by Crisis of Character- A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience
For these kinds of missions we weren’t undercover or even close to it. We wore the range gear that we used on training days: tan cargo pants, our vests that made us look from afar like fishermen or photographers, agency ball caps, and dull blue T-shirts that said U.S. Federal Air Marshal Service on the back. I couldn’t avoid mentally associating wearing my range clothes with a full day in the shoot house and live-fire training. Instead, I was heading for Cyprus. That attire served another purpose as well. I wasn’t undercover, and being undercover is a strain. You worry about drawing attention to yourself. You worry about a holster bulge giving the game away. There was none of that tonight. We were dressed as if were ready for anything, though we didn’t know what “anything” meant. We had no idea what to expect from a State Department–ordered airlift.
Once we were airborne, our TL, Mark, ordered us to put our heads together and concoct scenarios of what we might confront in Cyprus. We started with the standard ones. Air marshals protect the cockpit first, then the plane as a whole, from hijacking or anything else. But this mission was different. Maintaining control of the aircraft remained priority number one, but we’d be lucky if even a few refugees spoke English—and if any part of our mission transpired according to plan. We agreed that controlling infighting, maintaining general order, and protecting the flight attendants would be our close seconds. We reviewed our basics and trusted our strategy (what we had of it), training, individual instincts, and teamwork to see us through.
Training remained paramount because there were events in every law enforcement officer’s career where the only certainty is uncertainty. This was clearly one of those moments. We had no idea what we’d confront on the ground in Cyprus or what our passengers would be like, but we’d handle it. We had six hours to kill on the way to Germany and let our imaginations run wild.
Except for the crew, we were the only people on that 260-seat jet. None of us were very familiar with the DC-10, and our pilot and his engineer were helpful in revealing its nuances. They even showed us how to put on movies, which sounds frivolous. But it was knowledge that might later assist in calming agitated passengers. More important, they showed us each compartment and where food was kept in the galley, which we could reach only by elevator. The plane was eerily empty and loud. People absorb sound, whether in a theater or a restaurant—or a plane. And we were the only folks taking up that slack.
Having learned the DC-10’s ropes, the four of us swapped stories before finally curling up and catching as much sleep as we could. But sleeping was tough, at least for me, and I suspected for the others as well. It provided more unwelcome time to mull things over—and not just our current mission, but all the ones that had preceded it.
The thought crossed my mind: Maybe I should write a book.
Nah!
After seven hours airborne, we landed in Haan, refueled, and picked up our crew—so far, so good. Six hours later our landing gear touched down in Cyprus. I looked out the window. The airport was overcrowded and awash with panic and refugees. The flight tower wasn’t sure where to put us at first and we circled for some time. On landing, we saw hordes of anxious refugees. Somewhere in those throngs were the Americans we were tasked with rescuing. But corralling our approximately three hundred refugees would not be the end of our problems.
We had good reason to fear. The Americans we were charged with protecting and taking home would be either from Israel or from Lebanon, the two countries at war. We didn’t relish mixing civilians who had resided with (and most likely sympathized with) both warring sides in one tightly packed and tense airplane. We didn’t even have a really reliable estimate of how many souls we were picking up to take home, because another FAMS mission had arrived in-country a day before us. We were eager to check in with them, but then again, they should have taken off already but hadn’t. If all had gone according to plan, they would have left before we arrived. Even the best-laid plans go to shit, and we feared our plans were halfway down the bowl.
We peered out of the tiny passenger cabin windows and from the cockpit. Families of all ages huddled everywhere around the airport and behind fence lines, carrying whatever they had been able to pack together. Larnaca International was clearly understaffed in manpower, especially in security. Regular airport manpower, even at full staff, was nowhere near enough to sort, process, and adequately secure the hundreds and thousands of people who had fled to Cyprus hoping to head home, wherever that was. Rarely are airports state-of-the-art. Larnaca wasn’t that old, but it had been hastily thrown together when Cyprus itself blew apart into Greek Orthodox Christian and Turkish Muslim in the early 1970s. Neither it nor most airports were built to facilitate modern security measures like screeners and magnetometers, let alone accommodate this exodus of thousands of refugees.
Seeing the situation, our pilots grew very nervous. As we deplaned, one pulled us aside. Struggling to be heard, we shouted at each other over the roar of incoming airliners. One pilot said, “I need assurances from you guys. I get what we’re doing and it’s important, but I’m not sacrificing my crew. We don’t know who these people are! I gotta give my crew some kind of… you know?”
“We got you. We get it. We’re not going to let anything happen to your—our crew. You and this plane are our top priority. We’re always going to have an air marshal with you at the front, too. No matter what happens in the rest of the aircraft you’ll always have at least one of us by you—and we are going to look after your crew,” we reassured him.
I added, “You’re how we got here, you and the crew. So you and the crew are our priority.”
He said he understood that, but I could tell he’d been around the block enough times to know that like dreams, assurances don’t always hold. But he needed us to come through. He was going to have to trust us.
I shouted, “Listen, whatever ends up happening, we will be on here, too!” The pilot nodded. It was the best we could do for each other at the moment.
American security personnel were on full alert to get our citizens, but the airport remained clogged with people wanting so desperately to board flights off the island. The situation was getting worse—as so often happens in war zones. Collateral damage in lives and livelihoods is difficult for anyone to quantify or fathom. Civilians rarely take heed of war until it’s too late, and the 2006 Lebanon–Israel border seemed not so very different from New York City in September 2001. Panic-stricken civilians wanted out any way they could go: running, walking, driving, flying, you name it.
We didn’t know whom we were picking up. We didn’t know whom among them we could trust. And our flight crew wasn’t sure they could trust us.
Perfect.
And in typical United States Secret Service and United States Federal Air Marshal Service fashion, our phones starting alerting us to voice messages from our supervisors. “Crucial” messages of FAMS HR bullshit.
“This is [I’ll call him Ryan]: I just wanted to let everyone know that we are only paying the usual eight hours plus two paid hours for this mission.”
Unbelievable.
Thank you for caring.
The rest of our voice mails and emails were updates and confirmations and repeats! Half of us were pissed. I was fuming, too, but not about the pay. I wanted to tear Ryan’s head off once I got back. We saw the multiple alerts on our work phones and thought the message had to be serious—some sort of actionable intel of an enemy attack that we needed to be aware of. Nope. We didn’t care about the damn pay! We could yell about that afterward. Ryan had no clue what he was sending us into but he made sure, as usual, to screw with our heads as soon as we hit the ground running.
While in flight, we had talked of rumors of hazard pay because this mission was stretched so thin and was so important. But our supervisors, cushy and comfy behind their desks, instead sent us a message that they hadn’t secured even overtime for us yet. The over-budget expenses associated with our mission hadn’t been allocated from FAMS, the State Department, the Defense D
epartment, or anywhere else. So we were in financial limbo for our added time in-country. This wasn’t actionable intel! There was nothing we could do about it. Ryan’s rash of messages served only to take our minds out of the mission.
The plan was to be there four hours—no more.
Instead, another FAMS team switched with us.
Shit.
They took our DC-10 and filled the plane to the brim with passengers and headed back to Haan. We were left in airlift limbo. Our team leader grabbed someone with an airport ID patch and had him drive around the airport in a little taxiway car to gather what intel we could. We scurried to locate the airport’s FAMS HQ—and found it in, of all places, the food court: just a few guys with cell phones, radios, and laptops sitting in plain sight by a pizza counter. They coordinated everything from there.
I had to laugh. I respected these guys: They were actually working, and under trying circumstances, but I couldn’t respect top-heavy stateside management, people like Ryan, who was probably busy typing another stupid email informing us that we weren’t getting paid for being stranded in Cyprus. Our duty day so far was twenty hours plus, and now we didn’t have a plane back!
Mark got the real sit-rep (situation report) from other air marshals at ad hoc FAMS HQ from a guy who hurriedly waved him directions as he spoke to someone else on his cell phone. It was that kind of a day.
We made our way to a hotel right on the Mediterranean. It was beautiful, an old but timeless inn that reminded me of Casablanca, except it was live and in color! Somehow everyone could tell we worked for the American government. (Could it have been our “U.S. Federal Air Marshal Service” T-shirts?) We had our T-shirts but not our weapons. We’d been disarmed as both FAMS and normal host country policy.
Well, not every host country. Israel insisted that we carry our firearms. Our government still vehemently insisted they be locked up at any Israeli airport. I’ll never forget the eighteen-year-old Israeli female who questioned me about the policy.
“You’re trained, yes?” she asked in her thick accent, referring to my tactical ability.
“Sure am,” I said. I didn’t want to explain the “logic” behind our leadership disarming us.
“Then I don’t understand why we have to take this from you,” she said as she took my SIG pistol to lock it up.
Yet I have to concede that in many countries, I actually preferred to temporarily surrender my service pistol because I didn’t feel that toting it everywhere was necessary. But not in Cyprus. Not today. I wanted my lifeline, my service pistol, and not because I thought I might need it while on alert at the hotel—though kidnappings and targeting had occurred. I needed to retain it to absolutely ensure I’d have it for the mission home. In all the chaos, a real possibility existed that it might get “misplaced” in the shuffle, and we’d be screwed. Administrators we turned our gear over to weren’t nearly as scrutinized as we or even our LEO (law enforcement officer) host-country counterparts were.
We had hailed a taxi to get to our hotel and were fortunate that Cypriot taxis were familiar with tourists. On this mission our government rate for hotels was adequate. At the hotel I ran into a fellow air marshal I had known from the Secret Service. It was good to see a familiar face, someone who knew the Secret Service wear-and-tear the way I did. He was one of our schedulers and he filled me in on just how crazy the situation was. He informed me that everyone was playing catch-up, though he also insisted that everyone was doing all that could be done—they understood the importance of the mission. I appreciated everything he was doing. We needed more people like him, the kind who lead and delegate from the front. They harbor no misconceptions or illusions. When leadership like that hands you a shit sandwich, they don’t call it by another name. They’re eating it right there with you.
Our team lodged two to a room, so I shared a room with Mark, the TL. Having been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, we were both exhausted. Immediately we plugged our one room key into the air conditioner to get it going. The beds were two youth beds squeezed together and we laughed.
“I’ve served in the Navy, but even I have my limits,” Mark said.
We separated the beds, and Mark went out to get a baseline on the rest of the hotel and the surrounding neighborhood. I showered and finally caught some Z’s. I awoke to the sound of Mark banging on the door. I was very groggy and buck-naked, and I felt hungover. I looked at my full water bottle next to me and hated myself for not remembering to chug it before I let myself fall asleep. We were still technically on alert. I grabbed my FAMS shirt and covered myself as I opened the door.
“Damn, dude. I told you I served in the Navy, but even I have my limits,” he said again.
I made sure to chug my water bottle before we passed out. It was ninety-some degrees at night, and the air conditioner was blasting out air at a still very uncomfortable eighty-seven degrees. The locals tolerated their summers far better than we did. Air conditioners were clearly mere tourist amenities that they didn’t quite grasp. The nighttime view, however, was truly beautiful—a real job perk.
We were supposed to be there for four hours, but soon we’d been there four days. The restaurant across from the hotel accepted us as family. We went from strange American guys to tourists to regulars, and by the end of the second day they had us sitting at the family table and eating with them. They were great! So was the Cypriot cuisine, a mix of Greek and Mediterranean food: fried cheese, tomatoes, lamb, yogurt, and pita.
On our fourth morning in Cyprus, we reunited with our original flight crew. The pilot gave us the same speech: They wanted to do it, knew it was important, but he, his crew, and his plane had to be safe and secure. We got the rundown of the DC-10 again and were happy to have it. With the stress of a crisis on everyone’s shoulders, everyone either works together or falls apart, but we were in sync. They told us to treat it like it was our plane.
We were almost glad for the major delay between our original flight plan and our new charter because we got to see the “screening process” or lack thereof. Screening? There wasn’t even ticketing. But in a few short hours, between 250 and 300 refugees would descend on us. We had as much intel as we would get.
We still needed a plan.
We huddled. Our TL ordered to pat down everyone, no exceptions. Men should be seated in the rear of the plane separated from families, with women and children in the front in first class, no exceptions. From our reconnaissance we knew the majority of the people on our plane would be seventeen- to thirty-five-year-old military-aged males (MAMs). That term flew under the radar more so than the term I had learned in the service: combat age. If any man moved toward the front of the aircraft, he would immediately be a red flag.
The crew was pleased with our assessment, and the horde of American refugees moved toward the plane. They were a sorry sight. My eyes went right to their feet. Many were shoeless and had traveled the last few days from Lebanon and Israel across the Mediterranean, only to wait for days on end at Larnaca International. The boats they arrived on were often improvised. Many suffered from bruises, untreated cuts, abrasions, and rashes caused by the blazing summer sun, hot asphalt, or any number of other reasons.
We began our screenings. Initially, many opposed our patting them down. It gave us an opportunity to establish our authority—how this flight was going to play out. “If you don’t like it, then you stay here. And if you cause any problems, we will kick you out!”
Air marshals aren’t concerned with excuses. We were focused on checking for weapons. As usual there would be no exceptions to our pat-down policy, even if the person was a Muslim woman. They had a choice like everyone else: Submit to being checked—or don’t board. They quickly acquiesced.
We homed in on English-speakers and pulled them aside to let them know that we would need their help once everyone had completed boarding. We were just four American air marshals surveilling three hundred desperate and immensely frustrated passengers—plus a sixteen-member crew, three pilo
ts, and a flight engineer. Our most suspicious passenger was a well-rested Caucasian young man with clean skin, clothes, and shoes. He stood out like a giraffe among lions. I spotted him standing apart from the long line of other refugees. He was of combat age, but there was nothing combatant about him. He looked like a small-framed college boy. Mark approached me.
“Hey, this State Department guy says he needs to get on board for some important assignment,” Mark said, obviously agitated.
Mark and I went back and forth. I didn’t want him on board, but there was supposedly an agency behind this guy. Still, I wasn’t convinced a refugee should lose a seat for some State Department guy. If I was wrong we’d surely hear about it later.
“I want to talk to this guy,” I told Mark.
“Be my guest.”
I approached the State employee. “Look, don’t bullshit me. You’re what, a GS-9?”
“Uh, yeah,” he said. Then I really thought he was full of it, but I wasn’t going to get into his pretext.
“And you’re here on behalf of the State Department?”
“Yeah, I represent the State Department.”
He didn’t even refer to it as State, which is how everyone refers to it in shorthand.
“And what is it that you do for State?”
“I was helping set all this up,” he said, gesturing to the people and aircraft.
“Yeah, sure. You’re a GS-9. Now why is it you need to get back to the United States? Why’re they sending you home? If you’re ‘helping set all this up,’ your job’s not done yet.”
