Why The Pope’s Visit Will Be A Security Nightmare

During my twelve years as a Secret Service agent there was no “protectee” under the Secret Service security umbrella with a higher threat profile than the Pope. I have clear memories of my first days as a new agent in June of 1999, and the chaos around the New York field office as they cleaned up after Pope John Paul’s visit to St. Louis. It was an impressive security operation and, although the New York field office was many miles away from St. Louis, and nearly six months had passed, the remnants of the security operation were still everywhere around the office. When I asked a senior agent in the office about the magnitude of the security footprint around the Pope I recall him saying, “Billions of Catholics would be very upset with us if he got hurt.”

The “Big Six” Threat Assessment

The Secret Service doesn’t have the luxury of a second-rate security plan with protectees carrying with them the threat profile of the Pope. The Papal visit is an all-hands-on-deck type of security operation which I used to break down according to, what I referred to, as “the big six” threat mitigation model.

When I conducted security advances, where the threat level was critical, I broke down the threats and the threat mitigation measures according to these six categories; tactical assaults, medical emergencies, chemical/biological attacks, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks, airborne threats, and fire emergencies. Further complicating the security plan was that each of these six threats to the protectee required an “A to Z” mitigation plan where if “Option A” failed, then we had multiple fail-safes built in to the plan to prevent any security lapses from materializing (as a side note: this is the reason that the infamous White House fence-jumping incident was such a shock to my former colleagues in the Secret Service who are intimately familiar with the many “fail-safes” built into the White House security plan which had worked successfully for decades but which, tragically, all broke down simultaneously).

Mapping Out The Routes

Using motorcades and transportation routes as an example, the Secret Service has to plan for all of the six aforementioned threats, and the associated countermeasures, along every point of the Pope’s transportation route which will likely be many miles long. The logistics of this alone kept me up until the late hours of the night, and for weeks at a time, when I was assigned to the transportation section of the Presidential Protective Division. I drove those motorcade routes so many times that they became as familiar as your route home from work is to you. Everything on that motorcade route becomes a potential “safe area,” or an alternate escape route when there is no room for error.

High Threat Profiles & Accessibility

A number of other factors make this specific Papal visit a security nightmare for the Secret Service. Of all of the Secret Service protectees, both domestic and foreign, the Pope has a threat profile which is among the highest. The Secret Service allocates its manpower, equipment, financial, and administrative assets according to the threat profile of the protectee, and this Papal visit will strain all of those resource categories.

The manpower assets will come from the Counter Assault Team (CAT), which acts as the Secret Service special weapons team, the Counter Sniper (CS) team, specialized communications teams, hazmat teams and a variety of federal, state and local law enforcement personnel who will assist in the design and implementation of the plan. This has the potential to create a nightmarish scenario for the Secret Service because all of these manpower assets are, by design, overt.

Pope Francis shuns this type of overt security presence and prefers a lighter, more discreet, security footprint which allows him to openly mix and mingle in large crowds of people. This is simply not workable using current Secret Service security methodologies and the significant threat profile the Pope carries with him. There is no way to “hide” thousands of uniformed police officers, earpiece wearing Secret Service agents, BDU-clad CAT team and CS members and their associated equipment to make the Pope appear more accessible.

My experience in situations such as this, where protectees prefer a low-key approach, (Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate run in New York comes to mind) is that security takes a back seat to concerns about the ‘optics’ of the security. Worrying about how the security operation ‘looks’ rather than how the security operation functions, is a recipe for failure and I wish the Secret Service protectees understood this before declaring that they want to be more ‘accessible.’

The Secret Service security model is accustomed to working with crowds and granting those crowds accessibility, within reason. With the current macro-threat environment (threats not specific to the Pope) from ISIS, Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, and other terrorist groups, combined with the number of very specific threats from these groups, and other independent actors looking to do harm to the Pope, this is not time for concerns about ‘visuals’ and ‘optics,’ it’s time to focus on a responsible, comprehensive security plan that will ensure that the world’s billions of Catholics can enjoy the visit and not concern themselves with the Pope’s safe

EDITORS NOTE: This op-ed column originally appeared in the Conservative Review. The featured image is of a U.S. Secret Service detail. Source: Andrew Harnik | AP Photo.

3 replies
  1. Karel
    Karel says:

    Like very celebrity the pope needs his security too. But whoever wants this guy around, I mean its Joseph Ratzinger from the SS. He served in my country killing jews. This is no man of god right? God does not allow you to kill.

    Reply

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