A terrorist attack on the Capitol is inevitable and probably can’t be prevented as long as Congress insists on keeping it open to the public, the Senate’s top security official said Tuesday.
“You can’t keep buildings open to the public and have the security that I think is necessary,” outgoing Senate sergeant-at-arms William Pickle told The Examiner in his offices overlooking the Mall. “It’s almost an impossible task.”
Pickle is leaving after more than three years on the job. Prior to taking on the Senate’s top security job, he spent nearly three decades as an executive with the Secret Service, where he rose to be the special agent in charge of security for then-Vice President Al Gore.
Securing the White House was comparatively easy, Pickle said. There were only four people to protect — the president, first lady, vice president and the vice president’s spouse — and the Secret Service had broad authority to shut down the White House to the public.
In Congress, it’s different, Pickle said.
“You have 535 members who are elected and thousands of a staff. There is a desire by the members of the House and Senate to keep the ‘people’s house’ open,” he said. “How you [secure] a 300-acre campus where you have as many as 100,000 people every day coming and going … is really tough.”
It makes for restless nights as head of security, Pickle said. He said an attack on Congress is inevitable.
“If you have asked anyone in the intelligence community who’s honest with you, they’ll answer, ‘Yeah. It’s going to happen.’ ” he said. “A lot of us knew after the first World Trade Center attack in New York [in 1993] … that it would happen again.”
Government officials ought to shift their thinking from preventing an attack to minimizing the damage, Pickle said. He cited the Transportation Security Administration — for which he worked after the Sept. 11 attacks — as an example.
“They’re making travel much safer than it was, but there’s too many moving parts involved,” Pickle said. “When you have over 1 billion passengers flying each year in this country and you have hundreds of airports with thousands and thousands of portals and thousands and thousands of ways to get things on planes and in bags, it is an impossible mission.”
When he took over Senate security, Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., told Pickle that he wanted the latest technology and the best security possible.
Pickle said that he felt he has accomplished those goals.
“We’ve made significant progress, but it’s a moving target,” he said.
