved it.

“I took a $60,000 pay cut to get this job and I have never regretted it,” Ford said. “I just love chasing people down. I love being the first guy through the door.”

He has caught 500 fugitives in the last five years, he says, with a personal record of nine arrests before noon. The key, he says, is staying with a case, following up, and putting in some extra effort.

And staying excited about his work.

“I remember when I was a new agent, and my mentor asked me what my mission was as an agent,” Ford recalled. “I said it was putting away as many bad guys as I could. Wrong, he said. It’s making friends.

“This is a people business,” Ford added. “You treat people with dignity and respect and you will get it back. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a mother tell me where I could find her son because she felt I was fair.

“The more friends you make, the more people you catch,” he said.

These days Ford is on some special assignments he can’t talk about (and his bosses won’t even let his face be photographed). All he’ll say is: “Both my jobs are focused on the war against terrorism.”

His wife woke him on the morning of Sept. 11. Like everyone else, Ford watched the planes crash over and over again into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on television replays.

“I ended up at March Air Force Base in Riverside, helping with some Special Ops training,” he said.

As a lieutenant colonel in the Marine reserves, Ford, 41, has always put in some time on weekend military duties, building the retirement points needed to eventually get a military pension.

It wasn’t a full-time job until after Sept. 11. And Ford had to do a lot of talking with both the FBI and the Marines to get the chance to work with Miramar’s active-duty Hornet squadrons.

On the military side, Ford was setting a precedent. He was a reserve officer offering himself up as free labor seeking assignment to an active-duty squadron.

That meant cutting through a lot of Defense Department red tape.

But the FBI needed to know that Ford’s work as an agent would take precedence when the bureau needed him. Ford convinced everybody it would work.

“When my grandkids ask, ‘What did you do in the war on terrorism?’ I can say I helped fight it with the bureau and with the Marines,” Ford said.

“Right now I’m helping train some of the people who will be going overseas,” he added. “Ultimately, I want the chance to go back on active duty for 30 or 45 days and go over there myself, do whatever I can to free other people up.”

Once the Navy’s Top Gun school, Miramar is home to 11,000 Marines. There are seven Hornet squadrons. About 400 men and women are in the training squad Ford is working with now, 80 of them pilots and weapons systems officers.

“I try to relieve some of the pressure on everybody else,” Ford said. “I teach subjects like fundamentals of marksmanship and cockpit resource management. But I’ve also written a drug policy report on Ecstasy and sat on a court martial.”

Cockpit resource management? Ford says that boils down to keeping your eyes open and communicating “aggressively” with fellow pilots on such matters as incoming missiles and enemy planes.

And marksmanship? The key is trigger control, Ford says; just about everybody’s a little too quick on the trigger.

Marine Lt. Col. Dave Kelly went through Marine training with Ford two decades ago and more recently served with him at Miramar.

“He’s the only guy I’ve ever known who has ever done something like this,” Kelly said. “And it goes far beyond weapons training and that other stuff. A lot of guys have to learn officer qualities. Ford is a man who can teach honesty and integrity along the way. That’s pretty rare.”

The boy on the farm never imagined a war on terrorism--or the satisfaction he would find in his admittedly modest role.

“If it wasn’t for that dream, I wouldn’t be here today,” Ford said. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I’m having way too much fun.”