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

by Petro, Joseph

  Steve had no luck getting in touch with them all the time that he and the President were running back to the starting point. When they got there, Steve saw a phone booth. He knew if he called the White House, they’d contact the cars, but he was in jogging shorts and didn’t have any money. So he dialed zero and got the Bell operator on the line, introduced himself, and asked for the White House. The operator said sure, and hung up. Shades of Rocky getting the same response. Of course, he eventually got through, and the cars arrived immediately. Later, someone gave him a plaque with a quarter in the middle of it.

  The Mondale family was not particularly athletic, although they enjoyed skiing vacations. We had a lot of skiing experience with Jerry Ford, and there were several agents who handled themselves expertly on the slopes. Because the vice president was always covered with a hat, goggles, and ski gear, he wasn’t an easily recognizable target, so the main worry when skiing with him was injury. Still, we practiced “attacks on the principal” on ski slopes, just as we practiced AOPs wherever we’d go.

  I left the Mondale detail after about a year for one of the most fascinating areas of the Secret Service. The Intelligence Division was an outgrowth of the Warren Commission’s investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Secret Service realized it needed to do a better job of distilling intelligence information and maintaining liaison with the intelligence services and the FBI. Intelligence has become very sophisticated over the years and is today an essential part of protecting the president and others.

  Inside the division, there is the Domestic Intelligence Branch, and the Foreign Intelligence Branch. Both are staffed with agents who work alongside civilian research specialists tracking cases and sharing information with the CIA, the Defense Department, the FBI, and dozens of other sources. They analyze information, distill it, and distribute it to the people who need to know. Shared information is a hot topic today in the wake of 9/11, but the Secret Service has been sharing information for a long time. There is reason to believe that the FBI had information in Dallas in 1963 that it did not pass along to us. The selective exchange of intelligence was not an isolated incident at that time.

  John Hinckley had come to the FBI’s attention prior to his attempt to kill Ronald Reagan. Granted, it was marginal information, and there is an argument to be made that it was too marginal to pass along. Yet, the FBI did have a file on him, and there is also an argument that goes, if they had passed the information along, we might have interviewed him, and he might not have bothered to show up that afternoon in front of the Hilton Hotel. Then, too, the FBI had information on a lot of people like John Hinckley, and it’s easy to criticize with hindsight. In that sense, it’s no different than the intelligence that was not shared before 9/11. Some of the intelligence was too vague and some of it didn’t make any sense until after the fact. That said, it’s very difficult to look at a single piece of intelligence swimming around in a whole sea of intelligence and pick something out as being significant. It’s much easier to look back and see what was missed. Unfortunately, we only know for sure what we missed when it’s too late.

  The Intelligence Division Duty Desk is manned twenty-four hours a day by three agents and one supervisor who take calls referred from the White House. It’s here that we deal with all the people who demand to speak to the president. On good days, we get three or four nuisance calls. On bad days, usually around the full moon, we get twice as many. The rest of the time, we coordinate information between various people and field offices within the Secret Service and operate as a kind of command post. If somebody wants to get hold of the director on a Saturday night at ten o’clock, they know that the Duty Desk is always manned, and that the phones there will always be answered.

  Whenever an oddball called the White House, our routine was simple. We’d listen to what he or she had to say and would try to get as much information as possible. If the information was disconcerting, we’d run a trace on the line and, if need be, send out the cavalry. One night while I was there, a caller started making very specific threats. The system worked perfectly, and police officers in Illinois arrested him in a phone booth, still on the line with us. Most of the disturbing calls we take are either from people in mental institutions or from very disturbed people who ought to be. My guess is that such calls account for about 95 percent of the threats against the president and vice president.

  The problem is the remaining 5 percent. The Secret Service needs to find out who those people are and to determine whether they have the capacity, the means, and the opportunity to carry out their threat. Every sinister call, and every sinister letter and every sinister fax and every sinister e-mail, is looked at and evaluated. Information is forwarded to regional offices where agents open files on these people and begin to investigate them. The same applies when someone is referred to us. Almost everyone who comes to our attention is interviewed. Agents need to determine several things. One is to find out with whom we’re dealing. Once we establish a person’s identity, we run a very thorough background check. We want to know where that person went to school, whether that person has ever been arrested, who his friends are, and, in essence, find out everything we can about that person. We then do the most important thing of all, and it is, decidedly, also the most difficult thing of all: We determine whether or not this person qualifies as a dangerous subject.

  If the answer is yes, the person is put on a watch list. These people are then interviewed routinely, sometimes as often as every thirty days. Most of them are in mental hospitals, and the interview serves to confirm that they’re still there. If the president is due in town, we need to be sure that the person won’t be out on a day pass. If he is, we find him. It’s a certainty, for example, that John Hinckley is on a watch list. Just because his attempt on the president happened a long time ago, and just because someone somewhere proclaims him mentally stable enough to be out on weekends, that doesn’t mean the Secret Service has forgotten him, or ever will.

  We also want to know how certain people are feeling. In cases where people on the watch list are being treated for mental problems, agents may talk to their doctors. Though the patient-doctor confidentiality is an issue, it can be helpful to get the doctor’s opinion about a person’s proclivity for violence. We find that most doctors take our discussions seriously. If, after all that, a person poses some sort of danger, even if he or she hasn’t actually committed a crime, it’s not unheard of for us to impress upon the person’s family that their relative needs further psychiatric help. If that doesn’t work, or the family refuses, we have the right to go court to ask that someone be committed.

  Intelligence agents are sent into the field for every presidential visit. They work with the local field office and local police intelligence to identify potential problems. I always looked for what we called “unusual direction of interest.” There are letter writers, for example, who send mail by the ton to the president. They may not be outwardly dangerous, but by sending so many letters, they are demonstrating obsessive behavior. We interview and reinterview those sorts of people because we need to get a sense of what’s going on in their head. In many cases, the best way to do that is to go to their homes and see what’s on their walls, see if any guns are visible. You can get a really good idea of whom you’re dealing with when you can see how they live.

  There is an intelligence agent riding in the president’s motorcade, and there are intelligence agents at every event, in the crowds, looking for faces they recognize. Often you hear intelligence agents complain that a lot of their work is routine, and that some of the work seems like a waste of time. But it’s very difficult to judge how dangerous a person might be. There’s no doubt that the Intelligence Division is underappreciated because there is no way to quantify their successes. It’s their failures that make the papers. The classic example of that was the interview of Sara Jane Moore the night before she fired a shot at President Ford. The agent who interviewed her, the late Gary Yauger, was hauled up
before Congress. In his testimony, he discussed how we do this sort of thing and how he came to determine that Moore was not dangerous. Ultimately, Congress concluded that, based on what Yauger knew that night and, given the circumstances, he made the best assessment he could at the time. Obviously, it’s a judgment call, but it weighs heavily on intelligence agents.

  Intelligence is an imprecise science, at best. We have never been able to use intelligence in predicting an assassination attempt. But it can help to establish a deterrence. Once you’ve identified someone who might be thinking about violence, the single act of interviewing that person can be significant. When an agent shows up at someone’s door, the person might conclude, They know who I am, I can’t get away with it, so I’d better not do anything. Again, there’s no way to accurately measure the success rate of deterrence, and it’s impossible to know the number of attempts that have been stopped this way. But there must be some. Suppose that, of the bulk of the people who make nuisance calls or write threatening letters, 95 percent don’t have the means or the capability or the opportunity to do something. Then suppose that, of the remaining 5 percent, there is some percentage—minuscule, perhaps 0.001 percent—who do have the means or the capability or the opportunity to do something. The fact that they don’t then carry out their threats suggests that the Secret Service agent who interviewed them had an effect.

  From Intelligence, in 1979, I was promoted to a very substantial position at the Treasury Department as special assistant to the secretary (SATS). I was in the service just ten years, and I was already working directly for the secretary. I served two: Michael Blumenthal and G. William Miller. I reported to the assistant secretary for enforcement and operations, Richard Davis, who’d been an assistant to Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski. Davis was a smart guy who oversaw Customs, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), and the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC).

  My office was small, looking out to Fifteenth Street and the south grounds of the White House, but it was directly above the secretary’s office. He and I shared a private elevator. Well, to be more precise, his private elevator came up into my office. When Stu Knight, then director of the Secret Service, took me to my office on my first day, he said to me, “Your most important job is to keep this office.” It afforded the Secret Service a unique position within the Treasury Department, and he didn’t want to lose it. We, of all the agencies inside Treasury, had the most direct access to the secretary. “Keep the office,” he said over and over again. And I did, for two years.

  Like the Intelligence Division, the SATS job had been created by the Warren Commission, which felt that Treasury wasn’t well enough aware, on a day-to-day basis, of what the Secret Service was doing. In the fall of 1979, when Fidel Castro arrived to address the United Nations, I took Richard Davis to New York so that he could see firsthand what we do.

  The Secret Service had set up a command post on the second floor of a building directly across the street from the Cuban mission, which is on Lexington Avenue at Thirty-eighth Street. The visit was coordinated with the New York Police Department, which had set up barricades everywhere. Now, Castro routinely does things at very odd hours, like landing at Kennedy at 3:00 AM and flying back to Havana at 3:45 AM. It gave me a chance to show Davis how we could cope with anything at any hour. There were thousands of police lined up, literally shoulder to shoulder, from the Cuban mission to the United Nations. We rode in the motorcade, in the backseat of the spare limousine. I told Davis that if he wanted to get the full Secret Service experience, we’d put a beard on him and he could be the decoy.

  Castro gave his speech, then came straight back to Thirty-eighth Street, where he spent most of his time. The night of his departure, we pulled both limousines into the mission’s two-car garage and shut the doors so that he could get into the car safely and so that nobody would know which car he was in. The way the cars were lined up, the spare limousine was closest to the mission’s back door. For some reason Davis and I were alone in the garage with the two drivers, standing near the spare limousine, when the door flew open and Fidel was there, standing in front of us. I knew he was big, but I never realized that he was so tall and so imposing. He looked at us and started to get into the backseat of the spare limousine, until I put up my hand to stop him, and motioned, “It’s that car.” He was surprised, but turned and went to his limousine, and by then the detail guys were there, too.

  During those years that I was the SATS, civil war broke out inside the Secret Service. A political struggle began between two factions, and it would have severe repercussions for many years to come. It was a sad time. Although I served the secretary of the treasury, I was also, as a practical matter, the staff assistant to the director of the Secret Service. I’d walk back and forth from Treasury to headquarters every day, sometimes more than once. The director, Stu Knight, was a man I respected enormously. A Canadian by birth, Knight had served in the U.S. military during World War II and had won the Silver Star for bravery in the Pacific. He was dignified and impressive both physically and in his manner. He had been a very good agent and, as director, skillfully balanced the protective and the investigative functions. His deputy, Mike Weinstein, had been my first boss in Philadelphia. Weinstein was the smartest and best manager in the Secret Service. A man of unquestioned integrity, he should have succeeded Stu Knight in the director’s office, and that he never became director was an enormous loss to the Secret Service.

  At the time, the agent in charge of Los Angeles was Bob Powis. He was a powerful figure in the service because Los Angeles was a big and important field office. Some people jokingly referred to him as “the West Coast director.” He was a dynamic guy who commanded a staunch loyalty—field agents worshipped him—over the years. A whole faction of Powis guys permeated the service. Knight saw the challenge coming from Powis and did what I thought was a clever thing. Instead of leaving Powis on the West Coast, where he had great independence, Knight brought Powis back to Washington as assistant director of protective operations. It was all about adhering to the old adage, Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Knight wanted to keep an eye on Powis, and perhaps neutralize him, by removing Powis from the investigative side of the Secret Service where he’d earned his potent reputation. Unfortunately, it backfired. Factions quickly formed as Powis put his old Los Angeles guys in various senior protective positions.

  There are, I suppose, four categories of agents in the Secret Service. There are those who really like investigation work and don’t want to do anything else. There are those who want to do protective work, perhaps because they love the glamour of being at the White House and don’t want to do anything else. Then there are agents who go back and forth, making a point of doing both throughout their career. And finally, there are agents who choose training or technology and prefer to manage their careers that way. But there are very strong forces on all sides, pulling in all directions, and, as a result, ill feelings have developed between the investigative and protective factions. Some agents refer to other agents as the “protection pukes” or “investigation pukes,” and those tags can stay with you for your whole career. The lines became very distinct during the Knight-Powis battle and contributed to a lot of the problems that the Secret Service had at that time.

  A showdown was coming, and I knew that if Powis won, I’d be viewed as a Knight guy and would fall victim to it. That’s when a lucky opportunity arose. I was selected to go to Princeton University as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. I was the first agent to go there since 1966, when Stu Knight attended. So, in the fall of 1980, I started graduate school.

  The Reagan election in November 1980 tipped the scales toward Powis, who’d known the new president during his years as California’s governor. Powis soon became deputy assistant secretary of the treasury, working for the assistant secretary of enforcement and operations, to whom the director of the Secret Service reported. An alliance quickly formed
between Powis and John Simpson, who’d been agent in charge of the Reagan detail during the 1976 Republican nomination campaign. As Powis moved up, so did Simpson. They squeezed Knight and Weinstein from both sides, and before long my friends were gone and John Simpson was director.

  I returned from Princeton in 1981 to a routine job in Internal Affairs, and, with Powis and Simpson now running things, I did not feel encouraged. When Powis moved on, Simpson shifted his own guys—most of them refugees from the Spiro Agnew vice presidential detail—into positions of authority, replacing the old Powis team. The Knight-Powis battle now became a Knight-Powis-Simpson struggle. But then, for some reason, John Simpson promoted me to deputy assistant director for public affairs, making me an official spokesperson for the Secret Service. I never knew why he did it, except that I might have been the token Knight guy they needed to keep around in order to make the civil war look more civil. I didn’t like the way Simpson ended up where he was, or what he did to Knight.

  Public affairs was new territory for me, and I wasn’t always at ease dealing with the press. However, one of my predecessors was a really sharp character named Jack Warner, and he’d once been interviewed on a midnight radio show in Washington hosted by Larry King. Jack was with him for a couple of hours, and no one ever gave a better interview about the Secret Service. When I took the job, I got a tape of that interview and listened to it every now and then, because it was a master class in public affairs. It was Jack on that show who best summed up November 22, 1963: “The Secret Service failed.” He told Larry King to forget the circumstances surrounding that day and to forget the excuses and to put everything else into this one single context: “We lost the president.” Jack Warner was the best, and I listened to his interview with Larry King because I wanted to be that good.

  Dealing with the media is a risky business and I learned quickly that I could never win. I would do an hour-long interview with a reporter, and when the story ran, invariably something would be misquoted, or exaggerated, or embellished, or it wouldn’t come out the way I intended. Jack was famous for saying that every time he gave an interview, the next day the director would want to know, How could you say what you said in this second paragraph? Jack’s customary response would be, “I don’t know how I said that, but look at paragraph eight, that’s pretty good.”