Presidential campaign puts strain on Secret Service

Story Highlights

• Protection for candidates beginning earlier than ever before
• Agents being brought from across the country to train for campaign details
• Secret Service anticipates spending $110 million this year protecting candidates

By John King
CNN Chief National Correspondent

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BELTSVILLE, Maryland (CNN) -- Don Coyer is trained to take a bullet and quick to make a joke.

"You elect them -- we protect them. That's my motto," Coyer says with a smile and a shrug when asked about the stress of Secret Service work.

Coyer is a 24-year veteran, now a deputy assistant director who oversees manpower issues, including the recruitment and training of campaign details for a 2008 presidential election cycle that an unprecedented challenge for the agency.

Experienced agents from around the country are being tapped for the details and brought to the Secret Service main training center in suburban Washington for training that includes briefings on the latest firearms, explosives and unconventional weapons, refresher courses in defensive and protective driving, and drill after drill in which agents run through scenarios and potential threats they will encounter on the campaign trail -- from arrivals and departures at airports and hotels to rope-lines where the candidate shakes hands and is inches away from potential harm. (Watch how agents pull their protectee away from danger )

To visit the firearms classroom at the training center is to get a sense of the many threats; traditional handguns and rifles, but also cell phones, pens, cigarette lighters and palm-sized tire gauges all customized to have the ability to fire bullets or other deadly projectiles. Not to mention pendants or umbrellas that serve as casings for razor-sharp blades.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-New York, already had protection because of her days as first lady. But the Service also took on protecting Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, in May -- a full eight months before it anticipated protecting additional candidates. More assignments to White House hopefuls are expected later this year and early next, and the Secret Service also is intimately involved in security preparations for both national nominating conventions.

It causes a strain, to say the least.

"We used to protect candidates in February of the election year. Now it is June [2007]," retired agent Terry Samway put it in an interview with CNN. "So, the strain is really that we have to stop doing something to do this -- or at least partially stop doing something."

Those "somethings" are counterfeit or cyber and financial crime investigations, thought Secret Service officials insist all top priority work continues without any significant impact.

To help with manpower issues on the campaign trail, other federal law enforcement agencies are being tapped for help.

The Transportation Security Agency, for example, will assist screening crowds at events.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency also is being asked for support help; though an initial thought of borrowing 2,000 ICE agents for the campaign has been trimmed back to 200.

"We layer these events with security and they play roles," Coyer says of those being asked to help. "I don't think we put them into anything they aren't prepared to do."

The Secret Service anticipates spending $110 million on candidate protection; nearly double the previous record of $65 million.

But the cost could go even higher. The House Homeland Security Committee, for example, notes the cost of protecting Senator Obama is $44,360 a day -- or approximately $6.7 million through the end of the current budget year in October.

In response, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the committee "any proposed funding modifications for the Secret Service" would be sent to congress later in June.

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