by Dan Bongino
The Secret Service repeatedly drills their agents and trainees on easy-to-recall emergency response medical actions during their training programs because agents will likely use their emergency medical response training only in scenarios where the fight-or-flight physiological response has taken over. Place yourself in the shoes of a senior Secret Service agent standing in front of the presidential podium as the president is delivering a speech to thousands of people in an arena, and millions more on television. I’ve been there, and it’s a surreal feeling that encourages temporary attention lapses as you notice the unusual behaviors and mesmerized stares of people seeing the president for the first time. As an agent on the presidential detail, you have to be hyper-attentive to your surroundings, and the condition of the president, at all times. There is no room for daydreaming on the PPD. But, when you’re standing in front of the klieg lights with the leader of the free world, it’s exceedingly difficult to maintain 100 percent focus. I was always fighting the urge to mentally wander off to what my daughter was doing at school or why that man in the third row of the speech location is wearing that awful lime-green sweater to a presidential speech. Secret Service agents are human beings too, and as their careers progress, they learn, as I did, to drown the noise out and to pay attention to the details that matter, such as inappropriate crowd behavior and hidden hands. But no amount of training can teach an agent to act like a robot. If the president were to collapse onstage during a speech, the Secret Service agents surrounding him would immediately respond, but there’s little doubt that temporary chaos would ensue. Media figures would be trying to report the breaking news while their camera operators and photographers would be trying to get the best shot of the fallen president. The crowd would quickly grow concerned and would need to be controlled to avoid a stampede. The White House staff would respond to the stage, desperate to control the ensuing narrative and to protect the president’s image. And all of this would create an environment of unimaginable physiological stress for the first Secret Service agent to arrive at the president’s side. But that agent must control his emotions and act, because the moments immediately following a serious medical crisis can be the difference between life and premature death. In the critical early moments of a medical emergency, it is absolutely essential that certain steps be followed, and to ensure those steps are followed, the Secret Service trains their agents to “look, listen, and feel.” This is familiar to any emergency responder, and it’s a quick way to remember to look for the chest rising and falling, to listen for breathing at the mouth and nose, and to feel for a pulse. It is these easy-to-remember bullet points that enable agents under stress to easily recall their training without having to engage in higher-order mental gymnastics, which can be lost while responding to a medical emergency under stress. But there was another training tip I learned as an agent trainee in the Secret Service academy that I worry will never apply to the Secret Service again after the events surrounding Hillary Clinton on September 11, 2016: “check, call, and care.”
There are few areas as uncontroversial in the security field as the appropriate response to a medical emergency, but the Clintons have a penchant for politicizing everything they touch, and the Secret Service response to a medical emergency may never be the same after Hillary Clinton’s medical episode on September 11, 2016. During a memorial ceremony commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, which I described earlier in the book and which Mrs. Clinton attended, she left the event earlier than her scheduled departure. Mrs. Clinton’s early departure elicited some attention from the media representatives on the scene because there had been some earlier media speculation about her fitness to be the president of the United States based on scattered reports of poor health. As a video later showed, Mrs. Clinton appeared to lose consciousness temporarily as her Secret Service detail escorted her into an awaiting van. I was taught in Secret Service training that during a medical emergency involving the loss of consciousness of a protectee, we should “check, call, and care”: check the scene for danger, call 911, and care for the protectee. These steps are modifiable, depending on the severity of the medical emergency, but after reviewing the tape of Hillary Clinton nearly collapsing while attempting to enter her Secret Service van on September 11, 2016, I’m convinced politics took precedence over her health during the incident. Unfortunately, the Clintons appear incapable of separating any decision they make, about their health or otherwise, from the resulting political ramifications. They have spent their entire lives in the political arena, and they have learned to consider each decision not on its moral, ethical, or health merits, but on the resulting political capital to be gained or lost by that decision. I have little doubt that the agents working on Hillary Clinton’s detail on the day she nearly collapsed at the September 11 memorial ceremony wanted to take her to a hospital for evaluation. But in the heat of a contentious political campaign, where questions about her health continued to surface, the pressure from the campaign staff appeared to have won out. As stated in chapter 3, Hillary Clinton didn’t go the hospital after her health episode that day. Instead she retreated to her daughter’s apartment, where the campaign staff, and the political voices around her, could focus on handling the narrative they wanted to spin about her health, rather than ensuring that she wasn’t in the midst of a severe health crisis. Thankfully, Hillary reappeared later in the day in front of an eager outpost of media representatives, anxiously staged in front of her daughter’s apartment, and appeared to be fine, but it didn’t have to turn out that way. If her health had taken a turn for the worse, the agents assigned to her that day would have been ruthlessly second-guessed for their actions. And the political decision makers who may have had a role in her avoiding the hospital would have likely faded back into obscurity, avoiding any blame whatsoever. It’s precisely these types of pressures in this new era of twenty-four-hour-a-day news coverage, ubiquitous cell phone cameras, and social media postings that the Secret Service is going to have to deal with in the future.
Secret Service management, as with the pushback they’ve received from the Clinton camp and others on the “optics” of uniformed police officers at Secret Service–secured sites, must be prepared for pushback in the future when a protectee medical crisis demands that they respond in a manner suited to save the life of the protectee, not to spin a media narrative. It’s not the Secret Service’s job to ensure that in the tragic event that the president faints and hits his head on the ground, the people surrounding him don’t use their phones to take a video of the event. These videos may be embarrassing on the evening news, but the videos won’t kill the president. The lack of medical attention in a medical crisis, due to political concerns over health concerns, will.
6
THE THREAT TO THE PRESIDENT FROM CHEMICAL/BIOLOGICAL ATTACKS AND EXPLOSIVES
ASSASSINATIONS, ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS, AND WARFARE through poisoning, chemical, and biological attacks have been used primarily by states or state-sponsored actors. The 2017 assassination of Kim Jongnam, the estranged half brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jongun, using a nerve agent; the 1988 chemical gas attack on the Kurds by the Iraqi military, which killed thousands; and the 2013 and 2017 gas attacks on Syrian civilians by the Syrian Army are recent examples of state-sponsored chemical attacks. Another was the near-lethal poisoning of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko, which was likely carried out by state-sponsored actors. And although these tactics aren’t completely foreign to terror syndicates and small group actors, as we saw with the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Japanese subway system by the group Aum Shinrikyo, and smaller chemical attacks in the Middle East by known terror groups, these types of attacks are exceedingly difficult to pull off without the backing of state actors. Despite the ready availability of preparatory information on the Internet, these deadly chemicals and biological agents are extremely challenging to prepare and store without eliciting the attention of law enforcement officials. Once prepared, many of thes
e chemical and biological agents also require a delivery mechanism to disperse them among the intended victims.
A growing problem for the Secret Service with regard to the chemical/biological weapons threat is detection. The bureaucratic inertia of the Secret Service often prevents the agency from responding proactively to growing threats, but this threat is uniquely dangerous, and the agency must respond as such. Given the grave danger of this threat to the president, and to Secret Service protectees, I must be cautious in this chapter not to divulge any operational details that would put our agents at risk. With that caveat stated, the Secret Service does extensive planning to prevent losing a protectee to a chemical/biological attack. The Secret Service has a special team dedicated exclusively to the decontamination of the president and his immediate protective detail, but decontamination is far different from detection. The Secret Service should prioritize the training of their hazardous agent detection teams, and they should immediately recruit from the military and scientific communities the best chemical/biological weapons experts they can find and use them to train for attacks using these chemical/biological agents. It is only through the repetition, under stress, of a simulated attack training-stimulus that the Secret Service personnel assigned to the hazardous materials teams will uncover the holes in their detection, decontamination, and evacuation plan.
The use of chemical/biological weapons presents a number of additional complications for the Secret Service outside of the physiological complications from such an attack. For example, are there extra clothes around to cover the decontaminated personnel after the immediate attack? Clothes would be immediately stripped off, and as I discussed in the last chapter, the political figures surrounding the president would be understandably concerned about the “optics” of a seminude president being decontaminated or dragged from an attack site. Do not underestimate the power of political “optics” and the pressure constantly put on the Secret Service to do things that make their protectees look good, rather than taking actions that make them safe and secure. I’m concerned that in a questionable chemical/biological attack scenario (one where a suspicious powder is found on or near a protectee, but its status as a weapon isn’t confirmed), the growing pressure on the Secret Service to engage in a political response rather than a decontamination response will be overwhelming – and potentially deadly. The hazardous agent teams in the Secret Service must be assured of the support of Secret Service management in the unfortunate event that they must take action in a questionable scenario such as the one I just described. Sadly, when I was an agent, I heard from agents often on the PPD and in the Uniformed Division at the White House who feared acting out of precaution and then being thrown under the bus by Secret Service managers. It’s tragic that with a pressing threat such as the one from chemical/biological agents that the concern of many of the Secret Service personnel would be support by management, but it was very real when I was on the PPD.
The threat to the president from the tactical use of explosives is another evolving threat that keeps many Secret Service agents up at night. The recent wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been instructive for U.S. military personnel. They have learned how to respond to the evolving tactics of our enemies, but those wars have also been instructive for our enemies, who are learning to evolve to our technology as well. Our enemies are learning how to modify explosives into explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), which are shaped to penetrate the armored vehicles our military use in the war zone to transport personnel. Many of these EFP attacks have been lethal in the war zones, and they led to the military’s development of newer transportation platforms, such as Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles with V-shaped bottom halves to disperse the blast pressure from improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. This is an area where the Secret Service has done a superb job. They are so concerned (appropriately so) about the threat from an EFP, or an improvised explosive device attack, on their armored vehicles that they are constantly working with both private industry and entities within the U.S. government and military to improve their vehicle armoring technology. The Secret Service has a full-time crew of personnel exclusively dedicated to winning the dangerous “explosives versus armor” technology race, and their approach to armor technology is evidence of the agency’s ability to do things correctly when the management puts aside politics, and personal ambition, to fix a problem.
7
THE GROWING THREAT TO THE PRESIDENT FROM THE SKIES
WHEN I JOINED THE SECRET SERVICE IN 1999, the threat of a potential attack on the president from the skies was expected to originate from small planes and helicopters. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that threat analysis changed. Although Secret Service security advances had considered the threat of an airborne assault from the skies using a hijacked jetliner in the years before the September 11 attacks, the gravity of the threat became tragically transparent after the September 11 attacks occurred. Ironically, as the airborne threat evolves, the primary threat to the president has morphed from the passenger jets used in the September 11 attacks to small, miniature, and micro-sized drones.
Drones present a number of security complications for the Secret Service. A small, commercially available, modern drone can be used as a delivery mechanism to carry and drop an explosive device on the secure grounds of the White House, causing both damage and chaos (a method already being used by terrorist organizations against U.S. forces on foreign battlefields). Or, a micro-drone the size of an insect could be flown into the White House complex and used as a nearly undetectable surveillance tool. A miniature, unarmed drone can also be used to tie up limited Secret Service surveillance, uniformed officer, and agent assets while a secondary assault takes place elsewhere on the White House complex. The threat of distraction while a secondary assault takes place, taking advantage of the protection assets bogged down with the distraction, is nothing new to the Secret Service. But a distraction from the sky, using a drone, is a new type of threat.
When I was an instructor in the Secret Service training academy, we used a training scenario for protection exercises where trained role players and training staff would pretend to be members of a crowd on a presidential rope line. The role players would pretend to fight at one end of the rope line while a mock assassin would fire his training weapon at the person playing the role of the president from the other end of the rope line. New agent-trainees frequently got baited into the distraction and would miss the real threat from the assassin at the other end of the rope line. But seasoned agents returning to the training academy for in-service training rarely fell for this same stunt. Distractions from the sky, whether planes, or drones, create additional security complications for an obvious reason; Secret Service agents and officers cannot fly. Investigating a ground-based threat such as an alarm break on the White House grounds is usually as simple as an agent or Uniformed Division officer walking over to the area where the alarm was tripped and clearing it, or apprehending a suspect. The overwhelming majority of the time, these alarm notifications are wildlife walking across the White House grounds at night and are quickly cleared, creating a minor distraction for the White House protection personnel involved. But airborne alarms create a multitude of security headaches because they require some technological intervention to clear the alarm or take down the drone.
Drones have to be either physically removed from the secure skies over the White House by physically intercepting the drone, or by intercepting the drone’s communications from the drone operator. The drone threat is further complicated by rapidly advancing drone technology, which allows the drone to be flown automatically, without guidance and communications from an operator (in this complicated case the Secret Service should monitor the ongoing development of a new class of military lasers that can overload the electronics of a flying drone, destroying its capability to stay airborne). Disrupting the communications of the drone can allow the security personnel at the White House
to land the drone and investigate if it is weaponized, being used for surveillance, or just a nuisance. All of these interventions require time and technology, and they present the Secret Service with a number of complications if the drones infiltrate the secure White House airspace in swarms. As I stated in the introduction, I know many of you reading this may be wondering, “Why give the bad guys any ideas?” That’s a fair question, but I can relay to you with certainty that the “ideas” have been floating around among groups with ill intent for a long time. I wrote this book precisely because I am genuinely concerned that some of the sclerotic Secret Service upper management, who are entrenched and who refuse to evolve with the evolving threat environment, will not acknowledge the seriousness of this threat and boldly respond to it. I’m also convinced that Secret Service management may avoid the necessary, major security overhauls that must happen at the White House until enough public pressure is put on them to respond. Many of the Secret Service managers making the critical decisions about the safety of the life of the president of the United States are career risk managers. They’ve learned to manage the risks to their own careers by not rocking the proverbial boat. Many of these upper-management personnel are just years from retirement and are looking at high six-figure postretirement jobs in the consulting or security services fields. They are not looking for a fight over a dramatic shift in the Secret Service security plan at the White House. They’ll enact some token security measure to take a few drones down on the White House grounds, but they likely understand that the real threat comes from the more spectacular swarm attacks, and I’m concerned that they’re doing little to defend against this very real threat.
