Washington DC, Jan.20, 2021, 3 p.m.
David Cho repeated this moment a hundred times in his head, and almost as many times on the spot.
To say he is on the alert is an understatement.
At this precise moment, he plays his career, his reputation, his life.
He plays them constantly, to be honest, but this moment is unique in that it is the most dangerous of an already delicate day.
Continuing a tradition inaugurated in 1977 by Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden has just stepped out of his presidential Cadillac and begins to walk along Pennsylvania Avenue, in order to reach what will be his residence and his office for the next four years: the White House.
Behind him, his whole family.
On the sides, behind barriers, a handful of officials and handpicked journalists, whom he comes to greet with a leap.
All around him, about fifteen bodyguards, led by David Cho, appointed a few weeks earlier head of the presidential guard, one of the most senior positions in the Secret Service.
Square face, brush hair, this American of Korean origin remains permanently in the shadow of his protege.
With their suit and tie, their badge resembling a sheriff's star, their sunglasses screwed to their noses - in order to scrutinize the suspects without attracting attention - and their finger on the headset, he and his men form the body of elite in charge of the security of the American president.
"Zero Fail", no room for error
Tension is inherent in their job, and the slightest mistake can prove fatal.
Two weeks after the assault on Capitol Hill by supporters of Donald Trump, this inauguration is the most electric the country has seen in the years following the Civil War.
In total, 25,000 National Guardsmen have been deployed, armored vehicles block the streets, drones and helicopters crisscross the sky, snipers are in position on all the surrounding rooftops, and no less than seven armored Cadillacs have been taken out of the garage for transport the 46th president, his vice president Kamala Harris and three of his predecessors (but not Donald Trump, who is boycotting the ceremony from his rococo palace in Mar-a-Lago, Florida).
On January 20, when Joe Biden was inaugurated in Washington, the presidential limousine was supervised by Secret Service agents.
Getty Images / Justin Sullivan
Hard to imagine more secure.
And, in fact, no incident will be deplored, demonstrating the effectiveness of these exceptional bodyguards, whose unofficial motto is "Zero Fail", "zero fault".
A daily requirement that does not suffer from any loopholes.
Particularly during the “National Special Security Events”, these large-scale events during which the Secret Service becomes the most powerful agency in the Nation.
Its agents then have access to all the information transmitted by the various agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA…), coordinate the forces involved, and show their muscles.
"Some means put in place must remain invisible, but it is essential that others be visible to have a dissuasive effect", explains Jonathan Wackrow, member of the Secret Service from 2001 to 2014, now a security consultant.
It hasn't always been that way.
When Abraham Lincoln moved into his private box at the Ford Theater in Washington on April 14, 1865, to attend the play "Our American Cousin," he cared little for his safety.
Despite the constant death threats he has received since he abolished slavery five years earlier, and despite the advice of his generals, he refuses to surround himself with bodyguards.
He thinks that a president must remain close to his people, accessible.
Ironically, the Secret Service, which it has just created, then has the sole mission of combating the endemic circulation of counterfeit money.
So that night John Wilkes Booth, a white supremacist, had no trouble breaking into the theater and shooting Lincoln in the head with his 44-caliber Derringer. The country was in shock, but that is not enough to convince his successors of the need for close protection.
Sixteen years later, at Baltimore station, President James A. Garfield was attacked by a madman and died shortly after from poorly treated gunshot wounds.
It was not until 1901, when William McKinley, the 25th American president, was killed by an anarchist of Polish origin - still in the middle of the street in Buffalo, and again with a gunshot - that Congress finally decides to entrust to the Secret Service the mission which is its today, although the fight against financial fraud and counterfeit money remains in its attributions.
An act of heroism that saves the life of Ronald Reagan
During the first secure investiture by the Secret Service, in 1905, only twelve agents protected Theodore Roosevelt.
Today, there are 3,200, including 1,300 uniformed officers (or Uniformed Division, the White House police).
The rest are split between analysts (who collect and process information, often behind desks) and field agents, of whom only a small part, on a rotating basis, actually sits alongside the president - their exact number is not publicly known. .
All for a colossal annual budget of 2.2 billion dollars (nearly 2 billion euros).
By way of comparison, the GSPR, which protects the French president, has 70 men and costs the taxpayer 8 million euros per year.
But in the United States, a country that has made the carrying of arms a constitutional right, violence can arise anywhere, anytime.
Morning essentials newsletter
A tour of the news to start the day
Subscribe to the newsletterAll newsletters
Few democracies where so many heads of state have been assassinated (four, the most recent being John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in 1963), or seriously injured, without even mentioning the countless foiled or aborted attempts.
On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan left the Hilton hotel in Washington DC where he had just delivered a speech to labor organizations.
He waves to the crowd before getting into his armored Lincoln Continental.
On March 30, 1981, in Washington, a madman named John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan.
A Secret Service agent takes a bullet while protecting the president.
Historical / Corbis / Getty
Suddenly, a man armed with a revolver, John Hinckley Jr., emerges and empties his barrel on the delegation.
Of the six bullets fired, only one hit Ronald Reagan, puncturing his left lung, as one of his bodyguards pushes him into the car, and another agent, Timothy McCarthy, is shot for his president. , saving him from certain death.
A policeman and White House spokesman James Brady are also injured, in what could have turned out to be an absolute catastrophe, but remains, to this day, an emblematic example of the heroism of Secret Service agents .
Only an elite can join this unit
In such a dangerous context, only an elite can claim to join this unit.
Each year, more than 15,000 apply for an average of 200 job openings.
When Mary Beth Wilkas Janke filed a case in 1989, she was 23 years old, had no children or husband, perfect physical condition and a master's degree in criminal law.
Since childhood, she dreams of embracing a career in the Federal Police, and therefore presented herself in the various agencies.
The process is long, each file is scrutinized.
The young woman first failed at the doors of the FBI, but, in 1991, after two years of investigation of her file, a recruiting agent of the Secret Service announced good news to her: she was admitted in training, with a position in the key if she completes it safely.
As her interlocutor confided to her, she had the perfect profile, especially since she spoke fluent Spanish, a rare resource at the time.
As for its gender, it has not been discriminatory for about twenty years, even if machismo remains common in this service, which still has only 10% of women today.
In 2002, at the James J. Rowley training center, near Washington, a dog was trained to detect explosives under the watchful eye of George W. Bush./Ron Edmonds / AP / SIPA
At the Federal Agent Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, she trained for over eight months in hand-to-hand combat - she practiced systema, a martial art pioneered by the KGB!
-, the handling of weapons, interrogation techniques, information research, first aid, law ... In short, everything that will make her an infallible agent.
"A protection agent rather than a bodyguard," she insists on clarifying, because it is not enough to follow the person to be protected and to dissuade by his physical presence.
There is a lot of research and organization work upstream, and adaptation to variable scenarios downstream.
It's also an intellectual job ”, she explained at the exit of her book,“ The Protector ”, in which she looked back on her career.
Every flaw is tracked down
Like all future agents, Mary Beth Wilkas Janke is subjected to the most advanced lie detectors in the world, tasked with tracking down the smallest loophole.
It is not uncommon for some to crack before the end of the training, ruthless.
And even those who go to the end know that, regularly, during their career, they will have to go through this intensive training box.
Two weeks every two months for field agents.
Everything is going well for Wilkas, as his colleagues call him.
Until this day in 1992, when, on a mission to protect the grandchildren of George Bush senior, she received a phone call from her superior.
The latter informs her that she must return immediately to Washington for an interview, "in order to clarify certain elements of her past".
She who starts her career so brilliantly cannot imagine what awaits her.
A sleuth in the service responsible for combing each profile noticed that Mary Beth had, during her candidacy, confessed to having smoked hashish when she lived in Spain.
The Secret Service also accuses her of having, as a teenager, stolen Easter eggs from a store, and of not having specified it in her file.
The agent is justified, but nothing helps, her dismissal is notified to her a few weeks later.
"Zero tolerance" is not a phrase to be taken lightly within the Secret Service.
Exhausting work, total self-sacrifice
Even those who do not experience such mishaps rarely make old bones.
With overtime, stress, family difficulties, careers - physically and morally exhausting - rarely last more than twelve years.
Sometimes twenty years, exceptionally.
Dan Emmett stayed for twenty-one years.
He protected George Bush father and son, as well as Bill Clinton.
A task that requires self-sacrifice and a sense of sacrifice.
"Not sleeping for twenty-four hours, skipping lunch and dinner, guarding the door of a house all night in the rain, taking an airplane, catching up on one or two hours of sleep there, securing the premises on arrival. … And do it again for several days in a row, he says in his book “I Am a Secret Service Agent”.
And to complete the picture, it is quite possible that this will happen during your wedding anniversary!
"
The Secret Service also ensures the protection of presidential candidates.
Like here Donald Trump, in March 2016./Luke Sharrett / Bloomberg / Getty
Most agents then retrain in the private sector, and use their skills in the service of VIPs or companies.
After her lightning stint in the civil service, Mary Beth Wilkas Janke worked for Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (at the height of the civil war, in the 1990s) and for the Versace family (after the assassination of the founder of the brand, Gianni).
She does not reveal her salary at the time, but it was undoubtedly still higher than the 140,000 dollars (115,000 euros) a year that an agent of the Secret Service earns, on average.
For security, budgets are "unlimited"
Money is in any case not a problem when it comes to ensuring the safety of the President of the United States - or rather presidents, since their protection is guaranteed for life.
The resources implemented are considerable.
The White House would thus have been added a second underground bunker, between 2010 and 2012, at the instigation of Barack Obama, for the modest sum of $ 375 million.
The first, built by Franklin D. Roosevelt at the start of World War II, was apparently not deep enough to withstand a modern nuclear attack.
The information remains in the conditional, because few elements have filtered.
We simply know that, in June 2020, in the heart of the Black Lives Matter protests, Donald Trump boasted of having taken refuge there for a few hours.
According to Ronald Kessler, journalist and author of "In the President's Secret Service", this shelter, located under the north lawn, would be buried more than 15 m and would meet the best current standards.
President Joe Biden boards the Air Force One plane on February 16.
In the background, David Cho, Chief of the Presidential Guard. / Doug Mills / The New York Times / REA
When Potus (acronym for "President of the United States") moves, he can count on one of the two Air Force One, completely refitted Boeing 747s and equipped with ultra-sophisticated security devices, such as a radar jammer or decoys intended to deceive possible homing missiles.
Each of them is a real small mobile White House: 370 m2 spread over three floors, with a presidential suite, offices, a conference room capable of accommodating 70 people, food reserves for several months, and even a room. operation with a surgeon and a nurse always on board.
The aircraft can be refueled and stay in the sky for as long as needed.
Despite its imposing size, and its armor capable of withstanding radiation, Air Force One is able to approach the sound barrier.
Joe Biden, who took it for the first time on February 5, was never allowed to go up there when he was vice president, the rule forbidding the two heads of the state to share the same flight For safety reasons.
"The Beast", a car worthy of a James Bond
On the roads, the president also has a mobile fortress: “The Beast”.
This is the nickname given to the armored limousines specially built by Cadillac.
They cost 1.5 million dollars each (1.25 million euros), and the fleet has a dozen.
Supposed to be indestructible, capable of withstanding a mine or a rocket, “the Beast” is also surrounded by a veil of shadow, its exact characteristics being classified as “secret-defense”.
Regularly modernized, it has nonetheless revealed some of its mysteries over the years.
Car magazine "The Drive" describes it as a "real James Bond car," equipped with smoke screens, oil jets, tear gas, electric shocks, and even (rumored) a Automatic submachine gun placed in the trunk, in order to sow possible attackers.
Blood bags of the same type as the president's are kept in a refrigerator.
No one has needed such features yet, but the role of the Secret Service is to provide for everything.
Including, why not, a zombie apocalypse!
Such a scenario was considered by the Pentagon, under the code name of CONOP 8888. A far-fetched hypothesis, but still studied, in case ...
The fear of infiltration
Since the attack on the Capitol on January 6, unprecedented in American history, the tension has risen a notch in the corridors of 950 H Street, at the headquarters of the service.
"There are permanently all kinds of terrorist threats, foreign or domestic, from the right and the left", relativizes JJ Hensley, former agent specializing in recruitment.
Before admitting that "the risk of an attack perpetrated by white supremacists is today more real than ever".
Without even considering the most extreme assumptions, the Secret Service wonders: how can the president move normally in a country where a third of the voters consider that Joe Biden is a usurper having stolen his victory?
What particularly worries its leaders is the possibility of a lack of loyalty on the part of certain agents, or even of infiltration.
After the January 6 uprising, an investigation was opened about an officer who encouraged “patriots to take action” on Facebook.
Although all agents are regularly subjected to the lie detector and undergo a "background check" (a thorough investigation) every five to seven years, it is entirely possible, underlines JJ Hensley, "to become radicalized in less time. that ".
In 2020, following a 9/11 memorial service in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, two officers stopped a man on the tarmac trying to approach candidate Biden./Chip Somodevilla / Getty
To deal with this eventuality, Joe Biden, even before the nomination, proceeded to a thorough cleaning of his personal guard, recalling to him those who had protected him during his two terms of vice-president.
And the current Service boss, James Murray, should soon make his way to a man of confidence, Leonza Newsome, who led Obama's protection squad.
David Cho, affectionately known by his compatriots as the “second Joe” (“ch” being pronounced “j” in Korean) has escaped the purge.
Better, he was promoted to the head of the presidential guard.
His extreme rigor and his sense of detail have made him essential.
The man had demonstrated his effectiveness by brilliantly organizing the historic meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, in 2019. A mission that had earned him the gold medal of the Department of Homeland Security (the equivalent of our ministry of Interior), in 2019. Joe Biden can be reassured, David Cho and his men are watching.
