convergence

Threat Finance
Directive 5205.14 charged the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) with providing a critical
intelligence component—the Joint Threat Finance Intelligence ( JTFI) Office—dedicated
to the DOD CTF mission. In October 2011, the JTFI office within DIA joined USSO-
COM’s CTF effort. The command continues to proactively pursue private-sector partners
to contribute to additional facets of its mission of providing direct support to a global
whole-of-government effort. Overall, these private-sector individuals and the organizations
they represent have supported DOD efforts to identify immediate threats and aid the working
group members in planning for imminent vulnerabilities from foreseeable technological
trends in the financial community. Over the last 4 years alone, the USSOCOM CTF Working
Group has supported over 300 Executive Orders and UN Security Council Resolution
designations, provided critical leads that led to over 50 CTF-related arrests and warrants, and
been instrumental in the seizure of over $500 million. Since no sector and no community is
immune from threat finance, public-private sector partnerships that detect new methods of
money laundering and threat finance and devise effective and timely countermeasures are a
critical component of strategies to combat the financing of illicit networks.
Conclusion
Financing is the lifeblood of any organization, licit or illicit. While globalization and financial
innovation have provided consumers unprecedented conveniences to finance their daily
activities, illicit actors have capitalized on these very developments to expand their criminal
enterprises. Illicit networks through their terrorist, insurgent, and criminal activities undermine
democratic institutions, governments, and international markets and present national
security threats to nations around the world. For all of these activities, financing is the engine
of growth and is therefore a critical enabler of illicit networks.
To finance themselves, illicit actors engage in a broad spectrum of activities to raise, move,
and disguise money that are difficult to detect and disrupt. They include cash couriers, bulk
cash smuggling, alternative remittance systems, charitable organizations, trade-based money
laundering, and mobile and virtual payments. These modes of finance are ever evolving, and
illicit actors are the first to take advantage of gaps in government regulation and oversight of
these new methods. Since illicit networks use their capital to keep score and wield influence
to undermine, corrupt, and co-opt state actors, attacking their financing is a key component
of any strategy to fight illicit networks.
To combat threat finance, governments have developed complex interagency and international
counterterrorism and countercrime strategies that struggle to keep up with all
the financial innovation and illicit actors’ creativity—in other words, networks to fight the
networks. These strategies include law enforcement and intelligence operations that “follow
the money trail” to pursue and prosecute illicit actors. Since September 11, 2001, financial
intelligence has become a fundamental component of counterterrorism and countercrime
efforts to detect, disrupt, and deter illicit networks, as evidenced through the Treasury Department’s
Terrorist Finance Tracking Program against al Qaeda, Hizballah, and their affiliates.
Further afield, the mission of the Afghan Threat Finance Cell against the Taliban and the
insurgency in Afghanistan has directly contributed to U.S. and coalition counterinsurgency
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