November 21 marked the 25th anniversary of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, or CTD. In the time since its creation, the division has worked to counter the constantly evolving threat of terrorism at home and abroad.
“I think the 25 years has given us a very strong base to be extremely proficient—both here at Headquarters in the Counterterrorism Division and the JTTFs in the field,” said FBI Assistant Director David J. Scott, a special agent who spent most of his career working counterterrorism violations before being tapped to lead CTD in August 2024. “Thanks to our people, we’re extremely good at what we do. We’ve advanced over the years, but we’ve become very proficient at what we do, and therefore, we’re able to stop these types of attacks from occurring.”
An influx in terrorist activity around the world in the early 1980s inspired then-Director William Webster to name counterterrorism as the Bureau’s fourth-highest priority. “And that was an increase from where it had been,” Scott said.
That trend continued in the next decade with the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.
But August 1998—when a pair of truck-bomb attacks against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania claimed hundreds of lives, including those of American citizens—proved to be a turning point for the FBI.
“Those years leading up to the establishment of CTD witness the globalization of terrorism, and there was a willingness by both the domestic and international terrorists to use weapons of mass destruction to inflict large numbers of civilian casualties,” Scott said.
Thus, on November 21, 1999, the Counterterrorism Division was formally created, consolidating “many of the anti-terrorism efforts and capabilities for the first time in 20 years,” Scott said.
After the ISIS caliphate collapsed in the late 2010s, a perception arose that terrorist threats were on a decline. To some, the threat posed by foreign terrorist organizations had diminished to the point where counterterrorism didn’t need to be the Bureau’s top priority.
“And, I’ll admit, I even had my own doubts,” Scott said. “I was a JTTF [Joint Terrorism Task Force] squad supervisor at the time and then assistant special agent in charge at a field office, and I could see that downward trend myself. And it was very obvious. And, of course, I consider that a good thing. If we had helped to diminish the terrorist threat, that’s always a good thing.”
But, he said, the events of October 7, 2023, in the Middle East confirmed the Bureau’s threat calculus.
“Even before the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the FBI had been very public in saying that the terrorism threat was already elevated across the board, with international threats, domestic terrorism threats, and the state-sponsored threat,” he said. “And, as I talk to my counterparts now across the interagency—and even with international partners—everybody is saying the same thing: They’re seeing this across the globe. This is an issue that’s not just facing the U.S., but it’s facing everybody with these simultaneously elevated threats.”
The Bureau’s bandwidth for handling counterterrorism-related tips has also grown exponentially in the past 25 years, with the creation of our National Threat Operations Center to triage and route tips from the public to investigators in the field.
The FBI’s use of partnerships to stem this threat has expanded in parallel fashion.
In 1980, the FBI New York Field Office pioneered the Joint Terrorism Task Force partnership model—which brings together experts from local, state, and federal government agencies to leverage their collective range of skillsets to investigate and prevent acts of terror. Since then, these task forces have expanded throughout the field.
“And, now, you’ve got 4,000 members from over 500 different state and local agencies, 50 federal agencies, all working nationwide on Joint Terrorism Task Forces, and they’re working to prevent any of these domestic attacks, any international terrorism attacks,” Scott said.
The Bureau has also established a Headquarters-level National Joint Terrorism Task Force, whose membership includes representatives from the Defense Department, the U.S. Intelligence Community, and other federal government agencies. The interagency corps coordinates field-level JTTF efforts and oversees personnel movement to ensure those squads have the proper mix of staffing from member agencies, Scott explained.
As for tactics, Scott said the increasing sophistication of terrorists’ techniques and use of communications has also demanded innovation on the part of CTD. For example, he said, these bad actors’ use of encrypted mobile apps to plot attacks against Americans on U.S. soil and around the world inspired the Bureau to form specialized teams, known as Terrorist Use of the Internet squads, to determine how to disrupt such efforts.
Guidelines from the attorney general dictate when the FBI can start a terrorism investigation and authorize the FBI to collect information accordingly.
This information serves two purposes:
- First, it helps us build a case against people or groups who break the law to help us arrest them and to assist the U.S. Department of Justice in prosecuting them. Our investigations focus on the unlawful activity of the group, not the ideological orientation or First Amendment-protected activity of its members.
- Next, it builds an intelligence base that we can analyze to prevent terrorist activity.
The FBI’s approach to counterterrorism investigations is based on the need both to prevent incidents where possible and to react effectively after incidents occur.
The FBI is empowered to investigate terrorism both at home and overseas. “That goes back to 1983, when Attorney General William French Smith modified the guidelines for conducting intelligence investigations,” Scott said. “And then, the next year, Congress authorized the Bureau to pursue criminals who attacked Americans beyond our shores.”
These days, CTD has a global footprint to protect Americans the world over.
“Now, we have counterterrorism assistant legal attachés––or ALATs––forward-deployed in U.S. embassies across the globe,” Scott said. “We’ve got the fly team that can deploy both domestically and overseas at a moment’s notice. And then, we’ve got a significant portion of our division here at Headquarters that is dedicated to ensuring our U.S. citizens are protected overseas, just as they would be here within the borders of the U.S.”
Recent CTD Investigative Successes
October 2020: Two ISIS militants are charged in connection with a hostage-taking scheme that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, as well as citizens of the United Kingdom and Japan, in Syria. Two years later, both militants are convicted and they each receive eight life sentences for their crimes.
August 2022: An officer from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is charged for attempting to order the assassination of a former U.S. national security advisor. “We were very fortunate that the individual he attempted to pay to carry out this attack was one of our own confidential human sources, or CHSes,” Scott said.
January 2023: Three people who’d been hired by the Iranian government are charged with plotting the murder of a New York-based journalist who’d criticized the regime’s human-rights abuses. Additional individuals have since been charged for their alleged roles in the plot, Scott noted. “This was the Iranian regime’s second attempt to silence her, and both times, thankfully, we were there to stop them.”
September 2024: A Canada-based Pakistani citizen is arrested while trying to travel to New York City and subsequently charged with plotting to commit a mass shooting against a Brooklyn-based Jewish center. “He was aiming to execute his plan on the October 7 anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel, and he said—in communication with another individual—that he wanted to slaughter as many Jewish people as possible, all in the name of ISIS,” Scott said. The individual was allegedly hoping to commit “the largest attack on U.S. soil since 9/11,” he added.
October 2024: An Afghan citizen living in Oklahoma City is charged for allegedly planning an Election Day terror attack on behalf of ISIS. “As part of the plot, the defendant allegedly took steps to liquidate his family’s assets, resettle members of his family overseas, acquire AK-47 assault rifles and ammunition, and commit a terrorist attack in the United States,” a U.S. Department of Justice press release about the indictment states.
The original announcement can be found here.
