Protecting the President

by Dan Bongino

  The Gonzalez fence-jumping incident was a catastrophic security failure on the Uniformed Division side, yet the failure was inevitable given the treatment of, and the poor management of, the rank-and-file officers of the Uniformed Division. I spent nearly five years as a Secret Service agent assigned to the White House as a member of the PPD, and I cannot recall a time where the Uniformed Division officers were treated with the dignity and respect afforded to police officers in the streets, where I worked as an NYPD police officer. Thankfully, most people will have limited interaction with police officers throughout their lives. It’s this limited interaction that maintains the air of mystery surrounding police work and, I believe, provides for the high degree of respect most people have for police officers. It’s rare to find an adult who doesn’t remember playing “cops and robbers” while growing up, and few people would dispute the fact that it takes a tremendous amount of bravery to be a police officer. So, why is Uniformed Division police officer morale consistently poor as measured by job satisfaction surveys and anecdotal reports? I attribute some of the mistreatment of the Uniformed Division officers, and the corresponding morale problems, to the familiarity many of the employees at the White House have with the Uniformed Division officers. Unlike the average American citizen, who rarely interacts with police officers, the White House personnel see the same Uniformed Division officers every day when reporting to work at the White House complex. And as a result of the familiarity, many of the officers have subsequently been treated as second-rate security guards when working because the allure and mystery of the police officer brand wore off. Nearly every Uniformed Division officer I spoke with at the White House when I was assigned to the Presidential Protective Division had a troubling story about a member of the White House staff who had mistreated them. This mistreatment would often happen at the magnetometer checkpoints at the White House staff entrances. The dreaded “Do you know who I am?” line was a common component of these horror stories. Ironically, the Uniformed Division officers who would tell me these stories said that it was rarely, if ever, senior White House staff members who would engage in this type of obnoxious behavior with the officers. One officer told me that the degree of the obnoxious, and pretentious, behavior was inversely correlated with the degree of access the White House staff member had to the president. During the George W. Bush years, complaints about the pretentious behavior of senior advisers such as Karl Rove or Fran Townsend (both had reputations for treating both Uniformed Division officers and special agents with respect and dignity) were unheard-of, but it was quite common to hear complaints about low-level staffers, and new White House employees, treating the Uniformed Division officers like a bunch of servants. Compounding this problem was the oft-reported complaint that the sergeants and the lieutenants of the Uniformed Division wouldn’t back up their officers when a staff/officer conflict happened. Officers would relay to me that they were told to “just let it go,” even when they were unquestionably on the right side of the dispute with a White House staff member. This may seem like a minor complaint, but low morale due to mistreatment by Uniformed Division management and some members of the White House staff was extremely destructive to the security posture of the White House because of the officer attrition that resulted.

  The persistently low Uniformed Division officer morale, combined with the mediocre pay compared to other federal law enforcement positions, created a witch’s brew of conditions for a death spiral of attrition to set in among the Uniformed Division officer class. The officers of the Uniformed Division, due to their necessary proximity to the president, are granted a difficult-to-obtain top-secret security clearance as a condition of their continued employment as officers. Once this security clearance is granted to the officer, it becomes a tradable commodity in the constantly churning Washington, DC, law enforcement/intelligence community job soup. It wasn’t uncommon for me to be working a midnight shift at the White House, and chatting with a rookie Uniformed Division officer, only to find out the next night that he had left to take a position somewhere else, either within the federal law enforcement or intelligence community, or within the government consulting field where a top-secret security clearance is a game changer on a résumé. This caused severe problems within the ranks of the Uniformed Division because as more officers resigned, the ones who stayed behind were forced into double shifts and unmanageable work schedules, which further destroyed morale for the officers left behind (sadly, the same phenomenon that occurred on the agent side of the Secret Service). As this attrition death spiral continued over the course of years, the Uniformed Division was left with an experience vacuum for mid-career officers. The veteran officers, close to retirement, typically remained with the Secret Service, despite the poor working conditions. They had already invested nearly two decades of their lives with the Uniformed Division, and they weren’t going to forfeit that experience to start over somewhere else. But the newer officers turned over at unmanageable rates as they became more experienced, obtained their security clearances, and built up their résumés. This left the Uniformed Division stacked with inexperienced rookies, afraid to make waves at the White House because the management was likely going to abandon them, and officers close to retirement who were in FIGMO mode, as it was called (F--- It, I Got My Orders) – in other words, “I’m outta here soon, so leave me alone.”

  Given the poor management, the even worse treatment by the White House staff, and the attrition problems with the officers of the Secret Service Uniformed Division, it’s no surprise to observers of the Secret Service, active and retired alike, that both Omar J. Gonzalez and Jonathan Tran were able to circumvent the White House security plan, the sensors, the Emergency Response Team (also members of the Uniformed Division), and the officers on duty during both of these infamous incidents.

  There are some solutions to the Uniformed Division problems that the Secret Service should strongly consider. First, although I strongly support limited government spending, the Secret Service will continue to struggle to retain officers in the Uniformed Division if they do not pay them commensurate with the inflated cost of living in the Washington, DC, metro area, where most of their officers are stationed. This is simply a function of basic arithmetic. Suppose Uniformed Division Officer Smith makes X amount of money as a Uniformed Division officer at the White House but has to put up with rude staffers, terrible hours, and a Uniformed Division management that throws him “under the bus.” Then Officer Smith is offered a job at a Washington, DC-based consulting firm requiring the top-secret security clearance that he already has, and for more money than the officer is making with the Uniformed Division. Of course Officer Smith is going to leave. The Uniformed Division pay scale must be fixed to reflect the competitive DC job market for security-cleared personnel or the attrition death spiral among their officers will continue.

  Second, the special agent side of the Secret Service should be assigned internship-type training days where they are assigned to learn about, monitor, and eventually oversee the Uniformed Division’s White House operations. The special agents assigned to the White House work alongside the Uniformed Division officers whenever the president is physically present on the White House grounds, yet each side knows little about what the other side does. This knowledge gap creates a corresponding lack of understanding between special agents and officers, along with a noticeable friction between the officers and the agents. This damages morale on both sides. I knew many of the Uniformed Division officers by last name only, and unfortunately, when I was assigned to the White House, I couldn’t tell you much about their shift rotations, their work hours, or their specific roles during a “crash” (Secret Service jargon for a White House intrusion). The special agents spend so much time drilling and rehearsing their specific roles in an intrusion, and potential evacuation of the president during a crash, while focusing intently on physically moving the president, that they are largely blind to the security of the White House structure, many figuring “Uni
formed Division’s got that.” But if the agents assigned to the White House were nearly as familiar with the White House structural security plan as they were with the evacuation plan, then I’m sure the Jonathan Tran intrusion in March 2017 wouldn’t have happened as it did.

  Tran jumped the north fence of the Treasury Building and then jumped two subsequent fences on the southeast side of the White House to access the south grounds. Unbelievably, Tran nearly made it into the White House while President Trump was physically present. The location of the incident is critical because the external east side of the White House, where Tran made his way to the south grounds, is an area where the president rarely goes (he stays mostly contained to the East Wing residence and the West Wing), and for that reason most special agents aren’t as familiar with that White House territory. The alarms in this area, and the zones, are all numbered, and I’m reasonably confident that many of the agents working that night both in the Secret Service operations center, and with President Trump at the White House, were unsure of the exact location of the crash and the intruder. Focusing more on officer and special agent cooperation through “internships” would do wonders to solve the information gaps among the agents and officers. It would also help build camaraderie between a Uniformed Division that sees itself as the redheaded stepchildren of the White House, and the special agents of the Secret Service, who would benefit greatly from an expanded base of knowledge about the structural security plan at the White House.

  Third, the Uniformed Division must engage in a vigorous hiring effort to both replenish and stabilize its workforce. An increase in officer manpower would allow them to dramatically increase their personnel presence at the White House. A critical problem I often noticed at the White House was static posting with limited “pushes.” A “push” in the Secret Service is a break, and asking Uniformed Division officers assigned to late-night and overnight shifts to stand in the same spot for hours at a time while maintaining maximum alertness and response capabilities is absurd and defies human physiology. Movement, and fresh eyes, are key components of any security plan, and expecting an officer to stand and stare at a door in the White House, with just a few breaks over an eight-hour shift, is problematic. Fatigue, distraction, boredom, and even counting exercises (I’m not kidding; an officer once told me that he would keep his mind occupied by counting the components of the ornate crown molding on the White House State floor) are just a few factors that can render an officer assigned to the White House less-than-effective during a crash. If the Uniformed Division doubled the officer personnel at the White House, then the officers would be constantly moving around to “push” each other. And with each moving officer, a fresh set of eyes, not one that has been staring at walls for hours at a time, would be set upon the White House terrain. Fresh eyes notice things that tired eyes often miss, and this can be the difference between a security success and a mission-critical failure. A heavy rotation of officer manpower also provides for backup personnel during a White House crash, and it would cure some of the crushing morale resulting from long shifts staring at the White House walls, which haven’t changed in decades.

  Fourth, an increase in officer personnel would also allow the Uniformed Division officers to train to appropriately defend the White House. Can you fathom asking a football team to execute a successful series of plays that they have rarely practiced? In sports, the movements and the coordination between the players on the field must be rehearsed repeatedly to overcome the tendency to overthink a response, rather than react. A credible White House crash with an active intruder is a serious and stressful event. Stress causes inescapable biological responses, including dilated pupils, accelerated breathing, and the loss of fine motor skills. The only way to overcome the debilitating effects of human biology, and defeat these stress-caused physiological responses, is to repeatedly train under simulated stress conditions. The repeated drilling of a defined motor response can assist a law enforcement officer in overriding the natural biological response to stress and to more efficiently respond to a threat.

  In 2014 an independent panel, known as the United States Secret Service Protective Mission Panel, formed in response to multiple Secret Service organizational failures. Shockingly, a December 2014 report submitted to Congress by the panel exposed the shameful fact that for fiscal year 2013 “the Uniformed Division as a whole received 576 hours of training, or about 25 minutes for each of over 1300 Uniformed Division officers.”1 Twenty-Five minutes of training per officer? Think about that. If you work on an advanced assembly line, or at a consulting firm, there’s a darn good chance that you received more job training in a month than the officers assigned to protect the most targeted facility on earth, the White House, received in a year. There’s an enormous chasm between talking about a response to a White House crash, and actually walking through the physical motions of the crash response in a training exercise. I have little doubt that the clear lack of training, and the lack of urgency to reinstitute a rigorous training program, contributed to the Uniformed Division mess – and has left the president of the United States vulnerable to attack in the White House.

  3

  THE EVOLVING THREATS FROM THE “BIG SIX”

  IT WAS MARCH 2007, and I was staring out of a slightly smog-stained window on the upper floor of a Bogotá hotel, at the picturesque Colombian mountains. There was a hint of fog on the mountains, which blended in seamlessly with the green trees, and the vista served as a welcome distraction from the nonstop stress of the upcoming presidential visit by President George W. Bush. I had been a special agent with the Secret Service for eight years at the time, but I was still relatively new to the Presidential Protective Division, and this was my first major protection assignment with the PPD. A senior agent who served as a mentor to me once described being a Secret Service agent as “the longest job interview in the world.” He was right. Although Secret Service agents go through a nearly yearlong training program at both the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia, and the Secret Service Training Academy in Prince George’s County, Maryland (known as the JJRTC, or the James J. Rowley Training Center), nothing can prepare you for the stress and persistent anxiety that accompanies you while attempting to design a security plan to thwart the numerous potential attacks against the president. The senior agent referred to the evolution of a Secret Service agent’s career as “the longest job interview in the world” because every noteworthy assignment an agent was given served to “check a box” (another expression used frequently among agents) on a long checklist of security assignments that was largely informal, but understood by special agents as a barometer for a successful Secret Service career.

  I was approximately halfway through the career “checklist” when I was assigned to secure the Colombian presidential palace, the Casa de Nariñio, for President Bush’s 2007 visit to Bogotá, Colombia. The presidential palace had been attacked using mortars and projectiles just five years earlier, injuring three soldiers, and the looming threat of another attack while President Bush was present was causing me a lot of lost sleep during the protective advance phase of the Secret Service security operation. Compounding the anxiety was my poor health at the time. I had returned to the United States from Panama prematurely just weeks earlier due to illness, and I still wasn’t feeling well. I had contracted dengue fever while on a protection operation in Panama City, Panama, with First Daughter Jenna Bush, and when my fever spiked to over 103 degrees, the Secret Service supervisor overseeing the operation made the decision to send me home to recover. Knowing that there was a fixed and limited period of time while assigned to the Presidential Protective Division to “check the boxes,” I didn’t take much time off to recover. When I arrived home, I asked the operations section of the PPD to plug me in if they had an open assignment for a “major site” security assignment.

  A major site security advance was a necessary box to check to be taken seriously as an agent on the PPD. The checklist progression works l
ike this: New agents to the PPD are first assigned to secure airports because most U.S. and international airports have been advanced many times before. Also, most major airports expecting a visit from Air Force One already have detailed security plans in place, which the Secret Service supplements with their own personnel and equipment. After successfully securing an airport, PPD agents are assigned a small, non-airport site to secure. An example of a small site would be a “grip and grin”–type of event, where the president goes to a home or office building and shakes hands with a limited number of people, typically followed by a short speech. These small sites are challenging for new agents to the PPD, but the small crowds, limited floor space to secure, and easy-to-manage flow of people and press make them ideal opportunities for newer PPD agents to learn the critical skills necessary to secure the life of the president.