A View from the CT Foxhole: Deputy to the Under-Secretary-General Raffi Gregorian, Director, United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism.

• Author: Rassler, Don

Editor's Note: This interview was conducted ahead of the adoption on June 30, 2021, by consensus of the United Nations General Assembly of Resolution 75/291 for the seventh review of the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. This resolution is described in further detail at the bottom of the interview.

CTC: Over the course of your distinguished career, you've worked in key roles that have given you a front-row seat to the on-the-ground and strategic level intricacies and challenges related to peace processes, peacekeeping operations, defense reform, capacity building, and the practice of counterterrorism. Given the positions you've held in the Balkans, at the U.S. State Department, and in your current role as the Deputy to the Under-Secretary-General at the United Nations Office of Counterterrorism, you are uniquely positioned to provide an informed view about how the institutions you have been a part of have organizationally evolved and responded [in order] to combat and grapple with the broad mix of security challenges. From terrorism to the difficult business of building partner capacity, when you look back over the arc of your career, what are some of the key aspects that stand out to you about how the organizational effort to combat terrorism has evolved or not evolved?

Gregorian: I have a background as an historian so I try to think of things that way, and when I was working in the Counterterrorism Bureau at the State Department--when I first joined there in January 2015--I started to reflect on what is the nature of terrorism at that point and today, and how much it's actually evolved, and therefore, as a consequence of that, what are the tools and the responses that governments have done to respond to it. It's actually quite interesting when it comes to terrorism: Terrorism is fundamentally a technique. It's a tactic. But, in 2015, we were confronted with the eruption of ISIL and the conquest [the previous year] of Mosul, and one of the first questions I asked when I got there was, "well, is this an insurgency, or are we fighting a terrorist group?" I look backward, and you see the evolution of...let's call it modern terrorism, post-World War II terrorism. I did work for the U.S. Army on the Center for Military History. I worked on the official history of the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong used terror tactics in South Vietnam. Were they a terrorist group? Well, maybe today we might call them that, but back then, we didn't. It was an insurgency. Same thing with the communist terrorists in Malaya. That was an insurgency; they used terror.

The conventional view of terrorism in the '60s and '70s was associated with the sorts of small radical groups; they might have been tied to national liberation movements or they were fringe elements that would carry out acts that were meant to attract attention and advance a political goal to raise their profile. This is pre-social media and everything else. So how do you get the world's attention if you're a group of 10 crazy people? You do something spectacular: you take hostages, you set off a bomb in a plane, you hijack something. Back in the '60s and '70s, that was the milieu that terrorism operated [in], and the international responses to those typically were international conventions or treaties designed to address those problems. So you have the first couple international conventions under U.N. auspices that are about prevention of hijacking of aircraft or conventions against use of explosives against aircraft and that sort of thing. Then you get a horrible event like the Munich Olympics massacre, and that takes it to a new level, at least in terms of public consciousness. In the United States, it led to the creation of the Office of the Special Coordinator for Counterterrorism in the State Department, what was known for the longest time as S/CT because the counterterrorism coordinator reported directly to the Secretary of State, and it was meant to help work with foreign governments around the world on these kinds of groups, like those at the Munich Olympics or the Baader-Meinhof gang (a) or November 17 (b) and these, again, relatively small groups.

Of course, that all really starts to change in the early '90s, with the expansion and evolution of al-Qa"ida, and then probably most significantly with the Africa embassy bombings. And you can see that things are starting to change on the U.S. side. S/CT gets bigger. At the U.N., we still have these conventions and so on, but when you get to the point of, it was the Africa bombings, in fact, that led to the creation of UNSCR [United Nations Security Council Resolution] 1267, which is sanctions against al-Qa"ida, that's pre-9/11. So you see the beginning of a more operational configuration by Member States at the international level and also the national level. There's greater cooperation among states to track down what are now clearly transnational groups. That's one of the other defining features of what happened over the '80s and into the '90s. And then of course 9/11 comes, and that's clearly a watershed moment. It's a watershed moment for everybody, but here in the U.N., there was a Security Council resolution, 1373--[which] obliges all Member States to criminalize terrorist activity, including preparation and financing of it, prevention of safe havens, and so on--but it didn't create an apparatus in the U.N. Secretariat for dealing with that, although it established a committee in the Security Council and then an executive directorate that was initially intended to go around and assess how countries were doing in terms of comporting themselves with these [UNSCR] obligations under Chapter VII of the U.N. [Charter]. (c)

And then on the U.S. side, over the course of the decade, there are again changes--creation of Department of Homeland Security and in the State Department, the one I'm most familiar with, S/CT, became a full-fledged bureau within the State Department with its own programming office and specialized offices and so on, including the Office of Multilateral Affairs, which is what I was brought over to develop there--in lockstep, of course, with the emergence of ISIL, which takes it again to another level. Now you have a territory-holding group that uses extreme terror tactics. The institutional responses to that track with them. They don't get ahead of them; they track with them. So Security Council Resolution 2178 of September 2014 is in response to [the Islamic State seizure of] Mosul and the huge increase in the foreign terrorist fighter phenomenon that was associated with that.

All these things existed in one form or another before that, but accelerated with social media, to help with recruiting, alienation brought on by the 2007 financial crisis, a whole bunch of post-Cold War trends are kind of converging at that point, and then you have just a qualitatively and quantitatively different problem. There were foreign terrorist fighters that went to go fight in Afghanistan against Soviet troops, but if my memory serves me, the numbers were like 10,000 people over the course of 10 years. Well, it was like 40,000-50,000 people going to ISIS in the space of 18 months. It's just so much [of a] bigger problem. And from over 100 different countries. So it was really a global problem, and that is actually what led to the creation of the U.N. Office of Counterterrorism.

I was a driving force behind its creation because you could see a greater need for coordination and cooperation, not on operations, which the [Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS] was able to do at least with respect to ISIS in the core, but facilitation of international cooperation--setting of norms, standards, certain kinds of capacity building, which really the U.N. is perhaps better suited for in some instances. And Member States were clamoring for that; they needed help. So it didn't take much of a push to get Member States to say, "Yes, absolutely, we should have an office of counterterrorism at the level of an under-secretary-general," and the U.S. was a big supporter of that. But you were pushing on an open door. Everyone saw the obviousness of it, to elevate the very small counterterrorism apparatus that we had in the U.N. before that time--which it started back in about 2010, 2011, the U.N. Counter-Terrorism Centre, which was buried deep in the bowels of the Department of Political Affairs--and lifting that up and bringing it into the U.N. Office of Counter-Terrorism as the capacity-building engine of this organization. And then we went from there. That's just in the last four years; UNOCT was created in the middle of 2017. The evolution of terrorism is matched by these organizational changes and conventions and eventually Security Council resolutions.

CTC: You have spoken about why UNOCT was created. Can you elaborate a bit more on the role it plays within the U.N. system and its core focus areas?

Gregorian: It's supposed to, first of all, bring policy coherence to what the U.N. system does in the counterterrorism space. And [the way] it does that, and the mechanism by which it does that, other than being a focal point for policy, is to help coordinate U.N. entities that play some part in counterterrorism in its broadest sense. And it turned out to be massive. Under the [current] Secretary-General's leadership, we set up the Global Counterterrorism Coordination Compact, (d) which replaced something that had been there before called the Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force, but it was somewhat lackluster for a number of reasons. No one did anything wrong; it didn't have the [necessary gravity] to move itself forward at the time. [But in 2017] all the stars were aligning. Plus a little bit of money helps, right? It encourages people if you have some money. And we did. We had a little bit of seed money to help grow this global coordination compact, which now has 43 U.N. entities in it and eight working...