The fight, p.7
The Fight, page 7
This surveillance future will spawn an industry of detection devices for security professionals, businesses, and for the general public alike. These detection devices will likely be built into wearable and portable devices and we will be living far different public lives in the future as we are made aware, by our own personal surveillance detection equipment, of the ongoing monitoring of our behavior by the growing network of cameras and sensors. No business meeting or personal interaction in the future can be expected to remain private as a cottage industry of cameras and recorders, and detection equipment meant to detect them, sprouts and grows. Sony, and former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who was surreptitiously recorded in a racist rant with his former girlfriend, are harbingers of what’s to come in a future where private conversations can become public scandals with the simple click of a mouse.
In addition to the problems presented by a sprawling surveillance environment, today’s physical security infrastructure will be rendered useless in the future by technological developments in weapons construction. A significant portion of our physical security infrastructure has been built around the detection of metals by magnetometer sensors, and metals have almost always served as building materials for weapons both crude and advanced. The advent of three-dimensional printing devices in manufacturing using complex, nonmetallic polymers will render this metal-detection security infrastructure useless. It will also create another serious problem for security and law enforcement personnel: proliferation. Acquiring a personal firearm today, even in the locations with the most lenient firearm regulations, requires some degree of interaction either with a registered federal firearms dealer or with a private citizen currently in possession of the firearm during the purchase or exchange. Illegally trafficking in firearms also carries enormous risk because the firearms must be transported from point A to point B and movement creates the potential for unplanned interactions with the police and civilians, which could lead to arrest. The rapidly growing technology behind three-dimensional printing is going to render many of these movement and interaction risks moot in the very near future. Acquiring a firearm will be as simple as acquiring the three-dimensional printing hardware and the software code to print the firearm in the safety of your own home or office. And, while law-abiding owners of firearms will continue to be subjected to federal and state regulations on the acquisition of the software firearm codes, criminals and terrorists will print the firearms they need, on demand, with the printed firearms being virtually undetectable using current metal-detection technology. In this future, which I have described, every potential criminal or terrorist with access to the three-dimensional printing hardware and software has the potential to become an arms dealer as well. This future creates a conundrum for elected officials, law enforcement, militaries, and security personnel because, even if you could detect the presence of the three-dimensional printed firearm, using newer detection equipment, how do you handle the presence of a three-dimensional printer in a future where they are sure to be ubiquitous? Will the three-dimensional printer be regulated like firearms are regulated today? The answers here are not comfortable and I am not advocating for any specific regulation on three-dimensional printers, I am simply presenting options, which I am sure will be discussed by those desperate for a solution to a surveillance and weapons proliferation future that is rapidly approaching.
The evolution of sensors as a result of the slow technological divorce between metal firearms and explosives is already happening. We already have this technology at some airports where they have employed backscatter X-ray technology. Backscatter X-ray technology enables security officials to see the form of a weapon or bomb through a person’s clothing, but how comfortable are you in a future where this technology is present at the entrance to every government building and business that can afford one? Sadly, I can envision a future where an illicit trade in the clothing-free backscatter X-ray images of everyday Americans becomes commonplace due to the need for new imaging technology. Combine this with the growing use of high-definition cameras by both public and private operators and a surveillance future where your life outside of your front door is recorded by detection equipment, sensors, and cameras, and you can see how the concept of “privacy,” as we know it now, will only be a history lesson.
6
Istanbul, Bowe Bergdahl, and the Unforgivable Sin
When I was an instructor in the Secret Service training academy in Prince George’s County, Maryland, I noticed a pattern among the new recruits. The recruits entering duty with the Secret Service from a prior assignment with the U.S. military, regardless of their age, were consistently better prepared for the rigors of Secret Service agent training than their fellow recruits from other professions. Whenever there was a leadership void in one of the many practical exercises we would do with the trainees, it was frequently a recruit who was a former member of the military who would jump in and take charge of the situation. Some would even take charge of a situation that they were not in charge of the moment they detected that the leader of the task was a weak link. It would be difficult to distill down to a few overly simplified bullet points why the military training regimen and work atmosphere embed leadership qualities in military personnel, but having observed many of them in action in stressful scenarios, it appeared to be influenced by a strong desire to avoid letting their teammates down. The Secret Service training program has done its best to emulate this paramilitary training model and to ensure that these “team-first” qualities are core components of their agent’s job ethos. As I stated earlier in the book, divided labor within a team is fine, but divided responsibility is a deal breaker, and training agents to never let their fellow agents down on an operation is a crucial component of this. When you are given a task as an agent on a mission, then you own that task; it’s yours. If the ultimate responsibility for a task falls to “the team,” and not an individual, then the weakest members of the team have an excuse to avoid actively participating in the task and working to ensure a positive outcome. The importance of “the team” was consistently reinforced throughout the Secret Service recruit-training program and in their on-the-job training regimen, but the importance of the team was always stressed as a collection of individual responsibilities and contributions toward a larger goal. The concept of “the team” in the Secret Service training model is everywhere in the training program, even the method by which the Secret Service agent recruits are trained to surround and walk with the President; when the President moves, it is a team exercise. Every protection agent’s pattern of walking in the formation around the President is determined by how other team members in the formation respond to the President’s movements. It is a delicate ballet with no room for error. When mistakes are made, security holes appear and the person creating the hole has let “the team” down and everyone in the formation can see it.
Knowing that your individual responsibility for the proper completion of a task is pivotal toward effectively completing a mission, and that the success or failure of your task will be exclusively your responsibility, is a powerful motivator to get the job done correctly in the Secret Service. I felt this pressure to perform throughout my career as an agent but it was during one specific trip that this pressure to perform for the sake of the team resulted in long-term physical consequences.
In June 2004 President George W. Bush attended the NATO summit in Istanbul, Turkey, and I was selected as a security agent on the visit. The trip was a security nightmare from the announcement of the summit onward, but given the agents of the Secret Service’s penchant for seeking out adventure, the visit to Istanbul became a coveted operation among agents clamoring to be a part of it. Foreign security advances, even in countries considered relatively friendly to the United States, in the Secret Service are the most difficult protection operations we conduct. They are so detailed that a “go-by” (Secret Service lingo for a “to-do” list) I had prepared to help guide me through the many complicated tasks involved in a foreign security advance had grown to approximately fifty pages in length when I left the Presidential Protective Division.
I was selected, along with a few of my coworkers from the Secret Service training center in Maryland (largely because of the Secret Service training academy’s proximity to Joint Base Andrews, known at the time as Andrews Air Force Base), to go on the Istanbul trip because it was cheaper for the Secret Service to fly us to Istanbul from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, than to fly agents from field offices around the country. Agents from the training academy were also valuable on dangerous foreign visits because we all had a few years of experience, which was a prerequisite for foreign trips with this type of threat profile.
The two agents from the training academy assigned to the Istanbul operation with me—Tim and Curtis—were good friends of mine, but they had very different paths to the Secret Service, both contrasting sharply with my path. Tim was a Midwesterner with a heavy dose of accent and a heavier dose of leadership ability. He was a U.S. Marine and former police officer and he had an uncanny ability to tell you the truth regardless of how you were going to feel when he was done telling you the truth. I’ve heard people state many times that they want the truth from their friends and associates, but I found the opposite to be true. People want to be flattered and lied to when the truth is uncomfortable, but Tim had no time for that. I admired his ability to forgo easy promotion through the ranks in the Secret Service in exchange for his determination to do, and say, the right thing when the right thing mattered. Any fool can do the right thing when the consequences are irrelevant, but Tim had no problem telling a well-connected White House staffer that he or she was wrong, even when he knew that the staff member would try to blackball him as “difficult.” Curtis was a U.S. Marine as well and was raised in the South. They were both good friends and I enjoyed their company, but I knew there would be some hijinks during the trip because Tim loved to mess around with Curtis, in contrast to his otherwise solemn and serious personality. When we landed on the ground in Istanbul it didn’t take long for Tim to lighten up the deadly serious environment on the ground, at Curtis’s expense. When we hit the ground in Istanbul after a long flight on an old military C-5 cargo plane (where you ride in the upper section of the plane facing backward, which makes for an unusual flying experience the first time you do it) we were immediately met by the Secret Service lead intelligence agent on the ground for a briefing. It was always a dramatic sight standing in the belly of a C-5 after landing on a long flight and watching the nose of the plane separate and lift up. The sun and the air would rapidly rush into the plane as if you were in a sealed box and the top was removed and the agents on the ground would magically appear walking into the plane silhouetted by the sun in the background. Concerned about the visit, I had done some homework on the trip before leaving Joint Base Andrews, but I hadn’t seen the classified information on just how dangerous this trip was going to be, and I was about to find out just how dangerous from the team on the ground. Approximately one year before the Istanbul visit, a series of truck bombs in the country had killed and injured hundreds, and just hours before we landed on the ground, a series of explosions in both Ankara (outside of the hotel President Bush was scheduled to stay at) and in Istanbul had caused mayhem and death. One month prior to the trip a terror cell was arrested and found in possession of firearms, explosives, and terror training materials, and only one day into the trip, a bomb was found at Istanbul’s airport. But the icing on the cake was a comment from one of the agents on the trip, who had arrived in Istanbul a few weeks before us. I asked him if the hotel we were staying in was safe, and he said, “A few bombs went off recently outside of the hotel, but we’re pretty sure they were just noisemakers.”
“Noisemakers?” I thought. “Is he serious?” He was definitely serious. These “noisemakers” were explosives more intended to frighten than to cause damage and gauging by the lack of emotion in the agent telling me the story, the attempt to cause fear hadn’t worked, at least on him.
With this backdrop of danger, and the potential for a deadly terror strike hanging over the trip, the agents who arrived on the C-5 were noticeably concerned. But it was considered extremely bad form in the Secret Service to show that you were intimidated by your surroundings, it was the equivalent of letting down “the team” by showing fear. Visibly showing fear was seen as unnecessarily panicking the security team and it was irrelevant to the completion of the mission, which had to be completed regardless of how concerning the threat atmosphere was. The Secret Service was going to make sure that President Bush arrived and departed Istanbul without a scratch and worrying about your own safety was seen as selfish and distracting. As a result, we all kept quiet about our concerns.
Tim, always the prankster with Curtis, decided that he would turn the screws on Curtis and co-opted me into a prank he planned. The prank was a welcome reprieve from the tension on the visit and I happily joined in. Tim and I were in a small shop in the lobby of the hotel we were staying in and I asked the female shopkeeper to see a small gem she had. The shopkeeper took me to the back of the store where Tim and I disappeared for a moment. Curtis saw us disappear for a moment because when we emerged he asked us where we had gone and looked concerned. Tim decided this was the time to strike. He told Curtis to hold on and took me to the side and said, “Brother, we gotta do this. Let’s tell Curtis that the shopkeeper took us to the back of the store because she knew the hotel cameras were watching and cryptically warned us to ‘Beware of the Ishirahe.’” I asked him what the hell the “Ishirahe” was and he laughed with that hearty Midwestern belly laugh and said back, “I have no freakin’ idea, I just made it up. Let’s tell him we think it’s some group following us around the hotel.” It was terrible humor, and we both knew it, but we knew Curtis would eat it up. Tim told Curtis the story and I could see the look on Curtis’s face, and it was priceless. Curtis was a tough guy and he wasn’t going to show any fear, but we could tell it hit him hard. I know this attempt at humor, at Curtis’s expense, may sound a bit strange to people who have never been in these types of situations, but many of the military, intelligence, and law enforcement men and women I’ve worked with have various ways of relieving stress and showing friendship toward their teammates that defy a rational explanation. Even though Curtis was concerned, both Tim and I refused to let the joke go too far before we blew the gag. We both liked Curtis and this was some strange ritual that we used as an expression of camaraderie and friendship, although I’m aware that it may seem counterintuitive. Tim and I let Curtis off the hook about twenty minutes later to which he replied, “You guys are morons.”
The time for humor quickly came to an end a few days after our arrival in Istanbul when the mission was scheduled to start. In the Secret Service “wheels down” (a term we used for when Air Force One would arrive with the President onboard) was always on our minds in the planning process days before the visit and we would count down to “wheels down” with meetings and “walk-throughs.” Walk-throughs were similar to full dress rehearsals of the security plan and during a walk-through at a soccer field where our helicopters were going to land I felt an extremely unusual and painful twinge in my spine. I had severe back problems as a result of an injury I sustained during my Secret Service recruit-training class’s fitness test, when I attempted to achieve a score of “Excellent” in the sit-and-reach flexibility test and forced myself to push a small, flexibility measuring lever farther than my spine would allow. I had caused a severe bulge in two spinal disks as a result and my back was never the same. Back injuries are life-changing because there is no way to work around them. You can immobilize a bad arm or ankle, but your spine is what keeps it all together and when I had a “bad back day” it was torturous. The twinge I felt kept getting worse throughout the walk-through and I prayed that I could get through the very dangerous Istanbul trip without being a burden to the operation or the team so I kept it quiet initially.
The following day we returned to the soccer field, awaiting the arrival of the President and the entourage, and after dealing with the massive amounts of dirt and dust thrown in my sweaty face from the rotor wash from the helicopters, I asked the agents coming off the “birds” (as we would call the helicopters) what I could do to help. He threw me one of the twenty-five-plus-pound first aid kits we would carry in the event of an emergency and asked me to carry it. We had a steep hill to walk up and it was a hot and humid day. The walk up the hill was only a couple of hundred yards, but with my back really bothering me, it felt like a lot longer. About fifty yards into the walk up the hill, I felt it. I knew it was different this time. I felt a powerful twinge in my spine like I hadn’t felt before and I knew something had happened. It was game time, and now that President Bush had just landed and despite the pain, I kept on smiling although I was quietly in excruciating pain. I knew that no one walking up that hill with me to the awaiting vehicles wanted to be burdened with any concern for my back. These agents were from the Presidential Protective Division and had all of the same threat assessment briefings I did. They knew the danger level on the trip. The PPD agents were the best the Secret Service had to offer and they always acted as such. They walked with a noticeable swagger and they could be an intimidating group to talk to when you weren’t a part of their team (something I tried to change later when I became a senior agent on the President’s detail) and I wasn’t going to be the one to break the icy look on their faces with a comment about my injured back. I stayed quiet during the ride to the hotel and I tried to avoid squirming in the car to avoid drawing attention to myself, although my back was begging me to move in order to relieve the unbearable pressure on my spine from sitting squished between two large male agents. The moments in the car seemed like hours and the pain in my back made me completely forget the dangers involved in the trip, which were now magnified because the world’s number one target, the U.S. President, was on the ground. Arriving at the hotel, I slowly moved to my room to avoid causing a scene and aggravating what I knew was a serious injury, and while in the elevator I began to anxiously wonder how I was going to make it through this trip. I was now in severe pain and my assignments over the next few days involved hours of standing and being distracted by pain in such a dangerous environment was not an option. I closed the door to my room and took off my suit jacket and dress shirt revealing a thick, white level-3, bullet-resistant vest on top of a white T-shirt soaked in sweat from the heat. When I took off the vest and the underlying T-shirt, and the cold air from the room’s air-conditioning hit my still moist skin, I dropped in pain. My back muscles on my left side of my lower back immediately seized up and tilted me sideways in a painful spasm. I thought that if I toughed it out for a few minutes that it would relent and I would be able to stand up, but as the minutes passed, I knew that standing was going to be impossible. Now I was stuck and I knew that I had done the unforgivable; I was going to become a liability on this trip, rather than an asset, and I was going to let down the team. Secret Service training does that to the agents. I should have been more concerned with my spine and the damage that I had done to it walking up that steep hill, with an injured back, and carrying an unbalanced load in one hand while walking in dress shoes, but I wasn’t. I was in pain, but I was worried about how I would break the news to the team. I was embarrassed about this. I was a proud man and I couldn’t accept that I had become a complete liability at a moment where the Secret Service needed me to get the job done. There are no backup pitchers in the Secret Service. They do not have the luxury of backup players at every position. If you failed to perform the mission, then someone else would have to pull double-duty to fill your role and the security plan is never as thorough when agents are overburdened with multiple responsibilities.
