In the President's Secret Service

by Ronald Kessler

  In practice, some agents wear sunglasses so people do not see where they are looking. Others prefer not to wear them.

  Agents wearing plain clothes and no earpieces infiltrate crowds and patrol around the White House. If they spot a problem or vulnerability, they use a cell phone to notify the Joint Ops Center at Secret Service headquarters.

  “They’re the guys in the crowd,” an agent says. “You wouldn’t know they were there, and they’re on the outside looking in during an event and during an advance.”

  These agents try to think like assassins: How can they breach the security?

  “It’s their job to take apart our plan prior to game day,” the agent says. “It’s their job to basically say, here are the holes, here are your vulnerabilities, tell us how you’re going to plug these holes.”

  Technicians take photos of the crowds at presidential events. The images are compared with photos taken at other events—sometimes using facial recognition software—to see if a particular individual keeps showing up.

  Since the attempts on Ford’s life, presidents have generally worn bulletproof vests at public events. They are currently Kevlar Type Three vests that will stop rounds from most handguns and rifles but not from more powerful weapons. Agents on the president’s and vice president’s details are now supposed to wear them at public events, but some agents prefer not to wear them. While the vests have been improved, they are uncomfortable and can make life unbearable on a hot day.

  “You have to be hypervigilant,” says former agent Jerry Parr, who headed President Reagan’s detail when he was shot. In the twenty years before the attempt on Reagan’s life, “You had one president murdered, one shot and wounded, a governor shot and wounded and paralyzed, two attempts on Ford, and you had Martin Luther King killed. You know it’s out there. You just don’t know where.”

  12

  Rawhide

  IN CONTRAST TO Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan treated Secret Service agents, the Air Force One crew, and the maids and butlers in the White House with respect.

  “Carter came into the cockpit once in the two years I was on with him,” says James A. Buzzelli, an Air Force One flight engineer. “But [Ronald] Reagan never got on or off without sticking his head in the cockpit and saying, ‘Thanks, fellas,’ or ‘Have a nice day’ He [Reagan] was just as personable in person as he came across to the public.”

  “One Christmas when we were at the ranch, he came up to me and apologized to me for having to be away from my family on a holiday,” former agent Cliff Baranowski says. “A lot of times they would give us food from a party. I certainly did not expect it, but sometimes they insisted.”

  Former agent Thomas Blecha remembers that when Reagan was running for president the first time, he came out of his home in Bel Air to drive to Rancho del Cielo, the seven-hundred-acre Reagan ranch north of Santa Barbara. Another agent noticed that he was wearing a pistol and asked what that was for.

  “Well, just in case you guys can’t do the job, I can help out,” Reagan—code-named Rawhide—replied. Reagan confided to one agent that on his first presidential trip to the Soviet Union in May 1988, he had carried a gun in his briefcase.

  For a time, East Executive Avenue was closed, and when Reagan’s motorcade left the White House, it would go along E Street onto Fifteenth Street instead of using Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. As a result, unless he looked out a window of the White House, Reagan did not see demonstrators opposed to nuclear arms who camped out across Pennsylvania Avenue in Lafayette Park. After East Executive Avenue reopened, Agent Patrick Sullivan was driving when Reagan looked out the window of his limo. Reagan saw a perennial demonstrator in Lafayette Park give him a “Heil Hitler” salute as the vehicle passed him.

  “This one gentleman was there all the time, and he had posters,” Sullivan recalls. “He was a nonviolent protester. We pulled the president’s motorcade up East Exec and made the left turn on Pennsylvania. The demonstrator was so shocked, because he had been there for a year and had never seen the motorcade go that way.”

  The demonstrator jumped up.

  “He starts giving President Reagan the Nazi salute,” Sullivan says. “He starts yelling ‘Heil Reagan! Heil Reagan!’ The president sees him standing up giving him the Nazi salute. The president was so shocked and hurt, he said to us, ‘Did you see that man giving me the Nazi salute? Why would he do that?’”

  While it seemed to be a rhetorical question, Reagan clearly wanted a response.

  “Mr. President, he’s out there all the time. He’s a nut,” Sullivan said to Reagan. “That’s all he does. He camps out there; he’s there every day.”

  “Oh, okay,” Reagan said.

  “That’s just the way he was,” Sullivan says. “Once he realized he was a nut, he was okay with him. He just didn’t want this guy to be a regular citizen. Reagan was just a sincere, down-to-earth gentleman. And I think it hurt his feelings that this guy was giving him the Nazi salute.”

  Quite often, Reagan quietly wrote personal checks to people who had written him with hard-luck stories.

  “Reagan was famous for firing up air force jets on behalf of children who needed transport for kidney operations,” says Frank J. Kelly, who drafted presidential messages. “These are things you never knew about. He never bragged about it. I hand-carried checks for four thousand or five thousand dollars to people who had written him. He would say, ‘Don’t tell people. I was poor myself.’”

  While Reagan liked to look for the best in people, he was not a Boy Scout. On one occasion, Reagan gave a speech at Georgetown University. As the motorcade drove down M Street toward the White House, Reagan noticed a man in a crowd.

  “Fellows, look,” Reagan said to his agents. “A guy over there’s giving me the finger, can you believe that?”

  Reagan started waving back, smiling.

  “We’re going by, and he’s still waving and smiling, and he goes, ‘Hi there, you son of a bitch,’” agent Dennis Chomicki remembers, imitating Reagan’s buttery-smooth delivery.

  One late Friday afternoon, Reagan had left the White House for Camp David. Agent Sullivan was working W-16, the Secret Service’s office under the Oval Office.

  “A guy came up to the northwest gate carrying a live chicken, demanding to see the president,” Sullivan says. “He said he wanted to do a sacrifice for President Reagan. And he impaled the chicken on the fence of the White House. He took the chicken and stuck him on a point on top.”

  Uniformed officers arrested the man, and he was sent to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for observation.

  When Reagan was to go to Spokane, Washington, in 1986, Pete Dowling was part of the advance team sent to scope things out. Besides reviewing all known threats, he met with the Spokane police department, the FBI, and other agencies that might have intelligence on possible threats.

  One night, the police department called Dowling to report that an older couple staying at a Best Western downtown had found a large paper dinner napkin on the floor of an elevator. The napkin appeared to have writing on it, so they looked closer. The napkin apparently had a diagram of the Spokane Coliseum, where Reagan was going to speak in four days.

  “I went to the police department, I got the napkin, and sure enough, it was a diagram of the coliseum,” Dowling recalls. “And it had a legend; it had Xs around the exterior of the coliseum, and then in the legend it said X equals security post. Then it had all of our license plates of the cars we were using. Clearly somebody was conducting surveillance of us.”

  At the time, a neo-Nazi group called the Aryan Nations was headquartered at Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a drive of about forty-five minutes from Spokane. Among other things, the group objected to the tax system and was threatening to assassinate public officials. Dowling thought the napkin could have originated from the group. He drove to the Best Western and asked the clerk to show him all the sign-in cards.

  “He gave me a little wooden box that contained index cards,” Dowling says.
“There were four hundred rooms in the hotel, so I started thumbing through the index cards, and when I got to the sixtieth one, bingo. It was the exact handwriting and hand printing that I saw on the napkin.”

  Dowling noted the license plate listed on the card. He walked into the parking lot and saw a four-door sedan with the same license plate number. Looking inside, he saw blankets neatly piled in the back and two pillows on top of the blankets. Some books were piled on the floor. Obviously, someone was living in the car. Dowling thought it odd that someone living in a car would be so tidy. He called the police and asked for two backup cars.

  “We went up to the room, and I knocked on the door, and the guy said, ‘Who is it?’” Dowling says.

  “It’s me, open up,” Dowling replied.

  “The idiot opened the door. He was just in his underpants. I grabbed him by his hair, and I pulled him out into the hallway,” Dowling says. “One of the officers grabbed him, and we all went in and did what we call a protective sweep of the room, just to ensure that nobody else was in there armed.”

  Dowling noticed a bullet on top of the dresser. Attached to the bullet was a string, and attached to the string was a little white piece of paper.

  “Reagan will die,” the paper said.

  The suspect gave Dowling permission to search the room but not his car.

  “I’m going to be up all night anyway, so to do an application for a search warrant and to bring it to a judge at his home at three o’clock in the morning, that’s no sweat for me,” Dowling said to the man. “Either way, it doesn’t matter.”

  “You can search my car,” the man said. “The gun’s in the car.”

  It turned out the man had just gotten out of prison after being convicted of bank robbery. While he was in jail, he had had a romantic relationship with another male inmate. The other inmate had just been transferred to another prison, and the suspect heard that his former lover was romantically involved with somebody else.

  “He wanted to do something spectacular in the Spokane area so he could go back to jail and be reunited with the other man,” Dowling says.

  As Reagan was running for reelection in 1984, a New York state trooper spotted an old Buick sedan going twenty-five miles an hour on the New York State Thruway where the speed limit was sixty-five. The trooper pulled the man over and immediately noticed an array of guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition on the floor and front passenger seat.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the officer asked.

  “I’m going to kill the people running against Reagan,” the man replied.

  The officer arrested the man, who was committed to a mental hospital north of New York City for observation. Because the man had threatened to kill presidential candidates, two Secret Service agents, at the direction of the Secret Service Intelligence Division, were dispatched to interview him. At first, the patient’s psychiatric manager balked at the idea of a law enforcement interview. He then relented as long as the agents removed their guns and handcuffs and did not bring radios or briefcases.

  “The man said he was glad to see us,” one of the agents says. “He said he loves the Secret Service and was willing to tell us everything.”

  But first, the man asked the agents to pray with him.

  “We folded our hands and bowed our heads at the interview table and prayed with the man,” the agent says. “At that moment, the psychiatrist walked in. It’s a wonder he didn’t have us committed.”

  When the news broke that Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart was having an affair with Donna Rice, Reagan was returning to the White House from an evening event.

  “We were in the elevator going up to the residence on the second floor of the White House,” says former agent Ted Hresko. “The door of the elevator was about to close, and one of the staffers blocked it. The staffer told Reagan the news about Donna Rice and Gary Hart.”

  Reagan nodded his head and looked at the agent.

  “Boys will be boys,” he said.

  When the door of the elevator shut, Reagan said to Hresko, “But boys will not be president.”

  13

  Rainbow

  IF NANCY REAGAN’S wealthy California friends reported getting their copies of Vogue and Mademoiselle before she did, she took it out on the White House staff. For that reason, Nelson Pierce, an assistant usher in the White House, always dreaded bringing Nancy her mail.

  “She would get mad at me,” Pierce says. “If her subscription was late or one of her friends in California had gotten the magazine and she hadn’t, she would ask why she hadn’t gotten hers.”

  White House ushers would then have to search for the errant magazine at Washington newsstands, which invariably had not received their copies.

  One sunny afternoon Pierce brought some mail to Nancy in the first family’s west sitting room on the second floor of the White House. Nancy’s dog Rex, a King Charles spaniel, was lying on the floor at her feet.

  Pierce was old friends with Rex, Ronald Reagan’s Christmas gift to his wife, or so he thought. During the day, the usher’s office—just inside the front entrance on the first floor of the mansion—is often a napping place for White House pets. But for some reason, Rex was not happy to see Pierce this time. As Pierce turned to leave, Rex bit his ankle and held on. Pierce pointed his finger at the dog, a gesture to tell the dog to let go.

  Nancy turned on Pierce.

  “Don’t you ever point a finger at my dog,” she said.

  From the start of his political life, Reagan was stage-managed by Nancy.

  “Did I ever give Ronnie advice? You bet I did,” Nancy Reagan wrote in My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan. “I’m the one who knows him best, and I was the only person in the White House who had absolutely no agenda of her own—except helping him.”

  “Mrs. Reagan was a precise and demanding woman,” recalls John F. W. Rogers, the Reagan aide over administration of the White House. “Her sole interest was the advancement of her husband’s agenda.”

  It turned out that most of Nancy’s advice was sound. As she explained it, “As much as I love Ronnie, I’ll admit he does have at least one fault: He can be naive about the people around him. Ronnie only tends to think well of people. While that’s a fine quality in a friend, it can get you into trouble in politics.”

  Code-named Rainbow, Nancy was “very cold,” a Secret Service agent in the Reagan White House says. “She had her circle of four friends in Los Angeles, and that was it. Nothing changed when she was with her kids. She made it clear to her kids that if they wanted to see their father, they had to check with her first. It was a standing rule. Not that they could not see him. ‘I will let you know if it is advisable and when you can see him.’ She was something else.”

  Like Nancy, the Reagans’ daughter Patti Davis was difficult. When agents were with her in New York, she would attempt to ditch them by jumping out of the official vehicle while it was stopped in traffic. She viewed her detail as a nuisance.

  “On one visit to New York City, she was with movie actor Peter Strauss, whom she was dating at the time,” Albracht says. “Ms. Davis started to engage in the same tricks as on her previous visits and in general treated the assigned agent with disrespect. Strauss became incensed at her actions and told her, ‘You’d better start treating these agents with respect or I’m going back to L.A.’”

  “Guess what,” Albracht says. “She started treating us better.”

  Another agent says Nancy Reagan was so controlling that she objected when her husband kibitzed with Secret Service agents.

  “Reagan was such a down-to-earth individual, easy to talk to,” the agent says. “He was the great communicator. He wanted to be on friendly terms. He accepted people for what they were. His wife was just the opposite. If she saw that he was having a conversation with the agents, and it looked like they were good ol’ boys, and he was laughing, she would call him away. She called the shots.”

  “There was a dog out the ranch, a
nd the agents used to play with the dog, and the dog barked,” says Albracht, relaying what an agent on the scene told him. “One night the dog was barking and Nancy got mad, and she told the president, ‘You go out there and you tell the agents to leave that dog alone.’”

  Apparently, the barking was interrupting her sleep. Nancy was as persistent as the dog’s barking, so Reagan said he would take care of it and left the bedroom.

  “He went to the kitchen, and he just stood there,” Albracht says. “He got a glass of water, went back to bedroom, and said, ‘All right, I took care of it.’ He just didn’t want to bother the agents. He was a true gentleman.”

  On the day Reagan left office, he flew to Los Angeles on Air Force One. Bleachers had been set up near a hangar, and a cheering crowd welcomed him while the University of Southern California band played.

  “As he was standing there, one of the USC guys took his Trojan helmet off,” a Secret Service agent says. “He said, ‘Mr. President!’ and threw his helmet to him. He saw it and caught it and put it on. The crowd went wild.”

  But Nancy Reagan leaned over to him and said, “Take that helmet off right now. You look like a fool.”

  “You saw a mood change,” the agent says. “And he took it off. That went on all the time.”

  While Reagan and Nancy had a loving relationship, like any married couple, they had occasional fights.

  “They were very affectionate and would kiss,” Air Force One steward Palmer says of the Reagans. But they also got mad at each other over what to eat and other small issues. Moreover, Palmer says Nancy could only push the president so far.

  “We were going into Alaska. She had put on everything she could put on,” Palmer says. “She turned around and said, ‘Where are your gloves?’ He said, ‘I’m not wearing my gloves.’ She said, ‘Oh, yes, you are.’ He said he was not.”