Protecting the President

by Dan Bongino

  Learning to put your federal agent ego aside and to be a team player with the NYPD and local police departments around the country was an essential part of being an effective special agent.

  The middle perimeter, which is the area a protectee will walk through and bypass during the course of an event, is mutually shared by the Secret Service and outside law enforcement agencies. Cooperation in this middle perimeter is essential, and a successful security plan absolutely requires the full buy-in of the cooperating law enforcement agencies while working within it. The Secret Service often uses “pipe and drape” to close off the sensitive areas of its protected sites from public view. But pipe and drape is not a physical barrier (it’s literally a blue sheet hanging from a pipe); it’s a visual barrier only. However, with the addition of outside law enforcement to complement Secret Service agents on the outside of the pipe and drape, you now have an effective deterrent to someone straying into your secure area. The Secret Service relies heavily on outside law enforcement in the middle perimeter because in the real world, outside of the training environment, it’s completely impractical for a Secret Service agent to arrest someone for trespassing if he or she strays into the secure area. The arrest would pull the agent off of the posting assignment, and it would take hours of paperwork to process the arrest. The agent would probably be laughed out of federal court if he presented a case such as this to a federal prosecutor (these are such burdensome cases that the Secret Service will often rely on local prosecution even for trespassers at the White House, which, I believe, incentivizes more people to jump the fence because of the lack of a credible penalty). But the uniformed law enforcement officers in the middle perimeter, in addition to serving as a strong visual deterrent (the special agents of the Secret Service do not have uniforms), are vital because the officers can easily issue a trespass citation or, if necessary, make an arrest if someone intentionally enters the secure area, without getting bogged down in hours of federal paperwork.

  The outer perimeter is primarily, but not excusively, manned by non–Secret Service law enforcement personnel and is typically the ring of security that is the most manpower-intensive. The outer perimeter consists of the motorcade route and the areas around protected sites, which require access control and “eyes on” (law enforcement–trained personnel to intercept vehicles and people attempting to circumvent the security fencing or temporary barriers). The Secret Service, due to its small size and geographically spread out field offices, does not have the manpower to provide a special agent for every post on the manpower-heavy outer perimeter. Therefore, cooperation with local law enforcement is critical in obtaining and deploying their equipment assets and manpower to ensure that the perimeter is fully staffed during a protection mission.

  It’s these critical soft skills, learning to request the appropriate assets and dealing respectfully with outside law enforcement agencies during the protection mission, that have always served the Secret Service well, while effective liaison remains a soft spot for some of the other federal law enforcement agencies. There is a tangible tension in many of America’s big cities between some federal law enforcement agencies, notably ICE and the FBI, and the local law police departments. Some of this is due to the larger political environment, specifically with regard to ICE and the ongoing immigration debate, but some of this tension is due to jurisdictional turf battles, the lack of information sharing, and sometimes, just plain old “big-leaguing.” The Secret Service doesn’t have the option of starting fights with local law enforcement about petty jurisdictional fights or information sharing because the Secret Service cannot do its job without outside law enforcement help. Outside law enforcement provides the Secret Service with critical intelligence about local crime trends (an essential component of any protective intelligence advance in any of the locations the president or another protectee visits), stolen police uniforms (always a significant threat in the Secret Service because of the access they provide), and essential manpower to secure posts in the middle and outer perimeters. This forces junior agents to learn the soft skills necessary to gain cooperation from their local law enforcement partners, and it has given the Secret Service a generally strong reputation among the nation’s law enforcement agencies. I still receive positive e-mails and social media connections from law enforcement officers across the country extolling the virtues of the Secret Service agents they worked with when the president or a world leader visited their city or town.

  14

  YOUR CHILD’S SCHOOL IS SAFER BECAUSE THE SECRET SERVICE STUDIED ASSASSINS

  INVESTIGATING PEOPLE WHO THREATEN THE LIFE of the president of the United States, world leaders on U.S. soil, and the group of individuals the Secret Service is charged with protecting according to 18 U.S. Code section 3056 is unquestionably the most important mission the Secret Service has. There is no room for errors when conducting PI investigations. If a special agent interviews a PI subject who has threatened a Secret Service protectee and that agent determines that the subject presents no threat, then, after filing a long and laborious report with Secret Service headquarters (due to the seriousness of PI investigations, headquarters monitors every PI case and holds the investigating agent to a strict reporting timeline with little tolerance for reporting delays), the case is typically closed. If the subject then attempts to harm a Secret Service protectee, not only has the agent failed to execute his or her responsibility to properly assess the threat of the subject, but the Secret Service has failed as well in managing its primary responsibility, protectee safety. The importance of learning how to properly diagnose the danger level a PI subject presents after making a presidential threat is made crystal clear to Secret Service agents from the moment they swear in as new employees. A supervisory agent I respected for his candor once told me, “You can screw up a lot of things here, but you can’t screw up a PI investigation.”

  Here is an incident I experienced that demonstrates the seriousness that Secret Service headquarters applies to PI cases. I was on duty in the New York field office protective intelligence squad on October 3, 2002, when Steve Kim fired multiple shots from a .357 caliber revolver at the upper floors of the United Nations building on the east side of Manhattan. When the news broke and our office was notified about the incident, we sent a friend of mine, an agent named Scott, out to investigate. Secret Service headquarters was all over this, and I remember the immediate chaos in the office as headquarters repeatedly called the backup (the agent immediately in line to the supervisor of the field office squad) and wanted answers regarding the shooter’s intent. During the early stages of an event such as this, intent can be tough to determine, and if it weren’t for the leaflets that the shooter had with him regarding the plight of the North Koreans, then the investigation into motive and intent could have taken a while. In this case, the shooter’s intent was relatively clear, but the immediate search for answers, as evidenced by the constant calls from headquarters, is an example of the gravity of a PI case and the pressure to produce immediate answers. Secret Service headquarters was concerned that the shooter was targeting a Secret Service protectee, and if that were the case, they would have demanded access to Kim early on in the arrest and interview process to assess the threat level. Immediate questions such as “Did you act alone?”; “Where did you acquire the weapon?”; “Have you communicated with a Secret Service protectee before?”; and “Did you have any additional plans?” would have been critical questions if Kim were determined to be a threat to a Secret Service protectee.

  The Secret Service has long been recognized for its expertise in assessing the threat level of the many subjects that it comes into contact with each year for threatening their protectees. Threats are reported to the Secret Service in many ways, and I witnessed the evolution of the reporting process during my time as a special agent. When I first joined the Secret Service as an agent in 1999, most of the tips for PI cases came in via telephone to the field offices. It was pretty common for a bartender to call into th
e office and notify us that a drunken bar patron has said that he wanted to “hurt the president,” or worse. But tips came in outside of bars as well, from all sorts of places. I was working out in a gym in Melville, New York, in the early morning hours before my work day began in our Secret Service office in Long Island when we received a tip about one of the strangest PI leads I’d ever seen. A man calling himself “the Nazarene” called in to the Howard Stern radio show during the 6 a.m. hour and expressed a desire to kill Sen. Joseph Lieberman, saying, “That Lieberman guy has gonna [sic] go. He is gonna take my bullet. He’s going to take it.” Stern tried to warn the caller about the consequences of threatening a public figure such as Lieberman, who was the Democratic vice presidential nominee at the time and, therefore, a Secret Service protectee, but “the Nazarene” persisted, saying, “I’m telling you right now ... You got the killer on the air ... And that is me right here.”

  It wasn’t long before listeners to the wildly popular radio show began lighting up the Secret Service offices with calls warning about the subject. The case quickly progressed, with the cooperation of the Stern show staff, when a trace led the New York field office agents to the home of Lawrence Christian Franco. Franco worked in a facility falling in the jurisdiction of the Long Island office where I worked, and due to the publicity surrounding the events, the investigation became an immediate priority. But instead of working with us, the New York field office agents looking at the case did a bit of big-leaguing to our tiny Long Island office. They properly notified the supervisor in charge of the Long Island office, but they steamrolled us a bit by telling us that they would handle the case, despite the connection to our district, and they basically sidelined us during the investigation. Franco was later arrested, and a pellet gun was found in the home where he resided.

  The Secret Service cannot afford mistakes in PI cases, and they are always looking for an investigative edge to employ to determine whether a subject is a threat or just a big talker. Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of threat cases are just that, big talkers. I watched the evolution of threat reporting from inside the Secret Service where PI leads, early in my career, came in almost exclusively over the phone and by traditional mail, to my later years as an agent, when most of the tips came in over e-mail, and now, through social media. Regardless of the path these threats take in their route to a pair of Secret Service agent eyes, they all must be investigated. And in an effort to weed out, in the early stages of a PI investigation, the talkers from the doers, the Secret Service engaged in an ambitious project to determine what the investigative hallmarks of a credible threat were. The project, called the Exceptional Case Study Project, began in 1992 as an effort to generate a “research study that would produce information and ideas to assist law enforcement organizations that have protective responsibilities.”1 The project had the laudable goal of determining what specific risk factors and behavioral markers were associated with people who had “assassinated, attacked, or approached with weapons prominent persons of public status in the U.S. since 1949.” By painstakingly dredging through case studies of eighty-three assassins and potential assassins and interviewing many of these subjects, the project team came to some startling conclusions about the thinking and behavior of assassins. Many of these findings changed the way the Secret Service conducted PI investigations forever. Some of the critical takeaways from the study were these:

  •Many of the attackers blended into society and were not extreme social outcasts as shown in many fictional depictions of assassins.

  •Although many didn’t have an arrest history for violent crimes, there was a history of “harassing others” and “resentments, especially towards public officials and leaders.”

  •Many of the attackers had previous contact with the mental health system, ranging from psychiatric evaluation to commitment in a mental health facility.

  •Many considered suicide.

  •Many took an active interest in assassination as an acceptable way to act out their grievances, and some gathered “information about previous assassins.”

  •Many of them “took special interest in one or more public official targets.”

  •Few of the attackers communicated a threat to the target or to a law enforcement official before their attack, but many of them communicated their interest in an attack to someone they knew.

  •Many of the attackers practiced the attack and traveled long distances in pursuit of their target while in the planning stages of the attack.

  •Target shifting is common, and many of the attackers will consider more than one target, only settling on a target as an opportunity presents itself.

  These were profound findings that, once the study was concluded in 1997, permanently changed how special agents interviewed, investigated, and evaluated subjects who threatened Secret Service protectees. Whether it’s a Hollywood movie or a popular work of fiction where an assassin is the central antagonist, most assassins are shown as isolated social misfits, repeatedly taunting law enforcement and stalking the target they are singularly obsessed with. We’ve seen this character template used with the John Malkovich character in the movie In the Line of Fire, and the Robert De Niro character in the movie Taxi Driver. Both of these characters, but specifically the Malkovich character, engage in a prolonged game of cat-and-mouse with law enforcement, which may make for good cinema, but does not reflect the realities of a PI investigation.

  The findings of the study were taught to us in the Secret Service academy during agent training, and I learned to use them later in my career in a number of protective intelligence investigations I conducted. The project’s findings were crucial in one particular PI investigation I was involved with while assigned to the Secret Service’s Long Island office. The target came to our attention via a telephone tip from an associate of the suspect’s. This associate described a number of disturbing statements the suspect had made about wishing to harm the president. When we confronted the subject in the supermarket where he worked, he immediately became hostile and lunged for a knife from the deli counter. Thankfully, my partner and I talked the subject into dropping the knife and speaking with us. We eventually made it back to the subject’s apartment, and after a long conversation about everything from his musical tastes to his relationship with his family, we got him to open up to us. Keeping the subjects talking is necessary in a PI investigation because, although there may be criminal charges later, the immediate Secret Service need is not to jail the subject, but to determine if the subject is going to harm one of their protectees. Eventually, the subject disclosed that he had a fascination with a famous female musician at that time, and this set off a bunch of bells and whistles in my head. The findings of the Exceptional Case Study, and my subsequent protective intelligence training, had taught me that target shifting was a sign of potential danger, and this was a clear case of target promiscuity. That answer combined with his history of communicating threats to friends and associates, along with other factors, caused us great concern, and I subsequently communicated my concerns to Secret Service headquarters. I was always impressed with the seriousness of the Secret Service’s commitment to their agents’ judgment in PI cases. Once I made the determination that the subject was a potential threat to our protectees, I was never second-guessed. The determination was not without cost, because a finding of potential danger means more than just a lot of reporting and paperwork. It can also mean years of follow-up investigations and case monitoring, which can add up to thousands of man-hours. But back then, the Secret Service had faith in its agents and its methodology. They had trained me to look for specific signs, to combine those signs with an intense background investigation into the subject and the circumstances surrounding the threat, and to make a judgment call. I still feel, over a decade later, that I made the right call in that case, and more important, I’m convinced that the Secret Service made the right call by choosing a deeply analytical approach to threat assessment rather than being simply guided b
y an agent’s “gut feelings.” In short, protective intelligence investigations, and the corresponding threat assessment process the Secret Service teaches its agents, is something the Secret Service does better than anyone.

  Given the Secret Service’s extensive expertise in the evaluation of threats through the study of “targeted violence” (violent acts that are preplanned and directed at a specific person, or group of persons), the Secret Service once again waded into threat assessment to assist in helping diagnose the causes of another tragic development, the growing number of shootings and other targeted acts of violence in our nation’s schools. After the horrific Columbine school shooting in 1999, the Secret Service lent its expertise to another exhaustive research study, applying some of its experiences with the Exceptional Case Study project, and its decades of experience in investigating and evaluating targeted threats and violence toward its protectees, to the study of school violence. The study was concluded in 2002, and some of the findings are remarkable because they point to a number of troubling similarities between the pre-attack behaviors of assassins and the pre-attack behaviors of perpetrators of targeted school violence. And whereas the perception of the presidential assassin as the societal loner, taunting law enforcement and stalking his target, was challenged by the Exceptional Case Study Project, the Secret Service’s study of targeted school violence rebuked the commonly held belief that these acts were acute emotional outbursts. Some of the startling findings of the report, which should concern every parent of a school-age child, included these: