Guarding Pope Francis: Inside the massive effort to protect 'the people's pontiff'
Pope Francis personifies everything the Islamic State group hates, perhaps more than any other single person. And this week he'll address a gathering of almost every top American government official in Washington, D.C., before traveling to New York to speak at the U.N. General Assembly – itself a security logistics nightmare -- and then visiting Philadelphia.
As one leader tasked with overseeing security quipped privately, "It's crunch time."
Read more special coverage of the pope's visit: Why conservative Catholics call the pontiff 'Obama's pope'
Protecting any high profile official while traversing complex and highly populated urban environments is an incredibly difficult task. Organizations like the U.S. Secret Service must conduct extensive advance work to prepare for threats that could exist during a trip like this one, and to identify dangers they can expect throughout each point on the schedule.
Recent attacks in Paris, Chattanooga, and on a train speeding through Belgium are just a few examples that will give protection professionals evermore reason to worry.
Photos of Pope Francis' visit to Washington:
"The pope will essentially receive the same or greater protective measures than the president," says Dan Emmett, a former Secret Service special agent who served on the protective details for presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, as well as a stint on the elite Counter Assault Team, or CAT.
"Given his high profile as the symbol of the Christian world during a time when radical Islam would love to make a statement by carrying out an attack against him, he is possibly the highest profile protectee under Secret Service protection while in the U.S.," he says.
See the pope's schedule for his visit to the U.S.
Multiple organizations help protect high profile visitors to the U.S., and indeed many of them will be working with the Secret Service on this trip.
The State Department's Bureau Diplomatic Security often guards visiting heads of state and high profile visitors, as it has for previous visits by Britain's Prince Charles and the Dalai Lama, for example. But Pope Francis' visit to the U.S. has been deemed what DHS calls a "national security special event" and, as the head of the Vatican state, he will be under the careful watch of the men and women bearing dark sunglasses and earpieces who continuously surround the president.
The Secret Service participated in a tabletop exercise last week in New York City with local police, the local head of the FBI and other officials from the Department of Homeland Security. The group, closely coordinating with the mayor's office, played through how they would respond to catastrophes such as an isolated bombing, a building collapse or a power failure.
"The idea is we can see the stretching of our resources," the New York Police Department's Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller said during the exercise, according to the New York Times, which witnessed part of the session. "A lot of wheels turning at once."
"Have people ready for every occasion," Mayor Bill DeBlasio said.
A big responsibility indeed.
Emmett, who documented his 21 years of experience in a book, "Within Arm's Length," helped conduct technical advance security for Pope John Paul II's visit to Los Angeles in 1987, when an event with the pontiff at Dodger Stadium reached its max capacity of 56,000.
"I doubt seriously if POTUS could attract such crowds," Emmett says, using a common acronym for the president of the United States, and pointing to the intense magnitude of these rare trips. "The pope will always attract more attention -- good and bad -- than perhaps any person in the world."
A September memo drafted by the FBI and DHS and obtained by CNN indicates there were no specific credible threats at that time against the pope, but cited the devastating effects of so-called lone wolf attackers that have become a cornerstone of the Islamic State group's recruitment efforts worldwide. The visit, the document states, will be "a powerful motivator for groups or individuals with anti-Catholic or anti-Christian viewpoints" who may use religion to justify violence, such as al-Qaida, Boko Haram in Nigeria or al-Shabab in Kenya.
These threats require the very best of the Secret Service cadre and other federal agents to protect the pope. New agency director Joe Clancy – brought back in from retirement in the aftermath of a string of high profile failure and scandal among agents – will likely select the most seasoned available staff from the Presidential Protective Detail and the CAT to serve on this detail. They will have fluency in weapons and tactics, extreme physical fitness and significant experience on protective assignments.
Those skills will have no effect if they don't know what's coming, which is why the Secret Service now is likely engaged in deep planning and information sharing with other security agencies to determine threat levels in the places the pope will visit and how they would coordinate a response.
Read more:What non-Catholics think about the pope's visit
Part of the planning includes how to control any crowd that could get near to the pope, says Emmett. Anyone who comes within a certain radius of him will likely have to pass through magnetometer checkpoints under the careful watch of explosive ordnance disposal experts, just as they would around the U.S. president. The risk of moving a high level figure through an unchecked crowd is "so incredibly high, it would be beyond unwise," he says. "It could quite possibly be lethal."
"The importance of through advance work cannot be overstated," Emmett says. "If there is a countermeasure for a real, possible, or perceived threat, the Pope will receive that countermeasure at its highest level. Expense will be no object. The ultimate goal is to get him safely into the U.S., move him from point to point, then get him safely out of the U.S. regardless of cost and by any means necessary. That is the mission and the only thing that is of relevance to the Secret Service."
There is no requirement that these agents be Catholic, he says. But he adds, "as you might imagine, there is no shortage of volunteers."
More from US News:
Will Francis take the US to task?
The power, and the limits, of Pope Francis' climate message
Where to find Pope Francis this week
