The opulence of the shah’s lifestyle on Kish Island was incredible. The caretaker told me he was there fewer than thirty days a year. History is filled with the tales of similar monarchs and their lifestyles—and their demise.
Throughout my Secret Service career I carried a .357 Magnum revolver. I worried about keeping a gun in the house with a young child, and so did the Secret Service. In training session after training session, we discussed the dangers of having weapons at home. Training modules built around safety issues—designed purposely to scare the hell out of us—included videos of kids playing with guns and getting killed. When Michelle was old enough to know about the gun, I explained to her how dangerous it was, showed it to her, warned her that she must never touch it, and insisted that she must never allow anyone else to touch it. I never left it around when I wasn’t there, and I kept it locked in a briefcase in my closet where she couldn’t reach it when I was. I wasn’t so much concerned that she would go near it, but I didn’t want any of her friends to discover it and take it out.
Some agents wear a weapon when they’re off duty. I did when I was in Philadelphia, running criminal investigations, just in case I bumped into a perpetrator who wasn’t happy to bump into me. But I didn’t bother wearing it off duty in Washington because I didn’t think it was necessary. Anyway, I’m not fond of guns. The only gun I owned was the weapon I was issued. I never fired it in anger, and, as far as I’m aware, only two protective agents in the Secret Service have ever fired shots in anger. That was in 1950, when Puerto Rican nationalists tried to assassinate President Truman. But once, with Rockefeller, I came very, very close to being the third.
It was June 21, 1976. We were in a motorcade, driving through small towns in New Jersey, on our way back to Newark Airport from an event. People lined the route because a presidential or vice presidential motorcade—with all the outriders and police cars and limousines and cars following the limousines—is a special sight. We were going about thirty-five mph through one of those towns, and Rocky had his window down halfway waving to people. I was on the right rear seat of the follow-up car, with an Uzi submachine gun on my lap. My window was wide open, and I was doing what I was supposed to do, which was to look at the crowd ahead of the vice president’s limousine.
Suddenly, to my horror, at the front of the crowd I spotted a young boy go into a combat stance and raise his arms. He was holding a weapon and pointing it straight out into the street.
I screamed, “Gun,” and other agents noticed, it too. Instinctively, I raised the Uzi, aiming it right at this kid. There was absolutely no time to think about this; it all came down to training. With my weapon pointing directly at him, I was a fraction of a second away from pulling the trigger—a fraction of a second away from killing this kid because when we shoot we don’t miss—when something didn’t look right. The gun he was holding was red. I was now only fifteen feet away from him—this was all happening very fast, as the motorcade was speeding away—and my finger was tensing to squeeze the trigger when I realized that he was holding a water pistol.
Agents were already out of their cars as we speed by. They tackled the kid, and by then we were gone. My heart was racing, and I broke out into a cold sweat as I moved my finger away from the trigger and brought the Uzi back inside the window to my lap. He was fifteen years old, and had come within a millisecond of getting killed. He was looking straight ahead, almost in an hypnotic state. His head was cocked a funny way, and he was in a combat position. The nightmare haunted me for years. It was the red gun that made me stop.
If the water pistol had been black, I would have pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MOVING UP IN THE WORLD
Nelson Rockefeller chose not to run for vice president, and Gerald Ford lost in 1976, giving way to a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, named James Earl Carter.
When Gerald Ford announced that he would seek a second term in 1976, he asked Nelson Rockefeller to be his running mate. But by then Rocky was ready to call it quits. That didn’t mean, however, that he wasn’t going to keep his hand in the game. There were a lot of political battles going on—particularly with Ronald Reagan making a run against Ford for the Republican nomination—and we took Rocky to the party’s convention that summer in Kansas City. He spent much of his time on the floor with the New York delegation supporting Ford. They were right next to the Utah delegation, which was supporting Reagan. In politics things can get heated, and when one of the New Yorkers yanked a Reagan sign away from one of the Utah delegates, someone from Utah ripped out the New Yorkers’ phone. A scuffle started, and Rockefeller, who was still the vice president, was in the middle of it. Agents jumped in immediately and extracted him from the melee. The following morning at the hotel, I was in the elevator with the vice president and some other agents when he turned to us and said with gleeful expectation, “Well, boys, what are we going to do tonight?”
The agent in charge, Jimmy Taylor, joked back. “Mr. Vice President, you get into a fight tonight and you’re on your own.”
With only a few months left in Rocky’s vice presidency, it was announced that Mrs. Rockefeller would make an official trip to Moscow. So in October 1976, I flew there as lead advance agent with another agent, Roy Wilson. Our Secret Service counterparts in the USSR were a pair of lieutenant colonels in the KGB, Igor Sinitzin and Alexander Turnovsky. The four of us were joined by a young, good-looking, well-dressed woman who spoke perfect English and was introduced to me as the representative of Intourist, the Soviet agency that handled foreigners’ visits. During the cold war, you couldn’t travel anywhere in the USSR without Intourist overseeing your trip. She was meant to be a temptation, but of course, she, too, was a KGB officer, as were most Intourist officials.
We checked into the National Hotel on Red Square, and at some point while looking around my room, I happened to notice the phone next to my bed. There was nothing particularly distinctive about it. I looked at it simply because it was there. I then left the room to start advancing Mrs. Rockefeller’s visit. It was later, when I got back to my room, that I noticed my phone again and realized it wasn’t the one I’d seen earlier. I followed the wire to the wall and had to laugh because there was residual plaster on the floor where someone had drilled a new hole for the bug.
We traveled through Moscow looking at the sites Mrs. Rockefeller was going to visit. The two KGB officers led the way, with the nicely dressed lady and me in tow. What fascinated me was that I never saw either of these guys show any credentials. During the cold war, Russia was famous for having huge lines everywhere. People had to line up no matter where they went. At the GUM department store on Red Square, customers actually had to wait on three separate lines. They stood on the first line to pick out what they wanted to buy, then stood on the second line to pay for it, then stood on the third line with their paid receipt to pick up the item they’d just bought. If you went to a restaurant, you waited in line to get a table. Then, if there were only six people eating in the restaurant, which meant there were nineteen empty tables, the maître d’ would seat you at the same table with the other people, leaving the nineteen tables empty. The rules applied to everybody, except some people, like my new KGB pals. These two would march us right up to the front of every line, say something to the guard, and we would be whisked in. The line at Lenin’s Tomb was a mile long. But not for us. And no one standing in the line behind us ever complained.
Red Square was filled with old ladies in babushkas sweeping the streets, and in the hotel, on every floor, there was a woman sitting at a desk where you left your key. The whole country was overstaffed and underefficient. I didn’t have anything in my room to worry about, and I don’t think Mrs. Rockefeller had anything either, although during her stay we stationed an agent at her door to make certain nobody got in. When the maids came to clean, the agent went in with them.
The day before her arrival, I was part of a small group attending a meeting in the Kremlin with the head of the
KGB’s Ninth Directorate protection service. I’d been asked by the CIA station chief at our embassy to make a list of the Russians attending this meeting. Arriving at the Kremlin, we were escorted into a beautiful office and introduced to a man who looked as if he’d stepped straight out of Hollywood casting. Maj. Gen. Mikhail Dokuchayev was a bulky fellow, then in his fifties, with a well-worn round face. He also had a barrel-chest full of medals, including the Hero of the Soviet Union—the equivalent of our Congressional Medal of Honor—which he’d won as a seventeen-year-old during the battle of Stalin-grad. This was also a man who had plenty of skeletons in his closet, because that’s how you get to be a KGB general.
Another thing that struck me was his huge desk and the table next to it overflowing with telephones. He must have had fifteen of them. I’d never seen so many phones in anyone’s office and was fascinated as to why he needed them. It turned out that the Russians had not yet been able to build multiline phones, so that every line worked off a separate instrument. They were clever enough, however, to put a little light on each phone so that when one rang, the general wouldn’t have to pick up all fifteen to take a call. I remember thinking that the Soviets have nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, yet they can’t create a more sophisticated telephone.
Our discussions went well, which didn’t surprise me, because the Secret Service and the KGB have always had very good relations. This in spite of the fact that they were a military organization with a dark past and we are strictly a law enforcement agency with a very noble and proud past. Yet the KGB was the agency that protected the Soviet leaders, and in that regard, we had similar problems, similar methods, and a similar outlook. We understood each other.
The interpreter who’d come with us from the embassy was very nervous in Dokuchayev’s presence—the KGB had that effect on most Russians—and while I began speaking to him in English, she repeated to him what I’d just said—in English. He listened to her and answered in Russian, which she then translated into English for me. I said something else in English, which she repeated to him in English, and he answered in Russian. It went on that way for three or four questions and answers before any of us realized that he understood English perfectly.
At the end of the meeting, I wrote down Dokuchayev’s name phonetically to take back to the CIA station chief. But the U.S. regional security officer saw me doing that, worried that I might not have written it correctly, and asked Dokuchayev, “Can you please spell your name for us?”
Dokuchayev was annoyed by the question, stood up, announced in English, “The American embassy knows very well how to spell my name,” and walked out. Years later, I reminded him of the meeting. I said, “I’m not sure that the embassy did know how to spell your name.”
The KGB facilitated everything and couldn’t have been more helpful, except that they did it in their own inimitable style. Toward the end of the visit, Mrs. Rockefeller hinted to someone on her staff that she really wanted to attend an opera at the Bolshoi Theatre. We weren’t sure it would be possible to add that to the schedule, especially since tickets took the average Russian years to get, but when we spoke to our KGB hosts about it, they responded, “No problem.” On the appointed night, about an hour before the performance, I accompanied one of my KGB counterparts to the theater where, once inside, he pointed to the various boxes. “Which do you think she would like best?”
I shrugged, “Which one’s available?”
He picked one close to the side of the stage and proclaimed, “We will take that one.”
By now, people were arriving for the opera, including the people in the seats he’d chosen. He walked into the box and simply asked them to leave. I was aghast. Who knew how long those people had waited for tickets and planned for that evening? I knew that if Mrs. Rockefeller ever found out, she’d be furious. I also knew that if the press ever found out, it would be extremely embarrassing. If the situation was reversed, if the Secret Service had ever dared to pull such a stunt at the Kennedy Center simply to appease a Russian dignitary, we’d have a war on our hands. This was the KGB, however, and the people in the box left quietly. I never mentioned it to Mrs. Rockefeller.
I spent the evening sitting in the hallway, in front of the door leading into the box, in a whispered political discussion with my two KGB friends. Both of them wanted to know, “Why is it that we can get along so well, and our countries cannot?” Here it was 1976. America and Russia were both armed to the teeth, capable of destroying the entire planet, and neither of these Russians agents could understand why we were supposed to hate each other. Then again, neither could I. They were my age, they looked like me, we all had kids, and we all had the same issues. We also shared the same fears. I’m afraid their questions went unanswered.
Russia under the Soviets was a society in which so many questions didn’t get answered, mainly because there were no answers. It was a society overflowing with illogical contradictions. At the end of Mrs. Rockefeller’s visit, after she had left Russia, the two KGB officers produced a bottle of vodka. Along with the Intourist woman and a few people from our side, we went up to my room, and there they poured full glasses and we drank to peace and friendship. After that, they drove Roy Wilson and me to the airport, where a second bottle of vodka appeared and was emptied to more toasts. They then delivered us to the edge of the customs area, where they said good-bye. Roy and I turned in all our rubles—because a large sign right there said we could be arrested if we tried to smuggle rubles out of the country—went through customs, and checked in for an Aeroflot flight to Copenhagen. The woman behind the counter now announced that our bags were overweight and insisted that we owed the Soviet airline $250. I got out a government travel request to pay her, but she stated, “No GTR, only rubles.” So I reached for some traveler’s checks but she wouldn’t accept them either. “Rubles, only,” she demanded.
But the law explicitly prohibited us from having any because we’d come across the customs barrier, so I tried to reason with her. “How did you expect us to pay with rubles when we’ve already been through customs, which means we’ve already gotten rid of our rubles?”
She pointed to the Bureau de Change on the other side of the Customs and Immigration barrier, which was a low rope with a sign that warned, “Do Not Cross.” She said, “Go there.” But that meant going back into Russia without passing through Customs and Immigration and then coming back to her counter, again bypassing Customs and Immigration. I objected but she persisted, “Just climb over the rope.” Convinced that I would be thrown into some Gulag, I stepped over the rope, bought some rubles, nervously stepped back over the rope, and paid her. Nobody said a word. That’s how things worked in the USSR. That’s why the rope was low enough for people to climb over.
There was a stark difference in style between Nelson Rockefeller and Walter Mondale. The new vice president couldn’t wait to move into the official residence at the Observatory. He and his family would be the first to live there and to enjoy the beautiful Rockefeller furniture. I was now a shift leader on his detail, heading up the transportation section, which was my first supervisory job.
I won’t say I disliked Mondale, but he was slow to warm to and didn’t necessarily try very hard to warm to us. Maybe it had something to do with how the new administration didn’t much care about the ways of Washington. During the transition—those nine weeks after the election and before the swearing in—we spent time with Mondale at the Carter farm in Plains, Georgia. There was a guest house out by a lake on the property, which is where Mondale stayed. It was very rustic. Jimmy Carter might have liked that, but I’m not sure Walter Mondale did. I got up one morning and went over there early, only to discover the vice president–elect and his staff were eating beans for breakfast, because there was nothing else to eat.
Right from the start, the Carter White House was terribly cost conscious. For example, we would fly cars to events around the country. They told us to save money by trucking them. That ended up being
even more expensive, because the cars often arrived damaged. Carter was known for his micromanagement of everything, and one of the stories that circulated around the White House was that he personally had to sign off on anyone using the White House tennis court. The cost-saving decision that affected us the most was his decision not to use the standard presidential limousines, insisting instead on riding in a Lincoln Town Car. I can appreciate the fact that he didn’t want to look extravagant, but what he didn’t know was that to armor the Lincoln Town Cars cost more than our armored stretch Cadillacs.
Carter used to jog either on the towpath at Georgetown University or around the south grounds of the White House. That was fine with the Secret Service, as most agents can hold their own when it comes to running with a protectee. But the deputy agent in charge of PPD, Steve Garmon, once found himself with a jogged-out president and no cars. Steve and a couple of other agents were running with him that day in Georgetown. The cars were waiting at the appointed place when the president turned to Steve and said, “I’m going to run a little farther today.” So Steve got on the radio and told the drivers to meet them at the next pickup point. About halfway there, Carter decided, “Let’s go back to the original pickup point.” This time when Steve got on the radio to call the drivers, he couldn’t reach them. This wouldn’t happen today with cell phones, but there were dead spots for the radios, and they were in one.
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