PARIS − Mike Bjelajac will have his earpiece in. He’s packing a few suits − with no mention of packing heat. But he’s thinking it’s mostly a business-casual assignment, with a bit more sand than he typically encounters on the job.
The State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, whose agents protect dignitaries and diplomats all over the world, is the U.S. “security lead” for the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games.
DSS agents will be working with French and Olympic authorities to keep American athletes, coaches, doctors, corporate-sponsor bigwigs and tourists safe in a city expected to draw millions of extra visitors amid gargantuan security challenges ranging from extremist plots and cyberattacks to civil unrest and slippery pickpockets.
Not Special Agent Bjelajac. Bjelajac may have drawn the longest straw in the history of drawing straws: He’s not going to Paris.
Instead, the 46-year-old Wisconsin native is jetting 10,000 miles away from the French capital to Tahiti, the figure-eight-shaped island in French Polynesia where the Olympic surfing competition is taking place. The location reflects, organizers say, France’s ambition to spread the Games across its territory.
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Also, Tahiti has some pretty gnarly waves.
“I’ve discussed it with my family and friends. With co-workers, well, I’m a little bit more apprehensive because I realized there could be some jealously,” Bjelajac said on a Zoom call in late June. It was a few weeks before he departed for Tahiti’s black-sand beaches, extinct volcanoes and waterfalls − the luscious backdrop to his Olympics work.
“It’s hard to beat,” he said, letting a grin escape his all-business demeanor. Agents like Bjelajac are trained to be discreet and short on nonsense. If the stereotypical image of a surfer is that of a laid-back risk-taker, suffice to say Bjelajac is not − yet − a surfer.
The ‘right thing,’ whatever happens
Bjelajac wasn’t born to surf. In Wisconsin, they go ice fishing.
After college, he worked as a police officer in Atlanta before joining a DSS field office in Miami in 2010, combining passport fraud investigations with protecting foreign dignitaries visiting the U.S. He’s spent time guarding former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, as a security officer at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, and at a diplomatic facility in Baghdad.
After Tahiti he’s planning on enrolling in a masters program to study diplomacy.
The DDS traces its origins to World War, but the service wasn’t formally established until 1983, after devastating suicide bombings killed hundreds at the U.S. embassy and a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut. Today, it has more than 2,000 special agents in the U.S. and at embassies and consulates in more than 175 countries.
The DSS is a kind of sister agency to the U.S. Secret Service, which protects the U.S. president and vice president, their immediate families, visiting heads of state and others.
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Paul Benvie, who is the DSS’s deputy security coordinator for the Paris Games, said that in the Olympics context the job is not a traditional “close-protection mission.” That concept − the idea of the sharp-suited agent, earpiece in, sidearm at the ready, ensuring the safety of some of the world’s most important people − is something that’s been popularized in untold movies from 1992’s The Bodyguard to 2013’s Olympus Has Fallen.
“It’s a protective-liaison role,” he said. “It’s someone embedded with those teams who has gotten to know the security manager at each Paris site, who can engage with the police and gendarmerie (a branch of France’s armed forces) and feed back to the joint operation center,” a security hub run from inside the U.S. Embassy in Paris.
Benvie has spent the last two years in Paris helping to prepare U.S. security for the Games after holding security roles in various parts of Africa. He said that while the job is not a “traditional bodyguard” role, any DSS agent is “going to do the right thing, whatever that response needs to be in the moment.”
Anything happen, ‘even in paradise’
The Olympics surfing competition is scheduled from July 27 to Aug. 4.
In Tahiti, Bjelajac will be assigned to protect five American surfers and their professional entourages: Caroline Marks, 22; Carissa Moore, 31; Caity Simmers, 18; Griffin Colapinto, 25; and John John Florence, 31.
Moore became the sport’s first-ever winner of an Olympic gold medal in women’s shortboard surfing when the discipline debuted at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
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In keeping with DSS policy, Bjelajac would not divulge any details about the specific steps he would be taking to keep Team USA’s surfers safe, or whether he’d be armed. A DSS spokesman said the bureau does not share details about its security tactics, operations or procedures.
However, Bjelajac would say that one of the major things he’s taking into consideration is the possibility of a natural disaster, and Tahiti’s relative remoteness.
Surfing can be a dangerous sport. Participants routinely risk being body-slammed onto sharp and shallow coral reefs. If advanced medical facilities are required because of an injury to an athlete in Tahiti, it’s about a six-hour flight to Hawaii, and an 11-hour flight to the continental U.S.
Bjelajac said he’ll be reminding the athletes and anyone in their support network to be alert to pickpockets and whether to avoid certain Tahitian neighborhoods.
“If may feel like we’re in paradise. But things can happen anywhere, even in paradise,” he said.
Culture, corals, marine life − and surfing scaled back
The Olympic surfing will take place at Teahupo’o, on the island’s south side. The choice of location is not without controversy.
Forty-eight surfers − 24 women, 24 men − will be competing. Judges, coaches, journalists, Olympic organizers and, yes, Bjelajac, will boost the number of those descending on Tahiti into the hundreds for an event critics say could easily have been held on France’s Atlantic coast, reachable by bus or train from Paris.
“The impact and the risk are too important for only three days of contest,” said Tahitian pro surfer Matahi Drollet in a video petition last year as he joined environmentalists, campaigners and other surfers in warning that Teahupo’o’s culture, corals and marine life were being threatened by the Olympics-related influx. An original plan for the event called for new roads, housing units and an aluminum judging tower that required drilling into the reef.
Those plans have since been scaled back, though not abandoned entirely, amid the backlash.
Others are angry over the decision to stage the surfing competition in a place where the indigenous Polynesian culture has, they say, been eroded and appropriated and where France’s chief legacy is one of empire and repression. French Polynesia is made up of more than 120 islands, including Tahiti.
Historians believe that surfing’s roots can be traced to Polynesia. The British explorer James Cook is thought to be one of the first Europeans to observe the practice when he visited Hawaii in the 18th century.
Still, Bjelajac said he’ll know he’s done a good job at the Games if no one even notices he’s in Tahiti, unless they need him.
“And I’ll say this,” Bjelajac said of his surfing skills. “It’s on my bucket list. I grew up in the Midwest. The extent of my exposure to the beach early in my life was Lake Michigan and some lakes in northern Wisconsin.”
Getting better at sports by ‘osmosis’
Bjelajac isn’t the only DSS agent taking an interest in the Olympic sports of those he’s protecting.
Washington, D.C.-based Special Agent Dan Bair is a huge golf fan who’s been assigned protect Team USA Golf, who are competing 12 miles west of Paris, in Versailles. Bair, 40, a former U.S. Army helicopter pilot, said he’s hoping to absorb some tips and tricks for his game by “osmosis” when he’s in the field in France.
“Our focus is security: we’re robust, discreet, in the background. We don’t want to be seen. We’re there just providing that support,” he told USA TODAY.
“But at the same time, it’s pretty cool, right? We’re watching professional athletes,” Bair said, letting a little bit of fan boy slip out.
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Kendall Dyer, 30, is a former high school volleyball coach in Nevada and avid climber assigned to the bureau’s Los Angeles field office. The Paris Games will be her first Olympics and first major overseas assignment. She’ll be protecting the Team USA women’s gymnastics team.
“I’m really looking forward to the food. I’ve heard really good things,” said Dyer, who has never been to France, said.
And Caleb Lenard, 33, a first-year DSS agent in Houston who will be protecting members of the Team USA judo contingent, thinks he may even have competed against some of them when he was at Texas A&M University, where Lenard was president of the judo club and traveled across the country for tournaments. On one spring break he and his club trained with members of the Puerto Rican Olympic judo team.
“I’ve been following the Olympics since I started judo because it’s the ultimate tournament for it,” he said.
“I’ll know what the athletes are going through and what they’ll need.”
Bjelajac said he made a “solid attempt” to learn to surf when he was working in Indonesia.
But unlike his special agent field work, for which he studiously prepares, it didn’t quite go to plan.
“I didn’t realize there’s different kinds of surfboards,” he said. They put me on a hardboard which is apparently not what you’re mean to start on. I never actually was able to stand up.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Meet the special agent protecting U.S. Olympic surfers in Tahiti
