New to the post, Albracht was told by Secret Service Agent Pete Dowling, “Well, Bill, every day the stewards bake the cookies, and that is their job, and that is their responsibility. And then our responsibility on midnights is to find those cookies or those left from the previous day and eat as many of them as possible.”
At three A.M., Albracht, assigned to the basement post, was getting hungry.
“We never had permission to take food from the kitchen, but sometimes you get very hungry on midnights,” Albracht says. “I walked into the kitchen that was located in the basement and opened up the refrigerator. I’m hoping that there are some leftover snacks from that day’s reception,” the former agent says. “It was slim pickin’s. All of a sudden, there’s a voice over my shoulder.”
“Hey, anything good in there to eat?” the man asked.
“No. Looks like they cleaned it out,” Albracht said.
“I turned around to see George Bush off my right shoulder,” Albracht says. “After I get over the shock of who it was, Bush says, ‘Hey I was really hoping there would be something to eat.’ And I said, ‘Well, sir, every day the stewards bake cookies, but every night they hide them from us.’ With a wink of his eye he says, ‘Let’s find ’em.’ So we tore the kitchen apart, and sure enough we did find them. He took a stack of chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk and went back up to bed, and I took a stack and a glass of milk and went back to the basement post.”
When Albracht returned to the post, Dowling asked, “Who the hell were you in there talking to?”
“Oh, yeah, sure, right,” Dowling said when Albracht told him.
Bush’s regular vice presidential detail played a prank on an agent who was on temporary assignment, telling him that it was okay to wash his clothes in the vice president’s laundry room.
“He went down and used the vice president’s washing machine and dryer,” former agent Patrick Sullivan recalls. “Mrs. Bush came down and said to the other agents, ‘He’s doing his laundry!’”
A supervisor heard about the incident. Mortified, he told Barbara Bush that it had all been a practical joke.
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said.
In fact, at the Bush home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Barbara Bush once strode to the Secret Service post and asked if agents had any laundry they would like her to do, since she was about to do a load anyway. She was so close to the agents that when Pete Dowling’s wife, Lindy was expecting a baby, the first lady instructed him to call her when the baby arrived, day or night.
As vice president, Bush flew to a fund-raiser in Boise, Idaho, during the 1982 election campaign. He was to have dinner at the Chart House seafood restaurant on North Garden Street on the banks of the Colorado River.
“The way we protected him, we had some agents inside, but typically what we’d do was situate ourselves at dining tables near him,” says former agent Dowling.
Dowling had been seated a few minutes when he heard a radio transmission that two white males in camouflage outfits with long weapons were low-crawling around the back toward their location. They had their weapons in their hands and were crawling on their bellies, moving themselves along with their elbows.
Just then, Dowling looked up and saw the two bad guys. He recalled intelligence reports that Libya had sent a hit squad to the United States to kill American officials. The agent instinctively jumped out of his chair and tackled Bush to protect him. As food flew everywhere, Dowling threw the vice president onto the ground and flopped on top of him.
“What’s going on here?” Bush asked.
“I don’t know, but just keep your head down,” Dowling replied.
Dowling looked up. He saw about a hundred law enforcement officers with their guns drawn—Secret Service agents, sheriff’s department deputies, and state troopers. They were on the scene as part of routine protection for a visit by the vice president. The two bad guys were kneeling with their hands clasped behind their heads.
“We evacuated the VP out of the restaurant to get him away from whatever danger may have still been there,” Dowling says. “You would think I had just thwarted an assassination attempt.”
As it turned out, the restaurant was near an apartment complex where the girlfriend of one of the two men lived.
“The guy had gone to see his girlfriend, and she was there with another guy,” Dowling says. “So the boyfriend got very angry. The other guy who was there with his girlfriend pulled out a knife, kind of slashed him, didn’t hurt him badly. So this fellow who had been cut decided that he and another guy were going to go back and kill the guy that night.”
Not knowing that the vice president was coming, they parked in the lot at the Chart House and decided to sneak through the woods to get to the apartment complex. They were tried and convicted on illegal weapons and attempted assault charges.
In contrast to many other presidents, Bush—code-named Timberwolf—treated Secret Service agents and everyone else around him with respect and consideration, as did his wife, Barbara. After Bush 41 became president, his twelve-year-old grandson, George Prescott Bush, was hitting tennis balls off the back of the White House tennis court. J. Bonnie Newman, assistant to the president for management and administration, and Joseph W. Hagin, deputy assistant to the president for scheduling, approached the court to play. The two White House aides had earlier reserved the court, but when they saw the president’s grandson playing, they turned away and began walking back toward the White House.
Just then, Barbara Bush—code named Tranquility—came along and told George, son of Jeb Bush, to get off the court.
“When we went down and saw the president’s grandson, there was no question he should be the one playing on the court,” Newman says. “But Mrs. Bush saw it and just plucked him off. She really sent the message not only to staff but to family as well that you remember your manners.”
“Bush 41 is a great man, just an all-around nice person,” an agent says. “Both he and Mrs. Bush are very thoughtful, and they think outside their own little world. They think of other people.”
Bush “made it clear to all his staff that none of them was a security expert, and if the Secret Service made a decision, he was the one to sign off on it, and they were never to question our decisions or make life difficult,” Dowling says. “So consequently it was kind of a moment in time, because all the entities really worked well together to make his protection and the activities that he participated in successful.”
Bush was so considerate of the agents who protected him that he would stay in town on Christmas Eve so agents could spend it with their families. Then he would fly to Texas the day after Christmas. The Secret Service’s only complaint about Bush is that, to this day, he is hyperactive.
“He can’t sit still,” an agent says. “He is in perpetual motion.”
In every hotel, the Secret Service had to make sure Bush had an exercise bike in his suite. If the hotel did not have one, the agency rented one.
“He can’t read a book,” the agent says. “He has to be on a treadmill or StairMaster. It’s go, go, go. For the Secret Service, that meant more work. The tennis court, horseshoes, the golf course, the boat. Always something.”
Early on, Bush chafed at protection.
“Most people have difficulty adjusting to having protection,” says former Secret Service deputy director Danny Spriggs. “These folks do it because it goes with the job. However, it’s nothing they embrace initially. You infringe on their private lives. Even though I did it for twenty-eight years, I can’t imagine what it would be like to be told I can’t go to a movie or amusement park whenever I want, or to be told that friends I have known for years must submit their name, Social Security number, and date of birth before they can visit me.”
One week, with motorcycle sirens screaming, the motorcade twice took him to events just a few blocks from the White House. Bush fussed about the precautions and wanted to know why he couldn’t simply walk to the events. His protec
tive detail decided to play a joke on him. While the president’s limousine and backup are driven by agents, other Secret Service vehicles in the motorcade are driven by what are called physical support technicians. Billy Ingram, one of these drivers, was a grizzled Korean War veteran.
“He always had a cigarette dangling from his lips with ashes dropping all over,” says Joe Funk, an agent who was on Bush’s detail. “His personal car was twenty years old and dented. It reeked of cigarette smoke.”
Agents affixed the presidential seal and American flag to Ingram’s car. When the president came out for the next motorcade ride, his limousine was nowhere in sight. Instead, Ingram’s car was at the head of the procession.
“He looked at it,” Funk says. “He turned to Barbara and said, ‘What’s going on?’”
“Well, you’re always complaining about the limos. Let’s go,” the first lady said.
Bush got into Ingram’s beat-up car and said to the agents, “You win.”
“They drove him to the gate, and that’s where the presidential limo was,” Funk says.
Despite warnings from his detail, Bush had a habit of leaving the Oval Office through the door to the Rose Garden and greeting tourists lined up along the fence on Pennsylvania Avenue. The detail assigned agents to rush to the fence as soon as an alarm notified them that Bush had opened the door to the outside. Soon, The Washington Post ran a story reporting that onlookers were delighted at their unexpected greetings from the president. Right after that, when Bush again greeted fans at the fence, agents spotted what agent Glenn Smith calls a “textbook” possible assassin.
“The man had on a coat in the summer, he looked disheveled, and his eyes were darting in all directions,” Smith says. “We patted him down, and it turned out he had a nine-millimeter pistol on him and probably intended to use it on the president.”
The head of the detail pointed out to Bush that by greeting people spontaneously, he was not only endangering himself but his agents. After that, “Bush would give us time to set up a secure zone at the fence.”
As a courtesy, Secret Service agents try to preset the radio in the limousine to the stations the president or vice president likes. Bush is a country-western fan, so agents preset the radio to country-western stations in whatever town they happened to be in.
“One time, Bush 41 got into the limo and turned on the radio, and, of course, a country-western station came on immediately, and one of his favorite songs was playing,” Albracht says. “He started singing along with it. The agent who was driving looked up in the rearview mirror and saw Bush.”
“Larry, what do you think?” Bush asked the driver.
Without hesitation, Larry answered, “Don’t give up the day job, boss.”
Secret Service agents are instructed to ignore any conversations that take place in their presence, but of course they hear everything. At one point, the Secret Service was driving President Bush and Barbara Bush, along with two of their children, who were in the backseat of the limo.
“They were engaged in a deep conversation about something, and suddenly they were distracted,” Albracht says. “When they asked each other what they had been talking about, they couldn’t remember, and the agent who was driving said ‘Y’all talkin’ about Social Security’”
That was a violation of Secret Service protocol, and the supervisor in the right-front seat later reprimanded the agent. The agent’s tenure in the transportation section was about to end, but Bush liked him. When he hadn’t seen him for a while, Bush asked the Secret Service to assign him as his driver. That did not sit well with supervisors.
When Bush was president, the Secret Service obtained intelligence that a Colombian drug cartel had put out a contract on his family. As a result, Secret Service agents began protecting future president George W. Bush, his children, and his sister and brothers.
“He [George W. Bush] had just bought a new Lincoln, and we were following him closely,” former agent John Golden says. “He stopped quickly when a traffic light turned yellow. We plowed into his car, but it turned out there was no damage.”
Because Bush’s entire family would converge on his summer home in Kennebunkport, agents referred to it as Camp Timberwolf Because the home is on the water, the Secret Service enlisted the military to search for underwater explosives and patrolled the ocean in boats.
“Our cigarette boat at Kennebunkport was faster than his boat, but if we told him that, he would go out and buy a faster boat,” says Andrew Gruler, who was on the president’s detail.
At one point, Bush and Barbara flew to their Kennebunkport home in the winter. It was freezing cold, and the president and his wife came out for a walk.
“I had a hat on, and two of the other agents had hats on, but the one agent assigned to the first lady didn’t bring a hat with him,” says former agent Sullivan, who was on the president’s detail. “So the president came out with Mrs. Bush, and we started to walk.”
“Where’s your hat?” Mrs. Bush asked the hatless agent.
“Oh, Mrs. Bush, I didn’t bring one. I didn’t realize it was going to be so cold here,” he said.
“George, we need to get this agent a hat,” Barbara said.
“Okay, Bar,” he replied.
She walked back into the house, got one of President Bush’s furry hats, and gave it to the agent.
“No, Mrs. Bush, that’s fine,” the agent said.
“Hey, don’t argue with Mrs. Bush,” Bush said.
The agent put on the president’s hat.
“That was Mrs. Bush,” Sullivan says. “She was everyone’s mother, and she didn’t want this forty-year-old man walking around at Kennebunkport without a hat on. She was a sweetheart.”
“Barbara and George Bush were genuinely in love,” former agent Albracht says. “They share a special bond of being married and being each other’s best friends that you don’t really see a lot of. I know there was a woman on the staff that Bush was always rumored to be having an affair with, but I’m telling you, I never saw it, and I was with the guy for four years.”
While Barbara “can be sweet and nice, you do anything to cross anybody in the family, and you are written off,” says a former agent on Bush’s detail. “I remember the Bushes had some friends that would come to visit them, and one of them had decided to vote for Ross Perot, and she wrote that person off. And President Bush would say, ‘Aw, Barb, that’s just politics.’ And she’d say, ‘No, that’s just not right.’ And if somebody divorced his wife and married a younger woman, she didn’t like that at all.”
18
A Psychic’s Vision
RUNNING FOR REELECTION against Bill Clinton, Bush 41 was to give a speech on September 17, 1992, at the civic auditorium in Enid, Oklahoma. Agent Norm Jarvis was assigned to run intelligence investigations for the visit, and a detective from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation called him.
“He said that a woman who was a psychic had told her police contact, whom she worked with on a homicide case in Texas, that she had had a vision that President Bush was going to be assassinated by a sniper,” Jarvis says.
People call the Secret Service all the time reporting a vision they have just had about the president being shot. They are usually self-promoters. But in this case, the detective told Jarvis that this psychic’s visions had actually helped police find buried bodies and had provided useful leads in criminal investigations. Another seasoned law enforcement homicide investigator from Texas also told Jarvis that he needed to pay attention to her.
“She’s the real deal,” the Oklahoma detective said.
Jarvis remembered seeing the psychic on television. Sporting a beehive hairdo, she would don what she called a special pair of cowboy boots and then tell police not only where bodies were buried but how the victims had been murdered. The evening before Bush’s visit, Jarvis and his partner drove to the woman’s home in Enid. She invited them in, and Jarvis told her why they were there. The psychic confirmed that she had had a
vision that Bush 41 was about to be assassinated.
“About that time, her husband comes walking into the house, and he looks at me and he says, ‘Has she had another one of them visions?’” Jarvis says.
“Yeah,” Jarvis said.
The man shook his head and walked through the living room and into the kitchen.
“I gave my partner the nod to go in and talk to him,” Jarvis says. “My impression was he was disgusted because he didn’t believe her.”
Jarvis asked the psychic what she had seen in her vision. The woman said the president was going to come to Oklahoma: He was going to get off the plane, and he was going to get in a limousine.
“I see him sitting behind the driver,” she said. “As they start to drive by an overpass, the passenger window is shattered, and he is killed.” The next thing she saw was Bush in front of the family home in Kennebunkport. At that point, he is no longer the president.
“How could he be killed, and then your vision down the line is that he’s no longer the president and he’s at Kennebunkport?” Jarvis asked her.
The woman wasn’t sure, but as Jarvis questioned her, she offered more details of her premonition. When Bush gets into his limousine, he does not have a suit on, she said. Instead, he is wearing a light jacket and an open-collar shirt.
Jarvis knew that when the president flew in on Air Force One, he always came out in a suit and tie, and the dress code for the visit was suit and tie. Moreover, when the president is in the limousine, he is not behind the driver; he is on the right rear side, the position of honor.
Just then, Jarvis’s partner came out of the kitchen.
“What did he say?” Jarvis asked.
“The husband said if she’s seen a vision, it’s going to happen,” the other agent said.
As a chill went up Jarvis’s spine, he asked the woman to describe the limo. She correctly said the car was already in Enid. The Secret Service always flies its vehicles to the sites of presidential visits on a cargo plane prior to the visit, storing them in fire stations or in hangars at the airport where Air Force One is to land. At that point, Jarvis himself did not know where the limo was being stored.
In the President's Secret Service Page 13
