by Dan Bongino
It was an unforgettable sight on the day of the visit as Mrs. Bush arrived from Amman via helicopter and we drove her to Petra. Emerging from the long Siq and having the bright desert sun shining down on Al Khazneh (the Treasury) with the long motorcade of sophisticated, armored protection vehicles and hordes of Jordanian and American security representatives was an incredible visual contrast of the old and new world. The negotiating skills I employed on this trip would serve me well on my next foreign transportation advance in an area of the world presenting me with a completely different set of concerns: Paris, France.
President Bush’s trip to Paris in the closing months of his presidency was fraught with difficulty from the start. Most of the motorcade routes that my French security counterparts proposed involved either crossing over or driving down the Champs Élysées, one of the most famous streets in the world and a major, crowded tourist attraction in Paris. In my analysis of the security situation, I felt strongly that we could not provide adequate security without closing the street to vehicle traffic. The French strongly objected to my approach and were adamant that it could not be done. Compounding the difficulty was the notification I had received that the president wanted to take a bike ride somewhere in Paris. Planning for these bike rides was challenging in the United States but was nearly impossible overseas. President Bush was a skilled cross-country bicyclist, and securing a large enough area for him to ride within the confines of the city of Paris was a challenge. While in Washington, DC, the president typically rode his bike at military facilities that obviously had a high degree of security, a luxury we would not have in Paris.
After a week of negotiations between me, the Secret Service lead advance agent, John, and the French, they acquiesced to our request to close the Champs Élysées, which solved one problem. But the security of the bike ride was still an unresolved issue.
I asked an agent on the advance team named Frank to pick a location for the bike ride and to develop a plan to secure it. He assured me that the route he ultimately selected was secure and we felt comfortable with our plan. During the outing, our confidence quickly turned to panic as the president rode off the specified bike route at his typical fast pace and we had a difficult time keeping visual contact with him from the road. My heart rate accelerated rapidly as I thought to myself, Please do not lose the president.
My fear grew with each second I was “in the blind.” Then I heard the voice of the Secret Service supervisor working the bike ride in my earpiece saying something every agent dreads: “Where is the president?”
Angry and frustrated that they had deviated from the route we had planned, I prepared for a response and was readying to take responsibility for the mishap when the president and the agents riding with him emerged from the wooded area to the left of our vehicles. I calmly responded, “At our twelve o’clock, sir.”
Relieved, but still infuriated that we deviated from our plan, I thanked my French security counterparts who managed to keep pace with the president and privately concluded that I would never place that degree of trust in another agent again. “Trust, but personal follow-up” became my credo, and it would serve me well throughout my career.
11
THE PRESIDENT’S LIFE IN MY HANDS
AFTER YEARS WORKING DILIGENTLY through the ranks of the Secret Service in order to be selected for the Presidential Protective Division, I found that there is no competitive respite when you arrive there. A very small group of agents is selected for the PPD, and even fewer are selected as lead advance agents for the president, the highest level of operational achievement. One misstep and your chances at being selected as a lead advance agent are finished. Unlike many top-heavy departments within our federal government, the Secret Service has a flat management structure, and it pushes an enormous amount of responsibility down to its detail agents. Lead advance agents are given the sole responsibility for the overall security plan and are ultimately responsible for ensuring the safety of the president on any visit outside the White House grounds. Managing an entire advance team, monitoring the security budget, and serving as the face of the White House in conjunction with the White House staff is an honor and a privilege, and I was determined to exceed expectations.
I was selected for the lead advance training course after successfully completing a second assignment in the transportation section as the “Whip” (a quasi-supervisory position). The selection list is published on the agency’s e-mail system and is a public acknowledgment of a successful body of work. Attending the lead advance training course is no guarantee of being selected, however, and many agents “die on the vine,” meaning they are trained but never given the chance to actually conduct a lead advance. I was selected for a number of interim assignments after successfully completing the training course, and they all were challenging, but my first assignment enabled me to witness a transformative event in our collective US history firsthand: I was asked to handle the security for the PPD for newly elected president Barack Obama’s walk down the Inaugural parade route.
My involvement in this event transformed the way in which I viewed security for crowded outdoor events. It was a learning experience I was to speak of frequently in media appearances years later, after the tragic bombings at the Boston Marathon in 2013. President Obama’s election as the forty-fourth president of the United States marked a historic moment and I was proud to be a part of it, despite our legions of political differences.
President-elect Obama’s inauguration was going to require an elaborate security plan and I was honored to play a pivotal role in its implementation. The Secret Service and the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) knew this event was historic and that the crowd size would be unprecedented. The law-enforcement and military assets dedicated to securing this event were incomparable. Law-enforcement officers were transported in from all over the United States, and military personnel from specialized teams were deployed to strategic locations in Washington, DC.
Although the security operation we planned was impressive, I could see the apprehension in the eyes of the PPD management team when I briefed them in a secure room hidden in a dark corner of the eighteen acres of the White House complex. It was not a look I was used to. Everyone in the room knew that the president was going to exit the safe confines of our tank-like armored presidential limousine and walk the parade route, despite any misgivings we may have had about it, and the concerns were very real. Securing an entire street in Washington, DC, and guaranteeing the same level of security provided on the White House grounds is an enormous security undertaking, and if just one weapon managed to slip into our secure zone, a historic tragedy was virtually guaranteed.
The questions from the management team came quickly and covered such areas as tactical countermeasures to an armed assault, medical response, chemical and biological mitigation measures, explosive detection, airborne attack, and many others. I prepared extensively for the briefing, almost as if I were preparing for a difficult college final exam, and answered each question in detail to assuage their fears. I was comfortable with the planning and had walked through the site and the location of all our emergency and law-enforcement assets many times, always keeping in mind the grave consequences of any security failure.
The size of the crowd on Inauguration Day 2009 did not disappoint. In my ten years with the Secret Service to that point, I had attended many high-profile events, yet nothing compared to this. I arrived at 3:00 a.m. and immediately began checking that every door was locked, every window was closed, every magnetometer was working, and every agent was prepared.
It was an unusually cold day and the suit I was wearing did little to block the penetrating wind. As the hours passed, I could barely feel my extremities as the cold pavement of Pennsylvania Avenue drove straight through the leather soles of my shoes. The sun rising in the morning provided a small degree of relief, but that relief was short-lived as we were met by a rush of people waiting to be screened by our magnetometers—screening I would e
xperience for myself as a civilian media commentator for President Obama’s 2012 inauguration.
The security lines to access Pennsylvania Avenue grew by the minute and were becoming increasingly difficult to control. The calls for assistance from agents assigned to my zone were endless, and I believe we were saved only by the gracious nature of the impressive crowd. The crowds remained calm and in good spirits, despite the long lines, and the atmosphere inside the secure zone was festive.
Although I had staunchly supported Senator John McCain during the election, I felt pride in my country that day. A presidential inauguration is not the time to fight a political fight. I heard the newly inaugurated president’s speech booming over the speakers placed around the city and watched as many of the people in the crowd began to cry. Some of those people did not need to read about the civil rights era in textbooks; they had lived through the pain and indignity of that era, and although those are wounds that may heal, the scars will never disappear. Witnessing the joy in their eyes as they stood in the bitter cold, listening to the words of our first African American president, is an image I will never forget.
It also changed me politically. I came to the painful realization that my political party had done a poor job both acknowledging the lasting scars left behind by this dark period in our collective American history, and communicating the message about their integral role in ending it. Thankfully, most of us will never experience the indignity of institutional racism, but we must, as a country, never forget that the power of government has not always been a repository of good intentions.
It was not long after the conclusion of President Obama’s speech that he moved down the parade route toward my security zone. Working since three in the morning, I was confident that we were ready and I rehearsed the emergency response in my head over and over as he approached. In my earpiece I heard Don, the detail leader, say, “Bongino, coming to you.”
The crowd erupted as the president exited the vehicle with First Lady Michelle Obama and began his walk. The sea of camera flashes was nearly blinding and the excited crowd made it difficult to hear Don through my earpiece. I reassured him that everything was secure as he kept his eyes virtually glued to the president. This was Don’s last time working as a detail leader for the PPD and he was not going to allow any security lapses. Each step of the president’s walk seemed to last an eternity and I was anxious to see him leave my zone of responsibility and enter the viewing stand located just outside the north grounds of the White House. As I watched him leave my area of responsibility safely, I felt a deep sense of satisfaction with the success of the mission and the Secret Service’s role in it.
The media would report later on significant inauguration crowd-control issues in the Washington, DC, Third Street Tunnel, an incident that later became known as the “Purple Tunnel of Doom,” where numerous “Purple Ticket” holders were denied access. It turned out that the Capitol Police and the Secret Service had two completely different ideas of the role of the tunnel in the overall protection plan, despite months of planning and coordination. This incident was an embarrassment for the Secret Service but the lapse was not with security; it was a logistics and crowd-control failure. This is not meant to minimize the significance of its impact but to discriminate between operational security failures and organizational failures. Having lived through the experience, I attribute the tunnel failure to a recurrent theme within this book: an overly bureaucratic and unnecessarily segmented federal law-enforcement workforce that has a difficult time with interagency communications and coordination, despite the best of intentions.
These problems are all too common and are entirely preventable, but not as our federal government is currently organized. Every additional agency we create in turn creates another agency head whose interests are in protecting its department, its people, and its budget. As a result, missions consistently suffer because the incentives are wrong. Managers think they are doing their duty to protect “their agency” and “their people” when they are really employees of the American people and there to serve a larger mission. These incentives will never change until we pursue a complete overhaul of our federal law-enforcement architecture with a consolidation of agencies and bureaucratic layers. This can be accomplished only through a broad-based initiative designed to allocate scarce taxpayer dollars to law-enforcement priorities rather than individual agency priorities.
The assignment that followed President Obama’s first inauguration was not nearly as historic, but the safety of the president is not tied to any history lesson. The president had scheduled a number of trips outside the White House grounds postinauguration as part of his effort to grow in the role, and I was to be a part of one of them.
When I received a phone call from the operations section regarding a presidential visit to Trinidad, I knew it was too soon for me to conduct the lead advance, but I was pleasantly surprised to be selected to conduct the security advance for the Hilton Hotel the staff chose for the trip. This particular hotel had a reputation in the Secret Service for being extremely difficult to secure due to its complex layout. It was commonly referred to as the “Upside-Down Hilton.”
The hotel was built into the side of a mountain, and the entrance was located on the top floor and was labeled “L.” The floors below it went up in number as the elevator descended. If you want to go down a floor from the third floor in the Trinidad Hilton, you must press the button for the fourth floor. Although this sounds simple, I often encountered confused guests in the elevators over the course of the two-week advance. The layout of each floor was confusing as well, and many of the emergency evacuation exits would have exposed the president to exterior portions of the building, a factor I deemed unacceptable and worked diligently to design my plan around.
As a general rule, I would never evacuate the president from one attack with unknown variables into another scenario with an unknown outcome. If we evacuate, I want to know exactly where we are going and have a purpose for doing it. Sometimes it is far better to stay and defend what you have rather than try to defend an area you’re not sure you can tactically control.
The president’s arrival in Trinidad was welcomed by the advance team, as many of the team members had become ill during the two-week advance. Surprisingly, given my history of contracting illnesses on foreign soil, I had managed to avoid any serious illness. The initial portion of the visit at the hotel went smoothly because, outside of sleeping, the president spent very little time there. Toward the end of the trip I was informed by Steve, the lead advance, that the president would hold a press conference on the hotel roof during the final hours of the visit and just prior to his departure from the country. I retreated to my hotel room to put together the security plan.
Hotel roofs are some of the most dangerous places from a security standpoint, and holding a press conference there with all of the potential dangers (e.g., sniper fire, high winds) was going to require some creativity. Complicating the situation was the rapid deterioration of my physical condition. After avoiding illness for nearly two weeks, I began to feel very ill, very quickly. Memories of the dengue fever episode still fresh in my mind, I became concerned. With just one more day left in the advance, I was determined to get through it and not become a burden to the team. I did not want to disappoint and worked late into the night, heavily medicated by the always-helpful doctors from the White House Medical Unit.
When I awoke in the morning, I could barely roll out of the hotel room bed. The idea of putting on a bullet-resistant vest, a wool suit, and a tie in the searing Caribbean heat made the physical pain that much more intense. I took the medication the White House doctor had given me and met with Steve in front of the president’s suite and discussed the plan for the press conference. Steve was an intuitive and caring agent and could immediately see I was not well. I told him I could get through it and he responded by pulling my head close to his and saying, “It’s the fourth quarter; don’t come out of the game now.”
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nbsp; I assured him I would complete the assignment and, although I was running a high fever and sweating profusely, I was comforted by the idea that the trip was just hours from ending. While heading up to the press conference with the president in the elevator, I felt the strange looks from the Secret Service, military, and White House staff as they noticed my pale color and heavy sweating against the backdrop of an artificial smile. Press conferences in foreign countries can run very long, and with each passing minute standing in the hot sun in a suit, wearing the bullet-resistant vest, and carrying nearly twenty pounds of equipment, I became increasingly worried that I might lose consciousness. The ramifications for such a public display of failure would have been devastating to me, and the fear kept me lucid. The feeling of relief when the president concluded his remarks gave me the rush of adrenaline I needed to hurriedly move him down one level via the stairs to the limo and see him off without incident.
The White House photographer, Pete, took an official White House photo of the moment the president entered the vehicle that shows me looking up and loudly asking a guest to close his hotel window. I was sent the picture and when I look at it, I clearly remember how terrible I felt.
Completing the Trinidad Hilton advance allowed me to check a box on my imaginary career “to-do” list. The Secret Service is a remarkable agency that imbues in its agents a loyalty to the mission that far outweighs financial reward. Imagine a private business asking its employees to take on a responsibility commensurate with securing the life of the president of the United States, to work ten to sixteen hours per day without a day off in a foreign country, where your life is constantly in danger, and to do it all for no additional compensation. This is the life of a PPD lead advance agent assigned to a foreign advance in a high-threat-level country. Yet despite these conditions, PPD agents clamor for the opportunity to be assigned a foreign advance, and the more dangerous the more rewarding. I credit the Secret Service, which, whether intentionally or accidentally, has created this culture where your credibility as an agent depends on your taking on increasing levels of responsibility and rewards those agents who complete the most difficult assignments. The rewards are not material but are largely based on group dynamics and social prestige within the detail. After checking the foreign hotel advance box, I was anxious to move on to lead advance work and was happy to be assigned my first position in Youngstown, Ohio, at a Caterpillar plant.