Protecting the President

by Dan Bongino

  4.The Secret Service should double the special agent personnel assigned to evening and overnight shifts on the PPD when the president is “in residence.” An organized terrorist tactical assault on the White House is likely to happen in the evening hours, when the enemy can take advantage of the low-light conditions and the inescapable physical fatigue that accompanies overnight work. Relatively simple changes to the special agent work schedule, combined with a substantial increase in the number of special agents assigned to the PPD (which is more likely to happen if the Secret Service forfeits some of its current investigative responsibilities and frees up a portion of its workforce for reassignment to the PPD) would allow the PPD to shorten overnight shift posting requirements by increasing the number of agents available for relief and tactical support in the event of an attack. Overnight shifts are also an ideal time for agents on their down time to familiarize themselves with the unbelievably complex White House grounds. To stay alert on overnight shifts at the White House when I was assigned to the PPD, I would walk the grounds, open doors I had never seen before, peek behind pillars in the Rose Garden, and generally familiarize myself with all of the hidden details of the White House. (The White House is full of surprises, and not everything a person sees at the White House is as it seems, even for tourists on the East and West Wing tours.) Increasing the number of agents on evening and overnight shifts would give the PPD agents a number of golden opportunities to create mental maps of the complicated layout of the White House. This would turn complexity into a tactical advantage for PPD agents familiar with the cover and concealments options around the White House, rather than a hindrance, as it was on the night Jonathan Tran scaled multiple fences on the White House and Treasury complex grounds, and remained undetected for seventeen minutes.

  5.The Secret Service should take advantage of the presidential travel schedule and occasionally use the White House during out-of-town trips for training exercises. The White House is a complex building with a labyrinthine interior. Expecting the special agents of the PPD and the Uniformed Division officers to respond in a manner tactically suitable enough to repel an organized terrorist assault team, while simultaneously preventing them from rehearsing the response to an attack on the actual White House grounds, is both illogical and dangerous. And although building a replica White House at the Secret Service training center in Maryland, for training purposes, was briefly proposed in 2015,1 there was little legislative support on Capitol Hill for the multimillion-dollar expenditure. But there’s no replacement for the real thing. And no replica White House, however realistic, can provide the valuable training experience that training exercises conducted on the White House grounds would provide. There are, however, some complications to using the White House for training. The Secret Service would have to close the north and south fence lines for the training to prevent the public, and potential adversaries, from taking note of their training response to specific simulated emergencies. Also, the White House staff members left behind to work at the White House while the president travels out of town would be slightly inconvenienced. But, the experience of repeatedly navigating around the actual White House grounds during stress-inducing training exercises, under simulated emergency conditions, would lend the Secret Service White House personnel an incredible tactical advantage in a firefight. There is no substitute for knowing your terrain better than your adversary, and training at the White House is the only way to build this body of tactical knowledge.

  The Secret Service, despite its many organizational difficulties, can reestablish security dominance at the White House. And while the list of changes I proposed is by no means exhaustive, it’s a small, but positive, start towards a more stable security arrangement at the White House. The country cannot afford a second-rate security plan in a first-rate threat environment. The terrorists are surely planning, as you read this, to hit us at the White House and it’s incumbent on the Secret Service to hit back with a fury.

  11

  THE BROKEN SECRET SERVICE HIRING AND PROMOTION PROCESS

  THERE ARE FEW THINGS WASHINGTON, DC, politicians and entrenched bureaucrats agree on. The 1980s ushered in a new era of electoral competition between the Democrats and the Republicans (before then the Democrats were the majority political party in both the House of Representatives and the Senate for most of the post–World War II era, while the Republicans had adopted a mostly “play-nice” strategy to stay politically relevant), and with that new competition for majority party status came increased political belligerency toward the opposing party when they were in power. But even with political tensions currently at redline levels, you would be hard-pressed to find any member of the House or the Senate of either political party who would question the need to secure the life of the president of the United States. The gravity of the Secret Service’s protection mission transcends politics and is understood by both partisan and nonpartisan actors to be critical to the survival of our constitutional republic. With a mission so recognizably vital to our nation’s survival, one would think that the screening and hiring of candidates to conduct the protection mission would be agenda-free. A reasonable observer would expect that candidates for Secret Service agent and Uniformed Division officer employment and promotion would be judged exclusively by their ability to implement the protection mission and secure the life of the president. Unfortunately, if you choose to believe this, then you choose to be dead wrong.

  Sadly, and for many years, the Secret Service has been sacrificing mission-readiness at the altar of political correctness. I hesitated to include this chapter because whenever someone mentions the term “diversity” and discusses the real-world implications of applying such a loosely defined term to a specific job description, he or she runs the severe risk of character assassination by extreme partisan actors who don’t care a bit about the real-world ramifications of their ideological crusades. But the issue has become so serious in the Secret Service that it warrants discussing in the hope of providing enough public pressure to change this potentially disastrous policy. The Secret Service has a troubling fascination with informal, but no less real, gender and racial quotas in its hiring and promotion process, which is causing a growing tide of animosity to ripple across the agency. The subject is taboo to discuss in the polite company of Secret Service management, and they will assuredly deny this publicly if questioned about it, but it is a genuine problem. And if rank-and-file agents were given the opportunity to speak about the impact on the Secret Service of this obsession with racial and gender quotas without fear of retribution, many of them would tell a troubling tale. I know this because I lived it, and I spoke with agents during my career from different races and genders who felt that this problem was destructive to agency morale.

  Although it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the Secret Service management committed, above all else, to gender and racial quotas in promotion and hiring, I first noticed it in the early 2000s while assigned to the Long Island, New York, Secret Service office, where one of my assignments was recruiting and conducting background investigations for new special agent and Uniformed Division officer applicants. The same pattern would play out repeatedly in recruiting, where a small number of applicants with questionable job experience and qualifications (according to the Secret Service’s own hiring standards) were expedited along in the hiring process because they were non-male, nonwhite applicants. This was troubling because, as I experienced firsthand later on in my career while assigned as an instructor in our Secret Service training academy, the results of some of these quota-driven hiring decisions in training exercises were disturbing. (Note: As a Secret Service recruiter, a background investigator, an agent, and an instructor for the Secret Service training academy, I saw the hiring process from inception to swearing-in. There was no good reason for gender and racial hiring quotas. My experience in the hiring process, and in observing the promotion process as an agent, was that there were more than enough skilled, and qualified people, regardless
of race or gender, to both hire and promote into leadership positions in the Secret Service, but the Secret Service management simply decided to take the easy way out and quietly insist on quotas instead.)

  The Secret Service’s attachment to quota-based hiring was so intense that they hired applicants for the special agent and Uniformed Division officer positions that could barely meet basic physical fitness standards upon their commissioning as agents or officers. Some of these recruits for the special agent and officer positions were hired despite being unable to pull their own bodies up to a bar during a standard chin-up test. It was troubling for me, and many of my fellow agent and officer training-staff members assigned to the academy, to watch a fully grown adult, professing to want to be a member of the world’s most elite protection force, struggle to do one single chin-up. This is not a matter of personal fitness choices, or of unnecessary attention to one component of the Secret Service physical training regimen. It’s a matter of national security. If you are a Secret Service special agent or an officer, and you are on duty when a catastrophic assault occurs on the White House grounds, or when an attack on the president occurs, and you’re the one closest to the president when he trips and falls in the evacuation and you can’t muster the physical strength to lift him and carry him to safety, then it’s not your fault if the president is hurt. This is the Secret Service’s fault for hiring someone so completely incapable of carrying out its most basic mission requirements.

  Doubly frightening is that these cases were not isolated. During my twelve years with the Secret Service, there were numerous cases of individuals on both the special agent and officer, sides of the Secret Service who were moved along in the hiring and training process despite having skills deficits that would unquestionably endanger the president if one of these individuals were to be charged with his security on a shift. Instructors at the Secret Service academy who called attention to these insurmountable physical-skills deficits in the agent trainees, hired based on a quota, were often either directly told, or indirectly hinted at, to “let it go.” I know of one specific instructor, an exceptionally talented special agent and instructor, who was held back from coordinating new agent-trainee classes specifically because he was brutally honest in his evaluations of agent and officer trainees and the instructor refused to “let it go.”

  The coddling of people hired to fit the Secret Service’s quotas, disturbingly, didn’t end with the overlooking of glaring physical fitness deficiencies among their trainees. Many of the unqualified trainees who could barely perform one single chin-up, were also tactically deficient in the AOP exercises. AOP (Assault on Principal) exercises were training exercises where the trainees are placed in simulated protection roles as presidential protection shift members. These trainees are then put through a series of exercises, such as mock assassination attempts on the president. These exercises are often conducted using the Simunition ammunition, which I discussed earlier in the book, to impart a dose of realism. Simunition rounds fire via modified training weapons with smaller barrels (to prevent real weapons from being mixed in with Simunition weapons), and the plastic rounds contain a colored filler, similar to a paint ball. We would give one color Simunition round to the trainees and another color Simunition round to the instructors so the training staff could evaluate, at the conclusion of the exercise, who fired at, and hit, whom. The benefit of training with the Simunition rounds was the intense pain – and welts – they caused when you were hit. The threat of being hit by a Simunition round brought real fear into the training exercise, and there is no coach as good as pain and fear to teach a trainee to fight back furiously.

  The AOP exercises using the Simunition rounds were always the exercises where the cream would rise to the top. Regretfully, I was never a member of our U.S. military. But I was always proud to watch these AOP exercises as an instructor and to witness our former military members, who were now Secret Service trainees, calmly, and with precision, neutralize a threat in an AOP exercise without ever “shitting the bed” (see chapter 9). Without being told in advance who the former military members were, it was clear to me within seconds of the gunshots ringing out in these exercises who the military veterans were. Our military does an incredible job training our fighting men and women to operate cleanly in the “red zone” (the fight in the “fight or flight” response, where the heart rate increases and precise motor activities are difficult), and it was always refreshing to see them excel in Secret Service training while serving as mentors for otherwise competent trainees who were struggling because they had never been immersed in exercises using simulated battle-stress conditions. However, the competency of the military veterans in the training exercises served as a dramatic foil to the incompetency of some of the trainees hired based primarily on quotas. Some of the same trainees who struggled to meet the basic trainee physical fitness requirements also struggled to effectively mount any significant resistance during AOP exercises. Many would struggle to fight back, others would fire their weapons indiscriminately, and at times, some would hinder the team’s ability to evacuate the protectee during the exercises. Some would even accidentally shoot, and hit, their fellow trainees with one of their Simunition rounds during the more intense exercises (if the trainees were given red Simunition rounds, and a trainee had a red Simunition spot on his or her back, then it was clear that another trainee had fired that shot). This was all deeply disturbing to the other trainees who witnessed the physical fitness shortcomings and the tactical ineffectiveness of many of the questionable hires, and it was devastating to trainee morale. Many of the trainees felt as if there were two evaluation systems in the training academy: one for white male agents and another for quota-based hires. Again, I understand that this information may disturb many of you, and that it may rile up extreme left-wing partisans, who’ve convinced themselves that checking a series of race-based and gender-based boxes is all that really matters in the world, but this quota-based policy had crushing effects on the people charged with keeping our president safe. Ignoring this in order to engage in an ongoing game of political correctness will do nothing to fix the Secret Service.

  Halfway through my tenure as an instructor in the training academy, I was told by an upper-level manager assigned to the academy that one student, who was having extreme difficulty meeting performance standards on any of the physical or tactical exercises, was to be “left alone” because the trainee “knew the system.” This manager was referring to the Equal Employment Opportunity complaint system, and appeared to fear a baseless EEO complaint more than harming a protectee by graduating an unqualified trainee. It was an eye-opening moment for me, and another example of the federal government working against its own interests in order to advance politically correct ideas. The federal government doesn’t have anxious stockholders or customers to please in the traditional sense. The government takes your money, using the threat of force to back it up through the IRS, and they spend it on whatever they choose. And as long as the political insider class continues to get reelected, they will continue to ignore festering problems by allowing agencies such as the Secret Service to push through incompetent trainees, who are putting the president and other Secret Service protectees in very real danger. Unlike the private sector, where angry stockholders or customers can force a company to change or they’ll lose their business, few people are ever held to account in the federal government, even when dangerous policies, such as choosing hiring quotas over competence, are allowed to continue.