Speaker 1: The United States Secret Service, the protocols are born out of blood. It may seem dramatic, but it's actually a necessary process to understand past incidents, failures and successes to ensure that threats are fully mitigated for future protectees. My name is Jonathan Wackrow. I spent 14 years in the U.S. Secret Service as a special agent. I joined the United States Secret Service just prior to 9-11. I was assigned to the New York field office as a criminal investigator. In 2008, I went to Washington, D.C., where I was assigned to the Secretary of Homeland Security's detail. Then just after the election of President Obama, I went to the President's detail, which allowed me the opportunity to plan and coordinate trips both domestically and abroad for the President and First Lady. So the approach that the Secret Service takes is a very proactive, advanced process. We think about three main areas. We think about what are we going to do in a tactical or crisis situation, what are we going to do in a medical situation, and what are we going to do if we have to relocate this protectee. And those are the big three. There are subcategories to all of them, but every agent and officer is constantly thinking about what am I going to do? What is my personal protection plan, and what is my plan for my protectee? We're never complacent, because the moment that we become complacent, complacency kills and something happens. When the President goes to any location, the methodology is to set up concentric rings of protection around where he's going to be. That starts with the inside of a building, the dais, if he's giving a speech. How do we build out a security program from there? First we look at where the President's going to stand. We try to mitigate any line-of-sight issues that may occur. We want to make sure that that environment is secure. I want to be able to fortify my perimeter. I want access control. I want to fully understand how I mitigate everybody that's coming into that environment. That's the metal detectors. That's the explosive detection. That is the utilization of different technology to ensure that we're always putting the President in the most safe location, regardless of where it is. When a Secret Service advance agent goes into a location that the President or any of our other protectees are going to go into, they're looking at that space much differently than the average citizen. Everything from the HVAC, the air conditioning units, how does that affect my environment? Can someone introduce an aerosol spray from a clean air intake from the outside and affect myself or the protectee? I'm looking at the lighting. Who controls it? Can that room get dark real fast and then attack get launched? How many entrances are there? Is there a set of stairs that can lead up from a basement? Is there an access way into the kitchen area? I want to understand all of the access points into that location. Once that room fills up with people, I want to understand what are the crowd dynamics going to be in that space. In the event that something happens, it could be something administrative like a medical emergency, how is that crowd going to react? What are they going to do? And what that crowd is going to do is going to be the opposite to what I'm going to do with my protectee because I want to be able to quickly and effectively remove myself from that situation. Once that environment is established, how do we maintain it for the entire duration that the president's there? I'm looking at the perimeter of that location. That perimeter can be our local law enforcement presence that's now allowing us to keep the general public away from this protective site. That moves out even further. To start looking at long-range issues that I need to address, I need aerial surveillance. I need the ability to understand what that airspace looks like above me. I need to understand if I'm near a terrain feature such as water, how do I mitigate the vulnerability that's coming from that waterway? So do I need police boats out there? That starts to become that outer ring. So protective methodology in these concentric rings, you want to address those types of threats as far out as possible. That's really the tradecraft, and that comes down to experience. It comes down to constant training and communication and awareness of your environment. Oftentimes people look at the president and they have blinders on. They don't even realize that their own action or what they're doing around the president. Here we see a young woman who starts hugging the president and doesn't let go. She's not doing that out of malice. She's just starstruck that the president is there. The Secret Service has to be mindful that this isn't a threat that's going to take the president's life, but it is nettlesome. We have to address this because it can cause a safety issue in the operating environment for the president. A lot of times the actions that Secret Service agents take are not even realized by the people in the crowd. Here we see a special agent in charge and other agents carefully removing the arm of the individual away from the president. The president doesn't realize what's happening, nor does the individual, but this is tradecraft. This is what they train for, and it happens right here. What we're seeing here is then candidate Trump speaking. Someone aggressively comes towards the podium. Secret Service agent is immediately up onto the stage. The shift comes up with them. They provide 360 degrees of cover. Once the threat is taken away, the president can go back to giving his speech. So as dynamically as a threat rises, they can also be mitigated just as fast. Social media is just instant information, and it can be factual or disinformation. But social media is a challenge for any protective construct, whether it's the Secret Service, any government entity, or in private security, because information is dispersed and can go viral very quickly. There are times that the Secret Service, in conjunction with the military and the White House, take the president on a classified trip. Previously, that action was much easier. We could go under the cover of darkness. We could deploy a low-profile protective methodology where we're not going around with lights and sirens and a big police motorcade. The problem with social media today is everything becomes public. So the example of the president going over to Iraq, the disclosure of that became public when Air Force One was seen over the United Kingdom. And someone took a picture of it, posted it online, and instantaneously, every news service around the world realized the president was in the air. And then trying to track that aircraft becomes easier, and now we have the president's location on a classified mission. I mean, just think about how dangerous that is for the United States Secret Service, the military, and the president himself. Social media is a challenge not for just understanding where our protectees are. It's also a new pathway for threats. And social media has become this superhighway for making threats against protectees. But every threat that comes into the Secret Service has to be investigated. The pathway of social media doesn't change that, because now messages come in every single day that are either direct or veiled threats that have to be investigated the same way. The means, opportunity, intent for someone to cause harm to our protectee. The threat environment is very dynamic and unpredictable. Secret Service is mindful of that. So we have to constantly look back and say, how do we improve? How do we get better? Unless we came out of that environment, nothing happened. But is there something that we could have done better? Police Chief Jeff Curry, and here is the president of the United States. If you look back at the Kennedy assassination, no one had thought that someone would try to shoot the president from a long range as they were traveling in a motorcade. Think about how difficult that shot is to make. It's a moving target. It's small from a distance. So when the Secret Service at that time was looking at it, they're always mindful that there is a probability that an event like that could happen, but the likelihood was pretty small for that high impact situation. Well, calculation was wrong. So on this day in Dallas, we saw some things that worked really well. We saw that Secret Service agents that are located here and here are able to quickly react to anything that may affect the president or the first lady. What's different here this time as compared to today is the motorcade route itself, how it's secured. Back then, on either side of the motorcade, as you'll see, the crowd can get very close. So at any moment, someone could step into the crowd and block that motorcade. Today, based upon what we know, we ensure that all presidential motorcades have some sort of barrier and are posted by law enforcement to ensure that threats can't come and cross across in front of the motorcade. Additionally, what we're seeing in this angle is a great view of the president and first lady. You'll never see that today. Why? Because after this tragic day in American history, the Secret Service learned a very vital lesson, never to allow the president of the United States to ride in an open air vehicle. The Secret Service would rather have the president in an armored vehicle away from the public where they're not engaging, thus reducing the risk. However, that's just not feasible in today's environment. So what we have to do is we have to stage engagement between the president and the public very carefully. Here, we see a video of President Obama from the inauguration getting out of this limo. This is a carefully coordinated event that had a very specific security construct built around it to ensure, even though they are in open air and in the public, all threats within all concentric rings have been mitigated. Our protective methodology hasn't changed. We're providing 360 degrees of coverage. We're seeing the crowds are completely separated by barricades. So we will not have a surge onto the motorcade route. There's also police postings here, here, here. Every seven feet, there was another member of the law enforcement or military community that was providing security for this event. Every agent in this image has a very specific role. They're there to immediately respond to the president or the first lady and immediately bring them back to the limousine for protection in the event of a crisis situation. As you'll see, we have agents that are flanked on the left and right-hand sides who are there to address the threats if anyone is to immediately come over the barricade. The supervisors are in close proximity and they're there to cover and evacuate these protectees and get them to safety. Here we see in September 1975, President Ford leaving a hotel in San Francisco. Just after leaving the hotel, President Ford is walking towards his vehicle. At the same moment, an assailant across the street, Sarah Jane Moore, fired a weapon. The Secret Service, taking the emergency action drill that they have trained for, took the president and covered and evacuated him. We're seeing the absolute right things here being done by the Secret Service agents. The president is here. They're covering him. They're putting him down behind armor. They're trying to get him into the limo. But a faithful lesson was learned. The limousine door was not open. Ever since this day, every time the president is near a limousine, near armor, that door is open because that's our safe haven. Another lesson the Secret Service learned was the day that President Reagan left the Washington Hilton and was shot. In the moments that the assassination attempt had occurred, all the agents that you're seeing here and here are starting to face the protectee. The lesson learned from President Ford that we saw earlier, this limo door is open. One of the key elements of a Secret Service agent is putting yourself between the threat and the protectee. Here, we saw our Secret Service agent make themselves big. They absorbed the threat in this instance of firearm. This action alone saved the president's life because it allowed for President Reagan to be put right into the limo. We mitigated a potential loss of life by instituting a policy because of President Ford always to have the limo door open. Imagine the tragic scenario that we'd be in if this door was not open at that time or the Secret Service agent didn't react the way that they did. As we have seen, the protective model evolves over time. The Secret Service is always trying to evolve and get better. They're reassessing every action that they take on every single trip to ensure a more holistic and secure environment for the protectees. One thing that hasn't changed is that our protectees always remain a target. But how has the threat changed? What are the different tactics that have been used? They've become more dynamic. Because our mandate is protection, we have to put ourselves between the threat and the protectee. And that means that we have to stand up tall when there's gunfire. We have to go address the threat head on. We have to become the stop, the barrier between that threat, whether it's a sharp-edged weapon, a gun, doesn't matter. We have to stand in between that threat and the protectee. We understand that it's just not normal to want to put yourself in between a gun and a protectee, but there's a greater calling here. We have to think about what we're protecting and what that mission is.