By Sally Sara: The director of the US Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, has resigned over the agency’s failure to prevent the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. Ms. Cheatle stood down after blistering questions from a congressional committee investigating the security failures at the Trump rally at Butler, Pennsylvania. The shooting has focused scrutiny on the Secret Service as political divisions deepen in the US. Bill Gage is a former Secret Service agent who protected Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He now works for Safe Haven Security Group.
Bill Gage: The agency never, ever, ever wants the spotlight on them. Okay, they want to be in the background. This incident has put the spotlight on them and that’s not where they want to be. The agency needs to move on so they can focus on their mission and just do their job.
Sally Sara: Bill, when we look at the attempted assassination itself, how significant were the failures that that could happen at an event like that?
Bill Gage: Typically in these critical incidents, and I’ve been involved in many, many critical incidences in my law enforcement career, there’s rarely one thing that causes it. It’s usually a cascading series of events that happen that sort of compound, and then there’s one apex event. This just cannot happen again.
Sally Sara: When they do an advance assessment of a location for a rally like this, have you been through that kind of process yourself?
Bill Gage: Yeah, yeah, many times. These sort of events are driven by the candidate or the President’s staff, and so you really don’t have a lot of choice as an agent. You’re just told, hey, you have three days to prepare for this, get on it. The Secret Service would like a minimum of a week for a domestic advance for a site such as Butler, Pennsylvania, but it doesn’t always happen.
Sally Sara: Was it a dangerous site, an inherently dangerous site, given it’s quite open?
Bill Gage: Well, any outdoor event has inherent danger because there’s so many blind spots, and I will say when I first joined the Secret Service in 2002, there weren’t a lot of outdoor events, and the further we got away from 9-11, I did start to notice a lot of politicians almost became addicted to these outdoor events because you can pack in thousands and thousands of people. Obama one time did an outdoor event at the University of Michigan, and it’s one of the largest stadiums in the country. It holds over 100,000 people, and Obama packed the house, and that was the largest outdoor event the Service had worked at that point, so the outdoor events are very, very difficult to secure.
Sally Sara: How exhausting is it for the agents to be so alert for such a long period of time in such a big and complicated environment like these big rallies?
Bill Gage: Yeah, yeah, great question. Very, very difficult because a lot of times as an agent, you might do three or four cities in a day. Each of these events, you have to switch on, and so it takes a lot of mental discipline. I went to a training course once in the Secret Service. We actually had a nuclear submarine captain come and talk. It was a leadership class, and he was talking about during the Cold War how you would just train and train and train and train and train, training for this one event that may not ever, ever happen. He equated it to being a Secret Service agent because you train and train and train, and you’re just constantly on the knife’s edge just waiting for this event to happen and how much discipline that requires.
Sally Sara: How do agents deal with a sense of failure when an incident like this has unfolded, that the plans haven’t worked, that shots have got through?
Bill Gage: You know, I’ve been at events when balloons are popping, and it immediately gets your attention, and you think it’s a shot, and it’s very, very difficult to know the difference. It takes a few seconds for that kind of what’s happening to register, and then for you to take action.
Sally Sara: What kind of people are drawn to this work, and what’s the sense of camaraderie amongst those who are willing to do this?
Bill Gage: You know, the Secret Service is vital to the functioning of our democracy because our elected leaders in the United States have to make decisions based on their best judgment and not on the threat of violence, and so I joined the service because I was a young boy and I watched the Reagan assassination unfold on TV, and I remember being just a young boy and asking my dad, you know, hey, dad, who are those guys in suits that are getting shot? And I just thought that was a very admirable and noble profession.
Sally Sara: That’s Bill Gage there. He’s a former US Secret Service agent who now works for Safe Haven Security Group.
