Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service

by Petro, Joseph

  The doctor’s office, which is really just an examining room, is on the ground floor of the residence, next to the Map Room. They can’t do any major procedures there, but the White House is only four minutes from George Washington University Hospital. The photographer’s office is down the hall from W-16, next to the barber shop. That’s one chair, just for the president, with the barber coming in from his own shop.

  For the record, there is a little-known third command post at the White House. It’s a tiny room on the ground floor of the residence, right behind the elevator on the north side of the hallway, across from the Diplomatic Reception Room. Normally it is used by the first lady’s detail, but when the president is upstairs in the residence, the night shift moves over there. Its code name is Staircase.

  Official code names are assigned by WHCA, which is an army agency staffed by the Signal Corps. They began to be used in the days when our communications were not scrambled, and the Secret Service didn’t want to attract unwanted attention by saying the word “president” over a radio. I’m not really sure why WHCA still uses code names, because, since the mideighties, all of our transmissions are encrypted. Code names are usually two-syllable words, easy to pronounce, and somehow—at least in someone’s mind—are supposed to fit the person or place. President Reagan was “Rawhide” and Mrs. Reagan was “Rainbow.” The president’s limousine was “Stagecoach,” and the follow-up car was “Halfback.” Personally, I always thought they were a little silly. I can honestly say that at no time during my Secret Service career did I ever get on a radio and announce, “This is Stagecoach with Rawhide and Rainbow …” or anything even remotely similar. If I said, “This is Petro,” everyone knew who I was, where I was, and who I was with. But code names took on a romantic air when it was revealed that John Kennedy was “Lancer” and Jackie was “Lace.” Shades of Camelot.

  When we first started protecting Nelson Rockefeller and his wife, the vice president’s code name was “Sandstorm,” and Mrs. Rockefeller’s was “Shooting Star.” Within a few days someone realized the latter wasn’t such a good name, because in a broken transmission all you might hear was the word “shooting,” and that could inadvertently set off a chain reaction and an awful lot of problems. So they changed her code name to “Stardust.” These days, lists of WHCA code names can be found on the Internet. If you look carefully, you’ll see that everyone in the president’s family has a code name starting with the same letter, so that Richard Nixon was “Searchlight” and Pat Nixon was “Starlight”; Gerald Ford was “Passkey” and Betty Ford was “Pinafore”; Jimmy Carter was “Deacon” and Rosalynn Carter was “Dancer”; George Herbert Walker Bush was “Timberwolf” and Barbara Bush was “Tranquility.” Visitors we protected also got code names. Prince Charles was “Unicorn,” his mother Queen Elizabeth II was “Kittyhawk,” Frank Sinatra was “Napoleon,” and my all-time favorite was Pope John Paul II, whose code name was “Halo.”

  In addition to screening every person who comes into the White House, the Secret Service has procedures for screening every item that comes in, too. I won’t go into detail, for obvious reasons, but suffice it to say that everything is inspected off-site, including all the food that regularly gets sent to the president. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, for instance, people send him cured hams, turkeys, cakes, cookies, and puddings. Sadly, all of it must be destroyed. We can’t trust unprotected or unsolicited food.

  The only letters or packages that actually get brought into the White House have been looked at and secured. That said, if the president’s daughter wants to send him a birthday card, there’s a way for her to do that. Same thing with phone calls. The president has private lines and private addresses.

  There is still a bowling alley in the basement of the White House, but the indoor swimming pool has been covered—Richard Nixon did that—and today it’s the press briefing room. There is a trapdoor in the floor of the room, and through it you can see the tiles of the old pool. I doubt that it is deliberate, but the way the press briefing room is designed, reporters sit at the shallow end of the pool and the press spokesperson stands on the podium at the deep end. If that wasn’t done purposely, it probably should have been.

  Some years after Richard Nixon covered the indoor pool, Gerald Ford had an outdoor pool built on the south grounds, next to the tennis court. Both are well hidden, so you can’t easily see them. I recall the Reagans using the pool occasionally, but never the tennis court. President Reagan did work out, and there is a small gym upstairs at the residence. After he was shot, he went through a long series of exercises to strengthen his upper body and used to brag that he’d added an inch to his chest. This was a man in his seventies, and in very good shape.

  This was also a man who never carried anything in his pockets. When he remembered, the president might sometimes bring a pair of glasses with him, but I held his jacket often enough to know that his pockets were empty. With the exception of that five-dollar bill he brought to the Orioles game to pay for hot dogs, he never carried money. I have no idea where he got the five dollars. He must have had money stashed somewhere, because if he’d have asked for money, someone would have warned him that five wasn’t enough. On those rare occasions when he wanted to buy something, there was always somebody to arrange for the payment.

  He wasn’t allowed to drive—except for the Jeep he kept at the ranch—and someone else always opened the doors he went through, so there was no reason for him to carry keys. As far as I know, the only thing that President Reagan ever had with him was a handker-chief and a little plastic-coated card with instructions on how to implement the nuclear codes. The White House Military Office had briefed him before his inauguration in January 1981 on what’s known as “the football.” It’s a briefcase containing things I can’t discuss that is never far from him. Along with the military aide who carries the football, the other person who is never far from the president’s side is the doctor.

  There’s a story told, which I can’t substantiate, that during his first briefing on the “football,” President Reagan said, “Where’s the button that I push?” I wasn’t there, so I don’t know if he said it, but it sounds like his sense of humor. Anybody who thinks that he said such things in earnest doesn’t know the man. He took his duties seriously, but he was always telling stories and always happy to see the people around him laugh. I read not long ago that for two weeks in 1954 he worked in Las Vegas as a stand-up comic. Because he had such a wonderful sense of humor, there were times when people chose not to tell him certain things. Like about the national Christmas tree.

  Presidents traditionally light the tree on the Ellipse, a quarter of a mile south of the White House. But following the assassination attempt and the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983, we rearranged some of President Reagan’s events. We didn’t want him exposed, the way he would be at the Ellipse, so it was decided that he would host the tree-lighting ceremony from the south grounds of the White House. WHCA built a podium with a big switch on top of it and set it up just in front of the steps, so that the president could watch the tree light up when he threw the switch.

  On my first Christmas there, which was only two months after the Beirut bombing, I stepped out onto the south lawn a few minutes before I brought the president out, to see where the press would be and where the carolers would be and where they wanted the president to stand. I noticed the WHCA officer putting the podium on the lawn and what caught my eye was that I couldn’t see the wire leading from the switch down to the tree. I walked around for a moment looking for it, then quietly asked, “Where’s the wire to the tree?”

  The WHCA officer replied, “There isn’t one.”

  “So how does it turn the lights on all the way down at the Ellipse?”

  “It doesn’t,” he said. “It’s a dead switch. When the president pulls the switch, I radio down to one of our guys at the tree to say, turn on the lights. That’s when he plugs them in.”

  I said, “What happens
if the president pulls the switch and the radio doesn’t work?”

  The fellow from WHCA assured me, “We test it nine times and have a backup radio to make certain it will work.”

  I’m sure that the president didn’t know. The switch looked like a switch, it worked like a switch, I assumed it was a real switch, and he would have assumed that, too. The reason no one told him was, perhaps, because he would have played games with the switch. He would have pulled it halfway and watched the lights come on before he made the connection. No one would have trusted him not to have fun with it.

  Can you successfully protect someone you don’t like? The answer is, definitely, yes. At various times I protected Yassir Arafat and Fidel Castro and did my best for them, just as I did my best for Ronald and Nancy Reagan, whom I did like. We take our responsibilities seriously regardless of who we’re protecting. Years ago I saw a T-shirt with the Secret Service logo and the words “You elect ’em, we protect ’em,” and that’s the way it works. It doesn’t matter whether we agree with a protectee’s politics, whether the protectee is a Republican or a Democrat or the Communist leader of Cuba. I can swear that had I not liked Ronald Reagan, I would have still done everything in my power to protect him in exactly the way that I did.

  Accepting that, if you like a protectee sometimes it means you are more sensitive to him or her as a person. The graciousness that the Reagans always showed the agents was returned to them in kind. Typical was the case of two female agents on one occasion when the president attended an annual “boys only” dinner hosted by his pal Paul Laxalt.

  A former governor and three-term United States senator from Nevada, Laxalt’s yearly, black-tie affair at the Georgetown Club on Wisconsin Avenue was a popular night out. The room was small, packed with a hundred men dining on Rocky Mountain oysters—lamb’s testicles—and, in true guy’s-night-out spirit, telling off-color jokes. I’d accompanied the president there a few times, always with an all-male detail. I was scheduled to work it again one year when I realized that, for the first time, two women were on the shift. Barbara Riggs, who eventually became assistant director of the Secret Service, and Shawn Campbell, another outstanding agent, were to come with us. I admired them both, but I wasn’t sure that it was wise to have female agents in the room. I didn’t know, nor did I particularly care, whether any of the other men at the dinner would be bothered by their presence, but I knew it would be awkward for the president. This was a man who held doors for women and stood up when a woman walked into a room. I never heard him utter a foul word, nor did I ever hear him tell an off-color joke, even at the Laxalt dinners.

  In principle, I could have had Barbara and Shawn assigned to other duties for the evening. In practice, it was not the proper thing to do. Many women in the Secret Service believed that they should be expected to do, and that they themselves should expect to do, anything a male agent does. Rightly so. In this case, the best thing would be to explain the situation to them and see how they felt about it. But Barbara and Shawn beat me to it. Barbara came to me to say, “We know what this event is tonight, and Shawn and I think it’s probably a good idea if we stay out with the motorcade.” It was a classy and dignified way to handle the matter. They could have insisted on going into the room, but they liked the president enough to respect his feelings.

  Although the president was always personable with the agents, he did not get personal. He knew faces, but he wasn’t someone who made it a point to memorize everyone’s name. He referred to us as “the fellas,” which included the female agents, and it was rare to find one of “the fellas” who didn’t like him. There was a way to approach him, and when it was done properly, and when there was time for such things, he was receptive to being approached. I took him to the barbershop one morning and realized, while waiting for him, that he’d never seen our command post. I alerted the guys to straighten up the place, and when his hair was cut, I asked the president, “Would you like to see W-16?” He said he’d love to.

  There’s a small area just inside the door with a couch, and off to the left, separated by a little counter, there’s a U-shaped section with all the alarms, telephones, monitors, and other communications equipment. It’s manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, regardless of whether the president is in the White House or not. There’s a large cabinet where we keep weapons and, beyond that, a small office where I sometimes worked. The president was his normal gracious self, saying hello to the agents on duty and listening attentively to what everyone said. The room was decorated with vintage Secret Service photographs of previous presidents with agents, and he looked at all of them. At the back, under the staircase, there were two other things I wanted him to see. So just before we left, I said, “Mr. President, I want to show you where the guys keep their equipment.” He must have thought to himself, Why do I have to see this?

  He spotted what I wanted him to see as soon as we turned the corner: one was a poster of an ad from Look magazine in which the actor Ronald Reagan was a model for a shirt company, and the other was a popular poster at that time showing Sylvester Stallone’s body with Ronald Reagan’s head and the caption “Ronbo.” He’d never seen the Ronbo before, and he loved it.

  Upstairs in his own office, there was a sign on his desk that comes pretty close to summing him up. It read: “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.” To that I would add, he was an old-school kind of guy. He would often work in the residence in the early morning, but would always come down to the Oval Office at nine. One morning in particular, I was waiting upstairs by the elevator and the door to the residence was ajar. It was perhaps three minutes to nine, and I could see him pacing up and down the middle corridor of the second floor, looking at his watch. For him, nine meant precisely nine.

  On those mornings when I’d walk with him from the residence, he followed the same routine. I’d open the Oval Office door for him and hold it, because he always came right back out. He’d go to his desk and reach into the lower right-hand drawer. I don’t know who it was, but somebody kept that drawer filled with nuts. He’d take a handful, then come back out onto the portico and spread the nuts around for the squirrels. (In January 1989, when he left the Oval Office for the last time, he placed a note for the squirrels to watch out for the Bushes’ dog.)

  It was difficult not to like him. He was warm, he listened to what people had to say, and he genuinely liked people. He was a man whose natural ease made everything seem normal, and he was never too busy to make the people around him feel special. And it was rare to find anybody he didn’t like. The only person I can think of who wound up on both lists—a man who didn’t care for Ronald Reagan and a man whom Ronald Reagan didn’t particularly care for—was French president, François Mitterand.

  Diplomatic interaction is often intertwined with personalities, and if the personalities don’t like each other, their countries are not going far together. You see it in government, just as you see it in business. Whether it’s working out a nuclear nonproliferation treaty or trying to hire a driver for an executive, chemistry matters. And there didn’t appear to be enough of the right chemistry with François Mitterand. He was aloof, and though he was never disrespectful, he always gave us the impression that he didn’t much care for Americans.

  In spring 1986, we were together at a G-7 economic summit in Japan. As deputy agent in charge of PPD, I was in the limousine with the president, going from our ambassador’s residence, where he was staying, to the plenary session at the Akasaka Palace. We were riding in a standard presidential motorcade of around twenty-six cars. There’s a pilot car that is five minutes ahead and a route car that is three minutes ahead. Then there are motorcycle outriders, followed by the lead car, the protocol car, and two limousines. In the old days we put only one in the motorcade—the spare car would be an off-the-record Town Car—but we changed that after the assassination attempt, using two identical limousines to halve the odds if someone tried to att
ack the president. Behind the limousines is a follow-up car with shift agents, then two or three cars for the senior White House staff, and then the CAT car, with agents in battle gear and carrying automatic weapons. Behind them are a few more staff cars, then three or four press vans, a local ambulance, the WHCA car, and a bunch of tail cars, followed by more motorcycles. Everyone is linked by Secret Service radio, which is vital when something unexpected happens, which it did in Japan.

  The police always block off the streets and cross streets we’re traveling, but in Japan they also block the parallel streets on either side of the motorcade route, which causes havoc with downtown traffic. Still, we were moving along at a fairly good thirty-five-mile-an-hour clip when the president leaned toward the front right seat and asked, “Joe, has President Mitterand arrived at the palace?”

  I said I’d find out and got on the radio. Ten seconds later I told the president, “No, he hasn’t arrived yet.”

  Protocol dictated that the G-7 leaders arrive in reverse order of seniority. That meant, Mitterand should arrive sixth and Ronald Reagan should arrive last. Even though the president never took too much interest in these things, at least not that I’d ever noticed, he seemed unusually aware of protocol that morning. Having been annoyed by Mitterand a few times in the past, especially Mitterand’s habit of always arriving late and keeping everyone waiting, the president decided he wasn’t going to put up with it this time. When I said that Mitterand hadn’t arrived yet, he said, “Slow down the motorcade.”

  I stared at him for a second, thought to myself, this is going to be interesting, nodded, “Yes, sir,” got on the radio, and told the agent in the lead car, “Slow down the motorcade.”

  Now, this is not an insignificant matter. Dozens of streets were blocked ahead of us and parallel to us, and, I assumed, Tokyo rush-hour traffic had already come to a standstill. Slowing down to ten miles an hour wasn’t going to help, but that’s what we did.