In the President's Secret Service

by Ronald Kessler

  “She said one evening to one of the butlers, ‘I’m kind of used to having a little nip before going to bed. Do you think you could arrange to give me a little brandy each night?’” says Shirley Bender, the White House executive housekeeper.

  When Vice President Walter “Fritz” Mondale visited Carter at Plains for the first time, Miss Lillian knocked on the door of a Winnebago the Secret Service was using as a command post.

  “I opened the door, and there’s Miss Lillian standing there with a paper bag with two six-packs of beer in it,” says David Curtis, an agent on the Mondale detail.

  “I’ve got something for the boys,” Lillian Carter said. “Don’t tell Jimmy.”

  “I appreciate that, Miss Lillian, but we can’t accept that,” Curtis said.

  When he was in the White House, Carter would regularly make a show of going to the Oval Office at five A.M. or six A.M. to call attention to how hard he was working for the American people.

  “He would walk into the Oval Office at six A.M., do a little work for half an hour, then close the curtains and take a nap,” says Robert B. Sulliman, Jr., who was on Carter’s detail. “His staff would tell the press he was working.”

  Another agent says that at other times, he could see Carter through the Oval Office windows dozing off in his desk chair while pretending he was working.

  Carter claimed to the press that he was saving energy by having solar panels installed on the roof of the White House to heat hot water. “It would not generate enough hot water to run the dishwasher in the staff mess,” Cuff says. “It was a fiasco. The staff mess had to go out and buy new equipment to keep the water hot enough. That blew any savings.”

  Carter even tried to cut back the crew on Air Force One.

  “Air Force One is an airplane, and you need a minimum number of people to fly it,” Cuff notes. “You have to have a pilot, copilot, and others. They never understood that. The presidential pilot and the vice chief of staff of the air force had to argue with them.”

  Carter found out that after a catering company put on parties at Blair House for foreign dignitaries, instead of throwing away any leftovers as it normally would, the company would offer the food to Secret Service agents standing post.

  “The guys were working shifts of twelve to fourteen hours a day,” a former agent says. “Sometimes you could not break away to get food.”

  Carter insisted that the catering firm figure out the cost of the extra food and charge agents for the leftovers they ate in the future, the former agent says.

  Gulley the head of the military office, says Carter became so involved in micromanaging the White House that he would veto the replacement of carpets.

  “He wouldn’t allow them to change the carpeting where the public went through the White House,” Gulley says. “The White House looked like a peanut warehouse when I left,” referring to Carter’s business enterprise. “Thousands of people pass through there, and it requires a high degree of maintenance. Carter himself got involved in that. It [the carpeting] was worn and dirty.”

  Carter thought of himself as a better runner than his Secret Service agents and would challenge them to races. The Secret Service began assigning its best runners to his detail. One day at Camp David, Carter collapsed into the arms of an agent as he was trying to outrun them.

  “He wasn’t in bad shape, but he never warmed up,” agent Dennis Chomicki says. “It was an exceptionally hot day, and he took off real fast and kind of burned himself out. He basically lost it.”

  On another occasion, agents warned Carter that cross-country skiing at Camp David would be dangerous because there was not enough snow on the ground and there were a lot of bare spots. Carter ignored the advice.

  “Yeah, okay, I’ll decide on that,” Carter said, according to agent Chomicki.

  “He went out, and sure enough, he fell on his face and broke his collarbone,” Chomicki says.

  In Washington, the Secret Service tried to find secluded routes so Carter could run. One beautiful fall morning, Carter went running on the towpath along the C&O Canal. He planned to run from Key Bridge to Chain Bridge, then back to Fletcher’s Boat House, where Secret Service agents had been instructed to wait in their vehicles to pick him up. Because of a miscommunication, when Carter and his detail got to the boathouse, agents were nowhere to be seen.

  Stephen Garmon, the detail leader, and other agents had been following Carter on bicycles. Garmon, who later became deputy director of the Secret Service, tried to radio to the Secret Service vehicles, but his transmission was not getting through.

  “The president said he was getting cold,” Garmon recalls. “I asked if he would mind running back to Key Bridge, and we could flag a cab if necessary. Then I saw a pay phone, but I didn’t have any change.” Garmon decided to try calling the 911 emergency number. Identifying himself as a Secret Service agent, he asked to be connected to the White House Communications Agency switchboard.

  “The 911 operator connected me, and I was able to communicate to the vehicles so agents would pick us up,” Garmon says.

  Besides seeing what presidents and first families are really like, Secret Service agents get to see the real face of the White House political staff. When Carter was meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat at Camp David, former agent Cliff Baranowski heard a strange noise in the woods around midnight.

  “Then Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff, came out of the woods with a pretty intern,” Baranowski says. “They were parked in the woods, and his car got stuck. The noise was the spinning of wheels.”

  As a micromanager, Carter gave his vice president, Walter Mondale, few duties. So Mondale was able to spend much of his time playing tennis and traveling.

  Toward the end of his term, Carter became suspicious that people were stealing things and eavesdropping on his conversations in the Oval Office.

  Carter and his staff were becoming “very paranoid,” says a General Services Administration (GSA) building manager in charge of maintenance of the West Wing. “They thought GSA or the Secret Service were listening in.”

  One afternoon, Susan Clough, Carter’s secretary, insisted that someone had stolen a vial of crude oil from the Oval Office. The vial was a gift to Carter from an Arab leader.

  “Susan Clough swore up and down that someone poured some of it out,” a GSA manager says. Even though the vial was sealed, “There was a big fuss over it. The Secret Service photographs everything in the president’s suite. They photographed it [again], and it hadn’t been touched. It shows the paranoia.”

  Before going on a fishing trip in Georgia one morning, Carter accused a Secret Service agent of stealing fried chicken that stewards had prepared. In fact, White House aides Jody Powell and Hamilton Jordan had eaten it.

  After Reagan was inaugurated, GSA discovered that the Carter staff had left garbage in the White House and had trashed furniture in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

  GSA saw “furniture, desks, and file cabinets turned over,” a GSA building manager says. “They shoved over desks. We had to straighten it out. It was fifteen or twenty desks in one area. It was enough to look like a cyclone had hit.”

  After he was voted out of office, Carter occasionally stayed in the townhouse GSA maintains for former presidents at 1716 Jackson Place. On the walls of the townhouse are photos of former presidents.

  Checking the premises, GSA managers found that when Carter was visiting, he would take down the photos of Republican presidents Ford and Nixon and decorate the townhouse with another half dozen sixteen-inch by twenty-four-inch photos of himself. Each time, Charles B. “Buddy” Respass, then the GSA manager in charge of the White House, became irate because GSA had to find the old photos and hang them again.

  Through his lawyer Adamson, Carter denied this. He also denied that he thought people were listening to his conversations in the Oval Office.

  But Lucille Price, the GSA manager who then repo
rted to Respass, says, “Carter changed the photos…. He didn’t like them [Ford and Nixon] looking down at him. We would find out he would put photos of himself up.” Then, she says, Carter “would take the photos of himself back with him.”

  For all his bizarre behavior and shams, Carter was genuinely religious, did not swear, and had a loving relationship with his wife, Rosalynn, who acted as an adviser.

  Says Richard Repasky who was on Carter’s detail, “Rosalynn really was the brains of the outfit.”

  11

  Stagecoach

  AS PART OF an advance, the Secret Service reviews reports from the intelligence community about possible threats. In 1996, former president George H. W. Bush was planning to fly to Beirut, Lebanon. The itinerary called for him to land on Cyprus, then helicopter over to Lebanon.

  “The CIA informed us there was a threat on the former president’s life,” says Lou Morales, an agent who was with Bush 41, as he is called, on the trip. “The informant knew the itinerary of the helicopter flight and the time it was to take off. In fact, he was part of the plot, which had been hatched by Hezbollah. They were going to shoot missiles to take the helicopter down.”

  The Secret Service informed Bush, who insisted he wanted to go to Beirut regardless of the risk. The Secret Service scrubbed the helicopter flight and instead drove him in a motorcade at ninety miles per hour from Damascus to Beirut. As with most thwarted plots against protectees, this one never appeared in the press.

  Once agents have completed an advance, they recommend how many additional agents will be needed to cover the president. The normal working shift consists of a shift leader or whip and four shift agents. These are the “body men” around the protectee. Other agents include three to four transportation agents, along with counter-surveillance agents and a complete counterassault team of five to six agents.

  Besides agents from the local field office, the additional agents for a presidential visit come from the rest of the Secret Service’s 139 domestic offices. They include forty-two field offices in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago; fifty-eight resident offices; sixteen resident agency offices; and twenty-three one-agent domiciles. These offices are in addition to twenty overseas offices.

  Prior to a presidential visit, agents are flown to the location on air force transports, along with the president’s limo—code-named Stagecoach—and Secret Service vehicles. The countersniper and counter -assault teams and bomb techs fly in the same aircraft. These agents are in addition to shift agents who accompany the president on Air Force One. Canada prohibits agents from carrying arms, but they sneak in their weapons in presidential limousines.

  In contrast to the open car President Kennedy used, the presidential limousine now is a closed vehicle. Known affectionately as “the Beast,” the 2009 Cadillac now in use was put into service for Barack Obama’s inauguration. The Beast lives up to its moniker. Built on top of a GMC truck chassis, the vehicle is armor-plated, with bulletproof glass and its own supply of oxygen. It is equipped with state-of-the-art encrypted communications gear. It has a remote starting mechanism and a self-sealing gas tank. The vehicle can keep going even when the tires are shot out. It can take a direct hit from a bazooka or grenade. The car’s doors are eighteen inches thick, and its windows are five inches thick. The latest model has larger windows and greater visibility than the Cadillac first used by President Bush for his January 2005 inauguration.

  Often the first limousine in the motorcade is a decoy. The second limousine is a backup. The president could actually be in a third limousine or in any vehicle in the motorcade. The number of cars in the motorcade depends on the purpose of the trip. For an unannounced visit to a restaurant, seven or eight Secret Service cars, known as the informal package, make the trip. For an announced visit, the formal package of up to forty vehicles, including cars for White House personnel and the press, goes out. Agents refer to their Secret Service vehicles as G-rides.

  Including the White House doctor and other administration personnel, a domestic trip entails two hundred to three hundred people. An overseas trip could involve as many as six hundred people, including military personnel. In 2008 alone, the Secret Service provided protection on 135 overseas trips. On such trips, the Secret Service relies on local police even more than it does in the United States. But when Richard Nixon was vice president, local police disappeared as an angry mob descended on Nixon and his wife, Pat, at the Caracas, Venezuela, airport on May 13, 1958.

  “The police were supposed to provide protection at the airport,” recalls Chuck Taylor, one of the Secret Service agents on the detail. “We noticed the police started to leave the motorcade. They were afraid of the mob, and so the police deserted their security arrangements.”

  As stones and bottles were being thrown at the couple, agents formed a tight ring around them and quickly escorted them into the president’s bulletproof limousine. Along the route to the American embassy, protestors had erected a roadblock. Wielding clubs and pipes, a crowd swarmed the car.

  “They had firebombs, and they were bent on killing everybody in the party,” Taylor says. “In some cases they put small kids out in front of the car, so we’d run over the kids. We appraised that situation and decided to walk the car through.”

  The crowd tried to pry open the doors and then began to rock the limo and try to set it on fire. But as long as the agents were facing down the insurgents, they seemed afraid to approach too closely. The agents managed to get Nixon safely to the American embassy where more angry insurgents confronted them.

  “They wanted to burn down the embassy” Taylor says. “We went ahead and put these sandbags around, and we jerry-rigged a radio system so that we were able to talk to Washington. I understand they had cut the transatlantic cable, and we weren’t able to communicate normally. We were able to radio the president and tell him what the story was. The president sent the Sixth Fleet out to evacuate everybody.”

  Now on domestic trips, each motorcade includes a car for the Secret Service counterassault team armed with submachine guns. Another Secret Service car, known as the intelligence car, keeps track of people who have been assessed as threats and picks up local transmissions to evaluate them. If necessary, it jams the communications of anyone who presents a threat. Normally, a helicopter supplied by the Park Police or local law enforcement hovers overhead.

  For a motorcade, local police on motorcycles block access from side streets and leapfrog from intersection to intersection. Agents check out offices along the route. Before President Ford visited Conroe, Texas, Agent Dave Saleeba was told that one office in a building along the motorcade route could not be opened. Checking further, he learned that the building was owned by the heirs of a local lawyer.

  Back in 1915, the lawyer had become heartbroken when his son, who’d been riding to see him, fell off his horse, hit his head on a well, and died. The lawyer never entered his office again and directed that his heirs never open it. However, at Saleeba’s request, the lawyer’s granddaughter agreed to open the office. Saleeba found the man’s desk covered with dust. A brown bag on top of the desk looked as if it had contained his lunch, now disintegrated.

  Secret Service agents believe that simply being there, scanning crowds with a ferocious look, often wearing sunglasses, deters would-be assassins. Agents are looking for signs of danger—people who don’t seem to fit in, have their hands in their pockets, are sweating or look nervous, or appear as if they have mental problems. Agents lock in on movements, objects, or situations that are out of place.

  “We look for a guy wearing an overcoat on a warm day,” says former agent William Albracht, who was a senior instructor at the Secret Service’s James J. Rowley Training Center. “A guy not wearing an overcoat on a cold day. A guy with hands in his pockets. A guy carrying a bag. Anybody that is overenthusiastic, or not enthusiastic. Anybody that stands out, or is constantly looking around. You’re looking at the eyes and most importantly the hands. Because where those hands go
is the key.”

  If an agent sees a bystander at a rope line with his hands in his pockets, he will say, “Sir, take your hands out of your pockets, take your hands out of your pockets NOW.”

  “If he doesn’t, you literally reach out and grab the individual’s hands and hold them there,” Albracht says. “You have agents in the crowd who will then see you’re having problems. They’ll come up to the crowd, and they’ll grab the guy and toss him. They will take him out of there, frisk him, pat him down, and see what his problem is. You are allowed to do that in exigent circumstances in protection because it’s so immediate. You don’t have time to say, ‘Hey would you mind removing your hands?’ I mean if this guy’s got a weapon, you need to know right then.”

  An agent who sees a weapon screams to fellow agents: “Gun! Gun!”

  To identify themselves to other agents and to police helping during events, Secret Service agents wear color-coded pins on their left lapels. The pins, which bear the five-pointed star of the Secret Service, come in four colors. Each week, agents change to one of the four prescribed colors so they can recognize one another in crowds. On the back of the pin is a four-digit number. If the pin is stolen, the number can be entered on the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the computerized database that police use when they stop cars to see if they are stolen or if the occupants are fugitives. If the pin is found, police return it to the Secret Service.

  When on protection duty, Secret Service agents wear trademark radio earpieces tuned to one of the encrypted channels the Secret Service uses. Known as a surveillance kit, the device includes a radio transmitter and receiver that agents keep in their pockets.

  As for the sunglasses, “In training, they would give us clear Ray-Ban glasses,” former agent Pete Dowling says. “The reason they did that was eye protection, in case somebody threw something at the protectee. Most of the guys had them shaded. But the stereotype is the Secret Service guy always has sunglasses on, even when he is indoors.”