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

by Petro, Joseph

  On September 9, 1987, one hour before the pope arrived, President and Mrs. Reagan landed at Miami International Airport on Air Force One. As soon as they parked, I called Ray Shaddick and asked if I could bring Bob Lynch over to say hello. He radioed back that the Reagans were looking forward to seeing us. So Bob and I walked over to Air Force One and climbed the stairs. I hadn’t seen the Reagans since I’d left the detail almost a year before, and they were as gracious as always. The president kept saying to me, “You’re going to take good care of the pope, aren’t you?” And I kept promising him that I would.

  Although I didn’t say as much to him, I was nervous about this. Tens of millions of people were anxiously awaiting what would be, for many, their chance of a lifetime to see the pope. What worried me were all the things I didn’t know: I didn’t know the pope, and when you don’t know the person you’re protecting, you can sometimes find yourself walking on thin ice; I didn’t know his staff; I didn’t know the cardinals and didn’t know if they would interfere with what I needed to do. What’s more, protecting the pope is not like protecting an American president. The president is, after all, pretty much a regular guy. The pope is not a regular guy, and the protocols are starkly different. The Roman Catholic Church is a state, but with a bureaucracy that doesn’t operate the way a republic does. And I didn’t know how this state would react if there were unexpected conflicts.

  Furthermore, being the product of Catholic schools, I’d been raised to think of the pope with reverence, but I wasn’t spending ten days with him in the context of being a Catholic. I would be constantly at his side because I was the United States Secret Service agent directly responsible for his safety. To accomplish that, to maintain the highest level of professionalism, I decided that I would not do anything with him, either in public or in private, that manifested my Catholicism. I would not kneel, I would not kiss his ring, I would not bless myself. I would always be respectful, but my respect would be only displayed in secular ways. I’m not sure when the pontiff realized I was Catholic, but at no point during those ten days did he indicate in any way that my secular comportment was an issue with him.

  By the time Bob Lynch and I left the Reagans, the pope’s flight was on final approach. Some minutes later, an Alitalia 747—with the papal flag flying out the pilot’s window—taxied to a stop and the door opened. I climbed the steps and walked aboard. And there he was. It took me a second to realize that this really was the pope. Chabin and Tucci introduced me. I said, “It’s very nice to meet you. I promise that we’ll take very good care of you.” He said, “It’s very nice to meet you, and thank you.” And that was it. This wasn’t the time for small talk, because President and Mrs. Reagan were waiting. I left the plane, and then the pope came down the steps to be greeted by the Reagans. After the welcoming speeches, we all got in our separate limousines and went off to the Reagans’ private meeting with him at Vizcaya.

  What was especially nice for me about the Miami visit was that Lynch had arranged for my mother and his mother to be at the first public event, a speech the pope was making in a small church. Naturally, our mothers were given front-row seats. When I brought the pope into the church, he’d been briefed to greet the women in the first pew. He shook their hands, and pictures were taken. After the visit, the church in Miami put out a book with photographs from his visit, and in the middle of the book there’s a two-page picture from behind the pope with Dorothy Petro and Virginia Lynch in the background.

  That event was followed by a big parade through downtown Miami, with more than a million people lining the route. I was in the front seat of the popemobile. The day ended at the very modest ranch house that was the archbishop’s residence. Because there wasn’t enough room for me inside, Lynch arranged to have a camper put in the yard where I would sleep. It was a good idea, but I didn’t sleep very much because there was so much noise all night long, with police radios blaring and officers talking. The next morning, the pope hosted a series of private audiences, and Lynch again arranged for our mothers to be there. We took them into the house with eight or ten other people. They met the pope again and had more pictures taken. I kept watching my mother with him, and I knew she was thinking, “It can’t get much better than this.”

  The second day, among other things, there was a meeting with Jewish community leaders. The pope always did that when he visited somewhere, because he was very conscious of the need to maintain a close relationship with members of other faiths, both for historical and personal reasons. I later learned that, as a young boy in Poland, one of his best friends was a Jewish girl and, I think, that when they were teenagers, they may have dated. She got married and had children, but he stayed in touch, and I know that her family visited the Vatican.

  The pope spoke English well, but in a very deliberate manner. His speeches were typed, double-spaced, on sheets of white paper. After the first couple of speeches we discovered—because we were counting—that it took him two minutes per page to read them. So at every speech, we’d ask Tucci, “How many pages?” If he answered, ten, we’d have a good indication of when to start preparing to leave. On that second day, the pope spoke to four to five hundred priests in a large church, and this time when I asked Tucci, how many pages, he said, “Twenty-two.” But as the pope delivered his speech, the priests clapped and cheered after every line. I could see that the pope was getting a little frustrated because he knew how long the speech was. He must have been thinking to himself—as we all were—at this pace it will drag on for three hours. He plodded on, and they clapped and cheered. After the seventh or eighth interruption by applause, he held up the twenty-two pieces of paper and said, “It’s a long way to Tipperary.” The place went crazy. And we got out of there in under an hour.

  Then came the gigantic outdoor mass in Miami. It was nothing short of breathtaking. The altar was absolutely enormous, built high enough so that three hundred thousand people could see him. Huge canvas sheets—which must have been fifty to sixty feet long—hung behind the altar on long cables, billowing in the wind like sails on a schooner.

  However, as I climbed the steps to the altar with the pope, I could see a typical South Florida storm rolling in. He began the mass, and before long there was thunder and lightning off in the distance. Huge speakers were mounted on gigantic scaffolds, and we had placed countersniper teams up there, too. When I saw lightning, I made the decision to bring them down. I was also very concerned that the pope wasn’t safe at the altar. By now someone was standing next to him, shielding him from the rain with an umbrella. But I was getting reports on my radio from the command post that the weather service was predicting gusts from forty to fifty miles per hour. We’d checked with the engineers, and those canvas sails behind the pope were only stressed at 35 mph. Anything more than that and they could snap. So as the pope read his homily at two minutes per page, I turned to Father Tucci and said, “We can’t continue. If those cables snap, people could get injured or killed. When he finishes the homily, we are taking him off the altar.”

  Tucci warned, “He may not go. He has never stopped a mass in the middle.”

  “He hasn’t started the consecration,” I reminded him, “so technically it isn’t a mass yet.”

  Tucci shook his head. “He’s Polish. He’s stubborn.”

  But I’d made up my mind. “It’s too dangerous. We’ve got to take him off.”

  In addition to the hundreds of thousands of people in the field, the mass was televised, and I couldn’t even begin to guess how many millions of people were watching it.

  Secret Service Director John Simpson—who, as an Irish Catholic from Boston, had knelt and kissed the ring when he met the pope and had given me an odd look because I hadn’t done the same thing—was standing there with us. I said to him, “If he won’t agree to leave, we’re going to have to pick him up and take him off.”

  When Simpson nodded that he understood, I told my deputy, Rich Miller, “You and I will climb up the steps to the big chair. I
f he won’t go, you take his left arm and I’ll take his right.”

  I’d only just met the pope the day before, and here I was about to drag him off the altar. This would be the main story on the national evening news. It was not something I was looking forward to. But the weather was getting worse by the minute. “Once we’ve got him off the altar,” I said to Tucci, “we’ll announce to the people that they should take cover.”

  That’s when the pope finished the homily. He put his papers down. Rich and I looked at each other for a second, then started up the steps. My heart was pounding. We’d only taken a few steps when I sensed that somebody was following me. I turned around to see John Simpson. It was his way of saying to Rich and me, if this gets ugly, the director is going to be there with you. It was a courageous thing to do, and gave me enormous confidence.

  Now I was at the altar. The pope was sitting in his chair, head bent in deep thought. The rain was coming down in torrents. Rich and I slowly approached him. The pope turned to look at me, and when I was within six feet of him, when our eyes met, I waved my finger for him to follow me. That’s all I did. I’m not sure why I did that, except perhaps that I couldn’t think of anything else to do. He stared at me, and I kept waving my finger. I could see that he was thinking about what to do. It was a very long few seconds, while he stared. I thought to myself, I’m going to have to carry him off.

  That’s when he began to stand up. I quickly moved to his side and, taking his elbow, whispered to him, “We must get off the altar, it’s too dangerous.”

  He said to me, “Are you sure?”

  I said yes. He nodded and came quietly down the steps with us.

  Everyone was told to seek shelter. The pope was suspending the mass but would finish it over the public address system from the house trailer placed behind the altar that was serving as the sacristy. Nobody left. Three hundred thousand people stayed in the open field, in the pouring rain, to listen to him over the loudspeakers. The storm was horrible. But almost at the exact moment that he finished the mass, the sun came out. We escorted him back to the altar, and three hundred thousand people went wild. From then on, every time we got into a limousine with the bishop or archbishop of whatever city we were in, the pope would explain what had happened in Miami. He would point to me and say, “I stopped a mass for the very first time in my life because the ‘institution for security’ made me leave the altar.”

  From Miami we flew to Columbia, South Carolina. By then the pope had changed into dry clothes. But none of the agents had anything to change into because our suitcases were already in the hold of Shepherd One, so we spent our time on the short flight trying to dry our shoes and our socks. In Columbia the pope did an ecumenical event with a congregation of Baptists, Jews, and Greek Orthodox, followed by six or seven other events, before we climbed back on the plane to fly to New Orleans. We were still in Miami-soaked clothes until late that evening. That was how the ten days started.

  New Orleans featured several events in the Superdome, the first of which were relatively small gatherings with laypeople and priests in various meeting rooms. The main event was meeting the ninety-six thousand children. We’d secured a men’s room for the pope—a typical stadium men’s room with dozens of urinals and toilets—but his staff made it a little more attractive, if that’s possible, by putting a rug and a chair in there for him. So when the private meetings were finished, Tucci suggested to the pontiff that he might want to use the men’s room before going into the stadium. He said he would. Tucci, Lynch, the entourage of cardinals, the detail agents, and I waited in the hallway for the pope to come out. Two minutes went by, then four minutes went by, and we could hear the kids getting rowdy. After five minutes, Tucci agreed that this was taking longer than it should.

  I offered to see if everything was all right. I left them and stepped into the men’s room, only to find the pope sitting in the chair with his arms folded. He asked, “Is it time?” He’d seen the chair and assumed that after he went to the bathroom, he was supposed to sit down and wait. I smiled, “Yes, it is time.”

  The instant the popemobile appeared in the stadium, screaming and yelling and applause erupted. Sections of the crowd started chanting, “John Paul Two, we love you … John Paul Two, we love you …” over and over again, and it spread through the entire place. By the time we got him to the platform, the chanting was thunderous—a noise level beyond anything I’d ever heard—and it must have lasted fifteen minutes. He then walked up to the microphone and said, “John Paul Two loves you, too.” And now ninety-six thousand kids erupted again in tumultuous cheering and screaming.

  At the end of a very long day in New Orleans, we headed back to the archbishop’s residence, which shared a property with a large seminary in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Because we couldn’t cover the neighborhood with snipers and agents, we set up a tent at the entrance so that we could pull the car into it and he could get in and out safely.

  We were in the popemobile because almost every route we took was a parade route, and on this evening Archbishop Hannan was in the popemobile with him. The pope’s private secretary, Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, had worked out a deal with the archbishop that instead of going straight into the tent, we would stop short in the driveway in front of the seminary. There we would open the window of the popemobile on the seminary side only—leaving everything secure on the side where the houses were—and the pope would speak to the seminarians. That was fine with me, as long as he stayed in the popemobile. And I was very specific when I told Monsignor Dziwisz, Archbishop Hannan, Tucci, and Lynch that under no circumstances could the pope leave the popemobile.

  So we pulled up to the seminary and I got out of the popemobile and moved next to the open window, within reach of the pope. He was looking at the seminarians, who were chanting and applauding and calling out to him, when I noticed Hannan open the door on the other side, call to the pope, and invite him out. I hurried over and closed the door. But as I came back around to the pope, Hannan opened the door again. So I came back to Hannan’s side a second time, and shut the door hard. I returned to the pope’s side, and Hannan opened the door a third time. Now I went back there and told Hannan, “Don’t open this door again,” and slammed it shut very forcefully. He got the message, because it did not happen a fourth time. As I came around to the side where I needed to be, Dziwisz was saying something in Polish to the pope.

  After the speech to the seminarians, we drove the short distance into the tent and went inside the residence. Before going up to his room, the pope clasped my hand with both of his, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “Mr. Petro, thank you very much.” It became a nighttime ritual that I looked forward to for the rest of the trip.

  Once the pope was upstairs, I joined Dziwisz, Tucci, and Lynch in the living room. Hannan was off somewhere furious with me. After a while, Dziwisz and Tucci left, leaving me alone with Lynch.

  “When you were in the middle of this confrontation with Hannan,” Lynch asked, “do you know what Dziwisz said to the pope in Polish?” He grinned. “Dziwisz told the pope, do whatever Joe says.”

  We started each morning at 7:30 or 8:00 and often didn’t finish until 10:00 or later at night. The pope would have a small breakfast by himself in his room. There were luncheons every day, and we watched the preparation of his food. He would eat very little for dinner, and never anything between meals. On the other hand, I missed a lot of meals, and a lot of sleep, too. After getting him back to his room, I’d go to mine for phone briefings with the advance agents for the next day, going over the visit site by site. I was usually in bed by midnight, but couldn’t fall asleep for hours, and would be up by six. I’m grateful that the pope didn’t jog.

  In San Antonio, it was very hot and extremely sunny. Some agents wear sunglasses because they like the Hollywood stereotype; others say it gives them an advantage because people can’t tell where they’re looking. I was never one to wear sunglasses, and but I wore them in San Antoni
o because the sun was so bright that it hurt my eyes. I don’t know how the pope got through that heat and that glaring sun.

  The only unusual security incident during the entire trip happened there, while we were in the popemobile driving past the Alamo. A woman broke through the crowd and ran toward us. The agent who spotted her, Dick O’Meara, reacted exactly the way he was expected to. He jumped off the follow-up car and stopped her. Another agent backed him up. They determined that she was just being overenthusiastic, and helped her find her place back in the crowd. At no point during the ten days were there any other incidents. Looking back, I’d like to think the reason was because we prepared properly.

  At our next stop, Phoenix, something did happen that I wasn’t prepared for. I hadn’t seen it at the outdoor masses, and didn’t notice it inside the Superdome, but at Sun Devil Stadium the very instant that the pope consecrated the host, tens of thousands of flashbulbs went off at exactly the same time. It was one huge flash of light, and for a brief second, it frightened me. Also at Sun Devil, there was a ceremony called “blessing the sick,” where about fifty people in wheelchairs, on crutches, and on stretchers waited for him in the middle of the football field. The pope came down and greeted every one of them, and it wasn’t just a brief hello. He put his hands around their faces and prayed with them.

  What I didn’t know about Phoenix until we got there is that it has a small Polish community. In fact, nobody seemed to know about it until the last minute, when the church hastily arranged a Polish event—complete with music and dancers—for the end of the day on the lawn at the rear of the residence. It was around 9:30 when we returned to the residence and went inside. The pope reached for my hand and started to say, “Mr. Petro—” I shook my head. “I’m afraid you’re not finished,” I said. “There’s one more event.” It was the only time in ten days that I saw him look tired. His head dropped as if to say, oh, no. But he immediately caught himself. We went onto the back lawn, and when he heard the sound of his native Polish, he became revitalized.