Fred Burton is the author of Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi (St. Martin’s, 2013), with Samuel M. Katz. One of the world’s foremost experts on international terrorist organizations, Burton is a vice president at Stratfor, the private intelligence firm that Barron’s has called “the shadow CIA.” He is also the author of Chasing Shadows: A Special Agent’s Lifelong Hunt to Bring a Cold War Assassin to Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, April 2011), and Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent (Random House, 2008), which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. He is at work on Beirut Rules: The Murder of a CIA Station Chief and Hezbollah’s War Against America, to be published in 2019.

Prior to joining Stratfor, Burton served as a special agent and deputy chief of the counter-terrorism division of the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), the arm of the U.S. State Department that protects embassy officials across the globe. In that capacity Burton tracked Libya-linked master terrorist Abu Nidal, the international terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and directed the capture of Ramzi Yusef, architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and pursued the assassins of world leaders like Yitzhak Rabin, Meir Kahane, and General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, the president of Pakistan.

As a personal-security consultant to top corporate executives, Burton has developed a protective program that has been used by governments and CEOs of some of the world’s leading corporations. A frequent guest on national news program on television and radio, Burton is a sought-after speaker on security and intelligence-related subjects.