Webster led the FBI for nine years, a year shy of the full term for director. In May 1987, President Ronald Reagan was seeking a replacement for controversial CIA Director William J. Casey, who had died amid Congressional investigations into the agency’s covert activities.

William Webster, a longtime U.S. public servant who served as the head of both the FBI and the CIA in a career spanning the late 1970s to the early 1990s, has died. He was 101. The FBI confirmed his death in a statement Friday.

His family announced his death in a statement that called him an “extraordinary man” who “spent a lifetime fighting to protect his country and its precious rule of law.”