: Today's briefing:
The Washington Hilton attack and the question of where the security envelope actually started.
Two London investigations, one operational picture.
The dispute-to-discharge cycle in three US public spaces this week.
Welcome to your Tuesday briefing.
On Saturday night, an attempt on President Trump's life was made for the third time in two years. The attacker was a 31-year-old part-time tutor with a Caltech engineering degree who had been staying at the host hotel since Friday afternoon. He almost made it. By the time the Secret Service stopped him, he was already inside the building, on the same level as the ballroom, with three weapons in a bag. Was this a security failure or just the harsh reality of difficulty in trying to protect public figures?
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TOP STORY
The price of being seen
Cole Tomas Allen traveled by train from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington over the days before the dinner. He checked into the Washington Hilton on Friday April 24, the day before the event. According to a Daily Beast editor staying in the room next to his, hotel staff did not check his luggage on arrival.
The timeline:
Friday afternoon, April 24. Allen arrives at the Washington Hilton with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives in a bag. Luggage unscreened. He goes to a 10th-floor room.
Saturday evening, April 25, 7:30 pm. Allen emails family members a written statement naming his intent to target administration officials in priority order, "from highest-ranking to lowest."
Saturday evening, ~7:40 pm. Allen leaves his room dressed in black, carrying his weapons. He uses an interior stairwell to bypass monitored hotel areas and exits onto the same level as the dinner's red carpet.
Moments later. Allen sprints past law enforcement officers and charges through metal detectors set up outside the ballroom. Secret Service personnel engage him at the screening checkpoint. Five to eight rounds are fired. A uniformed officer is struck once and saved by a ballistic vest. The President, First Lady, Vice President, and senior cabinet are evacuated from the head table within minutes. Allen is tackled, detained, and uninjured.
Two hours later. Allen's brother phones Connecticut police about the email. By then, it is over.
Monday, April 27. Allen is arraigned in federal court on three counts, including attempting to assassinate the President.
This is the third attempt on a sitting or former President Trump in less than two years, after the Butler rally shooting in July 2024 and the Mar-a-Lago golf course incident in September 2024. Which raises the question: is this a security failure, or the harsh reality of protecting a high-profile figure whose job requires public exposure?
Our take
The system held at the last point. Secret Service Director Sean Curran said multilayered protection worked, and at the screening checkpoint it did. A uniformed officer took a round saving the people behind it. That is the reassuring read.
The harder one is upstream. The Washington Hilton was running as a hotel and as a presidential event venue at the same time. A guest could book a room online, walk in 26 hours before the President arrived, take three weapons up to the 10th floor without anyone checking, and then move through the building's own stairwell to reach the screening checkpoint. The screening did its job. Everything before it did not.
The Mar-a-Lago breach in February 2025 came down to a service gate left open for staff. The attempt at the Hilton came down to an online hotel reservation. The political calendar reliably routes the President through hotels and conference centers several times a quarter. Each one re-runs the same problem.
The Secret Service will spend the coming weeks reviewing this incident and analyzing gaps to see where improvements could be made before the next event on the calendar.
READER POLL
Was this a security failure, or just the reality of protecting public figures?
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MEANWHILE
Is Iran running coordinated operations in London?
Counter-Terrorism Policing has made 26 arrests in the four-week arson campaign that began on March 23 with the firebombing of four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green and escalated mid-April through synagogues in Finchley, Hendon, and Harrow, and the offices of Iran International. A separate operation under the National Security Act produced four arrests of an alleged Iranian intelligence network targeting Jewish community members and Iranian dissidents.
The arrests in both investigations cluster across Barnet, Watford, and Harrow. Read together, the picture is the proxy model: state-aligned intelligence collection by individuals with legitimate UK status, kinetic action by recruited criminals with no necessary ideological tie. Eight people have been charged with arson offenses. Responsibility was claimed by Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, assessed by intelligence agencies as a front for the IRGC.
The UK government has put £5 million into expanded counter-terrorism patrols at synagogues and Jewish community sites, commissioned a review of public order law to address cumulative intimidation, and is using the National Security Act against the network and its proxies.
Seconds to discharge
On Thursday April 23 at 1:22pm, two groups argued in the food court of the Mall of Louisiana in Baton Rouge, drew weapons, and exchanged fire. Martha Odom, a 17-year-old senior visiting the mall on her senior skip day, was killed. Five other bystanders were wounded. 17-year-old Markel Lee turned himself in on Friday. A second suspect remains at large.
Four nights earlier in Iowa City, a brawl involving up to 40 people erupted in the downtown pedestrian mall at 1:45am on April 19. 17-year-old Damarian Jones took a firearm from another participant during the fight, separated briefly, then fired six rounds into the crowd. Five bystanders were hit. One has a life-threatening head injury. Police response time was 45 seconds. Jones is still at large.
Both incidents ran from argument to discharged weapon in seconds. On-site officers can run toward gunfire, but the detection window is too short for the response to do more than triage and evacuate.
Sound even smarter:
Buckingham Palace confirmed on April 26 that King Charles III's four-day US state visit would proceed as planned, after a same-day security review by UK royal protection officers and US federal agencies. Transport routes, venues, and public engagements were reassessed before the visit was cleared to begin Monday April 27.
MI5 Director General Sir Ken McCallum reported in his October 2025 threat update that the service had tracked more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in the previous year. That sits on top of the 20 plots reported between January 2022 and October 2024.
SNAPSHOTS
🇨🇳 CHINA / TAIWAN On April 21, the Seychelles, Mauritius, and Madagascar revoked overflight permits for Taiwan President Lai Ching-te's aircraft hours before his planned state visit to Eswatini. Taiwanese officials attributed the revocations to Chinese pressure tied to sovereign debt relief. It is the first time a Taiwan presidential trip has been cancelled outright over airspace denial.
🇸🇩 SUDAN The civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces entered its fourth year in April. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk described conditions on a recent visit as a "human rights catastrophe unfolding in real time." Both factions have shifted to targeting electrical grids and civilian centers with precision drones. Over four million people have been displaced into Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda, and South Sudan.
🇧🇷 BRAZIL On April 19 the US Department of State added a "K" kidnapping indicator to its Level 2 travel advisory for Brazil. Express kidnapping has evolved: perpetrators force victims to unlock mobile devices and use banking apps to initiate high-value transfers in real time before release.
🇨🇳 SOUTH CHINA SEA On April 20, Australian, Canadian, and US warships transited the South China Sea in a freedom-of-navigation operation. Earlier the same week, satellite imagery confirmed Chinese vessels had erected a substantial floating barrier across the entrance to Scarborough Shoal.
EXTRA INSIGHT
UK REGULATORY The SIA's £20 licence fee rebate ended on April 1, returning the standard fee to £204. The bigger story is the 18-month strategic reset of all licence-linked qualifications now underway, citing Manchester Arena Inquiry recommendations. The Home Office is consulting on extending mandatory licensing to in-house CCTV operators and the businesses supplying security services. Refusal criteria have expanded to cover human trafficking, modern slavery, FGM, revenge porn, and domestic abuse.
HNW RESIDENTIAL Just after midnight on April 17, model Barbara Palvin called LAPD after spotting a man on the property of the Hollywood Hills home she shares with actor Dylan Sprouse. While waiting for officers, Sprouse confronted the suspect, held him at gunpoint, then tackled and restrained him until LAPD arrived. The suspect was arrested on outstanding warrants and never entered the home.
RECOMMENDED READING
What Jack Reacher Gets Wrong
Every security professional has had the conversation. A principal asks why you can't just "handle it" the way the bodyguard did in that Netflix series. A corporate client references Jack Reacher's approach to threat assessment.
The mass-market thriller industry has spent decades training civilians to expect security work that doesn't exist. Lone operators with unlimited autonomy. Instant threat neutralization. No paperwork, no approvals, no liability exposure.
It's entertaining. It's also completely detached from how protection operations actually function.
But here's the bigger problem: once you've done the actual work, mass-market thrillers stop being satisfying reading. The genre conventions become impossible to ignore. The lone operator who never needs backup. The instant solutions with no planning phase. The complete absence of consequences.
There's an entirely different category of espionage fiction that practitioners actually read. Written by people who've done the work. David McCloskey (former CIA analyst and Sunday Times bestselling author, eight years running clandestine operations) writes operational fiction for readers who want to be entertained without having their experience insulted.
Unit 3877 curates this exact category: spy novels written by practitioners, paired with classified intelligence briefs covering the real tradecraft behind the fiction. April's deployment includes McCloskey's The Persian alongside a brief on Iranian intelligence architecture.
Not a book club. Fiction as professional reading for people who've done the work.
Visibility is part of the job for the people we protect, and so is the public life of the family around them. The week's stories are about what that exposure costs, and where the work to manage it actually has to start. Not at the door, and not on the day.
See you next week.
– On The Circuit
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PREVIOUS POLL - RESULTS
Q: In your own organization, has a vetting or security recommendation ever been overruled by senior leadership for a hire you knew about?
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Yes, and it ended badly (34%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yes, and it was the right call in the end (16%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 No, but I've seen the pressure being applied (44%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ No, my organization holds the line → reply and tell us how (16%)
Your Comments:
RB: "Always telling clients their gut isn't a vetting policy. Most of them still hire on instinct and ask us to clean up their mess.”
DC: "No paper trail, no audit, no apologies. Just a F-up that becomes someone else's problem."
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