A hero nobody knew: Fort Worth man led U.S. Navy cybersecurity, but it was top secret
A U.S. Navy war hero came home Friday, but he wasn’t fighting the way you think.
From 2006 to 2009, now-retired Capt. Roy Petty of Fort Worth led the Navy’s defense against computer system attacks worldwide, defending network security and America’s critical infrastructure in a time of persistent global cyberwarfare.
His work remains top secret.
“There was this time — well, I guess I can’t really talk about that,” he said Friday, home for a ceremony that added the Diamond Hill-Jarvis High School graduate’s name to the Fort Worth school district Wall of Fame.
His brother, Mark, said Petty’s own family never really knew what he was doing in his years as commander of the Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command.
He “couldn’t tell anyone what he was doing,” Mark Petty said: “But there were things we knew.”
For a century, schools like Diamond Hill-Jarvis in working-class Fort Worth neighborhoods have produced men and women who went on to become great leaders and fighters for America.
Now, we’re sending smart sons and daughters to fight computer battles.
Roy Petty grew up on Oscar Avenue as a mixed Anglo and Hispanic son of an Air Force family, and went on to become valedictorian of the Diamond Hill class of 1976.
At then-tiny Diamond Hill, he took one of the first computer science classes, Superintendent Kent Scribner said.
But it took Petty 10 years of college, a management degree and corporate life before a European vacation gave him the idea to join the Navy and travel the world.
From a start in cryptology and classified work, he moved into network security at a time when computers were becoming faster and the hacking attacks were coming in the hundreds of thousands yearly.
“We were on the defensive side — protecting the network, learning as we went along,” he said.
When an enemy attacked, “You didn’t always know what was going on,” he said, “and you didn’t always have time” to figure it out.
In 2009, when he was named to the “Federal 100” list of the government’s smartest computer pros, Petty talked about how enemies pose an “agile threat that adapts far quicker than our traditional ability to respond.”
He said he is proudest of putting network security up front in lessons at the U.S. Naval War College and as part of the planning for every mission.
“If you don’t,” he was quoted, “your adversary will.”
Now on medical leave from a position at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, Petty spoke briefly in Fort Worth to an audience of Diamond Hill classmates, district administrators and Army ROTC students.
He repeated themes from his 1976 valedictory speech, talking about the importance of goals and a plan to achieve them.
“Now, I didn’t necessarily follow that,” he said with a laugh.
He graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington with a degree in management and worked for the Carpenter family, developers of Las Colinas, before deciding to see more of the world.
“I was hitchhiking around Europe and just fell in love,” he said.
“Growing up, I couldn’t imagine not being in Texas. That changed.”
He was in the Persian Gulf in 1988 when Navy boats sank Iranian tankers.
During the 9-11 attacks, he was based in Virginia as a cryptologist and assistant intelligence officer.
“The whole day was spent just trying to understand what was going on,” he said.
“We were like everybody else. We were just trying to wrap our heads around what was happening.”
He has only rarely come home to Fort Worth, which he remembers from the 1970s as “a pretty tough town.”
He liked playing Sabine-Jarvis Little League baseball and sadly remembers the forerunners of later neighborhood gangs.
“You didn’t want to get in a fight, but sometimes you had to,” he said.
“There were times when I just wanted to stay out of the way.”
Sometimes, America has to fight.
“The United States of America is a wonderful, proud place,” he said.
“Do a lot of people read our messages wrong? Sure — we create a lot of our own problems. But at the end of the day, what we do is meant to be for the best.”
This is the first time his name or photo has ever been in the Star-Telegram.
This story was originally published December 8, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
