John Perren Describes Role of WMD Directorate

John Perren, assistant director of the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, describes the purpose of an exercise in May in New Orleans, and also the role of WMD coordinators in each of the FBI’s 56 field offices.


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This is a real good example of the WMD Directorate and the coordinators out in the field working together with state, local, and federal partners and in this case international partners. We have partners here from Australia, we have partners here from Singapore, we have partners here from Canada. And what we’re doing is we’re providing training.

The type of training that we are providing is training to identify what the WMD threat is around the critical infrastructures and around our key resources. What sort of mitigation and trip wires can we build around that. We are teaching our state and local partners and we are learning ourselves from our international partners, what are the indicators? What do we look for? How do we deliver that message to our state, local, and federal partners? How do we interact? How do we collaborate together to address this threat?

We have WMD Coordinators. We have one located in every field office. They respond daily with our first responders. They go down range. They look at whatever this threat is if it’s something that’s not conventional. And they assess this.

But what the bigger part of the day besides responding is doing the prevention part that I spoke about. They are going out in the community, they are outreaching, they are forming liaison partnerships with the state, local, federal, and the private sector. They are the pointed head of the spear. They are the ones out there, boots on the ground, getting the job done for the WMD Directorate.

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