The Fight by Dan Bongino

Author:Dan Bongino
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781250082992
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

9

Charlie Hebdo, Paris Terror, and Presidential Leadership

In Washington, DC, perception is reality and managing perceptions is a lucrative business for those who are skilled at it. I was sitting at home on Sunday, January 11, 2015, just days after the terror attacks at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, watching cable news, and I was surprised to see the massive size of the crowd marching in Paris as a response to the terror attacks. Word of the march had begun to spread throughout the diplomatic community days earlier and I was astonished to see neither President Barack Obama nor Vice President Joe Biden at the event. Having been behind the White House curtain for many years, and having been a part of organizing last-minute foreign trips under tight timelines, I was certain that this was a misstep as I asked myself, “How could the White House miss this?”

Here’s how the process works when the decision has been made to send the President or Vice President to an event, such as the Paris march. First, the White House advance staff will notify the Secret Service’s Presidential Protective Division of the decision to travel to the location. Second, Secret Service agents from the PPD will be notified that they have been selected to conduct the security advance and the logistics advance. Travel arrangements will then be made to immediately get the agents on the ground, due to the tight timeline (sometimes, if commercial travel cannot be arranged the military will give us a lift). Third, the Secret Service field office with jurisdiction over the location will be notified that the President intends on traveling to the location. The respective field office will provide a separate agent from their office, who is familiar with the location the President intends to visit, to assist the PPD agent in the delicate security planning. Fourth, the U.S. Embassy with jurisdiction over the location of the visit will provide personnel and logistics support to assist the White House and Secret Service advance teams in accomplishing their missions.

With that basic template in place the Secret Service can pull off a number of magic acts, in limited time, to make a foreign trip, under extremely tight timelines, successful. The incident with fake sign-language interpreter, Thamsanqa Jantjie, at the Nelson Mandela funeral, who was able to stand for a prolonged period of time, just feet from President Obama, thankfully, is a rare occurrence (vetting people such as this overseas can be extremely difficult because you are relying on the local government’s databases for information, which can be notoriously unreliable). Personally, I think these last-minute foreign trips by the President and Vice President are a very bad idea and that the White House Staff could do a better job in trying to understand the difficult situation they place the Secret Service in when asking them to perform this security advance magic act on foreign soil, and with limited time. But I understand the political pressure cooker the White House staff is immersed in to keep the leader of the free world actively engaged.

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