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The FBI has warned law enforcement agencies in California that Iran had aspirations, as recently as early February, to launch a drone attack against the U.S. West Coast from a vessel at sea, according to a bulletin reviewed by ABC News, a disclosure that underscores a widening landscape of aerial threats facing the American homeland from both state and non-state actors.
The alert, distributed to police departments across the state at the end of February, stated that the bureau had "recently acquired information" indicating Iran "allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using unmanned aerial vehicles from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United State Homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California, in the event that the US conducted strikes against Iran."
The bureau emphasized the intelligence was limited in scope, adding that it had "no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of this alleged attack."
The warning arrived just days before the United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes against Iran on Feb. 28, an operation that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and ignited a wider conflict. Iran has responded with hundreds of ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones targeting Israeli and American positions across the Middle East, including a strike on a tactical operations center in Kuwait that killed six U.S. service members, the only American troops known to have died in the retaliatory barrage.
A spokeswoman for the FBI's Los Angeles field office declined to comment on the bulletin. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The California-focused warning is not the only drone threat occupying U.S. intelligence officials. A separate, uncorroborated report from a September 2025 bulletin, also reviewed by ABC News, indicated that "unidentified Mexican cartel leaders had authorized attacks using UAS (drones) carrying explosives against US law enforcement and US military personnel along the US-Mexico border."
That bulletin acknowledged such an attack on American soil "would be unprecedented" but called it "a plausible scenario," noting that cartels "typically avoid actions that would result in unwanted attention or responses from US authorities."
Mexican drug cartels have in recent years added weaponized drones to their arsenal, turning cheap commercial models into tools for assassination and battlefield-style attacks within Mexico. Since at least 2020, cartels have operated weaponized drones against their enemies, security forces, and communities. In October 2025, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion flew a drone loaded with a primitive explosive device into a heavily protected compound housing the state prosecutor's office in Tijuana, just a mile from the California border. Despite these escalations, experts say there has never been a confirmed Mexican cartel drone attack on U.S. soil or against U.S. law enforcement.
The Pentagon has said there are over 1,000 drone incursions along the border each month. Reports have also emerged that cartels sent operatives to Ukraine's war effort with the specific aim of gaining advanced drone warfare expertise, particularly in the use of first-person-view drones known for their speed and maneuverability.
John Cohen, a former head of intelligence for the Department of Homeland Security and an ABC News contributor, said the twin threats from the Pacific and from Mexico are deeply concerning.
"We know Iran has an extensive presence in Mexico and South America, they have relationships, they have the drones and now they have the incentive to conduct attacks," Cohen said. He called the FBI's decision to issue the warning a prudent move, saying the information is "critically important for law enforcement" so that "state and locals can be better able to prepare and respond to these types of threats."
While the FBI bulletin did not specify how or when vessels carrying attack drones could get close enough to the U.S. mainland, intelligence officials have long been concerned about equipment being pre-positioned, either on land or aboard ships, in the event the United States or Israel struck Iran.
That scenario has now materialized. On Feb. 28, Israel and the United States launched surprise airstrikes on multiple sites across Iran, killing Khamenei and other officials and triggering a war now in its twelfth day. Iran responded with missile and drone strikes against Israeli and U.S.-allied countries and bases across the region, including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and the United Arab Emirates. Iran has fired more than 500 ballistic and naval missiles in addition to the drone barrages, though Pentagon officials said Iranian missile attacks have fallen 90 percent and one-way drone attacks have decreased 83 percent since the war began, a decline attributed to the degradation of Iranian capabilities.
The FBI alert, combined with the September cartel bulletin, paints a picture of a homeland security apparatus grappling with a new era in which relatively inexpensive unmanned aerial systems, once confined to distant battlefields, are emerging as credible threats to the U.S. mainland from multiple directions simultaneously.
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