by Dan Bongino
The management staff at the training center took this open-minded approach to the redesign of the control tactics program, and to their credit, they applied it to other components of the training program as well. The academic training in investigative tactics was clearly broken at the time. It used outdated case studies that only taught agent trainees what the agent who had worked the case ten-plus years ago had done – even if he or she had done it wrong. Although I was transferred to the training center to teach in the control tactics section, I only spent a few weeks there. The investigative tactics section was short instructors at the time, and I agreed to temporarily fill in there to ease the manpower strain. The temporary assignment quickly turned permanent when the supervisor of the section and I hit it off.
“Don” was an excellent supervisor who had served as an agent in the Vice Presidential Protective Division agent, but he never held a grudge about it. There was always a healthy tension between the PPD agents and the VPPD agents, mainly because the PPD was considered the “A-Team” within the Secret Service, and the available spots there were limited. As a result of the limited openings, a number of qualified agents hoping to be assigned to the PPD were forced over to the VPPD, and some remained bitter about it, even years later. That was unfortunate because some of the best agents I worked with during my tenure with the Secret Service were VPPD agents. The VPPD agents had an expression, “We do more, with less,” and they were correct. The threat level to the vice president isn’t that much different from that of the president, yet the VPPD agents were always struggling in the fight for limited protection assets. Whether it was magnetometers, Uniformed Division officers, or “post-standers” (special agents not assigned to the PPD or VPPD, but taken from the field offices to support the protection mission), they were always fighting with headquarters to get the assets they needed to accomplish the mission. This constant struggle for assets forced the VPPD agents to be extra creative when designing their security plans, and it showed when many of them were later promoted because they carried over much of this creativity and “outside the box” thinking to their new managerial assignments. The tension between the protective details still remained, though, as some of the agents on the PPD when I was there would joke around and say, “No one comes to the Secret Service to protect number two,” referring to the vice president. Don was one of those former VPPD agents who took his creativity with him from the VPPD to his new supervisory position in the training center’s investigative tactics section. He had a meeting with the special agents assigned to the section early in my tenure there, and he was clear that we were going to redesign and rewrite everything. But instead of updating the antiquated case studies, Don decided that we were going to do it right. We were going to abandon the case-study approach in the investigative tactics section and instead teach the agent trainees how to be the best federal investigators in the country. But to do that, we had a good bit of learning to do ourselves.
Most of the agents assigned to the investigative tactics section as instructors, like me, were relatively new to the agency, and we were “pre-detail” (newer agents who hadn’t yet completed a full-time protection assignment); therefore, our collective experience was limited. To overcome this skills deficit, along with the deficits in the training program, we undertook a bold initiative to reach out to the federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies that had a reputation for excellence in specific investigative tactics, and ask them for help. Not knowing where to start, a few of us began cold-calling agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and some of the federal government’s intelligence agencies, and asking them if we could sit in on their training. It took a few rounds of follow-up phone calls to get to the decision makers, but thankfully, a number of the agencies were gracious and agreed to either let us attend their academies or to assist us themselves in redesigning our own training program.
Two standout agencies who contributed greatly to this effort were the DEA and the military intelligence community. The DEA has a body of experience in undercover operations second to none. Their agents are constantly putting themselves in severe danger by going undercover to buy illegal drugs and contraband in order to further their investigations, and one small mistake could quickly cost them their lives. When the DEA agents agreed to join us at the Secret Service academy to train us, the instructors, they brought with them a series of disturbing videos of undercover operations “gone bad” because of avoidable mistakes. It was admirable that the DEA agents had embraced some of the mistakes they made in the past as an agency, and used them as training tools and cautionary tales for others engaged in dangerous undercover work. The Secret Service does the same thing when it trains outside agencies in protection operations by using the John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan attacks as examples of what not to do.
The videos were tough to watch. One specific video showed the outside of a house where an undercover operator was conducting a drug buy inside. In the middle of the operation, a coconspirator who was hiding in closet leaped out, and both suspects attempted to rip off the undercover officer. The criminals didn’t know the undercover operator was law enforcement. They thought they were ripping off another criminal drug dealer. The audio of the altercation from the undercover operator’s body wire is tough to listen to. Knowing he had children and was beaten within inches of his life was a rude awakening to just how dangerous undercover operations are. When the video ended, we were all dead silent. Not a word was said. Our stares did all the speaking, saying, Did that just happen? It reminded us all about how irresponsible it is to teach subpar tactics to agents who could be endangered by them. Candidly, we had been teaching little about tactics and a lot about paperwork and administrative processes, when in the real world, it’s bad tactics that could get our agent-trainees killed or injured, leaving their children without parents. We were so focused on the administrative paperwork process in the training program that we lost the forest for the trees. It’s really not that big of a deal when an agent forgets to sign an evidence analysis request to the Secret Service Forensic Services Division. Paperwork mistakes can be corrected, but mistakes in a dangerous undercover operation can easily kill you. What we were committed to caring about after the undercover videos was teaching agent trainees to stay alive. The paperwork is easy in the Secret Service, and relatively self-explanatory; we weren’t asking trainees to analyze the quarterly cash-flow statements for IBM. Besides, wasting precious training time teaching agent trainees to fill out paperwork, when they could take the information back with them at night and go over it on their own time, made this old approach to training look that much more foolish. Teaching the agent trainees world-class investigative tactics was clearly the more productive path to creating world-class criminal investigators.
After the DEA “train the trainer” undercover course, I, along with the rest of the instructor staff, felt invigorated. With a sense of purpose, we deconstructed the entire Secret Service undercover tactics training program and incorporated the world-class tactics taught to us by the DEA experts. But we didn’t stop at undercover tactics; we went on to scrap the interviewing and interrogation portions of the training program, along with the surveillance training program, rebuilding those programs using the most advanced and modern techniques. A friend and coworker of mine in the investigative tactics section took on the interviewing and interrogation portion and began to research better ways to teach the agent trainees these valuable skills. I took on the surveillance program.
The interview and interrogation training at the time, although it needed an upgrade, was in decent shape. Due to the Secret Service’s critical protective intelligence mission, which required them to interview people who threatened their protectees on a recurring basis, the training was relatively up-to-date. The Secret Service management never forgot the devastating lessons of the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford by Sara Jane Moore, and this incident impacted their outlook toward modernizing the interviewing and i
nterrogation training. Secret Service agents had interviewed Moore before her 1975 assassination attempt of Ford, where she fired a shot at President Ford from a revolver during a presidential visit to San Francisco, California. The interviewing agents mistakenly determined that she was not an immediate threat. This devastating judgment error served as a cautionary tale in the Secret Service academy when I went through as an agent trainee, and again later in my career, when I returned as an instructor. Much of the interviewing course relied on techniques used by a private company that specialized in interviewing and interrogation. This company taught their techniques to various entities in the intelligence, law enforcement, and corporate worlds, and they were well respected in the law enforcement and intelligence communities for their training product. Their interviewing and interrogation techniques were clever, and I learned to use some of them in other areas of my life outside of my special agent career. They taught us how to follow the direction of the eyes of the suspects we were interviewing. If they looked upwards, and in a specific direction, it could be an indicator of deception. They also taught us the “rule of threes,” which was a tool for getting a confession out of a suspect when you’re reasonably sure about the nature and degree of the crime. In other words, if you know a suspect printed and passed $100 in counterfeit money, then during the interrogation you can say to the suspect, “We know you printed the $300 in counterfeit,” multiplying the actual amount by three. And if you’re convincing enough, some of the suspects will come back with, “Three hundred? I only printed one hundred.” You may chuckle, but the technique works pretty well, and I used it successfully a number of times in financial crimes investigations. It was these techniques, combined with new material, and an emphasis on redesigning the associated practical exercises, where the students would interview a trained actor playing a criminal suspect, that eventually replaced the outdated case-study-based classes.
Unfortunately, the surveillance program was a total disaster, and I was committed to scrapping the entire program. It was nothing more than an exercise in following people around. That’s not surveillance; it’s stalking, and it requires no special set of skills to do. However, professional surveillance does require intense training. It’s a complicated exercise in seeing others without being seen yourself. I had to search for a while to find an agency willing to teach us how to do surveillance, but upon advice from a coworker (the same one who rewrote the interviewing course), I settled on approaching a group of former military intelligence experts and asking them for their help. These guys were top-tier and had conducted surveillance in some of the most dangerous countries in the world for American operators to work in. If they made a surveillance mistake, and they were “burned” (discovered by the person they were surveilling), they could wind up arrested, beaten, or worse. The penalties for these men for surveillance mistakes were very real, and their techniques were light-years ahead of the “Hey, go follow the instructor to Annapolis” surveillance class we painfully suffered through when I was a student in the Secret Service academy. They taught us surveillance techniques ranging from using “hazards” (forks and turns in the roads) to your advantage when surveilling a suspect, to avoiding “dough boys” (innocent civilians who notice you surveilling the target, and who inform the suspect that he’s being watched). They even had clever terms for suspects who would speed up in a vehicle surveillance to get through yellow traffic lights, to leave a surveillance team in the dust. They called this “squeezing the lemon.” But they also taught us valuable techniques for detecting surveillance on ourselves. Learning how to detect surveillance on ourselves was a skill that would come in handy later in my career on presidential protection when I was in the transportation section of the PPD and would escort the presidential vehicles from the military planes they flew in on back to the secure hotel. It always helped to use those countersurveillance skills to ensure that we weren’t being followed by hostile elements looking to see where we stashed the secure presidential vehicle package. The golden rule of countersurveillance was time, distance, and direction. If you’re followed for a long period of time, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being surveilled, because the person following you may be going to the same place you’re going. If you’re followed for a long distance by the same person, it may be suspicious, but again, maybe the driver is going to the same location. But if you incorporate some changes in direction and the person is still following you, now it’s time to heighten your suspicion. The course was far more complicated than this oversimplification, but I was proud to update the training program to reflect the advice and training techniques of these former military experts.
My experience in helping redesign the Secret Service’s training program taught me what can be done when the current alphabet soup of federal agencies combines efforts and expertise to produce a better product for the taxpayers. And given our disastrous national debt, it only makes sense in the future for federal lawmakers, and the president, to be visionary and to look at a complete reorganization of the current federal law enforcement and intelligence bureaucracy. Dividing up the federal law enforcement and intelligence responsibilities among an alphabet soup of federal agencies may have made sense to lawmakers in the past who were concerned about the power of a single federal police force. But as we saw with the Susan Rice/Obama administration spying scandal, where White House officials requested the unmasking of the names of Trump associates being spied on by our government, abuses of power can happen even when responsibilities and power are divided among agencies. It’s time we moved toward a single federal law enforcement agency, where expertise can be shared vertically and horizontally throughout the new organization; a single intelligence agency that can be strictly monitored by Congress and can share valuable intelligence seamlessly both vertically and horizontally; and a single internal affairs/inspector general, who could work with Congress to monitor the activities of the law enforcement and intelligence operations, to battle the inevitable creep toward power abuses.
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INTERAGENCY COOPERATION
THE COOPERATION WITH OUTSIDE FEDERAL AGENCIES in the redesign and development of the new agent training program in 2002, 2003, and 2004 was an example of something the Secret Service, despite all of its recent problems, generally does very well: cooperation. Secret Service upper-level management found it difficult to institute systemic, agencywide changes until White House security breaches and other public agency failures increased public pressure to the point where the status quo was untenable; however, the working agents in both the field offices and on protective details, by necessity, have very good working relationships with outside law enforcement agencies. Seeking help from the DEA and military intelligence operators in the redesign of the agent-training program was natural for me and my coworkers in the investigative tactics section of the Secret Service training center because seeking help from outside agencies was an essential component of our jobs when we were special agents in the field offices. Even the most junior special agent in the field office figures out quickly that he or she cannot design a security plan for a Secret Service protectee without the help of local law enforcement.
When a special agent is designing a security plan to protect the president against threats from the “big-six” threats, he must keep manpower concerns in mind when designing the plan within the three rings of security, the outer, middle, and inner rings. For example, the innermost security perimeter, which is best described as the roughly arm’s length area surrounding the president, is almost always manned exclusively by special agents from the Secret Service’s PPD. With few exceptions, the Secret Service prefers to keep this inner ring staffed with its own agents because of the very specific protection training its agents go through. Secret Service agents are trained in the control tactics program how to remove the dreaded huggers and hand shakers from their protectees. In the inner ring agents deal with these problems often. People, most with no ill intent, can get overexcited in the presence of the pres
ident and other world leaders the Secret Service protects, and many of them will hug the protectees or vigorously shake their hands and, sometimes, refuse to let go. The Secret Service trains regularly on simple joint manipulations using the hands and elbows that will allow them to remove an overexcited hugger or hand shaker from a protectee. This training, along with the rope-line training, where agents are trained to focus their attention on a zone of coverage rather than on the protectee, and close quarters firearms training, where agents learn to use an extra level of muzzle discipline while working closely with the protectee, makes Secret Service agents ideally suited for the inner protection ring. The rare exception I’ve seen is when the president or a world leader travels to New York City. The NYPD was always terrific to work with, but they would always insist that one of their Intelligence Division detectives be allowed to work the inner ring with the Secret Service protective detail. Due to the different training and job requirements of the NYPD detectives in the Intelligence Division and the Secret Service agents working the inner ring, I never thought this was a good idea. (I successfully completed not only the New York City Police Academy, but also the Secret Service agent-training course and the Secret Service Protective Detail Training Course, and although the training is high-quality in all of these, it’s different in preparing their officers and agents for their respective missions). But the Secret Service management in the New York field office and the management of the protective details never “big-leagued” (Secret Service jargon for cocky federal agents talking down to local police officers) the NYPD and tried to kick them out of the inner ring. I always admired the better managers in the Secret Service, and their desire to see the big picture, when circumstances presented them with a series of unpalatable options. Cooperation was key to the New York field office management staff when I worked there, and the management understood that the larger protection mission was better served by allowing an NYPD detective in the inner ring, despite some training disparities, rather than big-leaguing the detective and kicking him or her out, upsetting NYPD management, and destroying the generally positive feelings the two agencies had toward each other.
