In the President's Secret Service

by Ronald Kessler

  Jackal

  IN THEIR IN-HOUSE jargon, agents refer to any possible assassin as “the jackal.” Were a jackal to strike, it would most likely be when the president has left the cocoon of the White House. Every assassin has pounced when a president is most vulnerable—outside the White House, usually when arriving or departing from an event. That window of vulnerability opens several times a week when the president leaves the White House for an event in Washington or goes on a domestic or overseas trip.

  Even a visit to a friend’s home requires elaborate preparation. When George W. Bush was president, he and Laura had dinner at the home of Anne and Clay Johnson, a close friend from high school. Guests included Bush’s Yale friend Roland W. Betts and FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, and his wife, Ann. Checking out the Spring Valley home in Washington beforehand, the Secret Service set up a command post in the basement.

  “They asked that drapes be put up in the dining room and suggested a chair in which the president should be seated,” Anne Johnson recalls. “Agents were posted around the yard, and no-parking cones were put up in front of the house.”

  The Secret Service asked the Johnsons to clear a closet that was big enough for at least two people.

  “In case of an emergency, an agent was going to grab the president, and the two of them were going to dive in,” Anne Johnson says. “That would have been an interesting dive, because GWB would have had Laura by the hair, at the very least.”

  Anne Johnson asked an agent, “What should everyone else do in case of an emergency?”

  “I only have one client: the president,” the agent replied.

  Ten days before a presidential trip, at least eight to twelve agents fly to the intended destination. That is in contrast to the two-man advance team sent for President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas. Back then, the Secret Service had about 300 special agents, compared with 3,404 today.

  Now an advance team includes a lead agent, a transportation agent, airport agent, agents assigned to each event site, a hotel advance agent, one or two logistics agents, a technical security agent, and an intelligence agent. As part of advance preparations, a team of military communications personnel from the White House Communications Agency is sent to handle radios, phones, and faxes. They ship their equipment and additional personnel on Air Force C-130 cargo planes. The Uniformed Division’s countersniper team and the counterassault team from the Secret Service’s Special Operations division may also send agents on an advance.

  The counterassault team, or CAT, as it is referred to, is critical to providing protection outside the White House. A heavily armed tactical unit, it is assigned to the president, vice president, foreign heads of state, or any other protectee, such as a presidential candidate, deemed to require extra coverage. In the event of an attack, CAT’s mission is to divert the attack away from a protectee, allowing the working shift of agents to shield and evacuate the individual. Once the “problem,” as Secret Service agents put it, is dealt with, CAT members regroup, and the shift leader directs them to their next position.

  The Secret Service first started using the teams on a limited basis in 1979. They were formed after several agents involved in training were having lunch and began asking themselves how the Secret Service would deal with a terrorist attack, according to Taylor Rudd, one of the agents. After President Reagan was shot in 1981, the teams were expanded and eventually centralized at headquarters in 1983. CAT differs from a special weapons and tactics team (SWAT), which the police or Secret Service may deploy once an attack occurs. Code-named Hawkeye, CAT takes action as the attack occurs.

  “Depending on the circumstances, before 1979, besides agents riding with the president, we had five or six agents in a muscle car with Uzi submachine guns,” says William Albracht, a founding member of the counterassault teams. “If something happened, they were supposed to lay down a base of fire or have firepower available. They added another layer of protection to the principal. If they came under attack, they would have returned fire. The job of the agents with the protectee is always to cover and evacuate. Get him the hell out of there. So they would try to cover a withdrawal, or if they’re in a kill zone, try in some way to get him out with extra firepower.”

  The muscle car concept was “very loose, and the criteria for engaging hostile fire was somewhat unclear,” Albracht says. “The CAT program, which replaced it, was designed to codify and standardize the Secret Service’s response to terrorist-type attacks.”

  Clad in black battle-dress uniform, known as BDU, CAT members travel with the president. They are trained in close-quarter battle—when small units engage the enemy with weapons at very close range. They are also trained in motorcade ambush tactics and building defense tactics.

  Each CAT team member is equipped with a fully automatic SR-16 rifle, a SIG Sauer P229 pistol, flash bang grenades for diversionary tactics, and smoke grenades. CAT agents also may be armed with Remington breaching shotguns, a weapon that has been modified with a short barrel. The shotgun may be loaded with nonlethal Hatton rounds to blow the lock off a door.

  One time a CAT team had to deploy was January 12, 1992, when a protest rally got out of hand during a visit by President George H. W. Bush to Panama City, Panama. Agents rushed Bush and his wife back into their limousine, and they sped away unharmed. No shots were fired by the Secret Service.

  In August 1995, CAT deployed again when President Clinton was playing golf at the Jackson Hole Golf & Tennis Club in Wyoming. Secret Service agents spotted a worker aiming a rifle at Clinton from the rooftop of a home under construction on the edge of the golf course. It turned out that the man was using the rifle’s telescopic site to watch the presidential party up close. Agents held him for questioning and then released him.

  In contrast to the CAT team, the countersniper team, also dressed in BDUs, does not travel in the motorcade. Instead, the counter-snipers—code-named Hercules and long used by the Secret Service—take positions at key exit and entrance points. For instance, when the president is leaving or entering the White House, they position themselves on the roof and on balconies across the street.

  Thus, the countersnipers are 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 who is assigned the weapon. Each team is also equipped with one Stoner SR-25 rifle. Counter-snipers are required to qualify shooting out to a thousand yards each month. If they don’t qualify, they don’t travel or work.

  The countersnipers work hand in hand with the counterassault team. If CAT is in a building and wants to leave for the motorcade, the CAT team leader calls out to the countersniper unit to ask if the area is clear.

  In contrast to the cursory look given to Kennedy’s planned Dallas parade route, the Secret Service’s Forensic Services Division now creates virtual three-dimensional models of buildings along a motorcade route so that agents will know what to expect and can plan what to do at spots where the motorcade may be more vulnerable to attack. The division also produces slide shows of the floor plans of buildings where the president will speak.

  As part of advance work, the Secret Service designates safe houses, such as fire stations, to be used in case of a threat. It also plots the best routes to local hospitals and alerts them to an impending presidential visit.

  If the president plans to stay in a hotel, the Secret Service takes over the entire floor where his room will be, as well as the floors above and below. Agents examine carpeting to check for concealed objects. They check picture frames that might be hollow and conceal explosives. They plan escape routes from every room that the president will enter.

  “In the hotel, if the president will stay overnight, we secure the suite and floor he will stay on and make it as safe as the White House,” an agent says. “We seal it off. No other guests can be on the floor. If the floor is huge, we will separate it. But no outside people will be on the floor, guaranteed.”

  Before the president walks
into a hotel room, a Secret Service countermeasures team sweeps it for radioactivity and electronic bugging and video devices. Permanent hotel residents pose a special problem. Agents ask them to move temporarily to other rooms in the same hotel. Hotels usually offer their residents better accommodations free of charge. But some refuse to take them.

  “If they say, ‘We are absolutely not going,’ then we will not bring the president,” an agent says.

  Like the rest of us, presidents hate the thought of getting stuck in elevators, so the Secret Service pays a local elevator repair company a daily fee to station a service person in a hotel where the president is staying.

  The Secret Service checks on the backgrounds of employees preparing food for the president. If they have been convicted of an assault or drug violation, agents will ask the establishment to give the employees a day off. To ensure that no one slips any poison into food served the president at a hotel or restaurant, an agent watches the preparation, randomly selects a prepared dish, and watches as the dish is served. Employees who have been cleared are given color-coded pins to wear. On overseas trips, navy stewards might prepare dishes for the president. With food prepared at the White House, the Secret Service does not get directly involved.

  “You can’t watch everything,” a Secret Service agent says. “But the majority of stuff is checked. We have lists of the suppliers. We check the employees once and go back randomly and check them again to see if anyone has been added.”

  10

  Deacon

  IF THE SECRET Service considered Richard Nixon the strangest modern president, Jimmy Carter was known as the least likeable. If the true measure of a man is how he treats the little people, Carter flunked the test. Inside the White House, Carter treated with contempt the little people who helped and protected him.

  “When Carter first came there, he didn’t want the police officers and agents looking at him or speaking to him when he went to the office,” says Nelson Pierce, an assistant White House usher. “He didn’t want them to pay attention to him going by. I never could understand why. He was not going to the Oval Office without shoes or a robe.”

  “We never spoke unless spoken to,” says Fred Walzel, who was chief of the White House branch of the Secret Service Uniformed Division. “Carter complained that he didn’t want them [the officers] to say hello.”

  For three and a half years, agent John Piasecky was on Carter’s detail—including seven months of driving him in the presidential limousine—and Carter never spoke to him, he says. At the same time, Carter tried to project an image of himself as man of the people by carrying his own luggage when traveling. But that was often for show. When he was a candidate in 1976, Carter would carry his own bags when the press was around but ask the Secret Service to carry them the rest of the time.

  “Carter would have us carry his luggage from the trunk to the airport,” says former Secret Service agent John F. Collins. “But that is not our job, and we finally stopped doing it.” On one occasion, says Collins, “We opened the trunk and shut it, leaving his luggage in the trunk. He was without clothes for two days.”

  As president, Carter engaged in more ruses involving his luggage.

  “When he was traveling, he would get on the helicopter and fly to Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base,” says former Secret Service agent Clifford R. Baranowski. “He would roll up his sleeves and carry his bag over his shoulder, but it was empty. He wanted people to think he was carrying his own bag.”

  “Carter made a big show about taking a hang-up carry-on out of the trunk of the limo when he’d go someplace, and there was nothing in it,” says another agent who was on his detail. “It was empty; it was just all show.”

  On the first Christmas morning after his election, Carter strode out of the front door of his home in Plains, Georgia, to get the newspaper. Instead of saying “Merry Christmas” to the Secret Service agent standing post, he ignored him. After church and a Christmas brunch, Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, put some leftovers out for their Siamese cat. According to agent John Collins, the detail had befriended a stray Jack Russell terrier and given him the code name Dolphin. “Dolphin” conformed with the Secret Service code names beginning with D assigned to the Carters.

  Seeing the food, Dolphin began gobbling it up, pushing away the cat. According to another agent who was there, Carter got a bow saw—the kind that is used to saw down trees—and actually tried to attack the dog with the saw.

  “Carter got the bow saw off a woodpile near the family room patio and in full view of his family—including his mother, Miss Lillian—tried to kill the dog,” says the agent who was there. “Dolphin, who was much faster than Carter, playfully dodged the president-elect’s efforts. Carter then called the detail leader and demanded that the dog be removed from Plains. The Secret Service gave the dog to the press corps covering Carter.”

  Incredibly, Carter refused to carry out the biggest responsibility a president has—to be available to take action in case of nuclear attack. When he went on vacation, “Carter did not want the nuclear football at Plains,” a Secret Service agent says. “There was no place to stay in Plains. The military wanted a trailer there. He didn’t want that. So the military aide who carries the football had to stay in Americus,” a fifteen minute drive from Carter’s home.

  Because of the agreed-upon protocols, in the event of a nuclear attack, Carter could not have launched a counterattack by calling the aide in Americus. By the time the military aide drove to Carter’s home, the United States would have been within five minutes of being wiped out by nuclear-tipped missiles.

  “He would have had to drive ten miles,” an agent says. “Carter didn’t want anyone bothering him on his property. He wanted his privacy. He was really different.”

  Through his lawyer, Terrence B. Adamson, Carter denied that he refused to keep the nuclear football near him in Plains and that he instructed uniformed officers not to say hello to him in the White House. But Bill Gulley who, as director of the White House Military Office, was in charge of the operation, confirmed that Carter refused to let the military aide stay near his residence. “We tried to put a trailer in Plains near the residence for the doctor [who travels with the president] and the aide with the football,” Gulley says. “But Carter wouldn’t permit that. Carter didn’t care at all.”

  Carter—code-named Deacon—was moody and mistrustful.

  “When he was in a bad mood, you didn’t want to bring him anything,” a former Secret Service agent says. “It was this hunkered-down attitude: ‘I’m running the show’ It was as if he didn’t trust anyone around him. He had that big smile, but when he was in the White House, it was a different story.”

  “The only time I saw a smile on Carter’s face was when the cameras were going,” says former agent George Schmalhofer, who was periodically on his detail.

  “Carter said, ‘I’m in charge,’” a former Secret Service agent says. “‘Everything is my way’ He tried to micromanage everything. You had to go to him about playing on the tennis court. It was ridiculous.”

  One day, Carter noticed water gushing out of a grate outside the White House.

  “It was the emergency generating system,” says William Cuff, the assistant chief of the White House Military Office. “Carter got interested in that and micromanaged it. He would zoom in on an area and manage the hell out of it. He asked questions of the chief usher every day: ‘How much does this cost? Which part is needed? When is it coming? Which bolt ties to which flange?’”

  At a press conference, Carter denied reports that White House aides had to ask him for permission to use the tennis courts. But that was more dissembling. In fact, even when he was traveling on Air Force One, Carter insisted that aides ask him for permission to play on the courts.

  “It is a true story about the tennis courts,” says Charles Palmer, who was chief of the Air Force One stewards. Because other aides were afraid to give Carter the messages asking for permission, Palmer often wound up
doing it.

  “He [Carter] approved who played from on the plane,” Palmer says. “Mostly people used them when he was out of town. If the president was in a bad mood, the aides said, ‘You carry the message in.’ On the bad days when we were having problems, no one wanted to talk to the president. It was always, ‘I have a note to deliver to the president. I don’t want him hollering at me.’”

  Palmer says Carter seemed to relish the power. At times, Carter would delay his response, smugly saying, “I’ll let them know,” Palmer says. “Other times, he would look at me and smile and say, ‘Tell them yes.’ I felt he felt it was a big deal. I didn’t understand why that had to happen.”

  Early in his presidency, Carter proclaimed that the White House would be “dry.” Each time a state dinner was held, the White House made a point of telling reporters that no liquor—only wine—would be served.

  “The Carters were the biggest liars in the world,” Gulley says. “The word was passed to get rid of all the booze. There can’t be any on Air Force One, in Camp David, or in the White House. This was coming from close associates of the Carter family.”

  Gulley told White House military aides, “Hide the booze, and let’s find out what happens.”

  According to Gulley, “The first Sunday they are in the White House, I get a call from the mess saying, ‘They want Bloody Marys before going to church. What should I do?’ I said, ‘Find some booze and take it up to them.’”

  “We never cut out liquor under Carter,” Palmer says. “Occasionally Carter had a martini,” Palmer adds. He also had a Michelob Light. Rosalynn—code-named Dancer—would have a screwdriver.

  Lillian Carter, Carter’s own mother, contradicted her son’s claim. In a 1977 interview with The New York Times, she said that, even though the White House was officially “dry,” she managed to have a nip of bourbon every afternoon when she stayed there.