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

by Petro, Joseph

  We also looked after Mikhail Gorbachev, who made two trips to the States. On his second trip, in December 1988, I met his plane at Kennedy Airport. When Dokuchayev came down the steps, he spotted me on the tarmac, hurried over to throw his arms around me, and said loudly in English, “My good American friend.” For the head of the KGB detail to embrace an American in front of the press like that was a very public statement. Sadly, it was the last time I saw him. Fourteen years later, in June 2002, I found myself in Moscow and asked about him. I was told that he’d retired. I tried to find out where he was. No one seemed to know.

  By now, Gorbachev was considerably more media savvy than he’d been in Geneva. On a motorcade trip through Manhattan, he ordered his driver to stop so that he could say hello to some American people. I was in the lead car with the chief of patrol of the New York Police Department when I heard on the radio that Gorbachev was stopping. By the time we were out of our car, Gorbachev was on the sidewalk trying to shake hands with a crowd of a hundred startled New Yorkers. Minimizing the risk to him meant minimizing the time he was exposed like that, but he wasn’t on the street very long because he didn’t need to be. The whole thing lasted about four minutes. As soon as the press got photos and video footage of him, he was back in his car and the motorcade was moving again. The NYPD chief was very upset about the impromptu. Fundamentally, I didn’t disagree with him, because having Gorbachev on the street when we weren’t expecting such a stunt wasn’t a good thing. However, if we’d told Gorbachev he couldn’t do an impromptu in New York, what would he say when the president went to Moscow and, in a similar way, wanted to greet people in Red Square?

  It was the same reason why we allowed the Russians to bring their own Zil limousines on that trip, the first time that had ever happened. It’s called reciprocity, and it underlined one of the key areas of my job at DPD. We never wanted them to tell us we couldn’t bring our cars to Russia.

  In fact, reciprocity became such a concern of mine at DPD that I told our Canadian RCMP counterparts, When you come to the States you’re welcome to bring weapons. To show them how sincere I was, I even offered to issue guns to them for every visit. They always refused. I did the same thing with the British, who also refused. However, the point was made: They could do in our country what we needed to do in their country.

  Reciprocity notwithstanding, I was told that the main reason I was moved to DPD was to handle the pope’s visit, scheduled for September 1987. He would travel to nine cities in ten days and participate in over a hundred events. This would be the longest trip the pope would ever make to the United States, and it required the single largest protective effort in the history of the United States Secret Service. It would also be the most stressful ten days of my life.

  The man coordinating the visit was Bob Lynch, general secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB). An intelligent, articulate, and personable man, he’d been serving as a parish priest in Miami in 1979 when he was called on to help with the pope’s first trip to the States that year. Only a few cities were included—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Washington—but Lynch so impressed the NCCB and the Vatican staff that they moved him to Washington. Now in his midforties, he and I met for the first time in January 1987. During that meeting, he said that for the pope’s visit in 1979, the Secret Service had disguised an agent as a priest and he wondered if we would do that again. I said no. Besides the fact that there was no operational advantage, it was deceptive and inappropriate. I told Bob, “We are who we are.” He then explained that he wanted to visit the cities on the pope’s agenda three times before the pope did. It would be the typical survey, preadvance, and advance routines. For the advance, we would be joined by some senior staff from the Vatican, including Father Roberto Tucci, the man in charge of papal visits.

  Lynch said that, in each city, the pope would stay at the bishop’s or archbishop’s official residence, and that I would stay there with the pope. At first glance, protecting the pontiff under those conditions was very straightforward. The bishops and archbishops were also proposing venues and events. That worried me because their choices would be based on a religious agenda without an intensive input of the security considerations. Some stops were obligatory. The pope had to visit local cathedrals. Others seemed nonnegotiable from the start, such as the absolutely gigantic outdoor masses. So the survey trip became all about sitting down with the bishops and archbishops, listening to what they wanted the pope to do and where they wanted the pope to go, then seeing the sites for ourselves. It would be my only opportunity to make my views known if a venue or event was unacceptable. Because I didn’t know Lynch very well, I could only hope that when I said something was unacceptable, he would be my advocate.

  I underestimated my new friend. Throughout the survey trip, we discussed every site, every parade route, and every event, and he made a real effort to understand the intricacies of protecting the pope. Then, at the risk of infuriating those bishops and archbishops, when he knew I was right, Lynch stood shoulder to shoulder with me.

  Getting decisions set in stone, however, was not always easy. In New Orleans, for example, the pope was going to hold a special event for ninety-six thousand children at the Superdome. When I saw where Archbishop Philip M. Hannan intended to build the stage, I disapproved. Hannan was a high-powered, determined man who had assisted in serving the funeral mass for John F. Kennedy in 1963. He and I stood on the fifty-yard line while I indicated, No one can sit in the seats from this section to that section because we don’t want people sitting behind the pope. My no-go zone took thousands of seats away from him, and he refused to understand why that mattered. I reminded him we’d do the same thing with the president of the United States, but he never accepted the argument. However, to the archbishop’s chagrin, those seats stayed empty.

  While we were on that trip, my mother, Dorothy, had a hip replacement operation. She was in Florida and a bit frail. I was in Phoenix and couldn’t get to her. Luckily, my brother Tom was with her. But Lynch recognized my concern, and one afternoon, during a break in our schedule, we went back to the archbishop’s residence where Lynch suggested, “I’ll serve a mass for your mother.” I stood next to him at the altar, deeply touched by the sheer humanity of this man. He is, still, one of my dearest friends.

  The survey trip was followed by several months of work, during which ten days’ worth of venues and 114 events were fixed. Once the schedule was established, Lynch and I set off again, to go over every detail with the visit committees in every city. When we were done with that, we did it a third time, so that everyone knew exactly how everything would be handled. Some sites were more complicated than others. The pope was going to conduct open-air masses in odd places, like the campus at Florida Atlantic University in Miami and Laguna Seca Racetrack in Monterey, California. He was also going to hold mass in the Superdome in New Orleans, Sun Devil Stadium on the campus at Arizona State University in Phoenix, the Coliseum and Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Candlestick Park in San Francisco, and the Silverdome in Detroit. Logistics were nothing short of a nightmare. And problems cropped up at every site. For instance, at Sun Devil Stadium, there’s a huge sign bearing the stadium’s name, and the question became, Would the word “devil” be left uncovered for the mass? It was. In Detroit, the agent in charge of the field office—my friend Jim Huse from the Rockefeller detail—told me that Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the archbishop of Detroit, was a very worried man. The Silverdome had recently hosted one of those world wrestling knockdown events and had filled the place with ninety thousand fans. His Eminence fretted that wrestling might outdraw the pope. Of course, it didn’t.

  The White House also wanted to be included in the planning because President and Mrs. Reagan would be greeting the pope when he landed in Miami. It was decided that would happen at the airport. The three would then meet privately a few hours later. For this meeting Lynch selected an impressive old Spanish estate called Vizcaya, which is now a museum.

 
My worry was getting the pope safely through this maze of venues and events. That also meant worrying about all of the backup that the agents needed to make these events happen safely, including hotels, meals, and transportation. My DPD staff worked on this full-time for almost eight months, fitting each part of the trip together as if it were a jigsaw puzzle. More than once during that time I reminded myself how grateful I was that Mike Deaver and Bill Henkel had taught me how to do this.

  The resources we were going to devote to this trip dwarfed anything that had ever been used for anyone else, at any time, even the president of the United States. The Secret Service entourage totaled more than 750, which included three shifts of agents, Uniformed Division officers to work the magnetometers, and post standers. At each venue, we supplemented our own presence with thousands of local police.

  The plane the pope would use while in the States was a leased TWA 727, configured spaciously with first-class seats, but otherwise open. There were no private compartments. Its call sign was Shepherd One. In addition to his plane, we had two L-1011s to take the traveling entourage of the press and off-duty agents, and two sets of “advance packages,” each comprising one C-5A and two C-141s, which leapfrogged so that we had identical packages in every city. Each C-5A carried one popemobile, one limousine, one follow-up car, and one tactical car. The C-141s had the UD officers, the magnetometers, and the post standers. We also had several helicopters to get us from airports into town, including a Huey presidential helicopter for the pope, which carried six people, and much larger H-53s, seating fourteen to sixteen, for the press.

  We needed so many people and so much backup because the crowds we’d be dealing with were gigantic. Until then, the largest crowd I’d ever experienced was with President Reagan during a 1984 presidential campaign stop in Orange County, California. He drew just over fifty thousand people. The pope would get many times more than that. For example, at the parade and open mass in San Antonio, the crowd was estimated at two and a half million.

  While Lynch and I were still working out the plans, in the middle of March, I flew to Rome to meet with the head of papal security, Michele Chabin, and his staff. They brought me along with them to a local event and what struck me, immediately, was the semihysteria that the pope generated. It was the first time that I had any inkling of what was about to happen.

  Although I did not meet the pope on that trip, I did get a long look at the popemobile and decided I didn’t like it. Prior to the attempt on the pontiff’s life in 1981, the popemobile was open. It was little more than a Mercedes jeep with a place for him to stand. As a result of the attack, a Plexiglas cover was fitted over the back. But that wasn’t much of a deterrent. I wasn’t impressed with how well armored the cars were, and I didn’t like the fact that there was no way to get from the driving compartment into the popemobile without climbing out of the car. Back in the States, I told Lynch, “The popemobiles need to be modified and we would want to reconfigure them.”

  Lynch spoke to Chabin, who personally gave me permission to do what was needed. A pair of identical popemobiles were flown to Washington and delivered to the Secret Service garage. Because the bubble was a heavy, single piece of Plexiglas, we cut a big section out of it just behind the driver’s compartment, but then had to reinforce the remaining Plexiglas so the bubble wouldn’t cave in. We made the opening large enough to climb through, and I spent time practicing that move. The guys at the garage were superefficient and managed the reconstruction in under three days. Later, when the pope saw his new machine, he seemed surprised. But when he realized that the agent in the front seat could now speak with him and, if need be, reach him quickly, he understood why we did it. The Vatican still uses our redesigned popemobiles.

  Throughout the preparation stage, Lynch was relentless in constantly warning everyone about the emotional response of the crowds we would face. He’d go into cathedrals and churches and tell event coordinators that when the pope came down the center aisle, mayhem would reign. He would admonish them not to use ordinary ropes at the ends of the pews because people would lunge through them. He’d say, you have to block off the ends of pews with two-by-fours. He would tell organizers over and over again, “You’ve got to put hard barriers inside the church because nothing else will hold back the surging crowds.” He made that point firmly to us, too, insisting that none of the old rules would apply. From what I’d seen in Rome, I knew he was right, and for every rope line, we used wooden or metal barriers.

  Shift agents were specially selected from field offices across the country. Once we had a full complement, I brought them to Beltsville for three days’ training. We worked AOPs with the popemobile, but mostly we practiced rope lines. Every Secret Service agent knows how to work a rope line, and every supervisor has his or her own technique. I always liked to be on the protectee’s left shoulder looking ahead, with my hand around his waist or his back. But none of us had ever worked rope lines with crowds as big and as emotional as the ones we would get. So we practiced with crowds—hundreds of “extras” were brought to Beltsville to re-create the excitement of crowds—and we even had an agent dressed like the pope. We practiced attacks and shootings, and once we went through all of that, we started again with rope lines and crowds.

  We simulated the real thing as best we could, but even then the real thing turned out to be much more than any of us ever expected. No amount of training could have prepared us fully for such raw emotion and abundant enthusiasm. We actually had people fainting in front of the pope. Talk about anomalies, confusion, and losing control. Those were dangerous situations and created serious problems for us. The pope would make his way along the rope line, reaching out, touching people’s hands, and everyone in the crowd—nuns, priests, laypeople—was reaching out to touch him. Babies were being handed to him. Children were fighting to get close to him. And people were keeling over in front of us.

  It was equally difficult for some of the people protecting him to remain unemotional. Policeman along motorcade routes, who were supposed to be keeping crowds back, were snapping pictures as we drove by. I even had to discipline one of our post standers in a church when I spotted him standing on a pew to take a picture. Such an outpouring of emotion never happened with politicians. I’d never seen crowds react to any single human being the way every crowd reacted to him. Nor have I ever seen anyone react to crowds the way he did. They fed off each other in a spectacular way.

  Of course, all the agents were armed the same way they were for the president. We even referred to the level of protection as “a presidential package” and included CAT teams. The Intelligence Division came into the preparations and was soon working overtime. There were good reasons to worry about the safety of the pope. Not only had he been shot, but in his native Poland, the Solidarity movement was going ahead at full speed and Poland’s Communist leaders were on their last legs. The Soviet Union was going through similar turmoil, and there were issues in East Germany. Throughout much of the Communist bloc, the pope—and President Reagan, too—were being held responsible for the growing popular unrest. And we had our own right-wing extremists to deal with inside the United States. Intelligence picked up threats, and agents soon fanned out all over the country to investigate and evaluate them.

  I studied the attempt on the pope’s life in preparation for this, but it wasn’t particularly relevant. The circumstances surrounding that attempt were not going to be repeated here. In Rome the pope had been in an open car. There had been only an inner perimeter. It had been too easy for the assassin to get close. I made the decision—and there was some controversy within the Secret Service about this—that there would a “hundred-yard rule.” I felt strongly that anyone who got within a hundred yards of the pope would have to pass through a magnetometer. The exception would be the big stadium events. I wasn’t comfortable simply hoping that somebody sitting in the far end of say, the Silverdome—more than a hundred yards from the altar—wouldn’t have a good shot at the pope. Over the cour
se of a mass lasting three and a half hours, such a person might somehow make his way down to the foot of the altar. My solution was to require that everyone coming into every stadium would be magged. Even if that meant putting 106,000 people through metal detectors, which is what happened at the Los Angeles Coliseum, we’d do it. There were some people in the Secret Service who thought we were overreacting. I believed it was necessary, that we had the equipment to do it, and that we had the capability to do it. Finally, I knew that the director, John Simpson, supported this approach.

  But not everyone did. The assistant director for protective operations had come out of the investigative side and was fairly vocal about the way I was handling things. We’d had our moments in the past when it came to protection, and now, he argued, we could be just as effective protecting the pope with fewer people. I don’t think he ever realized that this assignment could not be compared to anything we had ever done before. The events were more intense, more focused, and more emotional, and were made considerably more complex by the added dynamic of colossal crowds. In emotional terms the pope was a prime target. I wasn’t prepared to take any risks—I had the DeProspero training.

  I knew that if someone came looking for an opportunity to create violence, the possibility existed that he could find it. What’s more, there would be repetitive opportunities. If a potential assassin missed the pope in the first city, he had eight more to choose from. Moreover, the pope’s schedule was public information. Anyone who wanted to know where the pope was going to be at any given time over those ten days could easily find out. Anyone looking to do him harm had 114 chances in nine cities to take advantage of that opportunity. We were going to make absolutely certain there were no opportunities. Which is why I spent almost every waking moment of those eight months preparing for this trip.