by Dan Bongino
Upon successful completion of a small site security plan, a PPD agent is then given a major site security advance “box” to check. If a sitting president has a limited travel schedule (as many 1980s-era special agents experienced with President Reagan, who had a limited foreign and domestic travel schedule after the assassination attempt at the Washington, DC, Hilton), then these major sites can be difficult assignments to acquire because of their scarcity. And if an agent doesn’t successfully complete a security plan for a major site, then the “box checking” stops, along with his or her career advancement on the PPD.
Knowing the potential scarcity of major site security assignments got me back on my feet quickly despite still recovering from a severe battle with dengue fever, a battle that cost me twenty-plus pounds of body weight and sapped me of nearly all of my energy. Even getting dressed was a struggle while recovering, but when a friend of mine in the PPD operations section called me on my Secret Service–assigned BlackBerry and said there was an opportunity approaching for a major site advance in Bogotá, if I was up to it, I jumped at the opportunity.
After hanging up the phone, I immediately dragged my still-hurting body (the well-deserved nickname for dengue fever is “break-bone fever”) out of bed, put on a suit, and drove into the White House complex to collect the materials and information for the major site in Bogotá. I was going to check this box even if it caused lasting damage to my body.
One of the WHMO (White House Medical Office) doctors had warned me in a phone call a few days earlier, while checking up on me, not to return to South America until I was completely recovered because the human immune system can work against you once you contract dengue fever. If you acquire a different type of the infection a second time, you can contract hemorrhagic fever, where your organs bleed internally and death is a possibility. Although the idea of liquefied organs scared the hell out of me, I knew if I didn’t take the assignment, then someone else would jump on it. I was all in.
And that’s how I wound up on the upper floor of the hotel room in Bogotá, staring at the beautiful mountain views. I was staring out the window, and not working on my security plan for the presidential palace, because I was patiently waiting to speak with the lead advance agent on the trip, “Nick.” Lead advance agents on foreign security advances were the most respected advance agents in the Secret Service. Only the best of the best agents were permitted to act as lead advance agents overseeing the security of the life of the most powerful man on earth while in a potentially dangerous foreign country. After competing with hundreds of agents for the extremely limited spots on the PPD (only a handful of spots open up each year, and most Secret Service agents will never be selected to protect the president full-time as a member of the PPD), then you have to compete throughout your career on the hypercompetitive PPD with fellow agents to check the boxes and advance your career. After conducting a successful major site advance, then an agent would be in line for a logistics assignment. Logistics advances are a nightmare. Logistics agents are responsible for getting every agent, vehicle, weapon, and piece of security equipment into a foreign country and making sure everything arrives both on time and in working order. There is no room for error for a logistics advance agent. You cannot forget a presidential limo at home in the United States or leave it behind at a foreign airport because a customs official in a foreign country is being difficult. You can’t forget to assign a flight or a hotel room to a PPD shift agent assigned to guard the president’s six (a military and law enforcement term for providing rear coverage) and then tell that agent to stay home. It doesn’t work that way. This is why a logistics advance assignment is the final box to be checked before being assigned to lead advance school, where PPD agents learn the skills necessary to act as a lead advance agent.
Logistic assignments separate the wheat from the chaff, and if a PPD agent can keep it together and manage international logistics successfully, then that agent can move up into the rarified air of lead advance agents. That’s where “Nick” found himself on the Secret Service PPD career ladder during the Bogotá, Colombia, trip. Nick wasn’t only the lead advance qualified agent on the PPD Bogotá advance, but he was one of few agents on the PPD who had checked enough boxes to qualify as a foreign lead advance agent. Acting as a lead advance agent within the United States was a difficult assignment because domestic lead advance agents are responsible for everything that happens on the presidential visit. Although the airport agent, the small site agents, the major site agent (me during this Colombia trip), the transportation agent, and the logistics agent all work for the lead advance agent on a presidential visit, the top supervisor on the PPD, the SAIC (special agent in charge) will deal almost exclusively with the lead advance agent on a presidential visit. That means that even if I were to blow it at the Colombian presidential palace by designing a terrible security plan, “Nick” would also be the one to feel the wrath of the SAIC.
I respected Nick, as did most of the agents on the PPD, and I was waiting to speak to him in that hotel room because I needed some guidance on handling the overwhelming number of name checks the Colombian intelligence services had given me. While talking about how to conduct the name checks, we veered off into a larger discussion about how to handle and prioritize threats to the president. That’s where the “big six” conversation started. Nick told me to spend the majority of my time developing plans to neutralize threats from tactical assaults, medical emergencies, chemical/biological agents, explosives, airborne assaults, and fires. Although it was a simple way to sum up the threat picture, it served as a guide for me for the remainder of my career. Threats from the big six will haunt you throughout your career as a Secret Service agent as you develop new and creative ways to learn to react to threats as quickly as the terrorists and assassins can create them. Making matters worse is the evolving social media ecosystem and twenty-four-hour news cycle. The omnipresence of cell phone cameras and social media platforms has made every American with a social media presence, and a cell phone, a potential celebrity reporter. This has made this generation of political candidates and politicians extra-sensitive about their public personae, which just decades ago were only “public” if you saw them on the news, on the streets outside the Capitol, or at a county fair. Now, every breath, utterance, and action has the potential to end a politician’s career because a camera or recording device is rarely more than arm’s length away. No sound bite will be left spared if some entrepreneurial citizen or reporter can get it recorded.
This possibility of being recorded at all times has made the extremely stressful job of being a Secret Service agent almost impossible. For example, put yourself in the shoes of the Secret Service supervisor on duty with Hillary Clinton on September 11, 2016. As the world watched the solemn remembrance of the September 11, 2001, attacks at Ground Zero, many noticed Hillary Clinton exit the event suspiciously early. Despite some initial spin, Fox News Channel’s Rick Leventhal accurately reported that Mrs. Clinton left the event early due to a “medical episode.”1 And a now-infamous video taken by a private citizen would later show Mrs. Clinton struggling to stand on her feet, and nearly collapsing, as a Secret Service van pulled up to the curb and escorted her from the scene. I was an instructor in the Secret Service academy, and I was a program manager for the rewriting of the Secret Service investigative training course for new agents. I know what agents are taught in the Secret Service training academy because I helped write and teach the curriculum. I took part in hundreds of mock emergency medicine and AOP exercises (assault on principle drills where we rehearse the response to a mock attack), and I cannot recall a single episode where an actor playing the president, or another Secret Service protectee, in a training exercise pretended to lose consciousness and the response was anything other than to immediately seek out a hospital or advanced medical care. But that’s not what happened on September 11, 2016, with Hillary Clinton and her protective detail. She was taken to her daughter, Chelsea’s, apartment in Manhattan ins
tead. And although I obviously was not in the apartment with Mrs. Clinton at the time, I can definitively state that the medical care she likely received there was not qualitatively similar to the care at New York City’s finest emergency rooms. Now, to be clear, I am not trying to pin blame on the Secret Service agents on Mrs. Clinton’s detail on that day. The purpose of this book is to highlight some of the pressures facing the Secret Service, the necessary fixes the Secret Service must make to avoid succumbing to these pressures, and what will inevitably happen if the Secret Service doesn’t evolve and change the way it currently conducts the business of protection. The country cannot, and should not, accept a Secret Service where emergency medicine and critical security decisions during potentially life or death moments are unduly influenced by political decision-makers.
4
THE THREAT OF A TACTICAL ASSAULT ON THE PRESIDENT
IT WASN’T A COINCIDENCE THAT NICK, the lead advance agent from the Colombia trip, named the tactical assault first when discussing threats from the big six. The grave threat to the life of the president of the United States from a trained team of well-armed, body armor–clad terrorists is difficult to manage, even for the elite agents of the PPD. The threat is so serious that the Secret Service protection model relies heavily on law enforcement and military assets outside of the agency to help counter the threat from a tactical assault. While coordinating security for a portion of the inauguration route on Pennsylvania Avenue for Barack Obama’s first presidential inauguration in 2008, a prominent member of the broadcast media asked me, “How do you guys do all this?” I responded, “We don’t.” I wasn’t suggesting that the Secret Service wasn’t responsible for the security of the president. I was trying to emphasize to the media figure that though we, the Secret Service, design the security plan, it’s a largely symbiotic effort between the Secret Service, the military, local police, and state and federal law enforcement that enables the Secret Service to manage enormous security undertakings such as a presidential inauguration.
If the Secret Service were forced to protect the president with no help from outside agencies and law enforcement personnel, the president would undoubtedly be put in immediate and grave danger. The Secret Service doesn’t have the manpower or local expertise to secure every street corner the president visits during his time in office. Moreover, the Secret Service cannot during a weeklong security advance (the average length of a difficult security advance), match the lifetime of accumulated local intelligence in the minds of the dedicated local law enforcement, many of whom have spent years patrolling America’s streets. The Secret Service, with few exceptions, has always maintained a strong working relationship with local and state law enforcement because they have to. Unlike the FBI, and other federal law enforcement agencies, where the relationship can be tense at times with local law enforcement, as jurisdictional fights, and the ever-present fights for access to classified information, muddy up the jurisdictional waters, the Secret Service cannot perform its basic and most important job, keeping the president safe, without outside help.
Imagine security around the president as a series of concentric rings, with access to each ring determined by the level of training, and the specific job function, of the agent or officer. The outer and middle security rings are almost exclusively the domain of local and state law enforcement personnel under the watch of a smaller number of Secret Service agents. There is a sensible reason for this concentric ring structure, and the use of local law enforcement personnel to man the middle and outer rings. No one knows the neighborhood terrain features, the local “players,” and what should and shouldn’t be in a neighborhood, like the local police officers. Years of patrol experience have trained the eyes of our nation’s local police officers to spot anything out of the ordinary,1 and any terrorist assault team using explosives and automatic rifles to initiate a tactical assault will most likely begin their assault on the outer ring first. They begin here, far from the president, because the ring of magnetometers surrounding locations the president visits have been pushed out farther and farther as the threat from suicide vests, and other explosives, has grown. It does the Secret Service no good to place their magnetometers just feet away from a location the president may walk by because a bomber could approach the magnetometer checkpoint and detonate before walking through. The trained eyes and ears of the nation’s local law enforcement officers are the front lines of protection against the nightmare tactical assault that would stress even the most well-designed Secret Service security plan. Having them on the outside perimeter is a significant force multiplier that can stop an attack in a parking lot, rather than on the inside of a secure venue.
The stress and chaos of having to deal with multiple attackers, loud explosions, blinding and deafening percussion blasts, and rifle rounds whizzing past Secret Service agents and law enforcement personnel at thousands of feet per second, is tough to replicate in a training environment. I remember being a young agent-in-training at the Secret Service training facility in Maryland and going through a “Hogan’s Alley”–type exercise where agent-trainees walk down the street and then all hell breaks loose. Instructors, in the role of the OPFOR (opposition force), pile out of buildings and start firing at the trainees, and the agent-trainees are expected to respond using their tactical training. To add pain to the training scenario (pain is a terrific training tool for training young agents what NOT to do), the instructors used Simunition rounds in their training weapons. Simunition rounds are plastic bullets with a soapy-textured, colored substance in the plastic round to mark where the Simunition round lands when it hits a trainee. It happened to be a very cool late-autumn day that training day, and we always hated Simunition training on cold days. The plastic rounds hardened up significantly in the cold weather, and if they hit you in the hands during the training exercise, then you would be in serious pain for the rest of the day, and you would have trouble moving your fingers. Aggravating the situation was that many tactical shooting exercises like this would naturally result in hits to the hands because the one thing both sides, the OPFOR and the trainees, are always focused on during the back-and-forth shooting is the opponent’s gun. And the gun is always in the hands.
During this particular exercise it was my turn, and I began my slow stroll down the street, with its many false storefronts for instructors to hide in and pop out of. About three-quarters of the way down the street, I began to wonder if the instructors had forgotten about me (something that I mistakenly did as an instructor when the roles were reversed years later), as nothing happened. But no such luck. As multiple attackers in dark-blue, Secret Service–issued battle dress uniforms appeared in the street, I immediately sought cover. The OPFOR had waited to attack because as I walked farther and farther down the street, all of the quality cover to hide behind had disappeared (cover is the tactical term for a relatively bullet-resistant object that you can hide behind for protection, such as a car, or a wall). Concealment is another option that may or may not provide bullet-resistant cover, but does conceal you from the line of sight of the OPFOR (for example, a thin piece of pipe and drape). The only cover available was a small fire hydrant, but when training in a Simunition gunfight scenario, you take whatever cover you can get to avoid being pelted with endless Simunition rounds. I was approximately 185 pounds at the time and I’m six feet tall, but after being pelted by about four or five rock-hard Simunition rounds, in all of the wrong places (yes, use your imagination), I squeezed my body behind that small fire hydrant and fired back. I even hit a few of the OPFOR instructors and managed to get them to move back before the exercise ended. This kind of repeated tactical training, where there is a real penalty for using poor tactics (being struck by a painful Simunition round), is the only effective way to train the agent-trainees of the Secret Service to respond to the inevitable tactical assault that awaits them in the future.
Try to imagine a continuum of stress in a Secret Service emergency where a “level three” stress scenario is a
lone gunman, with a handgun, caught hundreds of yards away from the president before he fires his weapon. Then imagine a “level ten” stress scenario on the stress continuum being a fifty-man assault team, firing high-powered automatic rifles, with body armor–penetrating rounds, and men and women being brutally mowed down all around you as you struggle to gather your senses in order to locate and evacuate the president. The training scenario where I sought cover behind the small fire hydrant was a one or two on that stress continuum. But even at that low level of training-induced stress, you quickly learn to respect what level ten would feel like. During the scenario, I vividly remember imagining how horrible the situation would have been if the Simunition rounds that were striking me in the arms and legs, and other painful places, were real bullets, not training rounds. This is the kind of mind-set you must train yourself to live with if you expect to succeed in the Secret Service. You must put aside the dread of being on the business end of a terrorist’s rifle and put the life of the president first, and all of your fears a distant second. And although that fear is subordinated in favor of action after a long period of tactical training, it never really disappears. That fear serves as a motivational tool that agents use to work long into the night, on very little sleep, to avoid staring at that business end of a terrorist’s rifle in a tactical assault that some terrorist group, somewhere in the world, is planning right now.
