White House security 'breached 91 times since 1980

By Giles Whittell in Washington
The Times
December 8, 2009

If the would-be celebrities who crashed a White House state dinner knew
what the Secret Service knew they might not even have bothered to dress
up.

According to a devastating internal review leaked after Tareq and
Michaele Salahi strolled into the banquet for the Indian Prime Minister
without a ticket, there have been at least 91 breaches of Secret Service
security in the past 30 years, including at least four by a serial
intruder who believes that God has made him undetectable to bodyguards.

It turns out that the men who talk into their cuffs are only human. A
family of four once penetrated the White House security cordon simply by
honking on the horn of their minivan. Five years later an intruder
nicknamed the Paper Boy drove through an open White House gate
unchallenged and gave a Secret Service agent a pair of handcuffs before
he was himself arrested.

In 2003 a stowaway flew several thousand miles across Africa aboard Air
Force One without credentials, claiming when apprehended that he had
brought weapons on to the presidential jet, and four times between 1991
and 2003 the Rev Richard "Rich" Weaver shook hands with presidents he
was not cleared to meet. On at least two of those occasions Mr Weaver
managed to give the Commander in Chief a souvenir of his supposedly
divine mission.

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