Uniting
Research and Policy

Gretchen Peters is Executive Director of the Center on Illicit Networks and Transnational Organized Crime (CINTOC), a strategic intelligence organization that finds hidden criminal networks, and she co-founded the Alliance to Counter Crime Online. Her work supports governments, communities and foundations to understand, investigate and counter transnational and online threats, ranging from rogue states to criminal traffickers. Peters has served as a subject matter expert (SME) to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counter-Narcotics and Global Threats and USCENTCOM’s AfPak Center (J2), and she supported USSOCOM’s Counternarcotics and Transnational Threats (J36) team to identify, research and counter tier one security threats.

She co-chaired an OECD Task Force on Wildlife and Environmental Crime, and received grants from key conservation foundations, including the Elephant Crisis Fund, to map illicit supply chains moving ivory from Africa to Asia. Peters is considered a leading authority on the intersection of crime and terrorism, trade-based money laundering, the illegal wildlife trade, online crime and transnational organized crime. In a past life, she worked as a journalist for 20 years. Peters authored Seeds of Terror, a groundbreaking 2009 book about the Afghan heroin trade that impacted U.S. policy towards Afghanistan and the understanding of the conflict there.