FBI Director Kash Patel on Securing the FIFA World Cup: Inside the Operation

We basically had 78 Super Bowls in 39 days across 11 different venues across the United States of America. We had 6 .5, excuse me, 6 .8 million people visit and attend the games during that time span. On top of that, we had all the teams at different base camp locations where they lived for the duration of their time at the World Cup. We had all the fan zones. We had all the pop-up zones across the country. So it was really the largest sporting event the world has ever had. seen. It was double FIFA's prior World Cup record. So what law enforcement had to do was meet the demands of the modern times. And the Bureau had to upgrade its spaces and our capabilities. So GESIC, our Director of Strategic Information Center, this is a part of it. But this specific space was used during the World Cup to share classified intelligence with our classified interagency partners along the IC and also our Five Eyes partners to make sure we were getting threat reporting in from overseas. And what we were getting, we were sharing back out with them. And it all happened right here, staffed by people from across the IC in this room. And so, but there were some incidents that you managed to thwart along the way and you're open to talking about any of this? Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, I think the biggest accomplishment for the FBI when it comes to the Royal Cup is we had zero, zero major security incidences for these 78 Super Bowls and some 38. days. One of the biggest threats we had to prepare for at the FBI was drone mitigation and counter UAS systems. And the government, the federal government did not have a capability to work with our state and local partners, because nothing we do at the FBI, especially with the World Cup, could happen without our state and local partner law enforcement relationships and they just don't have the capabilities on counter UAS systems. So what we did, we set up the first ever counter UAS school at our Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. and we trained state and locals over two -week periods and cycled them through from around the country until we ran into the World Cup. And we utilized that experience, and the FBI had what we call ground intercept teams, GET teams, at every venue in the country to deploy the capabilities that we have, the tech that we have, along with our state and local partners. And we interdicted with our partners at DHS and the state and locals 740-some drone interdictions flying over and we did a lot of work with our partners at DHS, and we did a lot of work with our partners venue spaces, either improperly or illegally, to make sure they didn't pose a threat, and especially if they were violating the law, then we worked with our DOJ partners.