Any one chapter in the life of Fairleigh Dickinson alumnus Walter M. Berwick would satisfy most people: After graduating from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1965 as an outstanding scholar-athlete, he served as a submarine officer in the Navy. Then he was a career CIA intelligence officer during the height of the Cold War, serving in regions as farflung as the Caribbean, Latin America and the Far East. After retiring from the CIA in 1990, Berwick established an international security company specializing in kidnap and ransom recoveries overseas.

But Berwick didn’t stop there. Having helped the West win the Cold War and families of kidnap victims to reunite with their loved ones, Berwick was again sought by his country after the 9/11 attacks to address a new global threat: Islamic terrorism. At an age when many professionals have settled into retirement, Berwick was recalled to government service, training young officers in Washington, D.C., and taking on overseas counter-terrorist assignments himself.

Examples of his commitment to service and dedication to larger causes—even in the face of personal risk—can be seen from his earliest years. After graduating from high school in Upper Darby, Pa., Berwick joined the Navy, where he excelled as an electronics technician and achieved the rank of ET2 (equivalent to staff sergeant in the Air Force) by age 19, the youngest in the Navy to reach that level at the time.

After four years in the Navy, Berwick was admitted to Fairleigh Dickinson’s original Rutherford campus, where he was a top student and athlete. While at FDU, he joined a U.S. Naval Reserve submarine unit, training at submarine school during the summers. By his senior year, Berwick had been elected senior class president and was named senior of the year. He was captain and high scorer of the varsity basketball team and was nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship—the one that eventually went to Bill Bradley of Princeton.

Three days after he graduated from FDU, Berwick was a junior officer on the USS Irex, a New London, Conn.-based submarine en route to the South Atlantic. Later that year, he was recruited by the CIA and began his clandestine career, gathering information and tracking the movement of key Russians, Cubans and Chinese, among other duties. Fluent in Spanish, he served the Agency in seven field stations and was CIA station chief in three of them: Caracas, Venezuela; Kingston, Jamaica; and Quito, Ecuador. Between foreign assignments, he received training in Washington, D.C., in graduate level economics and senior management, and later, helped create the CIA’s counter-terrorist and counter-intelligence centers. His final post was as deputy chief of the Far East Division.

At the age of 49, with a CIA rank equivalent to an Army major general, Berwick retired to begin a new career in the business world. He co-founded and was executive director of BPA Ltd., an international crisis prevention and response company that specialized in resolving kidnap-for-ransom cases. His first case involved a client receiving bomb threats from environmental terrorists, and soon he was dispatched on a kidnap for ransom case in Colombia that lasted for more than a year, with the victims—three Americans and a Colombian—recovered without harm.The company,in its nearly ten years, has never had a kidnap hostage killed or injured; all were returned safely at the end of negotiations.

Berwick’s personal life has been just as full as his professional one. He is married to Christie Jean, a restaurateur in the Florida Keys; between them, they have six adult children and nine grandchildren. They live in Key Largo, Fla., where he enjoys yachting, snorkeling, scuba diving, traveling, writing and playing tennis. Berwick is also an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary.