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In Depth: Democratic Party Convention Security

Boston's big political party in 2004 took a lot of planning. During a six-month period, CSO followed U.S. Secret Service Special Agent Scott Sheafe as he and others developed a security plan tailored to make the best of a bad situation.

Sheafe, for his part, doesn't let all this bother him. Money? Not his problem. Unhappy citizens? Not his problem either. "That's totally outside my purview," he said during a telephone interview in May. "It doesn't affect me in the job that we do one way or another. Our mandate is clear; our responsibilities are clear. The politics of the local reception for the event doesn't affect our way of thinking at all."

And in the end, that's what it is, really. Politics. "This seems to be a very political city," said Sheafe in May. "We were in a meeting yesterday, and somebody said that the three most important things in the city of Boston are sports, politics and revenge. Luckily for me, I'm not from Boston, so I don't come in with any preconceived notions. All I know is that I've got to work with whomever is assigned from these other departments to do what we can to meet our obligations from a security standpoint. I'm not an expert on how to make somebody look good on TV, so I don't trouble myself with that."

Lemonade

As it turns out, trouble was kept to a minimum. The convention came and went, got its business done and concluded with scarcely a ripple of disruption. Some demonstrators clashed with police on Thursday afternoon, the convention's final day. But by 1968 Chicago standards, it was a decidedly trivial encounter. Police reported on Friday that they had made only six arrests during the entire week and officials said that they had spent far less than budgeted for convention security. Best of all, of course, terrorism stayed away.

None of which surprised Richard Clarke. "The way al-Qaida operates, they like to do surveillance and reconnaissance over a long period of time to really understand the target and the nature of the security," he says. "Because something like an Olympics or a national convention doesn't exist until it's going on, they tend not to attack things like that. We're the ones who convince ourselves that al-Qaida attacks special events, not al-Qaida. They've never done it. Repeat: They've never done it. The significance of these events is significance in our minds, not significance in their minds. Their significant events are the anniversaries of Islamic defeats and things like that."

Not that the security was wasted, by any means. "The problem is that we have to persuade the participants that it's secure, and it takes higher levels of security since 9/11 to persuade people that things like this are safe," Clarke said.