It worked for 24-year-old graduate student Natalie Tyson. In October, she volunteered to drive a van as part of an official motorcade during the president’s visit to San Francisco. In a year with its fair share of Secret Service blunders, security experts are stressing that Tyson was untrained, inexperienced, and had no idea what to do in the event of an emergency. By all accounts, she had never even driven a van before.
She’d driven a pickup truck once, she told reporters.
A week before Obama’s arrival in San Francisco, a friend of Tyson’s who worked in the White House asked if she would be interested in the position.
While spending the entire day with the motorcade, Tyson had plenty of opportunities to take selfies of the President’s limo, Air Force One, and Secret Service agents. A CDC employee was fired earlier this year for attempting to take a photo of the president’s limousine — known, in the trade, as the Beast.
Presidential motorcades typically consist of 20 to 30 vehicles. These carry local police, White House personnel, communications staff, reporters, a doctor, and, of course, the president.
The motorcade also features a heavy Secret Service presence, which is trained to separate the president from the convoy in the event of an emergency and get him to safety. Former Secret Service agent Dan Emmett says that having a novice responsible for any part of the motorcade poses a serious security risk.
“If the motorcade ever comes under fire, it’s going to be a problem,” he told the New York Times. He said that while the practice of using volunteers in the motorcade dates back to the 1980’s, he was often more concerned with young drivers who were “just completely full of themselves and enthralled” than with an actual attack.
“Everyone will be responding, police officers and the Secret Service, and it will be all these people running around in panic like the last scene of the ‘Blues Brothers’ movie, when there’s the big police chase that ends in a wreck of 50 police cars.”
Tyson told reporters that while she had received almost no instruction on how to perform in the event of an attack, she assumed that she should just follow the lead of the car in front of her.
While Tyson seems to have done a fine job, a sordid history of motorcade accidents would seem to suggest that some minimal training would be beneficial. In 1902, a Secret Service agent was killed by a trolley car in Massachusetts. A motorcycle officer was killed in 2008 while escorting Hillary Clinton through Dallas.
Even as recently as 2012, a motorcycle escort was run over and killed while traveling with President Obama in Florida.
While the White House has made no official comment on the use of volunteer drivers, Secret Service agents have privately said that volunteers are often used to transport less high-profile passengers since journalists and staff members don’t fall under the Secret Service’s jurisdiction.
