Source: US FBI
USERT grew out of the New York Field Office’s dive team, which was established in the 1980s. Initially, two agents who were recreational divers began finding weapons on their dives, many of which turned out to have connections to criminal cases. Word spread, and the requests for their special skillsets led to the creation of the New York Dive Team.
Today, USERT is part of the Evidence Response Team Unit (ERTU) within the FBI Laboratory. USERT divers are based out of the New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and Washington field offices and collaborate on cases across the country. With a total of 64 divers for the program, there are approximately 16 divers in each of the four field offices.
USERT members are not only expert divers—each one joined the FBI as an agent with a broad range of skillsets. Every agent can have a specialized collateral duty, in addition to their other responsibilities, which can take up to 25% of their time. USERT falls under this category, requiring tryouts to make the team and then rigorous training to prepare for the often grueling underwater work.
With USERT’s specialization, they get called in for the toughest underwater recovery cases.
As Supervisory Special Agent Brian Hudson, USERT program manager, explained: “We work on FBI cases and support local law enforcement—they’ll work the details of the case and collect the intelligence. Once they know something’s in the water, they’ll contact us to come out and search. We’ll recover the evidence, and based on chain of custody, we’ll give that evidence to the case agent or local law enforcement. They’ll send the items to a lab for further examination.”
Depending on the case, USERT may also work in international waters or assist fellow U.S. organizations. For instance, while the Coast Guard has their own maintenance divers, they do not have their own investigative dive team. In one case, USERT helped the Coast Guard recover large amounts of cocaine from a sunken drug running boat off the coast of Honduras. USERT has also been deployed to countries like Iraq to assist in investigations.