On the day of the dinner, a technical security team began sweeping the hotel for bugging devices. Canine units swept the inside of the hotel, the parking areas, and the grounds. Including those in the motorcade, some seventy-five agents were on duty for the visit. They included counterassault teams armed with semiautomatic Stoner SR-16 rifles and flash-bang grenades for diversionary tactics. In addition, a countersniper team deployed by the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division was positioned at the Hilton’s side entrance, where Obama’s limousine would enter the hotel’s underground garage.
The countersnipers are there as observers and can respond to a distant threat with their .300 Winchester Magnum—known as Win Mag—rifles. The rifle is customized for the shooter assigned the weapon. Each team is also equipped with one Stoner SR-25 rifle.
A phalanx of Metropolitan Police officers on roaring motorcycles with flashing red and blue lights heralded the arrival of Obama’s motorcade. The motorcade consisted of eighteen vehicles. They included a specialized communications van for secure telephone and video connections, a truck operated by the National Security Agency that jams radio frequencies around the presidential motorcade and monitors possible threats, and a fully loaded ambulance equipped to handle biological or chemical contaminants.
At the front of the motorcade were two identical presidential limousines. Each of the twin 2009 Cadillacs is known as the Beast. Built on a GMC truck chassis, they are armor-plated, with bulletproof glass and their own oxygen supply. The doors are eighteen inches thick, the windows five inches thick.
The Beasts are equipped with state-of-the-art encrypted communications gear and are shielded against electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons that an enemy could employ to disable the car’s engine and knock out communications. Each car has a remote starting mechanism and a self-sealing gas tank. The vehicle can keep going even if its tires are shot out. It can take a direct hit from a bazooka or a grenade. A planned new model will have larger windows and greater visibility than the current Cadillac models, first used by President George W. Bush for his January 2005 inauguration.
Often, the first limousine in the motorcade is a decoy. The second limousine is called the spare limousine, a backup in case the first one breaks down. However, the president could actually be riding in the second limousine, or for that matter in any vehicle in the motorcade. Indeed, when a threat is perceived, the Secret Service may take the precaution of moving the president from one vehicle to another while the motorcade briefly stops under an overpass. On the night of the correspondents’ dinner, Obama—code-named Renegade—and his wife, Michelle—code-named Renaissance—were in the first Beast in the motorcade.
While an agent drives the limousine with the president, a Secret Service special officer drives the spare. Referred to as an SO, a special officer takes care of duties such as managing the Secret Service’s fleet of vehicles or protecting Bill Clinton’s home in Chappaqua when he and Hillary are away. While special officers carry weapons, they do not have arrest authority. Regardless of the type of vehicle transporting the president, agents call it “the limo,” and it is code-named Stagecoach.
As a security precaution, when not in use, both copies of the Beast are kept in the underground garage at Secret Service headquarters on H Street at Ninth Street NW in Washington. Secret Service employees clean and polish the vehicles. Any other vehicles to be included in the motorcade, such as press cars and even Secret Service Suburbans carrying agents, must undergo a sweep by canine units when they arrive at the South Lawn entrance of the White House.
On the night of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, to ensure that no unscreened vehicles got near the president, the Secret Service blocked the main entrance to the Hilton on Connecticut Avenue. Celebrities swanned onto the grounds of the Hilton after being dropped off at the curb. Only vehicles of other protectees were permitted to enter the circular driveway. But before entering, those vehicles were swept for explosives. In fact, even Secret Service vehicles driven by agents were swept.
With one exception.
Secret Service agents were shocked and disgusted to receive orders from a high-ranking agency official in New York to let in as a personal favor the unscreened vehicle of movie star Bradley Cooper. A photographer snapped a picture of the actor, who achieved fame with his roles in The Hangover, The A-Team, The Place Beyond the Pines, and Silver Linings Playbook, as he emerged from his vehicle, which was parked on the off-limits driveway.
An agent points out that Cooper’s driver or anyone else who had had access to the vehicle could have loaded it with explosives or biological or chemical weapons. While Cooper arrived before Obama did, agents found the episode a stunning breach of security and flouting of the rules for a presidential visit.
“Normally when you come through that checkpoint, a canine team would inspect the vehicle,” an agent says. “The canine goes around the vehicle. Your team would look underneath the vehicle and in the compartments of the vehicle and search it before it enters. Bradley Cooper was not subject to the same requirements that apply to me as an agent. I can’t drive into the White House complex or the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory without getting my own vehicle inspected. Even if it was my work truck, it would still be swept there before I drove it into the Hilton driveway. If my Secret Service vehicle has been sitting outside all night long, I don’t know who’s come by and loaded it with explosives.”
In the case of the movie star, “somebody in Bradley Cooper’s security can call the Secret Service and bypass what everybody else has to go through,” the agent says. “Agents were told not to sweep the car. Just let it in and don’t give Cooper any problems. Bradley Cooper had a free pass to come through the main entrance and drive right up to the front of the hotel. Everyone else, including all the celebrities, stopped on Connecticut Avenue, exited their cars, and then walked up the circular entrance into the front of the Hilton. The agents were blown away when they were told to forget everything they were told to do. And this was two weeks after the terrorist attack on our soil in Boston.”
Ironically, the security breach occurred at the same hotel where John W. Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan, press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy, and D.C. police officer Thomas Delahanty on March 30, 1981.
Asked how Cooper managed to be dropped off at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in the secure restricted driveway at the entrance to the Washington Hilton, Cooper’s publicist at WKT Public Relations in New York did not respond.
Obama’s performance at the Hilton came off without a hitch, to much laughter and applause.
“And of course, the White House press corps is here,” Obama said to the journalists and their celebrity guests, mainly from Hollywood. “I know CNN has taken some knocks lately, but the fact is, I admire their commitment to cover all sides of a story, just in case one of them happens to be accurate.”
As is the case with journalists, Secret Service agents like Barack and Michelle Obama, who treat them with respect.
“Twice Obama invited agents to dinner, including a party for a relative, both at his home,” says an agent who was on Obama’s candidate detail.
“On the night of the Super Bowl, Obama had several guys up in his house in the Hyde Park part of Chicago,” an agent says. “They made sure that we all rotated through to serve us chili.”
Michelle Obama, who is protected by twenty agents, insists that agents call her by her first name.
“Michelle is friendly—she touches you,” an agent says. Like Michelle, her mother, Marian Robinson, who lives with the first family in the White House and receives Secret Service protection outside the White House, goes out of her way to be friendly with agents.
One Father’s Day, Michelle gave Father’s Day cards to the agents who are dads to thank them for working their shift that day.
Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama makes an effort to be on time, and he usually is. If Obama is running late, Michelle gets on his cas
e, saying he is being inconsiderate of his agents. Obama will “acknowledge you when you’re there and seems appreciative and respectful to all the agents around him,” a current agent notes.
As for the Obamas’ children, Malia (code-named Radiance) and Sasha (code-named Rosebud): “I think they’re great kids, from what I’ve seen,” an agent says. “They are very respectable young ladies.”
Still, agents have been dismayed to overhear Michelle Obama push her husband to be more aggressive in attacking Republicans and to side with blacks in racial controversies. Examples were when Obama said Trayvon Martin, the black teenager who was shot to death in Florida, “could have been me thirty-five years ago,” and when he claimed Cambridge police acted stupidly when a white police officer arrested a black Harvard professor who was being obstreperous during an investigation of a report of a possible break-in.
In listening to their talk in the presidential limousine, “Michelle’s agenda goes back to when she said about her husband running for president, ‘For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,’ ” a former agent says.
But if Secret Service agents respect Obama, they say the agency’s corner cutting, laxness, and undercutting of basic security protocols threaten the life of the president. The corner cutting ranges from letting people into events without magnetometer screening to not keeping up-to-date with the latest firearms, cutting the size of counterassault teams, letting agents fill out their own physical fitness test scores, and ignoring firearms requalification requirements.
While most of the corner cutting goes on behind the scenes, symptoms of the lowering of standards emerged when Secret Service uniformed officers let party crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi and Carlos Allen into a state dinner at the White House, even though they were not on the guest list, in November 2009. It emerged again when I broke the story in the Washington Post on April 14, 2012, that the Secret Service sent home agents believed to have engaged prostitutes while assigned to protect President Obama during his trip to Cartagena, Colombia, after one of the agents refused to pay a prostitute her agreed-upon fee.
Secret Service agents have learned that if they blow the whistle on such high-handed breaches of security as letting Bradley Cooper’s vehicle into a secure off-limits area without screening, they will suffer retribution from management. The pressure not to rock the boat takes precedence over protecting the president from the jackal, the term agents use to refer to a potential assassin.
While Cooper arrived at the Hilton before Obama, given the orders handed down from the Secret Service official in New York, agents would have allowed the actor’s vehicle to remain on the driveway at the hotel indefinitely until Obama arrived. If loaded with explosives, it could have taken out the president.
“Agents were told just let Bradley Cooper through,” an agent says. “The agents did as they were told and let Cooper’s vehicle through, out of fear of repercussions. That’s just one example of the arrogance of senior managers in the Secret Service. They think they’re accountable to no one.”
5
THE STRIPPER
During his presidency, Richard Nixon maintained what was known as the Florida White House on Key Biscayne. Fronting Biscayne Bay on the Atlantic coast, the compound on Bay Lane consisted of Nixon’s home, a second house used as his office, and homes for his close friends Bebe Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp. At a checkpoint on Bay Lane, the Secret Service blocked vehicles from entering the compound unless they had been cleared.
One weekend during Nixon’s first term in office, Rebozo, a banker, and Abplanalp, a manufacturer of aerosol valves, drove up to the guard post in Rebozo’s convertible at two in the morning.
“Both were loaded,” a former agent on the Nixon detail recalls. “They had been partying. Bebe was a hell-raiser and would go on all night. They laughed and said they had to wake up the president. They had a present for him.”
Just then, the agent at the post heard a noise from the trunk.
“Excuse me, I think there is something in the trunk,” the agent said.
“No, no. There is nothing in the trunk,” Rebozo said.
“Who is in the trunk?” the agent demanded. He told them to open it.
“There was a naked young lady in the trunk, totally naked,” the former agent says. “She had a good body and was holding a bottle of champagne.”
“We are going to give her to the president,” Rebozo explained.
“No,” the agent said firmly. The young woman had no identification. Therefore, he could not do a background check on her.
But the agent allowed Rebozo and Abplanalp to deliver the stripper to Rebozo’s home. She could not go near Nixon’s home, at 500 Bay Lane. And given his habits, Nixon—code-named Searchlight—likely had been asleep since 9:30 P.M.
“If he had seen the naked young lady, he probably would have had a heart attack,” says another former agent who learned about the incident.
“Nixon never got a piece of tail in his life,” a former agent on his detail says jokingly. “He’d go out and have a couple drinks with Bebe and Abplanalp and start slurring his speech. Nobody would see it, but that’s the only time he ever let his hair down.”
In contrast to Nixon, his vice president Spiro Agnew had a number of extramarital affairs going at once. All the while, the Republican publicly proselytized about the importance of family values.
One morning in late 1969, Agnew asked his Secret Service detail of five agents to take him to a Washington hotel, now the elegant St. Regis Hotel at 923 Sixteenth Street NW.
“We took him in the back door and brought him to a room on the fourth floor,” says one of the agents. “He asked us to leave him alone for three hours. The detail leader understood he was having an affair with a woman.”
The agents waited for the vice president, then returned to the hotel to pick him up.
Agnew “looked embarrassed,” the former agent says. “Leaving him in an unsecured location was a breach of security. As agents, it was embarrassing because we were facilitating his adultery. We felt like pimps.” After that, the agent says, they couldn’t look Agnew’s wife in the eye.
In addition to his relationship with the woman he saw at the hotel, Agnew was having an affair with a dark-haired, well-endowed female member of his staff. When traveling out of town, Agnew insisted that the Secret Service arrange for her to stay in a hotel room adjoining his, a former agent says. The woman was the age of one of Agnew’s daughters. And an agent says Agnew also had an affair going with a blond woman in New Orleans. The agent found out because, at one point, he expressed interest in her himself. Another agent warned him that she was part of Agnew’s “private stock.”
Ultimately, near the end of Nixon’s second term, Agnew was charged with accepting $100,000 in cash bribes. Agnew had taken the payoffs when he was Baltimore County executive in Maryland and later when he was vice president. Agnew pleaded nolo contendere and agreed to resign. He left office on October 10, 1973.
Agents considered Nixon one of the country’s strangest presidents. He was notorious for walking on the beach at Key Biscayne and at his home in San Clemente, California, in a suit or sport jacket.
“He’d go out on the beach in the morning and walk by himself,” a former agent says. “You almost had to feel sorry for the guy. He wouldn’t know to put a bathing suit on. He’d wear slacks, a jacket, and dress shoes walking along the ocean.”
“Nixon could not make conversation unless it was to discuss an issue,” a former agent on his detail says. “Nixon was always calculating, seeing what effect his words would have. The one exception was baseball. You dropped a baseball name or a baseball figure—bingo! But if you couldn’t recite back batting averages and heights and who’s on what and who got traded and who’s up and down, that conversation would end just as fast as it started.”
In contrast to the swagger that comes across in his taped conversations revealed during the Watergate scandal, Nixon in private seemed pa
ssive and often out of it. After spending a weekend at Camp David, the president stepped out of his cabin with his wife, Pat, to get into a Secret Service limousine that would take them to Marine One, the president’s helicopter.
“Secret Service agents were at the ready to move,” says one of Nixon’s agents. “The agent who was driving was checking everything out, making sure the heater was properly adjusted. Nixon paused to talk to Pat. The driver accidentally honked his horn, and Nixon, thinking he was being impatient, said, ‘I’ll be right there.’ ”
While he became more depressed during Watergate, “there needs to be a new definition of depression, because that’s the way Nixon was all the time,” a former agent on his detail says.
As the Watergate scandal progressed, “Nixon got very paranoid,” a Secret Service agent says. “He didn’t know what to believe or whom to trust. He did think people were lying to him. He thought at the end everyone was lying.”
As the pressure mounted, Nixon began drinking more frequently. He would down a martini or a Manhattan.
“All he could handle was one or two,” a Secret Service agent says. “He wouldn’t be flying high, but you could tell he wasn’t in total control of himself. He would loosen up, start talking more, and smile. It was completely out of character. But he had two, and that was that. He had them every other night. But always at the end of business and in the residence. You never saw him drunk in public.”
In the months leading up to the 1972 election, under the guise of being concerned about Edward M. Kennedy’s safety, Nixon ordered his aide John Ehrlichman to arrange to offer Kennedy Secret Service protection as the Democrat campaigned for George McGovern. In fact, Nixon’s Oval Office recordings reveal that Nixon hoped to dig up dirt on Kennedy from the Secret Service agents he dispatched to protect him.
“I predict something more [besides Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick incident that led to the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne] is going to happen,” Nixon said on the tapes. “The reason I would cover him is from a personal standpoint—you’re likely to find something.”
The First Family Detail Page 4
