Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Signals, a CHDS Podcast explores the ideas, events and issues shaping homeland security.
In each episode, we offer a new perspective from experts in the field.
Today we discuss the World cup and the homeland security challenges behind this global event.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Hello, this is Caleb Cage with the second episode of Signals, a CHDS podcast. We're very happy to have G.B. jones joining us today. G.B. is the chief Safety and Security Officer for the FIFA World Cup 2026 where he leads all safety and security operations for all FIFA events, including the recent World cup and related events. Prior to his time with FIFA, GB served as the International Security Director for the NFL. In his public service career he was in law enforcement for 31 years, serving at the local and state government levels before completing a 23 year career with the FBI before retiring as an Assistant Special Agent in Charge with the FBI in 2019. GB served in roles in the areas of special event counterterrorism operations and in aviation and maritime security and I'm sure other areas as well. Welcome G.B.
[00:01:23] Speaker C: thank you Caleb. I appreciate you having me on.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Tell us about your background and what did you learn from that in your public safety career that you apply in your role with FIFA?
[00:01:34] Speaker C: Well I had the good fortune of starting in law enforcement at 19 years old. In fact when I started in policing I hadn't yet been to the police academy. I had a part time peace officer license in Minnesota just to fill shifts on the weekends and evenings in my local police department.
So I had only on the job training. And at 19 in Minnesota you couldn't buy your own bullets so mom bought my bullets, the department gave me my gun and I went on patrol. Fast forward to years beyond that. I became a state trooper in Minnesota and then became an FBI agent. And during my time in the FBI I also focused a lot on special events, in particular the counterterrorism response to special events. But I had some kind of seminal experiences in the FBI that also gave me a lot of exposure to intelligence and the importance of intelligence and in major special event planning and in major casework. One was the top 10 fugitive case on a guy named Andrew Cunanan. And of course 911 was a defining moment across the FBI and certainly in my personal experience.
And I played the role of the acting supervisor of the International terrorism squad on 911 in Minneapolis and on the 16th of August of that year we came across a guy named Zacharias Moussa. Moussaoui was one of the co conspirators of the 911 conspiracy and we spent three weeks prior to 911 trying to convince FBI headquarters that we had a no kid in real life terrorist in our custody. And that was Mousaoui. And we were met with a good bit of resistance from FBI headquarters and some at the Department of Justice. But ultimately, after the attacks of 9 11, we were able to get what we needed to across to members of the government to understand what it is we had in our possession in terms of intelligence and investigative information that had to do with the 911 plot. And one of the things that I learned through that whole experience was that intelligence really mattered and intelligence at the ground level really mattered the most. So great to have this contextualized intelligence at a very high level in the federal government. But you have to pay attention to what's happening on the ground level and how that fits into the larger picture. So that was one of the things I mentioned. It was a seminal moment in my career, really understanding the strength of intelligence and the importance of the networks at the very local level. So as I again fast forward and got into this role as the chief safety and security officer for the FIFA World cup, one of the things that we really anchored on was intelligence and how intelligence would inform operations and then divesting our operations to those on the ground who were closest to the problem and then organizing our command and control structures so that we were empowering the people on the ground at the stadiums and in the non competition sites to know what was happening and to control what was happening and to report up to us through defined channels what was happening on the ground so that we could then share information across this entirely complex ecosystem that was the World Cup.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: That's great insight. And so just for everybody listening, Moussaoui was the famous 20th hijacker. Is my memory correct?
[00:04:40] Speaker C: Yeah, that's right.
He's the only co conspirator from the 911 conspiracy who didn't extinguish himself in the course of his conduct.
He remains in supermax to this day.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: I'm a very novice World cup fan. For people who are listening who don't have that background, tell us about the significance of this event and the magnitude of this event from a global perspective.
[00:05:07] Speaker C: I'll give you an example. And this was probably the best way that things resonated with people that were soccer novices in the United States.
On any given Sunday in the United States, if you go to an NFL stadium, you're typically going to show up about four hours early and you're going to tailgate, you're going to hang out with the same people in the same area of the stadium or in the same parking lot. And over those four hours, you're going to generally make your way into the stadium through the same gates that you normally would go into, and you sit in the same seats. The vast majority of the people in that stadium are season ticket holders who have waited an entire generation to get those tickets from their parents or their grandparents before them. That means there's already some guardrails around their behavior because they don't want to lose their season tickets that they waited so long to get. So they don't need the wayfinding that we typically would have to have for visiting fans. They know exactly where to go, they know when to show up, they know where to show up, they know where to sit, they know how to comport themselves, and they enjoy largely the same experience every Sunday. I mean, it's a different team that they're playing, but they don't have this massive clash of cultures. And that happens like you see in international football.
Now contrast that with the international traveling fan who's absolutely passionate about their team. And international football, I think, is equal parts religion and civics and politics and patriotism and nationalism. It's not just about fandom. When they show up at that same NFL stadium during the World cup, they don't have signs in their language. In many cases, they've never been to that stadium before, perhaps never been to the United States before. They're not season ticket holders, so there's no guardrails around their behavior that is tied to their tickets. They don't show up four hours ahead of time because they don't know about this thing that is tailgating. That's not part of the international soccer culture. So they'll stay at the bars and the restaurants until 30 minutes before kick, and then they will ram the gates 30 minutes in the last 30 minutes and expect to be in their seats in time to hear their national anthem played in a stadium that's not their own.
So all of the assumptions that we have around our safety and security planning that are valid for the NFL are not valid for this international traveling fan. We need more wayfinding, we need more signage. We need to understand that they're going to show up late. So we need more security screening apparatus to handle that larger volume of people in a shorter period of time. And then we have to help them get into the stadiums in a timely way.
Once they get into the stadium, although they may have tickets to a defined seat, they may not even stay in those seats. They're going to Migrate around behind the goals where most of the energy, for the highest energy, most rabid fans are going to be. And that's again, decidedly different than what we see in the NFL crowd. So we have to police those areas behind the goals much more aggressively than you would in an NFL match. And I don't mean aggressively heavy handedly. I just mean that you have to stay very attuned to making sure the down aisles stay clear so that we've got emergency egress if we need it, making sure that the people that are sitting in those seats actually have tickets for those areas, and then controlling for the flags and the banners and the instruments and the other things that come along with an international soccer crowd that are prohibited items in the NFL context.
So decidedly different fans, decidedly different assumptions, which makes managing international soccer decidedly different than managing any other special event in the United States.
[00:08:27] Speaker B: And that's a fascinating contrast. Again, it really, I think it's helpful for somebody like me. I've been, you know, I'm, I'm from Nevada and I've been to some Las Vegas Raiders games and things like that. So to understand that contrast is really helpful.
What can you tell us about the challenge of security and the security challenges that lead up to something like a World cup game or an international soccer game or something that's in this unique culture and policing posture you were just talking about?
[00:08:59] Speaker C: One of the things that I identified very early on because of this sort of unique position that I played in the NFL in understanding soccer and soccer intelligence about what's happening overseas and then juxtaposing that into the United States, was I recognized the value of intelligence related to fan conduct and to team conduct. I identified that that was really a gap in knowledge, a gap in our intelligence that we could exploit as FIFA. So we are very well connected to the 211 member associations that comprise FIFA. Those 211 associations are sorted out in six different confederations around the globe. Each of those confederations has a safety and security department that we had access to. Each of those confederations understand their member associations and understand their fan conduct and their team dynamics better than anybody else. Nobody in the US Government understood that. Nobody in the local police establishments understood those different dynamics. So we exploited that lane and, and I deliberately built an intelligence team under the leadership of Sasha Larkin, who is a CHDS ELP alum, who identified some folks that had really good, strong intelligence backgrounds that lent themselves well to the international soccer space. And then I set them loose to understand the international soccer intelligence and to collect and disseminate international soccer intelligence among our state and local partners and our federal partners. So particularly I said don't go focus on counterterrorism and counterintelligence and human trafficking and cyber security. What we should focus on is this fan dynamic, the fan culture, the team dynamic. Understand each of the teams individually and what those match risks look like when the different teams come together in different matches. If we understand and can share that with our public sector partners and our private sector partners, with the state and local fusion centers and with our federal partners in Canada, Mexico and the United States, we are going to actually add value to the intel community by giving them intelligence they don't have right now that helps them position resources appropriately to meet the mandate that is coming to their city. So we're going to talk to the local police about that and say this is what you can expect. And if you manage that crowd by engaging with their supporters, understanding what they're trying to accomplish and helping to facilitate that, you'll have a much better outcome than if you go in and try to control that crowd and taking a more heavy handed approach to what's going on. So it was this give and take with collecting information, disseminating information and contextualizing information in the concept of the World cup that really allowed us to help with that game day policing and really inform our law enforcement partners. Now at the same time, we had to be attuned to challenges like geopolitics and the counterterrorism and the human trafficking and the counterintelligence components so that we could also pay attention to those threats and help manage those threats. Vehicle borne IED threats, vehicle ramming incidents, the use of fire as a weapon, use of drones as a weapon, all of those things are things that we also had to control for. But at the same time we had to fully partner with the public sector and private sector partners to establish the intelligence baseline and share the intelligence that was going to help them identify and utilize the resources best.
[00:12:17] Speaker B: One of the complexities is the intelligence in the local network, right? Partnering with the local communities and the local law enforcement.
And to make that more complex, you're doing that in three different countries at the same time, right? So you're going to local police in Canada, Mexico and in the United States did that in soccer, international soccer. Intelligence sharing. Was that something that helped you build trust and relationships with those important local holders?
[00:12:46] Speaker C: I think that became the commonality, that became the language that we needed to speak to with all of our partners that we had to develop partnerships and Relationships with. And that was true across not only government partners, but also on private sector partners and corporate partners, special interest groups, professional associations. I mean, there were so many people that we sought to develop relationships with because this was such a complex problem. For example, just in government partnerships, we had a number of international organizations with whom we coordinated. Not only FIFA Zurich, which was our parent company, but the international football confederations that I talked about before. The national Foreign intelligence points. Those are full time police officials in foreign countries that police soccer, the United Nations, United States, Interpol, the Council of Europe, embassies and consulates across all of the 48 teams that were competing in the tournament. Those were all just the international partners we talked with. Then we had administrative partners, legislative partners, executive branch partners in the United States, in Canada and Mexico. We had federal agencies across every one of those countries. We had state and regional partners, governors and homeland security advisors, state and local, regional fusion centers, regional tourism boards, and regional mass transit authorities, local and municipal authorities, mayors and host city committees and city councils. And that's just the public sector folks. As I mentioned, we had corporate and private sector partners, but utility partners, hospitality and transportation partners, university and academic partners, hospital and healthcare, sports leagues, broadcast partners, the human trafficking groups and those special interest partners. And then we did decided outreach to professional associations like the International association of Chiefs of Police, major city chiefs, National Sheriff's association, major county sheriffs, International association of Fire Chiefs, Homeland Security partners, just a variety of external partners that we had to coordinate with.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: What is the after action process of something like this look like with all of these partners? After, how do you capture all of these details that really show the complexity of what you've accomplished?
[00:14:52] Speaker C: Here we are starting with some internal after actions, not only within the safety and security department. So we are looking at what happened holistically within our department and then we're looking to see how that connected to the other functional areas within FIFA. Areas like ticketing, hospitality, transportation. We have 78 different departments, if you will, within FIFA. So we're unpacking those things internally.
And then we'll also be reaching out to many of those same groups and organizations that I just cited. Those government partners and the private sector partners understand what went well in terms of our planning with them and what went well with their planning. What are those best practices and lessons learned?
Now we took a look at the after action debriefs from Qatar.
In Qatar, it was eight stadiums in a single city, all of them under the Minister of the Interior. So one figurehead within Qatar who commanded all of the national police forces there. You know, if you needed 15,000 cops in Qatar, you called one person, the Minister of the Interior, and he would give you 15,000 people all attired in the same way, trained in the same way, and operating under the same command and control structure. If we needed 15,000 cops in the United States, we'd have to go to each of the 18,000 individual law enforcement agencies and convince each chief to give us one or two people to come. And they're all going to be wearing different uniforms, they're going to be trained differently, and they're going to be accountable to a little different command and control structure. So things were a little bit different. So they didn't map that after action process, didn't map really cleanly what we were doing.
So as a result, when I'm doing the after action model that we're looking at right now, I'm looking at things that are going to transcend an individual country and looking at the thematic things that we should be focused on that are best practices and lessons learned. How can we best adjust to existing and emerging threats and trends, regardless of where geographically the tournament is going to be held? What was interesting with our challenge in 2026 is this is the first time for the Men's World cup that we actually, we FIFA played the role of both the local organizing committee and the tournament organizer. So in years past that we would couple our efforts with a host nation, and the host nation would be responsible for implementing the FIFA requirements, but they would deliver the requirements based on our requirements set. FIFA was not the lead planners. FIFA planned the the organizational structure of the tournament. So we managed all the competition area, but what we would do is bring in our safety and security requirements and give them to the host nation and say, implement these requirements. And then FIFA would do a periodic status check to make sure that they were tracking against the requirements for ultimate delivery.
In 2026, we changed that model. FIFA itself created a wholly owned subsidiary of FIFA Zurich. We had three different independent entities, legal entities, one in Canada, one in Mexico, and one in the United States that delivered the tournament locally. So our overall tournament headquarters was in Coral Gables, Florida. So that was the US Headquarters, but it really was the tournament headquarters. And then we delivered everything from the safety and security plan and the operational delivery plan, for transportation and hospitality and ticketing, all of those things as both a local organizing committee and as the event organizer. So really unique, for the first time ever in FIFA's history that we've approached
[00:18:11] Speaker B: it in that way and were there Benefits to that approach that you saw?
[00:18:16] Speaker C: I think there were. It gave us much more control over the overall planning and the outcome of those plans. It made it somewhat difficult because much of our planning was done, you know, leadership without authority. We had to be the honest broker, and we had to be the honest stakeholder between multiple countries and multiple agencies at the department and agency level so that we could ensure that they were delivering something that was appropriate for the host city and the host nation. Government agreements that they had signed back in 2018 when they agreed to host the FIFA World Cup. But we were able to come in with a bit more flexibility, I think, than any one host nation and broker the relationships and the deals and the overall consistent delivery of the tournament across all of Canada, Mexico and the United States. Because FIFA played this role of the honest broker. It was a quasi governmental or in fact, a non governmental private entity. But we were the honest broker that was able to convene all three nations to come together to talk about things in the context of the World Cup. FIFA was not the lead planner. FIFA planned the organizational structure of the tournament. So we managed all the competition area. But what we would do is bring in our safety and security requirements and give them to the host nation and say, implement these requirements. And then FIFA would do a periodic status check to make sure that they were tracking against the requirements for ultimate delivery.
In 2026, we changed that model. FIFA itself created a wholly owned subsidiary of FIFA Zurich. We had three different independent entities, legal entities, one in Canada, one in Mexico and one in the United States that delivered the tournament locally. And then we delivered everything from the safety and security plan and the operational delivery plan for transportation and hospitality and ticketing, all of those things. As both the local organizing committee and as the event organizer, we were able to come in with a bit more flexibility, I think, than any one host nation and broker the relationships and the deals and the overall consistent delivery of the tournament across all of Canada, Mexico and the United States.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: Is this a growth industry of these international sporting events, or am I just more recently becoming aware of them?
[00:20:34] Speaker C: No, I think it absolutely is a growth industry right now. You see that the NFL has taken a very clear path toward growth of international games over the course of even just the last five years. And the NFL has grown from one or two games internationally in 2015, 2017, to now nine games internationally planned. I think it's nine or 10 that are planned for 26, 27 season. So we're seeing that. We're seeing, of course, F1 is very very popular. The NBA has been phenomenal in growth of the game, particularly through Asia and Africa.
Baseball is playing games in Europe as well as doing the World Baseball Classic that they're hosting within the United States. So I think you're right onto something. We're seeing sports as an asset class from a business investment perspective and we're seeing a tremendous growth in international sports sport.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: So I mentioned earlier, I come from Nevada, as does Sasha Larkin, who you mentioned earlier.
From a safety and security standpoint, how should leaders in places like Nevada that are just starting out in the sports space, how should they be thinking about the safety and security challenges associated with large scale sporting events, but then sustained sporting events as well?
[00:21:49] Speaker C: Boy, that's a great question. I think there's a lot of things to think about. I mean, you have to think about all the traditional threats, those existing threats that we talked about early on, but they also need to think about culture and context and the growth of these sports and the interest in these sports from people from around the world. Are you thinking about the impact of the systems of systems that are required to put on an international sporting event and at the magnitude that some of these things are drawing people in and you have to be prepared for? I think that shifting culture, I think that shifting fan base and I think the increasing international exposure and with information moving around the globe in just the blink of an eye, anything that happens in any one location when you're doing a multi location sporting event like we have in a tournament is going to be around the world in seconds.
And especially when you're talking about soccer, the most popular sport across the globe.
I mentioned at the outset, soccer to some people is politics, it is religion, it is culture, it is national bragging rights.
You know, it doesn't have to be military power. It can be this soft power, this soccer power. And I think one of the things the United States needs to be very clear about as we look at this growth of international sport is we probably need to manage sports as a diplomatic center of power more so than we have historically.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: You said the phrase, used the phrase thinking about things in terms of systems, of systems. And that brings me back to CHDs, where we use that phrase a lot, or at least where I heard that phrase a lot.
What aspects of the master's program here did you lean on when you were over these last three years as you've been a part of the FIFA or before that in your law enforcement career and in your career with the NFL?
[00:23:43] Speaker C: Wow. There was so much that I took away from the CHDS master's program. It was really a defining moment in my professional career because it was the first time that we saw the synthesis of academics and practitioners that were working through contemporary challenges in the homeland security space. And I was part of just the second or third class that went through CHDs.
One of the things that I think the center does very, very well is identifies members of the cohort that are representative across the homeland security enterprise. And one of my first takeaways and one of our really good conversations in the classroom was from a guy who was a public health guy from Philadelphia.
And he said, you know, in the context of trying to repair all that was wrong in homeland security in the United States, he looked back at his father, and his father was an auto mechanic, and he said, you know, if I had eight cars that didn't work, one had, you know, I wouldn't take the door off of one and the engine out of another and the trunk from a third and hobble them all together to make one car that worked. That's kind of what we tried to do with the department of homeland security. He said, no, my dad would fix the door on the first car, Then he fixed the motor on the second car. So at the end of the day, he would have eight cars that worked, not one that hobbled itself together. And that's always resonated with me is, how are we solving these problems? Are we trying to just mash things together and come up with something that is supposed to be this integrated car that works, or are we taking the time to unpack what the root cause analysis is in every one of our problems and then solving the problems? So that was one thing that I took away from that master's program is, hey, are we unpacking this and solving the problems with this root cause analysis, or are we just trying to solve the symptoms by just lumping things together?
That was one takeaway. And then probably the other most compelling takeaway from my time at chds was the network and the network on several different layers. One was the staff and the academics that were there. Chris Bellavita and Dave Brannan were my thesis advisors. Both of them had deep and rich experiences in counterterrorism and in special events. So my thesis was about creating a new special event rating model that was consistent across the United States government. I coined the term seer, or special event assessment rating, as a part of my thesis and then went about implementing that in my role as an FBI special event planner. And I got DHS to do away with a competing system that they had put together that was only two years old, if I did away with what the FBI had been doing for 10 years in favor of this new objective and fiscally responsible and repeatable system called the SEER system. Well, 20 years later, the SEER system is still the one way the US government rates and resources special events. So that was a huge takeaway from CHDs that not only impacted the homeland security community, it impacted me very personally.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: As the former emergency manager for the state of Nevada. We used, you know, of course we, we, we were had sear rated events all the time. I had no idea that that was your doing. That's really cool.
[00:26:41] Speaker C: Yeah, that's actually a CHDS doing. So I needed a thesis topic and I was the unit chief of the Special Events Management unit at the FBI at the time.
And I thought, you know, what are we doing that is competing with each other right now that is causing consternation at the state and local level? There was just too much confusion about what the federal government would bring to the fight at a major special event because we had these competing ways to rate and resource special events between DHS and the FBI. And so I thought if I can do away with these two competing systems and come up with a single system that they all endorsed and bought off on, we'd be better off. And that was the argument that I made through the course of the thesis. And then of course I was in a position with the Bureau at the time to be able to implement it.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: What do we need to be doing right now with These crops of CHDs Master's degree students in order to make their time here as a part of the Master's program as meaningful and as relevant as we possibly can?
[00:27:38] Speaker C: Well, I'll just take it back to the World Cup. I would bet that almost every one of the practitioners that are in your classes and had some way to touch the World cup over the course of this last summer. And special events are kind of like a slow moving disaster, right? They give you this opportunity to plan ahead of time and things will unfold or likely to unfold and you have to put again, processes in place and resources in place and have to build relationships. I used to tell people to treat special events like an exercise, but it's a real world exercise where you can exercise your communications, your command and control, decision making. You know, I would have them go back and codify what it was they just had as a lived experience and say, how does that impact a major special event that comes to your town or a major criminal incident that comes to your town or a terrorism incident that comes to your town, just think through the systems and the processes and the things that the the World cup challenge you to think through and think about how that then relates to readiness and resilience across everything that you're doing in the homeland security space right now.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: Well, this has been a great conversation, GP and I really appreciate you sharing with us your knowledge and expertise from the 2026 World cup and, of course, throughout your career. And I've learned a lot and I know our listeners have, too. So, so thank you so much. Appreciate it.
[00:29:06] Speaker C: Well, thank you, Caleb. I look forward to our future conversations. Thank you.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: Signals, a CHDS podcast. Stay informed, stay alert, and recognize the Signals. For more educational resources on homeland defense and security strategy and policy, visit us@chds us.
