We will defend America while protecting the freedoms that define America. Our strategies and actions will be consistent with the individual rights and liberties enshrined by our Constitution and the Rule of Law. While we seek to improve the way we collect and share information about terrorists, we will nevertheless be vigilant in respecting the confidentiality and protecting the privacy of our citizens. We are committed to securing our nation while protecting civil rights and civil liberties.
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY STRATEGIC PLAN, 20041
Day-to-day, as president of the United States, Barack Obama lives between the lines. Like all modern presidents before him, but increasingly and inexorably more so, he lives in a bubble, working and residing at 18 Acres, as the insiders call the White House complex. The residence, the family quarters upstairs on the second floor, has its own kitchen and the requisite trappings of normal life; there is even some modicum of privacy. But this is no normal life.
Discreetly yet intimately one step away is the president’s protective detail. For the Secret Service, presidential duty is the job of the very best, with an attitude of protection to match: “Presidents are only people who live and breathe like anyone else,” one former agent writes, “but they are worth dying for if necessary due to the office they hold. The office of the presidency must be protected at all cost.”2
The president is the man in the middle; it’s not exactly a pyramid that he stands on top of, as there are so many equal partners directly subordinate to him that the shape seems inappropriate. Yet the disparity in importance between him and everyone else is almost astronomical. In service with this mission, the Secret Service builds a bubble wherever the president travels, whether to Camp David for a weekend getaway or on a state visit to China. Since 9/11, the Secret Service has hired hundreds of new agents, doubling in size since the days of the Reagan assassination attempt, its budget growing in that time from a few hundred million dollars to $1.5 billion. Whenever the president goes, the Secret Service takes control of an additional reserve of local and state police (trumping all other activities), other federal law enforcement officers, and dedicated intelligence watchers who have a priority call on the most sensitive intercepts and agent reports; also included are military specialists in radiation detection, explosive ordnance disposal, weapons disablement, and more. And lurking behind these men in the sunglasses is the shadow team, the crisis action team of snipers, and an in extremis force, always at the ready.
The next ring around the president is made up of the operational units of the White House Military Office, also one step away and just as intimate, but with a different mission and task. Established in 1957, the WHMO was originally fewer than fifty people taking care of President Eisenhower’s communications, transportation, and medical care. Through 2001, that number grew to some 800 strong, and since 9/11, it has more than quadrupled in size, reorganizing into seven operational units made up of almost 2,500 individuals, mostly military personnel but heavily influenced by a permanent cadre of civil servants of the gray man variety. These days they are also supported by over 2,000 civilian contractors from more than a dozen private companies, the majority of them technicians in communications, IT, and other basic services; but also others deeply involved in the counterterrorism and continuity tasks created and expanded in the past decade.3
The WHMO is Air Force One and the other coded and numbered conveyances, the famous armored limousines (nicknamed “the beast”), and the exclusive Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the East Wing (the aboveground White House Situation Room belongs to the National Security Staff). The White House Military Office provides support, in its own words, for the “President of the United States (POTUS) in his role as Commander in Chief (CINC), Chief Executive Officer of the United States, and Head of State; and other elements related to the President” including the vice president, the First Lady, the First Family, the Secret Service, the White House staff, the White House Press Office, the National Security Council, “and others as directed,” a complex topology that opens the way for the Program and the envelope bearers.4
The worker bees of the WHMO are the technicians of the White House Communications Agency, the crew of the airlift and helicopter units, the doctors and trauma specialists from the medical unit, and the drivers of the White House Transportation Agency. The top of the top, the elite of the elite, are the five military aides to the president, one from each service, field-grade officers of major to lieutenant colonel and commander rank—“fast burners,” as military types like to say, officers on their way to becoming admirals and generals. They work directly for the man himself, always there, impeccably uniformed, carrying the football in hand. They among all the staff—indeed, among everyone on the planet—exclusively carry the decision documents and the emergency checklists and, these days, digital copies, of all the laws, the letters and envelopes of the secret world, the directives, the findings, the plans, and the predicted consequences—as well as the unique set of codes that would be used if the president issued emergency orders, implemented contingency plans, authorized continuity actions, or approved the use of nuclear weapons.5
Only bits and pieces are known about what really goes on with the football today, what “the biscuit”—the president’s codes—really looks like and how it works, how Obama’s BlackBerry is tied in, or how the contents of the football—computers, modems, radios, cell and satellite phones, and other modern accoutrements—have been modified for today’s threats and today’s technologies; and that’s the way the American government and military like it.
The military aides to the president are formally assigned to the WHMO, but the organization that formally works the procedures and technologies behind nuclear control orders and emergency action messages is actually something called the Center for National and Nuclear Leadership Command Capabilities, a Pentagon-run conglomeration of seven federal departments and agencies, which is itself just a staff organization reporting to the Strategic Command in Omaha, which in turn reports to the secretary of defense, who ultimately reports to the president or one of his constitutional successors, except in cases where the secretary—as one-half of the National Command Authority 6—is authorized to take independent actions, presumably only when the United States is under nuclear attack. In such instances, the secretary of defense can call upon his own football carrier, with his own central locator system identifying the status and location of every successor,7 and then he can open the symbolic final envelope, follow the guidance from the president, and push the figurative button, all on his own.
The secretary in theory can do this all by himself, with no discussion with the president, though the assumptions of this extralegal world—and even the mechanisms involved (there is no literal button to push)—demand that they consult, which is to say that the assumption is that if the secretary had to take independent action, no one down the chain of command would question why, so obvious would be the reasons. Since the assassination attempt on President Reagan’s life, the vice president also has his own military aides and football, and constitutionally can only act if sworn in upon the president’s death or disability, but again, though he has the accoutrements of independent action, the Program serves as the fail-safe. In other words, an extralegal governing mechanism to preserve constitutional sanctity makes the Constitution irrelevant.
The closest thing to any consistent headquarters of the Program is the White House Military Office, itself quasimilitary, quasicivilian, and practically off the books, partly funded and peopled by bits and pieces of the Pentagon and intelligence budgets but also host to multiple special-access programs of supersecrecy and limited access and enormous privilege.8 The working-class stiffs who make up the Program—even if they are elite Category 1 personnel and wearers of the proper lapel pins that give them access to intimate events—are meant to be seen and not heard. If that sounds like a comment about class, it is. They have a job to do and are distinguished from the president’s people, who are the temporary and temperamental dwellers who come in (and then go) with each election. From the chief of staff and the national security advisor all the way down to the gofers and interns, these guests might also be an inner circle, but it is the Program staff that clears and approves their presence; who gets to be a “tan badger,” the privileged one with unescorted access.
An enormous mass backs up all of this and is never many steps beyond: thousands (and ultimately tens of thousands) who toil away at the White House and Camp David and the top command centers and the government bunkers and emergency relocation sites, each with a role to play in the XYZ contingency plans: the WHMO Operations Plan, FUNCPLAN 2400 and the Joint Emergency Evacuation Plan (or JEEP), the Rescue and Security of the Occupants of the Executive Mansion (RESEM) Plan, the White House Emergency Action Plan, the Continuity of Government Support Plan, the Nuclear Incident Contingency Plan, the Chemical/Biological Incident Contingency Plan, the National Cyber Incident Response Plan, the national mission force’s Power Geyser WMD render safe plans; and OPLAN 8044, the offensive nuclear war plan. The outlines, designs, and authorities to implement these contingency plans are only vaguely known outside the Program and the executive agent class—the important point being how many simultaneous plans there are and how many people it takes to tend to their care and feeding.
When President Obama came into office and announced that his administration would cease using the term “global war on terror” in favor of the bureaucratic mouthful “overseas contingency operations,” the city that fights to the death over the differences between phrases like “homeland security” and “homeland defense” took it to be merely a marker that a new team was in town, a hopeful bunch intent on lowering the national volume. Obama followed up with a promise of abandoning the dark side, with pledges of transparency, and with a call for nuclear disarmament.
Obama’s new homeland security secretary, the tough-talking Janet Napolitano, followed suit, avoiding the word “terrorism” in speeches and congressional testimony, saying “man-caused disasters” and threats “natural and man-made,” prompting some partisan scolding. Terrorism “can’t be the evil we don’t speak about,” said New York Representative Peter King, then chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. “Any testimony on homeland security should be centered around the threat of terrorism and what we’re doing to combat it.”
Not to worry, Napolitano’s spokesman shot back. “Anyone who doesn’t understand that she’s talking about terrorism when she says her mission is to protect the American people from threats both foreign and domestic clearly needs a study guide.”9
For the former Arizona governor, border control loomed large in all risks. “I have walked, flown over, and ridden horseback along our southwest border,” she said. “I appreciate its vastness, as well as the grave consequences of our broken system.”10
The executive agents were all about grave consequences. They briefed the new secretary about natural disasters, infrastructure protection, transportation security, intelligence sharing, consequence management, risk analysis, weapons of mass destruction, money laundering, human trafficking, continuity, and essential fodder for the second decade of the forever war, cybersecurity. Presented with a flood of action directives ordering dozens of reviews of these areas,11 Napolitano got into the spirit, publicly musing about the threat from a pandemic, later warning the country about “a big influx” of swine flu cases, nattering on about cyberthreats. A reporter asked her if somehow the department—founded with the very justification of needing a federal lead to fight terrorism—was straying. Homeland Security, Napolitano responded, had “a very broad mission”—multitasking, she sarcastically called it.12 In the view of the executive agents, she done good.
And the president, he done even better. Obama appointed the former secretary of the army—and hallowed executive agent—Louis Caldera as his political man at the top (just as Bush had designated his own political man, Joe Hagin). Obama declared national security and homeland security one—even combining the different White House staffs,13 ranking the greatest risks to the “security of the nation”—acts of terrorism, cyberattacks, pandemics, and “catastrophic natural disasters,” in that order.14 “A potential game changer would be a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists, blowing up a major American city,” Obama said in an early interview. “Or a weapon of mass destruction in a major American city… and so when I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that’s one area where you can’t afford any mistakes. And so right away, coming in, we said, how are we going to start ramping up and putting that at the center of a lot of our national security discussion? Making sure that that occurrence, even if remote, never happens.”15
A year into the new administration, the bipartisan WMD Commission released its second report, “The Clock Is Ticking,” concluding that the United States was closer to a possible attack than it had predicted even in 2008. The commission gave the government a failing grade on bioterrorism preparedness,16 concluding that BioWatch wasn’t good enough, nor were general disease surveillance efforts, which equated to a failure of collective awareness and preparation in either the medical establishment or the university public health systems. The Obama administration agreed: more would be needed, improvement was promised.17
The National Security Strategy prepared for and signed by Barack Obama in May 2010 conformed to the continuum: the United States faced “no greater or more urgent danger” than a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon. Effective dissemination of a lethal biological agent within a US city, it went on to say, would endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and have unprecedented economic, societal, and political consequences.18 In just the first two years of the Obama administration, three new plans were added to the WMD lineup: the Federal Interagency Improvised Nuclear Device Concept Plan, the Federal Strategic Guidance Statement for Chemical Attacks in the United States, and the Planning Guidance for Response to a Nuclear Detonation in the United States.
Invisible to the public and with Congress oblivious, as head of the WHMO Caldera oversaw the Program: initiating the legal reviews, intimate with the president behind the scenes, traveling with him on almost every out-of-town trip. Until April 27. Barely three months into the Obama administration, a Boeing 747 airframe painted in the colors of Air Force One and accompanied by two F-16 fighter jets appeared in the skies over New York harbor, making an otherwise routine publicity flight to take a picture of the plane with the Statue of Liberty in the background. At about ten o’clock on a brilliantly sunny morning, the giant airliner dropped down to 1,000 feet. The immediate reaction of those who saw it in the skies over New York and New Jersey was to envision another terrorist attack, with the fighter jets streaking to shoot down the plane. Buildings were evacuated, people flooded into the streets in panic. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg fumed, and a “furious” Obama accepted Caldera’s resignation on May 8.
When the administration announced that Caldera’s deputy, George D. Mulligan, Jr., would become the new director of the White House Military Office, the media reported the Statue of Liberty incident as some cuckoo PR scheme gone bad, oblivious to the fact that Caldera was there to beef up the XYZ because of the ever present threat of another 9/11 and completely out to lunch about how his replacement put the running of the Program back in the professional ranks of a real gray man. The media applauded that Caldera’s replacement wasn’t some political hack. As did the president. “George brings decades of experience and has served with integrity and a deep commitment to his country—not just in his role at the White House Military Office, but throughout his distinguished career,” Obama said.19 Mulligan, a retired naval officer, had been deputy director since 2005 and had served in various WHMO positions since 1994. He was the classic invisible man who would become the new first among equals, the new number one executive agent.20
Then, in June 2013, Obama appointed trusted insider Emmett S. Beliveau to replace Mulligan, who was going back to the Pentagon. Beliveau had been with the president since day one at the White House, director of advance and deputy in the chief of staff’s office. Obama’s man would take his training wheels off and follow in the footsteps of Hagin and Caldera as the executive agent extraordinaire, political overseer of a Program crying out for supervision by the elected but one still wholly between the lines.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss—or perhaps more accurately: new boss, meet the old boss.