Zero fail, p.34
Zero Fail, page 34
Fairlamb, the detail leader for Mrs. Obama, stood six foot four, Paul Le five foot eight. Fairlamb leaned over Le, and at various points, agents watching saw a heated exchange. “Preston’s life was dedicated to making sure that nothing happened to that lady,” said one of his colleagues. “Anything that ever challenged that, he was a pit bull.”
Nevertheless, Fairlamb and Le had equal rank. They were both GS-14s. So neither man held back, either on their strongly-held opinions or on expletives. Fairlamb insisted that cutting bodies at the last minute was wrong. It ignored the expertise the advance agent had put into the security plan. Le argued that the manual was on his side: It did not call for staff to stand on guard on the midnight shift. Le reminded Fairlamb that he was responsible for minding the financial resources of his field office. Though this was a First Family visit, overtime for that midnight shift for every day of the visit would cost his office dearly.
“I really wanted to punch that guy,” Fairlamb later told friends. Through an agency spokesperson, Fairlamb and Le declined to discuss the incident but said they do not recall having a major argument.
Fairlamb shared his anger with the special agent in charge of President Obama’s detail, Vic Erevia. Erevia immediately agreed with Fairlamb. He couldn’t believe the L.A. office would change an advance security plan at the last minute. He called the special agent in charge of the field office to complain.
“He asked him, straight up, ‘What the fuck?’ ” a colleague of Fairlamb’s said. “[Erevia] didn’t go to the mat on many topics, and on this one he did.”
CHAPTER 18
THE NIGHT BULLETS HIT THE WHITE HOUSE
The gunman parked his black Honda directly south of the White House, on a closed lane off Constitution Avenue. It was about ten minutes to nine on the evening of November 11, 2011. He pointed a semiautomatic rifle out the passenger window, aimed directly at the home of the president of the United States, and pulled the trigger. Then again, and again.
A bullet smashed a window on the second floor, just steps from the First Family’s formal living room. Another lodged in a window frame, and several more pinged off the roof, sending bits of debris to the ground. At least eight bullets flew seven hundred yards across the South Lawn. Seven of them struck the Obama family’s upstairs residence.
President Obama and his wife were out of town on that chilly evening. But their younger daughter, Sasha, and Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, were inside the home. Their older daughter, Malia, was expected back any moment from an outing with friends.
Secret Service officers rushed to respond. One, stationed directly under the second-floor terrace where the bullets struck, drew her .357 handgun and prepared to crack open an emergency gun box on the side of the mansion. Counter snipers on the roof, standing just twenty feet from where one bullet struck, scanned the South Lawn through their rifle scopes for signs of an attack. With no camera surveillance on the far south perimeter of the White House, it was up to the Secret Service officers who protected the White House to figure out what was going on.
Then came an order that surprised several officers on the complex. “No shots have been fired….Stand down,” Sgt. Wallace Strong called over his radio. The noise, the sergeant said, was just backfire from a nearby construction vehicle.
His command was the beginning of a string of blunders as the Secret Service fumbled to recognize a serious attack on the White House. Throughout that night and the rest of the weekend, Secret Service leaders continued to miss clues and make mistakes. As they gradually realized their errors, the senior leadership tried to keep the details a secret—even from their own employees.
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WHEN OSCAR ORTEGA-HERNANDEZ shot at the White House just after 9 p.m., President Obama and the First Lady were in San Diego on their way to Hawaii for the Veterans Day weekend. The president was aboard an aircraft carrier in the San Diego harbor for an auspicious occasion—the first college basketball game aboard a military vessel. With the First Couple gone, the Secret Service staff at the White House slipped into what some called “casual Friday” mode.
By 8:30 that night, most of the agents and officers on duty were coming to the tail end of a quiet shift. On the White House’s southern border, a few construction workers were milling about. D.C. Water utility trucks planned to use the low-traffic hours to clean sewer lines along Constitution Avenue. They had parked in the lane closed off by orange cones on the side of the street adjoining the grassy park leading to the White House’s South Lawn. This is where the gunman pulled over in his black 1998 Honda Accord.
Ortega was a twenty-one-year-old high school dropout who had left his Idaho Falls home a month earlier, on what he told his family was a vacation. He and his girlfriend had just had a baby boy, but she had recently broken off the relationship. She loved Ortega but could tell something was deeply wrong. She and his friends noticed he had been acting increasingly paranoid. He would launch into tirades about the U.S. government trying to control its citizens. Friends often told him he looked like Jesus, and he had become fixated on his role as a messenger. He called President Obama “the Antichrist” and said he “had to be stopped.”
Ortega arrived in Washington on November 9, after driving more than three thousand miles and making a brief stop in rural Pennsylvania to stay with friends. Sitting in his car on the Washington Mall that evening, he was ready to send his message.
He had 180 rounds of ammunition in the backseat. A Romanian-made Cugir semiautomatic rifle, similar to an AK-47, rested at an angle against the passenger side floorboards and the right front seat. He had purchased the gun for $550 at an Idaho gun shop in the spring and practiced shooting at random pieces of junk at a gun range near his home. Now, more than halfway across the country, within striking distance of the president’s home, Ortega raised his weapon and pointed it out the passenger side window. He began firing.
On the rooftop of the White House, counter-sniper officers Todd Amman and Jeff Lourinia heard six to eight shots in quick succession. It was likely semiautomatic fire, they thought. They scurried out of their shedlike booth, readied their rifles, and scanned the southern fence line. Under the Truman Balcony, the second-floor terrace off the residence that overlooks the Washington Monument, Secret Service officer Carrie Johnson heard shots and what she thought might be debris falling overhead. She radioed the Secret Service’s Joint Operations Center, at the agency’s headquarters on H Street Northwest, to report she was breaking into the gun box near her post. She pulled out a shotgun and replaced the buckshot inside with a more powerful slug in case she needed to engage an attacker.
Ortega fired his shots about fifteen yards from Officers William Johnson and Milton Olivo, who were sitting in a Chevrolet Suburban on the Ellipse near Constitution Avenue but facing away from Ortega. They could smell acrid gunpowder as they jumped out of their vehicle, hearts pounding. Johnson took cover behind some flowerpots. Olivo grabbed a shotgun from the Suburban’s backseat and crouched by the vehicle.
Officer William Johnson noticed something odd as he looked around the grounds—leaves had been blown away in a line-like pattern, perhaps by air from a firearm muzzle, creating a path of exposed grass pointing from Constitution Avenue north toward the White House.
Then another call came over the radio from a supervising sergeant—the one ordering agents to stand down. This led to some confusion and surprise, especially for officers close to the White House who, like Carrie Johnson, felt sure they had heard gunshots. Officer James Sevison, a canine handler in a parked cruiser on the east side of the mansion, had hopped out at the sound, drawn his weapon, and taken cover behind the First Lady’s limousine. Officer Nathan Hogan, stationed nearby, had pulled out a rifle and started walking toward the South Lawn. Nevertheless, they complied with the order. They holstered their weapons and turned back to their posts.
But civilians, lacking any police training, had no doubt about what they’d seen. A woman in a taxi stopped at a nearby stoplight immediately took to Twitter to describe the actions of “this crazy guy” in a car in front of hers. “Driver in front of my cab, STOPPED and fired 5 gun shots at the White House,” she wrote, adding, “It took the police a while to respond.”
Another witness—a visiting neuroscientist who was riding by in an airport shuttle van—later told investigators he had seen a man shooting out of a car toward the White House.
Officer William Johnson hadn’t seen Ortega or the barrel of his rifle. He didn’t know about any witnesses driving down Constitution Avenue. But he felt sure he knew the sound of gunfire up close. He got on his radio to say so. “Flagship,” he said, using the code name for the Secret Service command center, “shots fired.”
The certainty of his report snapped officers back into action. Roving officers and members of an emergency SWAT team drew their weapons and began moving quickly to the South Grounds.
Ortega, meanwhile, was speeding down Constitution Avenue toward the Potomac River at about 60 miles per hour, according to witnesses. He narrowly missed striking a couple crossing the street before he swerved and crashed his car.
Three young women who were walking near the Vietnam Memorial heard the crash. One called 911. As they walked closer to the scene, the woman stayed on the phone with the emergency operator and narrated what they saw. The Honda was spun around to face them, headlights glaring at oncoming traffic. The car’s tires were straddling the curb, with the right side of the Honda in the on-ramp to the Roosevelt Bridge and the left side lifted slightly over the concrete curb. The driver’s-side door was flung open onto the grass. The radio was blaring.
The driver was gone.
Nestled against the passenger floorboards and the driver console was a semiautomatic assault rifle, with nine shell casings on the floor and seat.
McClellan Plihcik, a presidential detail agent who had been on his way to gas up his unmarked car nearby, responded to the radio report of gunshots and was the first to arrive on the scene. A homeless man told him he had seen a young white male running from the vehicle after the crash and heading north along the riverbank toward the Georgetown area.
From the Joint Operations Center, the sounds of voices competing with each other echoed over the police radios. A Secret Service dispatcher at the JOC, Officer J. Robinson, called 911 to report the sound of shots as a man’s voice in the background yelled details. The dispatcher gave the D.C. police operator contradictory descriptions of vehicles and suspects. At first she reported that both a black Cadillac and a black Honda were leaving the scene. Later she mentioned a black Caddy and a yellow car, apparently a reference to a yellow construction truck parked near the grounds. Some officers mistakenly reported that Park Police were chasing the yellow car as it traveled out of the city, either on George Washington Parkway or Route 66. With the dispatcher and officer’s conflicting reports, police now began looking for the wrong suspects: two Black men supposedly fleeing down Rock Creek Parkway. The man who had shot at the White House had disappeared on foot into the Washington night, with the Secret Service still trying to piece together what had just happened.
Back in the White House, key people in charge of the safety of the president’s family were not initially aware that a shooting had occurred. Officers guarding the White House grounds communicate on a radio frequency, White House One, which is different from the channel used by agents who protect the First Family. The agent assigned to Sasha learned of the shooting a few minutes later from an officer posted nearby.
The White House usher on duty, whose job is attending to the First Family’s needs, got delayed word as well. She immediately began to worry about Malia, who was supposed to be arriving any minute from an outing with friends. The usher told the staff to keep Sasha and her grandmother inside. They apparently had not heard the window breaking. Malia arrived with her detail at 9:40 p.m., and agents insisted on locking all doors for the rest of the night.
The Secret Service’s watch commander on duty, Capt. David Simmons, had been listening to the confusing radio chatter since the first reports of possible shots. When word came of the abandoned Honda, the captain left the new JOC at headquarters on H Street and drove to the scene at the foot of the Roosevelt Bridge.
It was technically up to Captain Simmons to decide whether the events of that night appeared to be an attack on the White House. But in the hierarchical Secret Service, no watch commander made that call alone. He checked with his bosses by phone. As Simmons surveyed the scene, he and Secret Service supervisors speculated that gang members in separate cars had gotten in a gunfight near the White House’s front lawn. It was an unlikely scenario in a relatively quiet, touristy part of the nation’s capital.
Sometime around 10 p.m., Simmons turned the case over to the U.S. Park Police, the agency with jurisdiction over random crimes near the White House grounds. With that, the Secret Service officially concluded there was no evidence connecting this shooting to the White House.
In the dark, nobody conducted more than a cursory inspection of the White House for evidence or damage. Ed Donovan, a chief spokesman for the agency, saw that a woman in a cab had tweeted about seeing the shooter aim directly at the White House. He forwarded her claim to the Service’s twenty-four-hour protective intelligence desk that investigated potential threats. But at 11 p.m., the intelligence desk sent out an alert to all supervisors at the White House complex describing the incident as “a drug-related shooting.” U.S. Park Police spokesman David Schlosser told reporters that the fact that the shooting had taken place near the White House was just a big coincidence. “The thing that makes it of interest is simply the location,” he said. “You know, a bit like real estate.”
At the time of the shooting, President Obama had been sitting courtside on the USS Carl Vinson warship in Coronado Bay, watching the fourth quarter of a basketball game between the University of North Carolina and Michigan State University on the flight deck. He was getting ready to be interviewed by ESPN at 9:05 p.m.
Not long after, the Carolina Tarheels were celebrating beating the Michigan State Spartans, 67–55. The president had finished his interview. He congratulated the players on a great game and chatted briefly with the basketball legend Magic Johnson. Forty-five minutes after the shooting, Barack and Michelle Obama climbed aboard Air Force One, bound for a trade summit in Honolulu. Director Sullivan was traveling with the president. Mickey Nelson, Sullivan’s assistant director for protective operations, called the director to let him know there had been a shooting near Crown. Everything was okay, Nelson emphasized. “It doesn’t look like there’s any connection to the White House,” he said. The First Couple was still unaware that a man had taken several shots at their residence while one of their daughters was at home and another was en route.
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THE NEXT DAY, the Secret Service bosses seemed to want to put the previous night behind them.
Officer Carrie Johnson, who thought she’d heard debris fall from the Truman Balcony the night before, listened intently during the roll call before her shift on Saturday afternoon. Supervisors explained that the gunshots came from people in two cars, likely gang-bangers, shooting at each other. Johnson had told several senior officers Friday night that she thought the house had been hit. But on Saturday she did not challenge her superiors about their conclusion. She held back “for fear of being criticized,” she later told investigators.
Though the Park Police was now in charge of the investigation, Sullivan urged Secret Service agents to continue to assist, amid new clues that the shooting could be connected to the White House. They used social media and other sources to locate witnesses, such as the tweeting taxi passenger. They had traced the car to Ortega and began reaching out to his family and friends, who would soon reveal troubling details. Yet the Service kept their suspicions from key law enforcement partners and even most of their own staff. Investigators inexplicably did not issue a national lookout to notify law enforcement to pick up Ortega for questioning, a routine move in such cases. If they had, Ortega could have been arrested that Saturday in Arlington County, Virginia. But police missed their chance. Police responded to a call about a man behaving oddly in local Quincy Park. They questioned Ortega but had no idea he was a suspect in a shooting, or a man who had abandoned a car on the National Mall with a semiautomatic rifle inside. They let him go.
The Park Police did not obtain a warrant for Ortega on weapons charges until that Sunday, when agents began interviewing his friends and family and learned he had become obsessed with President Obama and considered him the Antichrist. His mental health had been deteriorating for the last two years, and he believed he embodied the second coming of Jesus Christ, his girlfriend said. Now the Service dispatched Washington area agents in two-man teams to canvass the city to try to locate him. But it still made no Service-wide alert to say they had made a mistake—and that the Friday night shooting was now likely an attempted assassination.
The situation at the White House remained quiet until Tuesday morning. Most of the White House senior staff knew nothing about what the Service was piecing together. President Obama was flying onward from Hawaii to Australia. But the First Lady had returned to Washington on an overnight flight. She had gone upstairs to take a nap shortly after arriving home at five-thirty that morning.
