Protecting the President

by Dan Bongino

  The “wow factor” in the Secret Service doesn’t fit into a simple descriptive box, but most agents who have served any appreciable period of time in the Secret Service have experienced it. It’s that feeling that younger, less-experienced agents get the first time they do _______(fill in the blank) as an agent. I left the space blank because the Secret Service is so full of incredible experiences that I used to joke with people that it was the closest thing to being famous, without anyone knowing who you are. Most Secret Service agents have vivid memories of the first time the president of the United States walked by their post in the White House, or the first time they stood post outside of the Oval Office, or the first time they boarded either Air Force One or Marine One. Being a Secret Service agent is a job full of amazing firsts. I remember my first day assigned to the White House on the PPD as if it were just yesterday. I recall standing outside of the Oval Office on an afternoon shift for the first time and being overwhelmed by the fact that if, God forbid, something were to happen to President George W. Bush during the time I was assigned the Oval Office post, I was expected to act quickly, decisively, and without any hesitation to either save the president, or remove the threat. It really hits you like a blast of cold air after leaving a warm shower when you’re first turned loose as a new agent on the PPD. The gravity of what you’ve been trained to do slams you in the face as you’re posted in front of the Oval Office, and if you’re as fascinated by politics as I was at the time, you can’t process all of the information as people you’ve only come to know from their talking heads on the cable news channels walk by you and say hello.

  I was impressed in my early days on the PPD how friendly everyone in the George W. Bush White House was to the Secret Service. It took a few months for the “Who’s that guy? I know I’ve seen him on TV” internal questioning to wear off. Sometimes I would see a familiar face from Congress in the White House, and I would recognize the face but I couldn’t recall the person’s name. The irony was that many of the newer members of Congress who were at the White House for the first time appeared to have the same “Wow! I can’t believe I’m here” look on their faces as some of the new agents to the PPD did. The “wow factor” is generally strongest while at the White House, as the awe the building, its history, and its prior occupants inspires is breathtaking. During my first overnight shift at the White House, I remember walking through the State Floor on the East Wing side and thinking about how many presidents and dignitaries had walked this exact path, and the dramatic domestic and global crises they must have been trying to mentally power through as they took each step on the echo-prone and cavernous State Floor.

  Memories of my first trips on both Air Force One and Marine One also had a “wow factor.” Although my first trip on Air Force One was a short one (less than an hour of flight time), I still remember walking up the back staircase of the plane and thinking that I was surely being mistaken for someone else. I couldn’t fathom that I was doing what I was actually doing, even though I had been a special agent for nearly a decade at that point. I also remember the first time I flew aboard Marine One with President Obama. We were flying in the smaller UH-60 Black Hawk version of Marine One, and the quarters were extremely cramped, but it was still a breathtaking moment. Flying in the helicopters in the Secret Service, whether aboard Marine One or on the support helicopters, is visually stunning because it looks like a motorcade in the sky. I remember flying by the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles as a passenger aboard one of “the birds” and thinking that I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. It’s as if the Secret Service agent position is two entirely different jobs. First, you’re asked to be a cop, hunting down criminal counterfeiters and fraudsters, and then you’re thrust into the world’s most sensitive power centers with the most powerful people on the planet, and you’re told not to be a cop but to be a diplomat, a security agent, and a psychologist. Despite what the Secret Service management continues to publicly state in order to hold on to the investigative mission (again, largely due to the potential for postretirement positions in the financial sector, which the Secret Service is charged with investigating as part of its financial crimes investigations), these two missions require entirely different skill sets with very little overlap. Some of the field agents who excel at criminal investigations go on to become below-average protection agents, and vice versa.

  My initial experiences, and the accompanying emotions surrounding them, in the White House, aboard Air Force One, and aboard Marine One, are all examples of the “wow factor” (my sincere apologies for the ridiculous name, but there really is no sophisticated way to describe it). These experiences are emotionally overwhelming at first, even for the most experienced special agents newly assigned to the protection details, and it takes years to learn to treat the PPD as a job, rather than an experience. I know this may seem odd to the outside observer, because most people have only seen the Secret Service on television, and they are accustomed to seeing their stone faces devoid of emotion and hidden behind dark sunglasses. But this is a fantasy no different from a Hollywood movie filmed near the Hollywood sign I flew over aboard Marine One. Despite their stern, calm, and collected external demeanor, most of the agents on the PPD and VPPD, with the exception of a handful of senior agents who’ve been on the detail for years, are self-aware of the magnanimity of the task they are doing, and how special it is that they are doing it. Likewise, those agents are also aware of the penalties for screwing up the mission.

  This is why the wow factor is so dangerous to the protection operations of the Secret Service. Every moment spent deliberating on how amazing what you’re doing is, or how someone at home might see you on TV performing your job (note: I was not at all above this in my initial years on the PPD; therefore, I personally know the dangers of it), is a moment you may be distracted from observing a suspicious person in a crowd on a presidential rope line. Experience is a game-changer on the PPD, and it takes years on the PPD to learn how to drown out the external stimulation surrounding the president, and to focus exclusively on the protection task at hand. Yet, this is where the Secret Service has another glaring malignancy. The loss of many mid-career agents to other federal agencies due to the relocation requirement for agents, and the agent salary cap in the Secret Service, combined with the large size of President Trump’s family, who all fall under the PPD protective umbrella, has created another manpower crisis within the PPD, with no end in sight. The agents assigned to protect the grandson of President Trump on that day in March 2017 were temporarily assigned to the detail from the field offices. They were not experienced members of the PPD. Even with newer and less-experienced agents assigned to the protective details, there’s still an “I can’t believe I’m here” component, and although the two temporarily assigned agents unquestionably should have known better, they were probably thinking about how exciting it was to be protecting members of the First Family. I am in no way apologizing for their behavior; I am simply trying to explain why two adult Secret Service agents would think it was a good idea to snap a selfie with a sleeping youngster.

  I included the wow factor in this book about fixing the problems within the Secret Service not simply to discuss why a few agents took an inappropriate selfie, but also because this is at the core of a dangerous training deficit within the Secret Service. Being a new member of the PPD or the VPPD is an intimidating experience when agents first arrive, and learning how to speak up when you see something going wrong is a learned skill. It can be intimidating when an agent first arrives on the detail to tell a senior member of the president’s advisory team, or a member of Congress, that he or she cannot enter the president’s “holding room” (a room designated for the president where he can relax before or after a speech or event). The Secret Service is aware of the problem, and as a result, they assign new agents to the PPD to the “press agent” role for the presidential security shift because that’s the position with the least amount of responsibility (the press agent has to ensure that the
press stays “clean,” meaning free of weapons and explosives after the security sweeps). And candidly, it’s also the position farthest away from the president on a protective movement, where a less-experienced PPD agent can do the least amount of damage if he or she “shits the bed” (agent jargon for panicking when something goes wrong). But spending multiple shifts as the press agent is not enough training to wear down the wow factor to a degree that a PPD agent can function, agnostic of his high-octane surroundings. The PPD and the VPPD are currently so dramatically undermanned that fully staffed protection mission training has become a rarity. The White House is a ghost town during presidential domestic and foreign travel, and it’s a travesty that during these times, the Secret Service isn’t using the facility for intense protection training. It may surprise you to learn that in the nearly five years I was assigned to the White House as a PPD agent, I didn’t tactically train on the White House facility even once. Even worse, in that nearly five-year period, I never once saw the inside of the residence on the East Wing side of the White House. Think about that. I was a “number one whip” on the PPD (a non-supervisory position but one that places you in charge of the president’s protection shift while you’re working at the White House), and I never saw the inside of the residence I was expected to respond to if there was an emergency involving the president. I had only seen maps of what the inside of the White House residence looked like. Talk about a wow factor. Can you fathom having to wake the president at night during a dangerous intrusion into the White House as the working whip and having to look at a map of the presidential residence to find your way around, while seeing the president and First Lady’s sleeping quarters for the first time? To do this seamlessly, and without hesitation, these maneuvers should be drilled repeatedly, over and over, until the movements become instincts. This is the Secret Service; it isn’t bouncing at the local bar. Every decision an agent makes in the Secret Service in a real emergency is going to be scrutinized in perpetuity, and every agent on the PPD knows it. If you make a mistake as a bar bouncer breaking up a fight in your bar and, it turns out, it’s really just two friends messing around, it’s no big deal, and the world doesn’t really care. But if you’re a Secret Service agent who has never seen the inside of the White House residence, and you’re in charge of evacuating the president when multiple armed terrorists, with explosives and heavy weapons, start jumping the White House fence, and you turn left instead of right in the residence because the president got up to use the bathroom, then you just changed the entire course of world history. Local bars and bartenders don’t have a wow factor, and the penalties for the bouncer screwing up in the circumstances I described are painless. But being a Secret Service agent means being surrounded constantly by high-octane emotion, majesty, and history that can be a powerful emotional distraction and can paralyze even the most-seasoned agent with thoughts of the devastating consequences of taking the wrong action in an emergency. This can only be overcome with consistent, rigorous, on-site training of very specific responses to emergencies, which can override the emotions of the moment of attack and allow the agents to effectively operate and maneuver in the physiological “red zone.”

  You may be curious why Secret Service management hasn’t prioritized the training necessary to drill into their PPD agents the proper emergency responses at the White House. There are a couple of factors at play here. First, the manpower crisis within the Secret Service has rippled throughout the PPD and VPPD, and the constant search for personnel has forced them to assign temporary agents to the PPD, as was the case in the infamous Donald Trump III selfie debacle. This has severely curtailed the time allotted for training among the agents permanently assigned to the PPD and the VPPD. In a perfect world, PPD agents work two weeks of morning shifts, two weeks of evening shifts, two weeks of midnight shifts, and two weeks of training. But this perfect world rarely materializes because the management of the Secret Service, due to workforce constraints, doesn’t prioritize the two weeks of assigned training. Agents on their two-week training rotation are routinely taken off of training assignments to conduct both “in-towns” (presidential security advances in the Washington, DC, area), and out-of-town advances, and the training is rarely made up. Compounding the training deficit is that the best advance agents are typically in high demand because of their ability to handle difficult situations on security advances. Therefore, these agents are routinely taken off of training to do advance work, and as a result, many of the best agents, ironically, rarely train. At the tail end of my PPD career, I was assigned to a number of lead advances, and as an advance advisor (coaching a first-time lead advance) so often that I found it difficult to find the time to perform even basic training such as my mandatory monthly shooting requirement with my service pistol. I gave up trying to do it during work or training hours due to the never-ending travel, and I started shooting during those increasingly rare off days. This infuriated my wife, but it kept me out of the PPD supervisor’s office.

  Even when PPD agents are permitted to train, the training rarely happens on-site at the White House. This is inexcusable and is largely due to the fact that the Secret Service management in headquarters is risk-averse and does everything in its power to avoid conflict that might damage their promotional potential or post-retirement work plans. Fighting for training time on the White House complex would ruffle some White House staff feathers because it would alter their work schedules, and it would alter the White House tour schedule for their friends and families. But it’s absurd that Secret Service headquarters isn’t making a strong push for it.

  It’s not entirely surprising that this fight for White House access isn’t happening. The culture of the PPD imbues its agents with an unnecessary and dangerous sense of submissiveness to the White House staff, which carries over as the working agents become headquarters managers themselves. The Secret Service could push the issue with the White House staff to allow it to conduct regular exercises within the White House, but that would disrupt the White House social calendar. When you’ve learned to do everything in your power to avoid conflict with the White House staff and be subservient, these are fights few Secret Service managers are willing to initiate, even though the lack of on-site training is one of the reasons behind the recent security failures at the White House.

  I expect none of this will change until the Secret Service cleans house at the headquarters level and the DHS brings in outside eyes to see the training shortcomings currently staring the Secret Service in the face. Or, heaven forbid, a trained terrorist team of White House assailants successfully breaches the White House and has to be removed by a military special weapons team. I suspect that in the congressional testimony in the aftermath of such a devastating attack, it will be revealed that many of the agents on duty that day were never even offered the opportunity to train on the actual White House grounds they pledged their lives to defend.

  Subservience to the White House staff was a hallmark of the Secret Service’s PPD while I was on the detail. The obsequious behavior of the PPD management is not a natural trait inherent in most of the working agents on the PPD. Rather, it’s drilled into them by a Secret Service management class primarily concerned with conflict avoidance, not in always doing what’s in the best interests of presidential security. It was strange working on the PPD because, on the smaller issues that would pop up on security advances, I was always backed up by PPD management when the White House staff and I had conflicting views on how a presidential security plan should be implemented. But on the larger issues, such as the visibility of the Secret Service special weapons team CAT (the Counter Assault Team, which is the Secret Service’s version of a SWAT operation), and the distance between the Secret Service agents and the president (the White House staff was constantly asking us to stand farther away from the president than we were comfortable doing in order to keep the cameras from picking up the agents – again, to make the president appear more “approachable”), the Secret Service would consist
ently lose the fight. The world saw the results of the White House staff’s “keep the agents away from the president” cries during the infamous shoe-throwing incident during President George W. Bush’s December 2008 trip to Iraq. I was working in the Washington, DC– based PPD Joint Operations Center (JOC) when the incident happened, and as the team at the JOC watched it unbelievably unfold on the many television monitors inside the old, dank, and cramped Joint Operations Center, we were in disbelief. Of course, the phones started ringing off the hooks in the JOC in the immediate aftermath of the incident, with Secret Service upper management looking for answers as to what happened. But we only knew what they knew from watching the television, because it had just happened. The working PPD supervisor that day was one of the finest men I ever worked with in the Secret Service. He was a noble man with a warrior’s heart. I know that when he looks back on that incident, he wishes he’d been closer to the president than he was. But it wasn’t his fault. The White house staff were obsessed with getting Secret Service agents “out of the shot,” that is, away from the view of the TV cameras. Think about the insanity of this position. President Bush was in one of the most dangerous countries in the world for an American president to be in, Iraq, and the staff still wanted agents out of view. I’m hoping someone close to our current president reads about this silliness and asks the president himself to squash this potentially deadly, “stay out of the shot” nonsense before someone else gets hurt or embarrassed. Sadly, many of the PPD agents doing advance work knew that the management wouldn’t back them up in a pissing match with the staff about these larger issues, so most of these fights were over before they started, because agents just refused to fight them.