Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory: This year, the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division turned 25 years old.

To mark this anniversary, we’ll hear Assistant Director David J. Scott—a special agent who leads the Bureau’s efforts to combat domestic, international, and state-sponsored terrorism—reflect on how the threat has evolved over the past quarter century and how the division has risen to meet the challenge.

I’m Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory, and this is Inside the FBI.

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Assistant Director David J. Scott: The FBI's mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. So, our mission within the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division is to protect Americans from terrorist attacks. So, you can see how those sort of fit together. After 25 years, protecting the United States from terrorist attacks has become the FBI's number-one priority.

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After the fall of the ISIS caliphate in about 2017, there was a perceived downward trend in terrorist threats. And, around that time, there seemed to be a lot of people that were really taking a hard look at how we were prioritizing our threats. And we were even criticized at times for maintaining counterterrorism as our top priority because there were claims out there that the threats from those foreign terrorist organizations had diminished so much that we didn't need to make it our number-one priority.

And, I'll admit, I even had my own doubts. I was a JTTF 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 you look at today, and how does that sound? Because we're a year after the Hamas attacks in Israel from last October 7, when one of our closest allies was attacked by terrorists who killed almost 1,200 people that day.

So, 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. 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.

So, however you want to say it, we've got to be on our game because the American public depends on us to be able to address all of these threats at the same time and make sure that we're disrupting any potential attack in the U.S.

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In very general terms, the FBI is bound by guidelines issued by the attorney general that establish a policy on when an investigation can be initiated. And so, through those guidelines, the FBI obtains authorization to collect information. And that's where we get our investigations. That's where we obtain the facts that we can then analyze and use those to prevent terrorist activity.

We carry out the mission through a combination of the work that's done here at FBI Headquarters, through the Counterterrorism Division, where we program-manage all of the efforts against the terrorist threat. So regardless of whether it's an international terrorism threat, domestic terrorism threat, or state actors, we manage all of that from here at Headquarters.

But the people that actually carry it out are the teams that are out in the field offices. Those are the Joint Terrorism Task Forces. That's where you bring together all of the agents, the analysts, all the specialty teams, and they form the nucleus, the group that actually goes out and makes the arrests, does the disruption of the attacks.

Everybody knows that the FBI has the authority to investigate federal crimes here in the U.S., but what I find interesting—and what you may not know—is that the FBI has authorities around the world. That goes back to 1983, when Attorney General William French Smith modified the guidelines for conducting intelligence investigations.

And, then the next year, Congress authorized the Bureau to pursue criminals who attacked Americans beyond our shores.

Now, we have counterterrorism assistant legal attachés--or ALATs--forward deployed in U.S. embassies across the globe. 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.

And just one example of that overseas mission is when the FBI conducted a 10-year investigation of an ISIS hostage cell involving British ISIS members, nicknamed “The Beatles.”

The Beatles were responsible for taking more than 25 Western hostages back during sort of the peak of ISIS and for the murder of at least 13 Western hostages, including four Americans.

And so, in 2022, it was thanks to those authorities--and thanks to the overseas capabilities of the Counterterrorism Division--two of those subjects were convicted and were sentenced to eight life sentences each.

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I think it's kind of interesting to look back in history.

So, back in 1982, there was actually a high number of incidents in the terrorist world, just across the globe. And, at that time, the Director, William Webster, made counterterrorism the FBI's fourth national priority. And that was an increase from where it had been.

So, years later, the FBI established the Counterterrorism Division, back on November 21, 1999—so 25 years ago–and it consolidated many of the anti-terrorism efforts and capabilities for the first time in 20 years. So, 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.

You had a couple of really significant incidents that caught the public's eye and made the FBI very concerned about the terrorist threat.

On the domestic front, you had Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building in April of '95 and killed 168 people. And, at the time, that ranked as the worst terrorist attack to occur on American soil.

And then, in the 90s, you had the February ‘93 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City and the August ‘98 truck-bomb strikes against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and that killed hundreds of U.S., Kenyan, and Tanzanian citizens. And so, it was actually those embassy attacks that led to the FBI creating CTD as a standalone division.

Almost a year after, you had the attack on the USS Cole that occurred in October of 2000, killing 17 sailors.

And then, as we all know, on 9/11, that changed the world, and it changed CTD.

So, following those massive terrorist attacks in Washington and New York and Pennsylvania, the FBI dedicated 7,000 of the 11,000 special agents and thousands of FBI support personnel to those investigations.

And one of those major evolutions following the 9/11 attacks was the reshaping of the FBI into an intelligence-driven organization, which really strengthened the counterterrorism operations.

So, then, post-9/11—as we talked about—you had downward trends. You had upward trends, like you naturally would. But then, of course, we've got last October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel. And since then, that threat in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans to a whole other level.

So, I think all of this shows that we've got to be committed to remaining agile in our approach to the terrorist threat.

It's continued to evolve since September 11, and it will continue to evolve years after these attacks. The threat landscape has expanded considerably, and international terrorism remains a serious threat. But you've got the domestic terrorism threat, as well, that remains persistent overall.

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Since the establishment of CTD back in ‘99, we've changed dramatically, but so have the threat actors. And if you look at the terrorist threat, in general, and the sophistication and the change in our adversaries’ use of sophisticated techniques and their communications, we've had to really innovate in order to keep up with them.

You know, I look back to 20 years ago, I did a TDY up here to the Public Access Center Unit, or PACU, and that's where we used to get the tips soon after 9/11. There were a handful of us working the overnight shift at that point, and we'd come in and sit here at the Hoover Building, and we'd get maybe 40-50 tips that would come in by email each night. And we thought that was just huge, and the volume seemed to us to be just overwhelming.

And then, you look at today, at the thousands of tips that come in, and we've got our National Threat Operations Center that gets all of these tips, and it just shows you how things have changed. And that's just in how we take in the tips themselves and then triage those and get those out to be worked by the field offices.

I mean, over the last couple of decades, you look at the use of communications and encrypted apps and that type of thing, and we've got to work to maintain that lawful access to those sophisticated communications techniques. That's something where we have actually established Terrorist Use of the Internet squads that focus specifically on how to go after and figure out how to disrupt terrorists that are using sophisticated communication apps to plot their attacks against Americans—both domestic and abroad.

So, we've got to constantly keep up.

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I think a lot of this really comes back to partnerships.

It's partnerships within the agency. It's partnerships with our interagency partners.

Without our partners across the Intelligence Community and other parts of the interagency, we just couldn't keep this fight going the way it has been.

Same goes with our international partners. Almost everything we do involves an international partner. Any of the recent disruptions—they've all involved international partners—so that's critical, as well.

The evolution of the Joint Terrorism Task Force has a lot to do with it, as well. You know, that first one stood up in New York City, in our New York Field Office, and they sort of set the standard for all of the rest of the task forces to come.

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. And those are highly-trained investigators who have evolved, just like the rest of the agency has evolved and the division has evolved over the years to just become experts at what they do.

And so that's how we've evolved over the last quarter century.

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Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory: You can visit fbi.gov/counterterrorism to learn more about CTD’s efforts and recent investigative successes.

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This has been another production of Inside the FBI. You can follow us on your favorite podcast player, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. You can also subscribe to email alerts about new episodes at fbi.gov/podcasts.

I’m Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory from the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs. Thanks for listening.