by Dan Bongino
But does the management of both the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security have the collective will to battle political pressure and to modify the tactics and the training of the Secret Service in order to respond to the nightmare tactical assault that is undoubtedly coming? I know many of the working agents and first-line supervisors in the Secret Service, and many of them are asking the same question. First, let’s analyze why the threat of a tactical assault on the president is growing and evolving.
Terror groups, such as ISIS, al-Qaeda, and their affiliates, have embraced suicide as a strategic weapon, and this dramatically complicates security planning for the Secret Service. Before the rapid growth of suicide attacks using small arms and explosives, the Secret Service would allocate security assets to areas where cover and concealment were available, and a viable escape route was available to the attacker. If an agent is securing a motorcade route for the president that’s close to ten miles long, it’s virtually impossible to secure every square foot of the anticipated motorcade route; therefore, when planning the assignment of local police officers and Secret Service agents along the route, a good agent assigns those assets to the most likely place from which a threat would originate. Before the use of suicide attacks (which obviously require no escape route), as a standard terrorist strategy, an agent could reasonably assume that forested areas, abandoned buildings with back doors, adjoining highways, and elevated platforms would be the most likely places from which an attack would initiate. An attacker would have the benefits of concealment, possibly cover, and a means to escape during the chaos in those types of environments. But the evolution of the terror threat has thrown that playbook into the garbage can. A growing number of these radicalized terrorists have no interest in cover or concealment; they’re only interested in body counts and carnage. These killers have no need for a highway or access road escape route because many of them aren’t looking to escape; they’re looking to kill, and kill themselves in the process. If you watch the videos from the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks in Paris, you will see a clear example of this. The terrorists weren’t hiding behind garbage Dumpsters, seeking cover. They were spending most of their time exposed in the street, screaming terrorist propaganda, and they were in no rush to escape. And for an extended period of time, they didn’t even appear to be looking to leave the scene of their attack. Their priorities were media attention, propaganda dissemination, and accumulating as large a body count as possible. Escape and evasion appeared to be an afterthought.
The evolving threat of a tactical assault on the president that could originate almost anywhere, not simply from locations with an escape route, and with cover and concealment, will make future presidential visits to locations anywhere outside of the White House grounds difficult to secure with today’s technology and protection models. There simply aren’t enough police officers and Secret Service agents to secure every building and forested area on a motorcade route. But there is a way to begin to counter this evolving threat: quality pre-protection-operation intelligence. The Secret Service maintains a number of field offices around the United States, and around the world, even though the likelihood of a presidential visit to many of the small cities and remote towns these field offices cover is close to zero. The Secret Service maintains these field offices to conduct criminal investigations in their respective jurisdictions, but also to build and maintain critical working relationships with local law enforcement agencies. It is these local law enforcement agencies that are often the source of the most usable pre-attack intelligence, and they will likely remain so in the future as terrorists continue to attempt to infiltrate refugee populations from terror-ravaged countries. Refugee populations subsequently spread throughout the United States’ less densely populated cities and towns. (Note: the Secret Service doesn’t produce intelligence because of its sensitive role and proximity to the world’s leaders, but it does consume intelligence related to its protectees.) But rather than law enforcement at the local and federal levels narrowing down and perfecting the art of intelligence gathering in communities where the threats to the United States, and the president, are originating, many of these agencies are retreating due to political pressure. Many law enforcement agencies, such as the NYPD, are under intense pressure from both national and local political leaders to avoid surveillance of places where practitioners of Islam congregate. These artificial, and unnecessary, limitations constrain our law enforcement officials from doing their jobs. Imagine a scenario where an NYPD organized crime detective assigned to the Russian organized crime squad is forbidden to surveil locations where Russians congregate. Does this sound ridiculous? That’s because it is ridiculous, and it’s dangerous. The Russian mob would quickly figure out that they are operating in a law enforcement vacuum and adjust their meetings and tactics to ensure that they plan their illicit activities in locations where law enforcement is forbidden to go. (Note: just as surveillance of the Russian mob in no way implicates all Russians in organized crime, surveillance of suspect locations of radical Islamic activity in no way implicates all practitioners of the faith in the activities of a few radical terrorists.)
I wish I could tell you otherwise, but a tactical assault on the president is likely being planned right now. Terrorists seeking media attention for their heinous acts have long understood that a successful attack on the president of the United States is the ultimate prize. Either harming or killing the president provides terrorists with universal media attention, which assists them in establishing credibility among terror financiers and new recruits, but it also gives them an opportunity to directly strike at the political head of our government, causing chaos through the resulting national psychological trauma. And the growing use of suicide tactics as a component of the assault greatly expands the attack options of the terror strike team because there isn’t a need for cover or concealment, or the need for a viable escape route. The only way to react to a threat such as this is not to just react, but to be proactive via quality intelligence gathering and analysis, which will allow law enforcement and the Secret Service to intercept a planned tactical assault on the president before it happens. But even this necessary component of protection planning is being stifled by political pressure to provide extra justification for investigations involving threats from Islamic-inspired terror groups. Many of my law enforcement sources have told me that investigative leads are being left on the table and not properly investigated because of the pressure to provide unimpeachable, documented reasons for opening up terror investigations within Islamic communities. The fear of being labeled an “Islamophobe” by interest groups committed to using our legal system and public pressure to encourage law enforcement to look the other way, keeps many potential terror investigations locked in a desk drawer. We’ve already seen the tragic outcomes of these “known-wolf” terror attacks with Orlando night club terrorist Omar Mateen, Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hasan, New York and New Jersey bomber Ahmad Rahami and, the most disturbing case of all, Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki was a vocal al-Qaeda cleric and terrorist recruiter who was interviewed multiple times by the FBI after the September 11, 2001 attacks.2 The FBI and the NYPD cannot break up a terror cell from a case trapped in a dusty file cabinet. And the Secret Service will never be able to proactively stop the presidential assassination it never hears about due to political pressure suffocating investigations before they can begin.
Politics is impacting the Secret Service protective mission in other ways not immediately obvious to even the experienced observer. I spent most of my first year as a Secret Service agent providing protective advance work for Hillary Clinton during her U.S. Senate campaign. I was working in the Melville, Long Island, office of the Secret Service at the time, and the office had a limited staff of agents. The small staff, combined with the frequent trips by Mrs. Clinton to both Nassau and Suffolk counties (the areas covered by the Melville office) in Long Island, put me in frequent contact with Mrs. Clinton, her staff, and her PPD Secret Service agent
s. It was clear from the start of her U.S. Senate campaign that our lives in the Melville office were going to be made miserable by this campaign. As I stated earlier, one of the primary responsibilities of the Secret Service agents in the field is to maintain a strong working relationship with the local law enforcement officials for both investigative and protection purposes. The Secret Service relies heavily on these local law enforcement officials for both physical protection manpower on the outer and middle rings of protection, and for the critical intelligence that largely local law enforcement has the contacts to develop in order to disrupt any potential attack on the president. Maintaining good relationships with local law enforcement was exceedingly difficult when dealing with the Hillary Clinton for U.S. Senate campaign because Mrs. Clinton’s staff would constantly complain about the visible presence of the local police at the sites she visited. I obviously couldn’t read Hillary’s mind at the time, but in my conversations with her staff, it appeared that they wanted the uniformed police officers hidden and tucked away, to give Hillary the appearance of approachability. “Approachability” was the same reason given for the use of what we called the “Scooby Doo” van. Mrs. Clinton shunned the use of the standard First Lady limousine package and used a ghastly-looking brown van for transportation instead, thinking that it made her appear more approachable. The political decision to keep the local police officers at a distance, and the decision to use the “Scooby Doo” van, was a nightmare for the Secret Service agents in the Melville office. First, the use of a stock van built for family travel, not tactical efficiency, caused enormous headaches for the Secret Service armorers, who had to ensure that the vehicle met certain standards for bullet resistance. Additionally, the van was extremely difficult to operate in any tactical driving scenario because of its height and weight. If the van was fired at from multiple angles, it would be a challenge to rapidly speed off and navigate turns at high speeds. In short, the Secret Service management team should have shut the decision to use the van down early and negotiated a better solution, but politics and “approachability” got in the way. Second, the local police in Nassau and Suffolk counties, understandably, didn’t take kindly to constantly being told to “back off” by the Clinton campaign staff. It became a recurring hassle trying to soothe hurt Clinton staff members’ feelings whenever they would see a small cadre of uniformed police officers securing a road intersection near a site Hillary Clinton was scheduled to visit. Can you blame the local police management for being upset? They were hardworking career men and women who had spent their working lives policing their respective areas and creating both safety and security. No police officer or police manager wants to be known for letting an area descend into criminal chaos, for both moral and professional reasons. But, it didn’t appear that the Clinton Senate campaign cared about any of this. If they saw uniformed police officers in areas they didn’t approve of, and they thought the “optics” were bad and that it made Mrs. Clinton look unapproachable, they would raise the issue with the Secret Service supervisor responsible for her protective shift, who would then bring the issue to my boss in the Melville office. Rather than focusing on securing the life of Mrs. Clinton, this charade caused us all to waste inordinate amounts of time politely requesting that uniformed police officers move slightly to the left, or slightly to the right, so that Mrs. Clinton couldn’t see them. This back-and-forth dance with the police officers at these protected sites was a disgrace. The Secret Service works with local law enforcement to create a safe and secure scene for both the protectee and the people attending the protectee’s event. Asking local police departments to hide themselves like misbehaving children, in the corner of a classroom, was humiliating for agents like me, who were police officers before joining the Secret Service. And more important, it was humiliating to the hardworking cops just doing their jobs and helping the Secret Service accomplish the mission. With the growth of phone camera and video technology, I expect this trend to grow worse in the future as Secret Service protectees, the president included, demand improved protection “optics” and they empower their inexperienced staff members to insert themselves into, and change the security plans, depending on how “approachable” they look. Never forget: terrorists planning a group tactical assault with heavy weapons and explosives are looking for “approachable” protectees too.
Defending against an organized tactical assault on the president is an extraordinarily challenging task and is one of the Secret Service’s essential protective responsibilities. How can the Secret Service be expected to design security plans to defeat a small team of terrorists, with heavy weapons and explosives, when the rings of security, which are heavily reliant on the support and manpower provided by local law enforcement, are compromised due to political concerns, not security concerns? The Secret Service managers I worked with understood the need to balance the accessibility needs of Secret Service protectees against the security needs of the protectee, but Secret Service upper management must resist the urge in the future to roll over under pressure from protectees and their staffs to dramatically alter security plans because they don’t meet some hard-to-define political aspiration of “approachability.”
I suspect some Secret Service managers went along with these ridiculous security requests because they wanted to be liked by Mrs. Clinton, and they wanted to avoid any career-damaging controversy (which the Clintons would have unquestionably caused for any member of the Secret Service standing in their way). The natural instinct to be liked by the protectee is a tough one to suppress. I fell victim to it at times while assigned to Jenna Bush’s detail. Jenna was always very friendly and easy to work with, but conflicts would inevitably develop, and it was tough to do the right thing, and not the easy thing, when you know the right thing is going to cause a fight with your protectee. Being around Mrs. Clinton constantly as a result of her travel schedule and campaigning probably caused some of the same conflicts with the Secret Service managers on her detail. I know many of the members of Hillary’s PPD detail knew that the local cops were growing tired of the “run and hide” routine, but they would ask our Melville office team to make the request to move the police officers anyway. Mrs. Clinton had no issue airing her displeasure with things she didn’t like, and I’m sure the PPD agents assigned to her wanted to avoid being lectured by her in the “Scooby van” after an unapproved police “sighting.” Also, a call from Mrs. Clinton to Secret Service headquarters would be very damaging to any Secret Service agent’s career if that agent were the subject of that call. Mrs. Clinton’s security arrangements, because of this recurrent conflict with the local police, became more of a lesson in conflict avoidance rather than physical security. It’s a miracle nothing happened to her because of this, but due to the evolving threat of a tactical assault from committed terror groups, there are no guarantees in the future if protection becomes about the optics of “approachability” rather than sound protection tactics. Local law enforcement, in uniform or not, are a Secret Service agent’s best friend, and they are their first line of defense against the ever-present threat of a tactical assault. Secret Service management, in the future, is going to have to resist the urge to allow protectees such as Hillary Clinton the opportunity to treat them as political pawns to be shuffled around as they see fit, while compromising both their safety and that of the Secret Service.
The evolving threat of a tactical assault is compounded by the threat presented by evolving weapons technology. The detection of weapons is a mainstay of Secret Service security planning, and the use of advanced, nonmetallic materials for weapons construction may render much of their current technology useless in the future. Three-dimensional printing technology, and the evolution of advanced polymers will make it possible in the near future to construct deadly weapons in the comfort of your own home or business, and this technology has the potential to render the government regulation of firearms nearly impotent. In the future polymer-based firearms, built using a home-based, 3-D printer, will be easy to
construct and will be limited only by access to the software codes necessary to build these weapons. The Secret Service relies heavily on the use of magnetometers to detect weapons, but this dated technology relies on the presence of metal to function. Although technology currently exists, and is in use in many of our airports, that uses body scanning rather than metal detection, the Secret Service is going to have to overcome its tendency toward bureaucratic inertia to move toward an agency-wide overhaul of its current magnetometer-centric security planning. Better weapons detection through advance screening mechanisms using technology that already exists, a rededication to cooperative intelligence sharing with both federal and local law enforcement partners, a strong Secret Service management culture that fights back against protectees who politicize security, and the continued evolution of the Secret Service training program to ensure its agents are regularly exposed to the stresses of simulated combat in a tactical assault, are all steps the Secret Service can take today to ensure the threat of a catastrophic tactical assault on the president remains just that, a threat, and not a reality.
5
THE THREAT OF A PRESIDENTIAL MEDICAL EMERGENCY
HAVING AN ARSENAL OF FIREARMS and impact weapons capable of handling everything from an unusual interest case (that guy who refuses to let go of the president’s hand while shaking it on a rope line) to a terrorist hit team with belt-fed automatic weapons, is critical to both discouraging and countering an attack on the president. But it’s only a small piece of the presidential protection puzzle. We live in the real world, and in that real world the everyday threats the Secret Service encounters are more likely to come from a medical emergency involving the president than they are from a tactical assault by terrorists. I was both a student and an instructor at the Secret Service training academy, and a significant portion of the special agent training program is spent learning how to deal with a presidential medical crisis. The agents are trained to be skilled first responders because the advanced medical care, if necessary in a medical emergency, will be provided by military medical assets traveling with the president on every trip. The Secret Service’s training program trains their agents to effectively, and under intense stress, stop bleeding from an open wound, stabilize a broken bone, stabilize the head and neck, deliver oxygen, and take other immediate emergency medical actions in the moments just after a medical crisis.
