In spring 1980, the FBI's New York Office created the Bureau's first Joint Terrorism Task Force. The task force model united Bureau personnel and members of the New York Police Department (NYPD) in investigations of potential acts of terrorism. 

And in the 45 years since, the JTTF model—which started as a local solution to a local problem—has spread across the country.

Today, each of the Bureau's 55 field offices has at least one JTTF, and a National Joint Terrorism Task Force (NJTTF) in the National Capital Region reinforces these field-level teams' capabilities and expertise.  

History of JTTFs  

When people think of terrorism in the context of New York, the 9/11 terror attacks likely serve as a major frame of reference. But FBI New York's need to combat the terrorism threat predated that tragic day by more than 21 years. 

"The JTTF model actually came out of an earlier cooperative effort between the FBI and the NYPD," FBI Historian Dr. John Fox explained. This initial effort was a bank robbery task force that the FBI formed in 1979 in response to a rash of major bank robberies on the New York state and national levels. Since these crimes breached local, state, and federal law, agencies realized that information-sharing and cooperation could be beneficial.

"The model proved so successful that the next year, when a Brink's armored car was robbed by members of a radical group for political purposes—in other words, in a terrorist activity—we could bring the same model to the problem of terrorism," said Fox.

In its earliest days, the JTTF was a partnership between the FBI and the New York City Police Department. As the Bureau witnessed an influx in nationalist violence on U.S. soil in the early 1980s, the New York JTTF's work "became more varied and more important," Fox said. Additional local, state, and federal law enforcement partners joined its ranks, as well as other groups that dealt with terrorism-related issues.  

The JTTF model spreads

The model initially spread to about 12 FBI field offices. "It basically grew to the offices that had the biggest terrorist caseloads where we thought that it would be successful," Dr. Fox explained.

But following a global uptick in terror attacks—including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, attacks on two U.S. embassies overseas, the Millennium bombing, and the 9/11 terror attacks—the FBI realized that the threat of terror was a national one that demanded a nationwide response.

The Bureau soon expanded the JTTF footprint from 35 task forces to mandating that one be created in every FBI field office. As of October 2024, the FBI JTTFs comprised approximately 4,000 members—including FBI personnel and task force officers (or TFOs) from more than 500 state and local agencies and 50 federal agencies. 

National model, local results 

These days, FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces work to protect communities across the United States from potential acts of terror and to investigate attacks that happen in our backyards. And these task forces aren't just working in major coastal metropolitan areas like New York and Los Angeles. 

For example, the Kansas City Field Office's JTTF has successfully disrupted multiple terror plots against America’s heartland. These foiled attacks were planned or attempted by homegrown violent extremists and Americans who took inspiration from international terrorist organizations. 

The task force's major successes include disrupting an al-Qaida-inspired attempt to detonate a car bomb at the U.S. Army’s Fort Riley in Manhattan, Kansas, and foiling a plot by three Kansas men to blow up a Garden City, Kansas, apartment complex where Somali immigrants resided. In both situations, the JTTF's efforts helped secure federal prosecutions for the conspirators. 

Why the JTTF model works 

Kansas Bureau of Investigation Director Tony Mattivi praised the JTTF model for uniting the various players in national security investigations—including investigators, prosecutors, and partner agencies—"in an organized structure” and forced them to collaborate.  

"The advantage to having cooperation at all these different levels is you have access to all of the other outside things that each of those agencies is doing," he said. By being embedded within an FBI field office or resident agency, JTTF task force officers can have an awareness of what their Bureau colleagues are working on at any given time and can sync their efforts accordingly—especially if they're relevant to the same investigation.

This co-location also gives JTTF members awareness of their partner agencies' investigative styles, resources, and standard operating procedures—laying the foundation for interagency inspiration.
  
Mattivi first began working with FBI Kansas City JTTF in the late 2000s. At the time, he was a federal prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office in Kansas who had just finished a six-month assignment to help prosecute war crimes cases in Iraq. Upon his return, he worked as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO) for the District of Kansas handling part of the office's national security portfolio.  

"Having seen what happens overseas—right in the epicenter of that movement—was very helpful in preparing me to work back here, mindful that everything that's happening over there is what's informing, what's laying the foundation for the activities that we see here in the United States," he said. 

After a brief assignment prosecuting the U.S.S. Cole bomber at U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Mattivi returned to the Kansas USAO to lead its national security portfolio. He then spent the next seven years working hand-in-hand with the FBI Kansas City JTTF until his retirement from the Department of Justice in 2020. 

In his new role with the KBI, he said, he strives to emulate the model in everything he does. "We are stronger together than we are individually," he said. "The more we collaborate, the more we work together, the better off we all are." 

David Goldkopf, an FBI supervisory special agent who oversees the Bureau's National Joint Terrorism Task Force, said he's been struck by the model’s global reach: “Every couple of months, we get a call from an FBI legal attaché that wants us to provide a briefing to a local law enforcement agency in the country that they're serving in who wants to learn how to build a JTTF model to combat terrorism in their country."

The model is so effective that other portions of the Bureau have since tried to emulate it, noted Supervisory Special Agent Jake Foiles, who oversees the FBI Kansas City JTTF.
 
"The FBI's JTTF model has expanded and evolved and has been copied now by our cyber side, our counterintelligence side, by our traditional criminal side," he said. "We now have task forces on many of the different squads and areas that the FBI works. And the reason for that is because that task force model is incredibly effective when you have a variety of different people from different agencies and different walks of life and backgrounds working day in and day out, every single day with each other."

JTTFs are also powerful mechanisms for community outreach, briefing on topics such as what FBI investigations into terrorism matters actually look like, signs that someone might be mobilizing to violence, and why it's important for Americans to proactively reach out to the FBI if they spot those kinds of indicators. 

Ultimately, the FBI will investigate any individual who threatens violence, including those planning to commit an act of violence to further an ideology. (The FBI cannot initiate an investigation based solely on First Amendment-protected activity.) 

According to Kansas Bureau of Investigation Director Tony Mattivi, JTTFs are critical in reviewing incoming leads to determine which terrorism threats are substantive. These task forces have an obligation to resolve any real or potential threat they’re aware of "because you never know which one of those is going to turn into a really significant threat," he said. "And that's, I think, some of the most important work that's done on a daily basis inside the JTTF. And nobody sees it." 

Benefits of partnerships 

Retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent Dana Kreeger—a veteran of the Kansas City JTTF—said the biggest benefit of JTTF participation is the ability to keep a finger on the pulse of the terrorism threat.

"Terrorism is not a local threat," he said. "It's happening all across the country; a lot of it is intertwined. We have threat actors in Kansas City that might be talking to threat actors in Chicago or L.A. or Portland or New York." 

JTTFs can provide local law enforcement partners with threat briefs and case updates, but there’s no replacement for getting timely threat intelligence in the proper context, Kreeger said.

"If you don't have an officer here every day working with us, getting that real-time intelligence, there's going to be that lag time. And so, the value is having somebody here seeing the national and international picture."

Retired Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department detective Barry Berglund—who spent 20 years on the same JTTF—agreed. 

"I think part of the genius of the JTTF was if you needed help, you didn't have to go find somebody from another agency," he said. "They were on the task force, and literally all you did was walk over a row. You had their home phone, their address, you know, their email—everything—and everybody was pretty quick to drop whatever they were doing and help you with whatever you needed to do."

Task force officers also get access to training they might not otherwise have the opportunity to take. TFOs need to take many of the same trainings as their FBI counterparts to ensure they understand FBI rules, policies, and processes. This includes legal, system operation, and intelligence training.  

The National Joint Terrorism Task Force
 
The FBI established the National Joint Terrorism Task Force (or NJTTF) in 2002 to provide executive support to field-based Joint Terrorism Task Forces. 

Field-based JTTFs are often among the first responders on-scene following a terrorist attack in their areas of responsibility. The NJTTF, on the other hand, consists of "second responders." These Headquarters-level subject matter experts provide additional knowledge, resources, and personnel that field JTTFs, as needed, to ensure they can get the job done, explained Goldkopf, who leads this national-level team of counterterrorism experts. 

As of 2025, Goldkopf said, the NJTTF includes representatives from 35 different agencies, including various Department of Justice agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense’s civilian law enforcement agencies, the U.S. Intelligence Community, and more. Task force officers from non-FBI agencies form 75% of its membership, he noted.
 
"The unique nature of the NJTTF is such that we don't conduct the investigations; we support the investigations," he said. "Our field offices and the JTTFs across the country are the ones leading that frontline of the investigative process, and we're here to support them in that effort."

For example, Goldkopf said, if a JTTF recovers firearms when responding to an attack and has questions about them, the NJTTF can ping its ATF representative for assistance. From there, our partners can run a gun trace or take other steps to understand the weapon's history. "And if the field office does not have an ATF task force officer locally, our representative on the national task force will help build that connection for them with their local field office so that they can work the case locally together, even though they didn't have somebody officially assigned to them,” he said. 

In this way, the national-level experts on the Headquarters-based NJTTF cultivate local-level partnerships to empower investigative success. 

That support is both critical and timely. For example, in the early hours of January 2, 2025, NJTTF members sprang to action following the terror attack in New Orleans. "Our team automatically started working, and it's a well-oiled machine in the sense that we don't have to be asked to do it," Goldkopf said. "We see the alerts come in, and that process starts automatically, and the coordination naturally starts."
 
The squad helped investigators assess whether additional threats existed, as well as ways to proactively disseminate threat intelligence to our domestic enforcement partners so that they could be on the lookout for similar attacks. 

Retired NYPD officer Bobby was investigating the 9/11 attacks in Saudi Arabia for the FBI New York JTTF when he learned that he was the first local cop tapped to serve on the national squad. 

"He said, 'When you get back, introduce yourself to the unit chief; he understands what you're doing,'" Bobby recalled of the long-distance call from his boss. "It was great. There was a desk there for me. It was one-stop shopping for intel.”" 

Tom, a U.S. Capitol Police officer and the longest-serving task force officer on the national squad, echoed Bobby's sentiment. He said agencies who lend personnel to the NJTTF benefit from the brain trust just as much as the field-level task forces do. 

"It's not only the access to the federal side of it. It's the access to every member within that task force," Tom said. "Some agencies bring a tiny, but very specialized, piece that you might not have access to as a county sheriff's department in X state." 

And, he added, networking with one TFO can unwittingly connect you to additional subject matter experts within their home agency’s circles. 

Bobby—who moved on to the Department of Energy after more than 20 years of representing the NYPD on the National Joint Terrorism Task Force—concurred. 
 
"They'll come to me and say, 'Do you know anybody in this agency?' I'm like, 'Hold on. Let me let me call Tommy at the NJTTF, and we'll set you up.'"