Protecting the President

by Dan Bongino

  A repeated theme of this book has been Secret Service management’s fear of controversy, and their corresponding risk-aversion, when it means confronting brewing crises. The push to evaluate trainees, at least in part, according to their race or gender, rather than strictly on their qualifications for the job, was an unfortunate example of this reluctance to do the right thing. Secret Service management fears charges of bias and discrimination, and they will do nearly anything to avoid them. This pattern repeats itself and ripples across an agent’s or an officer’s career, and it is destroying the agency from the inside out. Everything from an agent’s or officer’s initial assignment, to his or her selection for a special team (the Emergency Response Team, the K-9 Team, the Counter-Sniper Team, the Presidential Protective Division, and more) is influenced by the Secret Service’s obsession with the racial and gender quota system, and nearly everyone in the Secret Service knows it. One tragic outcome from this ill-advised and misguided policy is that many high-performing nonwhite, female agents and officers have privately expressed to me sincere reservations about this quota system, because they feel that they will never be respected for their job skills. Many of the agents and officers view the under-performing employees, shielded from negative job action by a fear of baseless EEO discrimination claims, as a burden to the Secret Service. One of these agents, known throughout the agency as an exceptional performer, and who was a “triple threat” (Secret Service jargon for looking the part, acting the part, and talking the part), expressed to me many times the grave concerns he had with quota-based hires being placed in critical assignments close to the president. Many of the quota-based hires were not only pushed through the Secret Service academy, but they were also prioritized in their career development and placed in hard-to-get assignments, such as the PPD, despite having severe deficiencies in their abilities to perform the tasks necessary to secure the life of the president, and this agent knew it. The agent once said something to me, referring to a quota-based hire, that stuck with me: “______is going to get someone killed one day.” I never forgot that. And as someone concerned about the safety and security of the president of the United States, you shouldn’t either.

  PART 2

  WHAT THE SECRET SERVICE IS DOING RIGHT

  12

  THE SPECIAL AGENT TRAINING PROGRAM

  WHEN I GRADUATED the Secret Service agent training program in December 1999, the training curriculum was archaic. The training program is broken into four general parts: academics, physical fitness, firearms, and control tactics. The academic portion of the training program was designed to teach agent trainees how to navigate and apply federal laws, how to properly investigate protectee threat cases, how to apply investigative tools to investigate financial crimes and counterfeit currency cases, and how to apply federal statutes and Secret Service guidelines to the design and implementation of a properly designed protectee security plan. The physical fitness portion of the training program was designed to prepare incoming agents for the intense physical demands necessary to repel an attack on the president. The firearms training program was designed to teach agent-trainees how to operate the Sig Sauer service pistol, issued to all agents, the Heckler and Koch MP-5 machine gun (used primarily in support of the protection mission, but also available for law enforcement operations), and the Remington 870 shotgun (used for breaching doors in the protection mission, but primarily used for law enforcement operations). The control tactics portion of the program was designed to teach agent trainees the most effective hand-to-hand combat techniques for use in both the protection and law enforcement missions. The problem when I went through the training academy in 1999 was that portions of the curriculum at the time did very little to actually advance these training goals.

  The academic curriculum in 1999 was unfocused and antiquated. It was written as a series of case studies of investigations, but the material was dated, and it didn’t reflect current investigative trends. It emphasized process (mainly administrative paperwork requirements) at the expense of advanced instruction for the agent trainees on how to properly use and apply investigative tools to solve a federal criminal case. For example, the surveillance exercise, which was obviously supposed to teach agent-trainees how to surveil a criminal suspect, was little more than an exercise in following a Secret Service staff instructor around the Annapolis waterfront while he or she shopped for cigars or clothes. I remember thinking to myself during the exercise how majestic the views were from the dock in downtown Annapolis, as I stared at an instructor pretending to be a criminal suspect (while he was also pretending not to notice me). More important, I was also thinking, What the hell are we doing here? Following a pretend “bad guy” around Annapolis, while we both pretend not to recognize each other, with little hard instruction on the proper way to conduct surveillance was a microcosm of most of the academic portion of the training program in 1999. If you asked the dreaded “Why are we doing this?” question about much of the academic portion of the training program, you would get a similar answer, despite learning little about how to be a criminal investigator: “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

  The control tactics training wasn’t much better and it left trainees ill prepared for a physical confrontation. The Secret Service was teaching its agents and officers a modified version of aikido and traditional Japanese jiu-jitsu, which it called “Desmonics,” after the instructor who developed the program years prior. The program was a failure by modern standards of hand-to-hand combat science and mainly taught students how to roll and fall properly without smashing their heads into the concrete. But aikido-type techniques, while potentially street-usable after decades of training, are virtually useless in a law enforcement academy with just hours of instruction a week for just a few months. However, the program was good for comic relief in the stressful training environment. There were some incredibly athletic and accomplished agents in my training class who excelled at firearms training, academics, and in the tactical exercises, but some of them could not figure out, regardless of how many times they tried, how to forward roll the “Desmonics” way. It became an exercise in laughter control, not control tactics, each time we would start the class with a series of forward rolls on the heavily padded, law-enforcement-blue floor of the control tactics building, and the forward roll–challenged students would plunge themselves facefirst into the mats. They would get up and slap themselves in disapproval as we all tried our hardest not to laugh. We all knew it wasn’t funny watching these trainees struggle with this senseless technique, but it’s an almost undeniable human instinct to laugh when someone literally jumps into what he or she thinks is going to be a graceful aikido roll, and it winds up morphing into a belly flop into a waterless pool. Humor aside, this was a silly and unnecessary training regime. The essence of law enforcement focused hand-to-hand combat techniques is to learn to control a suspect until you can either handcuff him, or control him physically until help arrives. The goal is not to teach the agents to be professional stunt performers or Golden Gloves boxers. But that’s exactly what the program was trying to do.

  The control tactics boxing program was even more counterproductive. When we weren’t learning how to roll around on the floor, we were learning how to box. Teaching basic boxing techniques to law enforcement trainees may sound sensible, but it isn’t. If you approach a suspect for an interview, or in an arrest situation, and the suspect assumes a boxing or fighting stance, then an armed law enforcement officer should supersede this level of force by the degree necessary to overcome it. The law enforcement officer or agent has no legal obligation whatsoever to match the level of force first, before superseding it. For example, if a suspect takes a fighting stance and becomes physically aggressive, the Secret Service, along with most other law enforcement agencies’ use-of-force guidelines, allows agents to use their handheld extendible batons to fight back. The use-of-force guidelines, for common-sense reasons, do not require an agent to engage in a prolonged hand-to-hand box
ing match before taking out his or her baton to use in self-defense. Another example would be a suspect attacking an agent with a knife during an altercation. The use-of-force guidelines allow an agent in this deadly-force scenario to immediately use his or her firearm to diffuse the situation and to stop the deadly attack against him. Again, the agent is not required to first match the force level by engaging the suspect in a knife fight. This seems to have escaped the early designers of the control tactics training program, who spent inordinate amounts of control-tactics class time on teaching agents how to box. I struggled at the time to think of a good reason to teach this incredibly difficult skill to law enforcement officers. I was a boxer at the time, and I trained at a gym called Knockout Fitness, and I couldn’t help but think, I’ve been at this boxing thing for years, and I’m still not very good at it. Yet, the instructional program designers thought they could train the agent trainees to be street-effective boxers in a few months? It was backwards thinking. Worse, as the training program came to a close, they would have the trainees spar with each other. This was an incredibly irresponsible approach to hand-to-hand combat training. No credible boxing trainer would allow even a junior boxer into the ring for sparring sessions without mastering the basics first, yet, the trainees, with zero experience ever being hit, or hitting someone else, were told to give it a go. Yes, the results were exactly what you would expect. It wasn’t uncommon for trainees to get knocked out cold, or for some to go to the hospital. Imagine for a moment what it must be like for an agent trainee who has never even sniffed a fistfight, much less been in one, to be thrust into a sparring exercise with a stone-cold, seasoned streetfighter trainee who has knocked out more people in the street than Mike Tyson in the ring. These scenarios never ended well. All the agent trainee with no sparring experience learned in this scenario was how to get his or her ass kicked with dignity, and what smelling salts look like up close and personal.

  The physical fitness training in the late ’90s was a bright spot for the Secret Service. Between the obstacle course, the weight room, and the sprint work around the training center grounds, the physical fitness program produced decent results. The Secret Service fitness instructors wouldn’t hesitate back then to yell at, and kick some dirt on, the trainees if the effort they were putting forth wasn’t optimal. This military-style fitness training gave many of the new trainees an edge. There’s a reason training academies and military boot camps looking to imbue their trainees with a mental edge use stress and discomfort in their training programs. The act of yelling at and causing both emotional and physical discomfort for trainees places them in the physiological red zone. Learning to operate and carry out the Secret Service protection mission with your heart racing and your lungs screaming for air, while being screamed at and pushed to your physical limit, was the primary focus of the fitness program, and the instructors carried out the mission with laser-like precision.

  The firearms training during my time as an agent trainee was outstanding. When I joined the Secret Service, I was already familiar with firearms due to my training as a New York City police officer, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Secret Service had a different outlook on firearms training. The NYPD firearms training taught firearms competency, not firearms excellence, but the Secret Service didn’t have that luxury. Granted, the logistics were not in the NYPD’s favor, as their police academy classes could number in the thousands of new police recruits, while the Secret Service had a maximum of less than fifty trainees per class. But the Secret Service had no room for error. They drilled into us from day one of training that we were “accountable for every round” fired from our pistols. This may seem obvious in a law enforcement training academy, but it meant a lot more to the Secret Service. The Secret Service places men and women just inches away from the president of the United States, and, in the unfortunate circumstance that a firearm has to be used to defend the president, it must be done with extreme precision and barrel discipline. Firing a weapon in an exchange of gunfire in an altercation on an empty street with a hardened criminal is a far different scenario from firing a weapon at a crowded event, with tens of thousands of people, on a rope line, and with the president inches from your weapon. And while the concern for innocent bystanders is no different for a local police officer or a Secret Service agent the environments they are likely to encounter during a deadly-force interaction are far different. There is virtually no scenario a Secret Service agent in a protective capacity will encounter where there aren’t hundreds, or thousands, of innocent bystanders surrounding the agent. It’s a natural part of protecting the most targeted human being in the world; therefore, precision shooting is critical.

  One of the pistol that we as new agent trainees had to pass in the initial weeks of training was designed to teach this critical firearms discipline. The course sounds easy, but skilled shooters from both police departments and the military would routinely come up short on the course, having to shoot the course multiple times in order to pass. The course of fire was from the standing position, with the target fifteen yards away from the shooter. You were given nearly unlimited time to shoot the course, but the target was no larger than a small microwave pizza, and just a few misses outside of the bullseye of the target was enough to fail. Maybe it was the extended timeline that caused most of us to stress out over each round, but I recall bringing my Sig Sauer issued firearm up to eye level to place the shot three or four times before actually firing the first shot. Looking to the left and right of me, it was clear that my fellow agent trainees were doing the same thing, as the clear lack of a restrictive time limit on the training course made us all hyperattentive to each detail of the upcoming shot. And while this course was designed to be more of a test of the psychological component to shooting than the physical component, the other firearms courses were designed to test our tactical abilities to shoot the shotgun, MP-5 machine gun, and pistol under pressure. Some of the courses required us to sprint about two hundred yards from the fitness facility on the training campus to the outdoor range, and to then pick up a series of firearms while engaging moving targets, all while firearms instructors were screaming in our ears. Although the targets were paper, they were on a horizontal track, which allowed them to move rapidly from side to side. Complicating the course of fire was the placement of “friendly” targets (targets that pictured civilians without weapons) placed strategically along the horizontal track. If you hit them as you tracked and fired at the “bad guy” target, you would fail the course of fire. Doing all of this while sucking wind through our lungs because we’d just sprinted two hundred yards to the range was difficult, but it drove home for many of us the difficulties of firing at, and hitting, a target at a distance, while physiologically operating in the physiological red zone during an attack on the president.

  Their commitment to fixing the shortcomings of the training program, unlike some of the other managerial deficiencies within the Secret Service, was impressive. I was assigned to the New York field office protective intelligence squad in the early 2000s when I saw a special agent job opening in the James J. Rowley Training Center for a control tactics instructor. I only had a few years of experience as an agent at the time, but I inquired about the position. I found out that the training staff at the training center were looking for someone from the field office to transfer to the training center who had experience in ground fighting and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. At the time, I was training in a ground fighting school in Long Island, New York, and I was one of the few applicants for this position who had the experience they were looking for. The Secret Service was prescient in seeing the need for this type of training in the early 2000s, as most law enforcement academies were still teaching boxing as their primary form of hand-to-hand combat training. But the explosive growth of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and the corresponding growth in the number of ground fighting and Brazilian jiu-jitsu schools around the country, garnered the attention of instructors in the Secret Service academy. As
a result, they were eager to begin the transition from boxing to ground fighting. This move made sense from a practical perspective. If a suspect takes a fighting stance in an altercation with an agent, then the agent is trained to move up the force continuum until the subject is subdued, not to get involved in a boxing match. But if an agent is attempting to arrest a suspect, and the suspect tackles the agent, opportunity is limited to take out a baton or firearm to fight back. The decision to move away from boxing, and to train agents to fight back using ground-based fighting techniques inspired by Brazilian jiu-jitsu, was a brilliant move that has paid enormous dividends. Many of the instructors, inspired by the effectiveness of the ground fighting training, eventually took up training outside of the workday and have subsequently passed on their newfound expertise to the later Secret Service trainees. The training staff even had a Wednesday night “fight club” training session, after hours in the basement mat room of the training center, where I and members of the training staff would get together and basically beat the crap out of each other while fine-tuning the latest ground fighting techniques. These Wednesday fight club sessions were invaluable. I learned more in those marathon ground fighting sessions in the fight club than I did in years of training outside of the training center.