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Inside the FBI highlights news, cases, and people from around the Bureau—in audio form. For more information, visit fbi.gov.
[An energetic, but foreboding-feeling, musical track begins.]
Narrator: The FBI plays a pivotal role in securing major sporting events and other large-scale public gatherings across the United States.
Our special agents, intelligence analysts, professional staff members, and interagency task force officers work behind the scenes of these engagements to anticipate, identify, and combat any threats to the safety of those in attendance—whether those threats are based on the ground, in the skies, or on the internet.
On this My Mission episode of Inside the FBI, we’ll meet Supervisory Special Agent Jeff Hunter. He currently leads special events and crisis planning for the Bureau's Philadelphia Field Office, and has helped secure large-scale happenings since the earliest days of his Bureau career.
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Supervisory Special Agent Jeff Hunter: My name is Jeff Hunter. I'm the supervisory special agent over crisis management and special events planning here at FBI Philadelphia.
So, I'm the supervisor over our special-events program, which would be all the special-events planning that go into a mass event like the World Cup, like USA 250, and, then, also I'm the supervisor over our crisis-management squad. So, in the event of an incident, I supervise those assets, as well.
A lot of times, it's acting as an intermediary—either in between the city, our state and local partners, other federal partners, and the FBI, or within the FBI, sort of being a central point of contact for a lot of the different FBI resources that go into crisis and special-events planning.
In addition, I manage our Counter-UAS [Unmanned Aerial Systems] Task Force, which is also very involved in special-events planning.
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Hunter: I joined the Bureau about 20 years ago. I was a Chicago police detective when I joined the FBI. It's interesting how sort of a progression of a career can sort of coincide with a lot of different things in your life and sort of culminate in different ways.
When I first joined the FBI, I was assigned to a drug task force, working with state and local partners, with Philly PD officers and detectives on a regular basis. It was a great experience.
I did that for about 10 years, and then I took over the SWAT team here in Philadelphia and was the senior team leader, securing special events in a very different way than I do it now, more on the tactical side. But through the experiences that I had working those events and things like different deployments that we've had as a team all over the world, working with different tactical teams, working with different state and local partners—that's been an amazing experience.
And then, I took a hard shift from that and started working complex cyber-intrusion cases, working specifically ransomware cases, which was a wonderful part of my career.
There's a lot of local private sector companies that are unfortunately impacted by ransomware, and the victimization in that space is very real.
So, that was a very rewarding time, and it's also helped sort of develop my skills as we move into special-events planning to be able to know really how to help private sector companies on the front end, help them sort of fortify their defenses, help them prepare and sort of prevent any sort of cyber intrusion that might culminate during a special event.
And then most recently, after becoming a supervisor, being in charge of our private sector. So, really working with the private sector organizations that have that relationship with the FBI, enabling a lot of those principles that they can reach back to us to be able to talk to the FBI and have those touch points. And really, that's been an important factor moving into special-event planning as well.
So, as we move into the World Cup, I think all of those experiences have sort of converged in a very sort of odd, but maybe fortunate, way. I'm grateful to have had all those experiences, and it's informed how I approach the special events and crisis planning here in Philadelphia.
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Hunter: The overarching mission of the FBI is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution, so very much our special-events planning follows that line.
We definitely want to protect the American people. That could be from a variety of threats.
Certainly, we want to protect the American people from any threat of terrorism, any threat of major cyberattack, and any of the normal criminal threats that may be encountered on a day-to-day basis.
So, all of our special-events planning is always going to fit into our mission priorities. It's a mission that we're very comfortable with. It's a mission that we work very well with our state and local partners to execute, and we're looking forward to doing that.
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Hunter: Coming from the local law enforcement level has really informed my position throughout my time in the Bureau of really maintaining and bolstering those relationships with law enforcement, regardless of in what capacity.
Any success that I've ever had in my career has come through partnerships with others—being able to have the right people in the room that can really enhance either investigations, operations, put people in touch with each other in areas that maybe we don't even need to be directly involved in, that we can sort of step aside from and understand that this person and this person may have a better solution than even we might have.
So, I think that being able to leverage those partnerships, work with our law enforcement partners has really always been the foundation of what the FBI does best, and it's really something that goes into every facet of special-event and crisis-management planning.
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Hunter: I’m entering my 20th year at the FBI and I've been in Philadelphia for the entirety of my career. I'm known as what is a “Philly lifer.”
And so, it's really been a special time to see how the city has grown in the last 20 years, and to really see this sort of confluence of amazing special events come to Philadelphia.
I feel very fortunate to be in the position to be part of these events, because it's sort of a wonderful capstone to my time here in Philadelphia.
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Narrator: To hear other Bureau personnel reflect on their unique missions within the FBI, visit us at fbi.gov/mymission. And to learn more about career opportunities at the Bureau, visit fbijobs.gov.
This has been another production of Inside the FBI. You can follow us on your favorite podcast player, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
You can also listen to our show via the myFBI Dashboard app. Visit fbi.gov/dashboardapp to learn more. And you can subscribe to email alerts about new episodes at fbi.gov/podcasts.
On behalf of the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs, thanks for listening.
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