Free Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top-Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away From It All by Dan Bongino Page B

requirement and though it was the last step until I could reach my ultimate goal, it was going to add months and potentially years of additional protection time to my career, a prospect I was not looking forward to. An agent’s time on a protection detail, regardless of who the protectee is, is the most stressful portion of his service. It involves travel to extremely dangerous parts of the world with limited protection for yourself, extremely early wake-up times, long periods without eating or drinking or access to bathrooms, and a life that revolves around the schedule of the protectee and not your own. In addition, the sacrifices your family is either willingly or unwillingly co-opted into are enormous. No family event is sacred within the Secret Service, and “luxuries” like attending your children’s birthday parties or watching the joy in their eyes as they open gifts on Christmas mornings always take a backseat to your duties.
    There are various positions within the DPD and I was hastily assigned to the operations section. I was selected for this position because of my experience in the operations section of the training center, and it was common knowledge in the Secret Service that once you were labeled as a quality “ops guy,” it stuck with you. This was going to be different for me, though. The operations section in the training center required me to handle scheduling issues and trainee affairs, not protection logistics. I had never been assigned to a full-time protective detail before and had little knowledge or on-the-job training with regard to managing its operations. I began to feverishly research the job requirements and make calls to friends for advice. Protection details are unique operational outfits that have their own jargon, rules (both stated and tacit), and codes of conduct, and agents can quickly determine who is fit to be there and who is not. I was absolutely determined to fit in and was not going to be a cautionary tale told to other agents transferred to the section.
    In the winter of 2005 I reported to the DPD operations section in the middle of a midterm election and some staff shake-ups in the Bush administration. These staff changes usually had a profound impact on the agents of the DPD. The agent’s lives centered around learning to predict and adapt to the behavior of a protectee, a skill that can take years, andtheir replacement started the entire cycle over. Every time my phone rang in the DPD, it was an issue that the caller wanted handled “immediately” and I learned to produce results quickly. I found myself glued to a phone and a desk for hours at a time, calling our various field offices all over the country and giving them the bad news that one of our protectees was headed for their districts.
    Many of the field offices I dealt with on a daily basis were located in very busy areas of the country for both protection and criminal investigations, and every visit by a protectee under the management of the DPD was an additional task for them. Arrogance was a common complaint leveled against operations agents in the Secret Service, mostly due to the fact that we were handing out the orders even though we had no formal supervisory status. Having never worked on a protective detail and being responsible for guiding some of our experienced supervisors in the field through the process of protection operations was uncomfortable at times. I felt that I lacked credibility with them, but I did my best to help without coming across as arrogant, a skill some others could not pull off.
    We always had the cable news channels on the office television in the DPD operations section to ensure we never missed a breaking news event. I would listen to the news playing all day and my interest in political races grew as a result. One race I found particularly interesting was the US Senate race in Maryland between former lieutenant governor Michael Steele and Representative Ben Cardin (my future