By: Srijan Sharma

Last serious assassination attempt on an US President/ex-President was made in May 2005 when an Armenian named Vladmir Arutyunian threw a live Soviet-made RGD-5 hand grenade toward the podium where the former US President George W. Bush was giving a speech. Fortunately, the grenade didn’t explode because a red tartan handkerchief was wrapped tightly around it, preventing the safety lever from detaching. However, US Presidents especially those who steered USA during conflict times had close brushes with assassination attempts.  One more serious attempt was planned on Bill Clinton by the Al-Qaida chief Osama Bin Laden in 1994. Laden recruited Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, to attempt to assassinate Clinton. However, Yousef decided that security would be too effective and decided to target Pope John Paul II instead.  In 1981, former US President Ronald Regen was shot by John Hickely to impress actress Jodie Foster, with whom he had developed an erotomaniac obsession after viewing her in the 1976 film Taxi Driver.

The Threat Matrix of US Presidents

The threat matrix of US Presidents has always been high but it reached to concerning levels whenever US was contesting battles abroad.  Many survived but few were not lucky.  The threat assessment works on wide arrays and the most difficult part is predicting the exact degree of threat. According to reports and a former Secret Service Director, former US President Donald Trump faced around eight threats per day which average out to about 2000 threats per year.  With increasing developments in cyberworld, the threat emanating from the cyberspace is increasingly becoming difficult to track and eliminate. However, a brief study was done by Secret Service National Threat on evaluating risks on targeted violence and its approaches, first in 1995 and then in 1999. The Secret Service in its monograph titled “Preventing Assassination” in 1997 concluded that assassination is the end result of a discernible and understandable process of thinking and behaviour and perhaps works on micro to macro threat assessment where micro means individual level threats where threats from specific individuals civilians with psychological disorders or stunt maniacs, extremists, criminal syndicates which are not limited to only external domains those can even include individual threats within home.

The macro level threat exists considering US’ national security and its strategic decisions impacting geopolitics or any specific region. The macro level emanates from organizational levels, terror outfits, another state, the threat scale etc. In case macro level threat increases, intelligence gathering and investigations help detect the degree of threat that US Presidents face, especially when security environment around US becomes serious.

In both the cases, there is a common link which is the leadership behaviour and its decisions which impacts micro and macro threats.  The example of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by an Israeli ultranationalist after signing Oslo Accords is one way of assessing the relationship of leadership behaviour and threat matrix.  Similarly, the case of assassination of the US President Abraham Lincoln too reflects the importance of leadership’s behaviour.  In this case Lincoln was assassinated by a supporter of slavery and an opposer of idea of equality named John Wikes Booth, as he believed that Lincoln who supported idea of quality and was against slavery will overthrow constitution.  In totality, the threat assessment to be close to accurate has to go through qualitive intelligence assessment without any intel biases. Also, it must have a thorough scan of security environment. Thirdly, it must run a impact test of current leadership’s decisions and President’s popularity and hostility which will help to identify micro level threats. The macro level threats automatically get generated by intelligence agencies and counter terror setups.

Failure of Threat Assessments and Secret Service

The most startling miss by the Secret Service was the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy where a former US Marine Corps trooper named Lee Harvey Oswald, shot the President when his Presidential Motorcade passing through Daely Plaza in Dallas. Kennedy was shot once in the back the bullet exiting via his throat, and once in the head.  Warren Commission thoroughly investigated the assassination and ruled out conspiracy and put all blame on Oswald that he did it all alone.  However, still many analysts and even Americans don’t accept that. A conspiracy theory was swamped that the deep state system in the US conspired the assassination of its own President and the reason to some extent was quite obvious that the CIA budget had been slashed, CIA’s failure in Cuba and various other factors had made President Kennedy’s relationship with CIA quite troublesome.

The question of Secret Service was too examined and the agency was asked to make few modifications in their security details. Surprisingly, Commission member Richard Russell told the Washington Post in 1970 that Kennedy had been the victim of a conspiracy, criticizing the commission’s no-conspiracy finding and saying “we weren’t told the truth about Oswald”. John Sherman Cooper also considered the ballistic findings to be “unconvincing”.

The Overload of Threat Assessment: Trump’s assassination Attempt

Threat assessment can go wrong and it can be become a victim of intelligence bias or situation bias sometimes as to some extent reflected in Kennedy’s case. The reason of biasness and failed assessment is the overload of threat in evolving threat landscape. The argument of achieving 100 percent threat accuracy is too far fetched and near to impossible, but a near or high accuracy is possible at least from professional state agencies. The overload of assessments sometimes forces the agencies to overlook the micro threats which sometimes are present in their home regardless of internal or external abetments, which also include civilians with psychological disorder. An increase in situational awareness and close attention to micro threats especially in election season could have prevented Trump’s assassination attempt.  An introspection and need of filtration of threats, a strategic enhancement to increase their situational awareness should become priority for the security agencies to save themselves from getting caught off guard, as their one mistake can have serious implications.