Protecting the President

by Dan Bongino

  •The perpetrators of school violence “often tell at least one person about their plans, give out specifics before the event takes place, and obtain weapons they need – usually from their own home or from a relative’s home.”2

  •Many of the attackers did not act “impulsively” but developed a plan weeks in advance.3

  •Many of the attackers were victims of bullying, sometimes “severe.”4

  •And shockingly, some of the attackers communicated their plans to other students who, rather than reporting the incident, actually encouraged the attacker to carry out their plans.5

  The similarities here between assassins and perpetrators of school violence are striking. First, they aren’t all socially isolated loners. The subject I determined to be a credible threat in the Long Island protective intelligence investigation had communicated his desire to harm a Secret Service protectee to associates of his, and many of the school shooters in the Secret Service study also communicated their plans to friends. In my experience interviewing the associates of potential assassins, it was commonplace for the associates of a PI subject to report to law enforcement a credible threat by the subject. But shockingly, that wasn’t the case with many of the acts of targeted school violence. Some of the students who were told about the pending attacks both failed to report the plot and encouraged the attacker to carry out the act. This is a finding that should spark a conversation between every parent and his or her school-age children. There’s no need to overdramatize the risk of being caught in a school shooting because, thankfully, the likelihood is extremely rare. But a commonsense conversation with our kids about learning to listen to their friends and, most important, to communicate to a responsible adult in the event that a friend talks about engaging in targeted school violence, is an essential component of keeping them and others safe.

  Another similarity between assassins and targeted school violence perpetrators is the planning component. Few of these school attacks can be classified as impulsive acts; rather, similar to the assassins, many of the school attackers planned out the events in advance. That planning can involve anything from pre-attack drawings of the school, to attempts to solicit others to help carry out the violent plot. Importantly, these pre-attack behaviors can be detected if you know what you’re looking for. Finally, the Exceptional Case Study Project found that many of the assassinations and assassination attempts were preceded by a life crisis that may have aggravated the psychological symptoms of the subjects, playing a role in the violent behavior. In a school environment, and in this new era of ubiquitous social media usage, this crisis can take the form of bullying, both online, and in person.

  This is a simple conversation every parent can have with his or her child that doesn’t require a government-wide public service campaign. We should all be informing our children about the damage that can be done when they decide to engage in seemingly endless online ridicule campaigns toward fellow students. This is not, and never was “harmless” childhood behavior. I’m no “safe-spacer,” and I most certainly don’t believe in coddling our children or helicopter parenting, but children are now living in age where they can become the objects of thousands of insults a day if someone targets them online and wishes to make a fool of them. No child has the emotional wherewithal to handle that kind of harassment, and shouldn’t have to. The Secret Service study showed us all the damage that this type of behavior can cause, and it’s something every responsible parent should take to heart.

  PART 3

  HOW TO FIX THE SECRET SERVICE

  15

  WORTHY OF TRUST AND CONFIDENCE

  THE SECRET SERVICE NEEDS TO LEARN HOW TO WIN again and embrace their motto “Worthy of trust and confidence.” For the sake of the country, the Secret Service needs to return to better times, when special agent resignations were so rare that when word spread about an agent’s resignation, fellow agents would ask, “Why would he do that?” Despite the small size of the Secret Service relative to the other federal law enforcement agencies, they serve two critical missions for the maintenance of our constitutional republic: they secure the life of the president of the United States, and they secure the integrity of the nation’s money supply. Unfortunately, the expanding mission of the Secret Service, and the growing threat environment, requires that the Secret Service forfeit portions of their current investigative mission in order to fulfill their protection mission. The Secret Service does not have the manpower, or the time, to be involved in credit-card fraud investigations, counterfeit currency investigations, electronic crimes investigations, 419 fraud (e-mail and paper mail scams where innocent victims are solicited by phony Nigerian “princes” looking to give them millions of dollars in exchange for their bank account numbers), major events security, and protective intelligence investigations. The Secret Service does presidential protection better than any government agency in the world, and that’s where they add substantial value for U.S. taxpayers, not in doing financial crimes investigations, which can easily be absorbed the FBI.

  Although the transition would be painful at first for many of the current crop of special agents, many of whom have grown to enjoy criminal investigative work and have never known a time when they weren’t expected to conduct criminal investigations, it would benefit both the agents and Secret Service management to focus on high-value-added activities. This includes presidential protection, major event security, critical infrastructure protection, electronic crimes, and protective intelligence operations. Giving up their counterfeit, credit-card fraud, and 419-fraud investigative work would allow the Secret Service to refocus its mission and leverage the skills it has acquired from decades of presidential protection work across complementary activities (such as critical infrastructure protection and major events security).

  When a Secret Service agent does security advance work for one of their protectees, one of the tasks they regularly perform is a thorough security evaluation of the location the protectee is going to visit. Agents look at the building’s air-intake system, the fire-suppression system, the location of crash bar doors (crash bar doors close automatically and prevent stairways from filling with smoke in a fire) to ensure that escape routes are accessible in the event of a fire, the network connectivity of the building to make sure that critical information technology systems cannot be hacked, the location of the firebox, the location of the security cameras, and more. After decades of conducting security advances such as this, in buildings and facilities all across the country, the Secret Service would be the ideal agency to lead a national collaborative effort between private industry and government to secure our nation’s critical infrastructure. This effort wouldn’t require any additional taxpayer money, and it would be completely voluntary for private industry. But it would help the Secret Service in a few ways. If the Secret Service were to give up its financial crimes and counterfeit investigations, it would free up large blocks of time for Secret Service agents. Some presidents travel frequently, such as President Clinton, and some travel only when necessary, such as President Reagan. The Secret Service has to be prepared for the worst-case travel scenario, however, and doesn’t have the luxury of dismissing its workforce and then rehiring them when the campaign and presidential travel seasons heat up. The Secret Service is no different from a big-city fire department in this regard. Fire departments do not start fires to prove their worth. They wait for a fire event, and they are vigilantly prepared to respond to that event. The same principle should apply to the Secret Service with a presidential visit. Allowing the Secret Service, in the downtime between protection operations, to work with private industry to help provide security consultation for the nation’s power plants, critical electrical infrastructure, critical Internet hubs, and other infrastructure assets necessary for our national safety and survival, would allow agents the opportunity to fine-tune their site security skills while developing networks of industry contacts within their respective field office districts. This would benefit the agency as a
whole when a Secret Service protectee visits their districts.

  This would also fill a major hole in our nation’s security. As our society has evolved from a dependency on agriculture and manufacturing to a more diversified economy dependent on service sectors and connectivity, the line between private and public has blurred with regard to critical infrastructure national security. For example, no one doubts the need to secure our nation’s military facilities and government buildings, such as the White House and our courts. But with our growing dependency on energy and Internet connectivity networks, isn’t it critical that we also focus on securing our nation’s electrical grid and Internet connectivity, despite the fact that they are not government assets in the traditional sense? Now, to be clear, I am a strong advocate for limited government, and I am not suggesting anything more than making the Secret Service available to consult with the private industry representatives responsible for our energy grid, critical Internet infrastructure, national ports, and our other vital national security interests to assist in providing security guidance and best practices. The Secret Service is perfectly suited for this role because they are already involved in similar ventures through their leadership role in the coordination of the nation’s electronic crimes task forces in the investigation and prosecution of Internet crimes, and their role with the Department of Homeland Security as a partner in the US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team). The US-CERT is a collaborative venture between federal law enforcement and the technology industry to “analyze threats, and exchange critical cybersecurity information with trusted partners around the world.”6

  The US-CERT is a model for handling the increasingly blurry line between critical government assets and critical private industry assets in this new era of essential worldwide connectivity. The Secret Service uses this network of willing private and government partners to spread information about the latest cyber-vulnerabilities and trends in Internet-based crimes, all at little expense to the taxpayer. Expanding this model into business spheres outside of the technology industry, such as the energy sector, is a logical next step. The Secret Service wouldn’t be required to do anything more than to provide unclassified security consultation to willing private industry partners, and private industry would then be responsible for investing in the necessary security upgrades using their own capital.

  Undoubtedly, this effort to move the Secret Service away from financial crimes and into collaborative critical-infrastructure security wouldn’t come without friction. A knowledgeable defense expert associate of mine who served in the Reagan administration, once described the problem for me. He explained that our nation has a glaring hole in our electrical-transmission infrastructure because of the threat of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack generated from an atmospheric nuclear weapon detonation. This scenario may seem far-fetched, but it is very real in the eyes of our geopolitical adversaries, who understand that an attack such as this would wipe out electrical power for millions of Americans instantaneously. In addition, our national capacity to rebuild the electrical transformers that would be damaged in an EMP attack would be severely compromised, and as a result, it could take years to get the nation’s electrical power back. Literally millions of Americans could die if an attack like this were successfully implemented. With a catastrophic threat such as this, a reasonable person would conclude that our nation had already developed a thorough plan, in conjunction with the energy sector, to harden up our electrical grid to ensure that it could still function after being exposed to an EMP attack. But despite some efforts to solve the problem (notably, a recent push by the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Project, DARPA, in conjunction with BAE Systems to develop “alternative communication networks that would come into use in case of a cyberattack on the US electrical grid”7), the nation’s electrical grid is still largely unprotected from this catastrophic threat. One of the reasons behind this intransigence is an ongoing dispute about who should absorb the costs for this effort: private industry, the government, or both. The same disputes would likely emerge from a new Secret Service–led effort to provide best practices and guidance for private industry. Once a government agency such as the Secret Service provides security advice and guidance, private industry may hesitate when they see the costs of security upgrades. Even worse, many might avoid consultation with the Secret Service at all, figuring that ignorance is bliss. If they are told about holes in their security plans, and they fail to act, many industry figures may be rightly concerned about lawsuits in the event of a security incident. These are real concerns but they can be remedied with strict operating and disclosure rules for private organizations joining the consortium.

  Reforming the mission of the Secret Service should also include an expansion of their protective intelligence role. Although forfeiting the financial crimes and counterfeiting missions is essential to freeing up limited Secret Service manpower assets, they must hold on to the investigative responsibilities for threats to their protectees. Protective intelligence investigations are complicated investigations that require a Secret Service agent to dig deep into the mind of a potential assassin to determine the subject’s intent. There is no room for mistakes in these PI investigations, and learning to competently conduct them can provide an agent with essential insight into the psychological states of the people wishing to do their protectees harm. After interviewing multiple suspects accused of threatening the president and other Secret Service protectees, I became all-too-familiar with “the look,” that blank stare a sociopath, with no attachment to any moral code, gives you when you are interviewing him about a threat he made to the president. You learn quickly when dealing with sociopaths, a category into which many potential assassins fall, not to try to get a sincere apology or a morally relevant explanation of why they did what they did. Most of them did it because they wanted to, because it filled some physical or mental unmet need, regardless of the pain they were looking to cause. They are not overwhelmed by a sense of shame and sorrow for their actions because the moral code most of us live by does not equally govern their actions. These are critical skills that translate directly to the effectiveness of the protection mission.

  I recall multiple instances of agents on posts within a secure perimeter, telling supervisors that something “just wasn’t right” about a person, and later being proven right when the person was interviewed. Although not all of these people were assassins or terrorists, many of them were there exclusively to cause trouble for the Secret Service. There’s no good substitute for experience in protective intelligence investigations. It’s possible that what set off many of these agents’ “trouble antenna” was their ability to observe barely quantifiable behavioral indicators that they had experience in dealing with from their investigations of threat cases.

  Keeping protective intelligence investigations under the Secret Service umbrella, while turning over financial crimes and counterfeit investigations to other federal agencies, will also ensure that the Secret Service allocates more of its limited manpower to the exploding number of social media threats driven by President Trump’s unprecedented use of social media platforms. President Trump personally communicates regularly using Twitter, unlike past presidents, who used the platform through official channels, and this has invited a growing number of threatening responses. Twitter threats are nothing new to the Secret Service, but the public knows the president personally uses Twitter, and many PI subjects have decided to take the opportunity to personally threaten him by responding. Regardless of what the Secret Service says publicly, this has put an incredible strain on the agency because they cannot afford to ignore threats simply because they originate from a Twitter user. I fear that this threat stream emanating from social media will only grow in the future as President Trump redefines the role of social media within the presidency. And the future growth in social media threats will require a manpower response from the Secret Service. With government-wide budget cuts likely coming in the futur
e due to our nearly $20 trillion national debt, big increases in Secret Service hiring are unlikely. Therefore, it’s critical that the Secret Service upper management get ahead of this problem today by looking at reallocating financial crimes manpower assets to protective intelligence.

  Another lingering problem for the Secret Service that requires an immediate fix is their overreliance on internal promotions for their upper management team. The use of strictly internal promotions to fill the headquarters management staff of the Secret Service has promoted a “groupthink” atmosphere with no set of outside eyes to critically analyze major decisions. I place the blame for the destruction of Secret Service morale largely on a series of disastrous decisions made by the headquarters management teams over the past two decades. First, the decision to expand the Secret Service portfolio of responsibilities by taking on security responsibilities for significant national security events designated NSSEs was an avoidable mistake. Although the skill set Secret Service agents have due to their protection responsibilities is a strong fit for a coordination role in securing NSSE events, this role should be strictly advisory, similar to what I proposed for the private industry/Secret Service critical infrastructure security consortium. Having well-trained, and taxpayer-funded, Secret Service agents work as security guards at events such as the Salt Lake City Olympics was a mistake that did substantial damage to special agent morale as the NSSE assignments piled up. Secret Service management erred terribly in not taking a stand on this earlier, when the complaints from the agents on the ground began to pile up. They should have resolutely refused to provide special agent manpower, essential to keeping the president, and their growing number of protectees safe, for security at events that had no nexus whatsoever to the Secret Service’s core protection mission.