Biography
Gretchen Peters serves on the Board of Advisors at FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power. She is the Executive Director of the Center on Illicit Networks and Transnational Organized Crime (CINTOC), a strategic intelligence organization that finds hidden criminal networks. She is considered a leading authority on the intersection of crime and terrorism, money-laundering and transnational crime.
Ms. Peters is the author of Seeds of Terror, a ground-breaking book that traced the role the opium trade has played in three decades of conflict in Afghanistan. She spent five years researching the book, which Barrons called “a well-written, well-documented and exemplary work of journalism.” She later authored a paper about the Haqqani network with West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, along with chapters in leading academic books about how crime syndicates impacted peace-building efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s D-Company, the Pakistani Taliban, wildlife crime and the intersection of crime and conflict.
She has supported U.S. Central Command, U.S. Special Operations Command and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counter Narcotics and Global Threats in understanding and countering the convergence of conflict and organized crime.
Ms. Peters has testified before the U.S. Congress and is a frequent commentator on television and radio. She has delivered presentations on her work for government officials, think tanks and universities, and thousands of U.S. servicemen and women deploying to Afghanistan.
Ms. Peters was awarded the Sié Chéou-Kang security and diplomacy fellowship and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers Life’s Choices Foundation Scholarship to study transnational organized crime at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies. A former research faculty member at George Mason University, she lectures regularly about the intersection of crime and conflict, and how to understand and disrupt transnational illicit networks.
Previously, Ms. Peters worked as a foreign correspondent, covering Pakistan and Afghanistan for more than a decade. She was nominated for an Emmy for her coverage of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and won the SAJA Journalism Award for a 2010 story on ex-Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf. She has also reported from Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Mexico, Egypt and Kosovo. She speaks English and Spanish.