Brig Barker retired after 21 years as a counterterrorism special agent with the FBI. During his FBI career, he spent the majority of his time on a Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), with multiple extensive overseas deployments. His focus was Al Qa’ida for the majority of his career, while he spent his last two years working ISIS.

Brig was an FBI SWAT operator and FBI certified sniper. He served as a JTTF Squad Supervisor and Counterterrorism Program Coordinator in two separate divisions.

SA Barker was selected and served as the embedded Senior FBI Advisor at DoD Special Operations Command. During his career with the FBI, he conducted numerous Counterterrorism deployments throughout Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the U.K. In 2015, he completed a deployment to Tunisia.
SA Barker deployed to Nairobi, Kenya and Kampala, Uganda in 1998 as part of the Al Qaida Embassy Bombings investigation, as well as to Cairo, Egypt immediately after the attacks on 9/11/2001.

In 2006, SA Barker opened the Freetown, Sierra Leone FBI Legal Attache office.

He was the primary Counterterrorism Interrogation instructor for the FBI Training Division for two years during which he developed the RQRD Interrogation technique. Brig was also a primary instructor for the FBI National Academy program, teaching counterterrorism strategies to local law enforcement senior management.

SA Barker is an FBI trained Arabic speaker and is conversational in Farsi and German. He developed and has taught Survival Arabic for Law Enforcement for the past 10 years.
He has 10+ Counterterrorism articles professionally published in Law Enforcement and DoD publications to include the primary Interrogation article for the West Point Counterterrorism textbook, Terrorism and Political Islam. His master’s thesis, “Decoding the Language of Jihad”, a comprehensive study in Islamic statement analysis and exegesis, was published in Middle East Quarterly.

Prior to the FBI, SA Barker spent five years as a U.S. Army Ranger and Jumpmaster qualified Army officer with the majority of his time in the 82nd Airborne. He deployed as a Weapons Company Executive Officer to Northern Iraq in 1991 as part of a Low Intensity Conflict operation.

Barker is also the author of “The Dark Trajectory of Jihad: An FBI Agent’s Understanding of the Life, Mindset, and Intentions of Radical Extremists,” published in 2021.