Zero fail, p.50
Zero Fail, page 50
Standing outside the White House, a few hundred yards east of the entrance, another person was agitated that evening. A twenty-six-year-old engineer named Jonathan Tran walked along the north fence line several times, trying to figure out how to get to the other side. Tran feared he was being followed by a mysterious stranger as he approached Pennsylvania Avenue. He faced the north side of the Treasury building and a spiky fence that continued west as far as the eye could see and bordered the White House’s North Lawn. Tran wore a hooded jacket and a backpack; he carried two cans of mace. Also stuffed inside the backpack were a laptop, a book by Donald Trump, and a letter for him. Tran, the son of poor Vietnamese immigrants, had studied electrical engineering and was the first of his family to go to college. But he had suffered a one-two punch in the summer of 2016: He had lost his job and his girlfriend, which plunged him into a deep depression. Untreated and isolated, he became delusional.
For months, Tran had been hearing voices warning him that the president was vulnerable to assassination. He believed people were listening to his calls and intercepting his emails. In his agitated state, Tran believed he had to alert the president to critical information he had about Russian hackers and help save his presidency. Tran, who had been living in his car and subsisting on junk food since losing his job, drove from San Jose to Washington to fulfill his mission in late February.
Tran hoped to speak with Trump when he arrived February 27 at the Hay-Adams hotel, where Trump’s longtime ally Roger Stone was hosting a swanky party for the launch of his book, The Making of the President 2016. Milling about awkwardly in the mahogany-paneled reception room, Tran was disappointed to learn Trump would not be attending. “It’s my fault,” he told a conservative media editor he met at the book party. “The Russian dossier, it’s my fault. I wrote it.” According to the journalist Cassandra Fairbanks, Tran said that the CIA and FBI were following him, trying to keep him from telling Trump that he knew that the reports of Trump being videotaped in a “golden showers” incident were fabricated.
Several days passed, with Tran continuing to scheme about ways to see the president. On the night of March 10, Tran decided this was his last chance. None of the Uniformed Division officers spread around various posts on the White House complex that night noticed the thin, solitary figure in a dark hoodie shuffling along Pennsylvania Avenue near Fifteenth Street. But with the plummeting temperatures and on-and-off rain and sleet, several officers on the complex were inside their booths, trying to avoid the freezing cold.
Just after 11:20 p.m., Tran casually hopped over the five-foot-high fence on the north side of the Treasury Department, which bordered the White House lawn. The Treasury property was officially part of the White House compound and thus the Secret Service’s responsibility. At least one sensor alarm sounded at the Secret Service’s Joint Operations Center, letting the watch commander know there had been a breach somewhere on the Treasury complex. The JOC automatically relayed an alert to every guard booth and radio on the compound.
A Secret Service officer in the vicinity rushed out to the fence line. But by that point Tran was walking south along the tree-lined western border of the Treasury property, something the Secret Service colloquially called the Moat, following East Executive Drive. At the end of the Moat, Tran scaled an eight-foot-high gate that stood between him and the East Grounds of the White House. Walking a few more yards east to the main visitor entrance for White House parties, he hopped another three-and-a-half-foot fence between him and the East Wing. He stopped to tie his shoelace before moving closer.
Some of the sensors designed to detect movement on this eastern flank of the White House appeared to be either turned off or broken. These sensors’ newer technology made the alarms highly sensitive and had thus become a source of headaches for the Secret Service. The sensors generated false alarms as numerous contractors came and went in their work on a top-secret construction project on the East Grounds, so they were frequently deactivated while the work was going on. The classified project aimed to increase the president’s safety in case of a massive explosion. But with the alarms malfunctioning and often shut off, the president was even more vulnerable.
In the dark and the rain, several officers debated whether the original alert of a breach at the Treasury fence was also a false alarm. “Nothing found,” one officer radioed to the command center.
As the agents looked for signs of their mystery intruder, Tran had already made it past three manned security posts on the East Grounds and reached the eastern entrance to the mansion. He looked in the windows and tried unsuccessfully to open a door. Then he rounded the corner, heading toward the South Portico, which boasted a half dozen different doorways and an ornate marble staircase, all leading to the president’s residence. In the course of fifteen minutes, he had been able to elude a team of fifteen trained security professionals who had been alerted to a possible intruder and crossed two hundred yards of White House property without being stopped.
But then Officer Wayne Azevedo, stationed at the nearby Charlie 11 post on the South Grounds, saw a shadow move. He spotted Tran as he appeared to duck behind a pillar at the base of the portico. When Tran caught sight of an officer in black uniform, he turned and began walking briskly toward the South Lawn, away from the White House. Azevedo called out to him to stop.
“What are you doing here?” he barked.
“I am a friend of the president,” Tran said. They were now face-to-face. “I have an appointment.”
“How did you get in here?” Azevedo asked.
“I jumped the fence,” Tran said.
With that, the officer reached for his handcuffs and told Tran he was putting him under arrest. Azevedo radioed for backup, not realizing his radio wasn’t working. He then searched Tran’s pockets and discovered he had a can of mace inside his jacket. In his backpack, officers would find another can of mace, his laptop, Trump’s book, and Tran’s letter for the president. In the letter he never got to deliver, Tran said he had important information about Russian hackers. He acknowledged that some described him as schizophrenic but asserted that “third parties” had intercepted his phone and email communications. Police took Tran to the main lockup at the D.C. jail.
On Saturday morning, Gen. John Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, learned about the jumper not from the Secret Service, but from the early morning news reports. He was more than annoyed, but he kept his composure, telling his chief of staff he wanted some answers quickly from the Service’s acting director, Billy Callahan.
The general was up early that Saturday, preparing to head for a series of meetings with the president at Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, out near Dulles Airport.
The president had a fairly quiet morning that day. After a round of golf at Trump National, he summoned members of the press pool into the club to see that he was holding a luncheon “meeting” that included some of his cabinet members and their wives. One reporter asked Trump what he thought of yet another intruder getting within steps of the White House mansion.
“Secret Service did a fantastic job,” Trump declared about the jumper’s arrest. “It was a troubled person. It was very sad.”
Kelly sat at the opposite corner of the luncheon table, listening to the president’s answer with his back to the visiting reporters. He pursed his lips. Kelly was still awaiting a fuller picture of what went wrong, but “fantastic” was definitely not the word Kelly would have used based on what he knew so far. The secretary had his hands full managing the fallout from the president’s hastily announced travel ban, but he knew he had to get to the bottom of this breach. He was stunned that yet again a stranger had penetrated so deep onto the grounds, and he wanted to know why the officers on duty hadn’t nabbed him immediately.
The Secret Service leadership, however, took comfort in the president’s words. They declined to answer questions from reporters Saturday about whether all the alarms worked and how the jumper had crossed so much ground without impediment. “We’re not going to have any more for you on that,” spokesperson Catherine Milhoan said.
Out of the public eye, Kelly checked in with his chief of staff, Kirstjen Nielsen, who said the Service was dragging its feet, not giving her a full picture of what happened, saying they were still sorting through a few things. Kelly was their boss. He told Nielsen to summon Acting Director Callahan for a briefing immediately, and to bring the security tapes from Friday night. “Enough with the bits and pieces,” he said. “Get ’em over here. I want to know what we knew, what we didn’t, and what the hell happened.”
Callahan told Kelly his team was still interviewing all the officers and commanders on duty that night and working on a PowerPoint presentation. They arranged to give Kelly a full briefing that coming Friday, St. Patrick’s Day.
“Classic Secret Service,” groaned Rich Staropoli, a former agent who was working for Kelly at DHS. “If you need to do a bunch of slides in a PowerPoint to tell me what went so horrendously wrong, you’ve got a problem.”
The briefing day arrived. Kelly was horrified as he watched the tapes showing Tran’s breach and his long walk around what was supposed to be the most secure eighteen-acre property in the world.
The worst part came as Kelly saw the shoddy state of the so-called cutting-edge technology the Service had deployed to prevent any intrusion on the White House. Nearly every piece of it had failed in some way that night. A crucial sensor that normally detects movement coming over the fence line was on the fritz, so it never sounded an alarm to the Joint Operations Center. One of the motion-activated lights that were supposed to flash when someone crossed the White House grounds didn’t work. A camera in the eastern portion of the grounds where Tran entered wasn’t functioning properly. When an officer spotted Tran seventeen minutes later, the radio on his shoulder wasn’t working, so it never relayed his location to his fellow officers when he banged the radio switch to report that he had a possible suspect. They didn’t know he had found someone or where he was, so they couldn’t rush to him and provide backup.
Holy shit, this is bad, thought one of Kelly’s aides who was watching nearby. Kelly put his hand to his forehead and asked Callahan how in the world all of these systems could have failed. Callahan explained they had run out of money to repair some of these devices, but they hoped to eventually get the funds and get them repaired or replaced. Callahan and his deputies explained this was not the end of the world, because the Service had several duplicative layers of security on the grounds to protect against any single failure. Kelly just sat back for a minute, saying nothing. In this case, he reminded them, none of those extra layers, neither the officers nor the canines, had worked. Kelly saw a White House that was unacceptably vulnerable, and a Secret Service leadership that didn’t seem all that concerned. Callahan may not have worn it on his sleeve, but he did consider the breach a very serious one.
After the briefing, one of Representative Chaffetz’s investigators got a call from a whistleblower inside the Service. “You might want to know something about that jumper,” the source told the staffer. “He was on the grounds for more than fifteen minutes before we found him.”
Chaffetz called and texted me to try to let me know, but I was on an airplane to San Francisco. When the plane landed, I turned on my phone and it immediately began buzzing with backed-up texts and calls from him and Secret Service sources. It was 3:45 p.m. on the East Coast. CNN had just broken the story. The March 10 jumper had somehow gotten onto the White House grounds undetected and lingered there for seventeen minutes.
The Secret Service issued a statement that afternoon, altering considerably their previous claim that they had successfully apprehended a jumper. The statement said surveillance cameras and alarms showed that Tran had jumped over the Treasury fence at 11:21 p.m., hopped two more fences on the White House grounds, and hadn’t been found by an officer until 11:38 p.m. No longer was their performance fantastic.
“The men and women of the Secret Service are extremely disappointed and angry in how the events of March 10 transpired,” the statement read.
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THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, at Kelly’s invitation, Chaffetz came to a closed Secret Service briefing to see the videotapes of the incident that the Joint Operations Center had collected.
Just as Kelly had, Chaffetz recoiled at watching Tran jump three barriers and seeing no officers rushing to the scene. He was surprised by Tran’s relaxed demeanor. He rested against a fence. He tied his shoes. He pulled on a door handle on the East Wing. Still no officers came.
“Did you not have adequate staff on duty that night?” Chaffetz asked.
“No, sir,” Callahan said. “We staffed it the way we always do.”
Chaffetz called me later to share his reaction to the breach. He was careful not to discuss classified details about the technology the Service uses. I knew the Service had infrared and microwave sensors that ring the compound and motion sensors buried under the lawn, but he said he didn’t want to be specific about what was deployed, what failed, and what worked that night.
Chaffetz sounded resigned. “It was painful to watch,” he said. “Everyone was slow and pathetic and inadequate. This is by far the worst one and most inadequate and scary. They just didn’t respond.”
And then he took stock of the acting director.
“When I sat there looking at this individual, who had spent his entire career there, and he could not defend a single thing that happened, I had a visceral feeling,” Chaffetz said. “I appreciate that he didn’t try to excuse this. But it scared me to hear him say, ‘This is the way we’ve always done it.’ ”
Callahan years earlier had proposed cutting back the number of officers on the White House complex at times when the president was gone. The Service was under pressure to save money, and Callahan was looking for a logical place to apply the knife.
Wackrow said the failure on March 10 should have set off alarm bells throughout the Trump White House. It proved the Secret Service had failed to fix the problems that had been laid bare back in September 2014.
“The talking point from the Secret Service is that this is a success,” Wackrow said of Tran’s capture. “It was a success by default. Your success shouldn’t be predicated on the attacker’s failure. This is absolute negligence on the part of Bill Callahan and Joseph Clancy….The fence is the same size, technology is obviously failing, the training must not be working. It’s a fundamental failure on every level.”
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MIKE WHITE WAS BEAT.
That March 10 weekend started off badly for the Secret Service. The security level had been raised to Condition Red just before midnight on Friday because Tran had reached the East Wing while the president was sleeping upstairs. The breach prompted agents to swarm toward the president’s bedroom on the second floor just in case. As the special agent in charge of Trump’s detail, White had to quickly gather the essential facts and share them with the president.
That weekend only got worse for the Secret Service, and for White as the bearer of bad news. White had a special touch, supporting his agents while also working well to find common ground with White House staff. It had been his calling card and helped explain why he’d been working on presidential protection so much longer than most. But in this moment, he couldn’t come up with a way to justify what his agents had done.
On Saturday, March 11, while the president was praising the Service’s “fantastic” response to Tran’s fence jumping the previous night, Trump’s eight-year-old grandson was feeling quite the opposite about the agents assigned to protect him.
That afternoon, Donald Trump III had fallen asleep in the back of his Secret Service detail’s sport utility vehicle. Two agents, one from the Nashville office, another from the Atlanta office, had been driving him home from some activity. Donnie awoke to find one of the protective agents in the back of the truck with him, and another chuckling. The agent appeared to have snapped selfies with his famous young charge.
The boy felt both afraid and uncomfortable. When he got home, he told his mother, Vanessa Trump, “I don’t like those guys. They were taking pictures of me.”
His mother was stunned, but she focused first on asking questions to make sure Donnie was okay. When she got to talk to her husband, Donald Trump, Jr., later that weekend, she laid out what happened. The president’s son hit the roof.
“What?” he said. “Are you serious?”
His mind raced, as Vanessa’s had, wondering if the agents were some kind of deviants. She said their son reported only the selfies, no touching or anything else. Because the Service was so strapped covering all the president’s extended family and extensive travel, the Trump family members didn’t have a set group of agents they got to know. Instead the Service sent a rotating set of agents from various field offices every few weeks to shepherd each family member to school, work, social events, and other trips.
Vanessa and Donald Trump, Jr., had to wait until Sunday night to talk to a top supervisor about what had happened. The supervisor assured the president’s son that he would alert headquarters and they would investigate immediately. “He called it in to headquarters. They told the agents, ‘We want your phones. We want to polygraph you,’ ” one former agent said. “They were trying to figure out—did they send it somewhere?”
The two agents on the grandson’s detail were called in for interviews with investigators at headquarters and relinquished their phones to prove they had not forwarded any selfies of the president’s grandson.
