White House Counter intelligence Coup

Overhead View of White House Grounds (US Department of Defense )

The Times reported that the ushers had muted the alarm or “crash box" on the front door of the White House because it was too loud “Armed Intruder at White House Got to East Room,” NYT, 9/29/14) It was further reported that Omar Jose Gonzalez had actually made it all the way to the East Room with a knife in his pocket—something that would have been prevented if the Secret Service had put one of those accordion children’s gates across the entranceway to that wing of the sacred redoubt. Of course, you could dig trenches between the rooms of the White House and create manned battle stations in front of the staircase leading to the presidential family’s living quarters which is one of the places Gonzalez passed in his travels or say on the threshold of the Oval Office. None of the journalistic recountings of the security breach has pointed out that Gonzalez’s possession of a knife, might simply have been indicative of the fact that he could have been looking for a job in the White House kitchen. But what is most significant is that no one in US intelligence has realized that Mr. Gonzalez’s talents could be employed elsewhere. If he could break into the White House, why not parachute him down to the Iraq Syria border or to the Syrian city of Raqqa, which is now the de facto ISIS capital. Let him jump over the fence of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s palace and see if he can penetrate to the equivalent of the East Room, an area usually designated for receptions. This would be a real coup, even though there are some (there are always critics—“those who can do do and those who can’t do criticize” goes the old saw) who would find this simply counter intelligent.