In the President's Secret Service

by Ronald Kessler

  Like most assassins, Bremer kept a diary. His jottings described how pathetic and insignificant he thought he was. Also, like most assassins, Bremer had stalked his victim. Before shooting Governor Wallace, Bremer had stalked Richard Nixon and other national figures. Only days before he shot Wallace, Bremer had sat in his car in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for nearly the entire day outside an armory where Wallace was scheduled to speak. A store owner called the police, and Bremer was picked up as a suspicious person. He told police that he was waiting to hear Wallace’s speech. Satisfied, the police released him without searching for a weapon.

  As with the previous assassination attempts, the Secret Service learned lessons from the incident. Back then, the Secret Service did not travel with emergency medical technicians in case of an assassination attempt. Breen remembers looking for a pack of cigarettes so he could rip off the cellophane and try to stanch a gaping wound in Wallace’s chest. Now the Secret Service alerts hospitals when the president or other protectees will be in their area. At least as far back as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a military doctor has traveled with the president and has maintained a medical facility at the White House.

  “If something happens now, you have an entire medical staff waiting for you when you get to the hospital,” Breen says. “It’s nothing like back in 1972, when Jimmy Taylor and I were confronted with the worst thing that could happen to a Secret Service agent, to have a protectee hurt or killed. This is your job, you’re supposed to protect him, and something like this happens. And it rarely does, but it certainly happens. The agents feel horrible about it, and you live with it a long time.”

  While the Secret Service wanted to screen crowds with magnetometers, candidates like Wallace objected, saying such security measures would needlessly irritate people and discourage them from showing up. After the Reagan shooting, the Secret Service began using magnetometers routinely to find hidden weapons. To allow crowds into an event without magnetometer screening became unthinkable. Yet in recent years, under pressure from politicians’ staffs to let crowds into events without screening, the agency has buckled.

  Only one such incident has been publicized. The press reported complaints from current or retired law enforcement officials that an hour before a rally for presidential candidate Barack Obama was to start at Reunion Arena in Dallas on February 20, 2008, the Secret Service stopped magnetometer screening.

  The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that Danny Defenbaugh, a former FBI agent who was inspector in charge of the bureau’s investigation of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, questioned why guards would suddenly stop searching for weapons.

  “Why were they doing it in the first place?” Defenbaugh asked rhetorically, adding that “of course” screening for weapons should have continued. “Dallas, 1963,” he added. “You know what happened. I don’t think Dallas wants that to happen again.”

  “This relaxed security was unbelievably stupid, especially in Dallas,” Jeff Adams of Berkeley, California, said in an email to the paper, noting the assassination of President Kennedy in that same city more than four decades earlier.

  Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, denied that stopping screening posed a problem.

  “There were no security lapses at that venue,” Zahren told the Dallas paper. There was “no deviation” from the “comprehensive and layered” plan, implemented in “very close cooperation with our law enforcement partners,” he added.

  But agents say such lapses occur periodically and defy common sense. An agent who was on Obama’s presidential candidate detail says it was “not uncommon” to waive magnetometers at events when the crowd was larger than expected. While the overflow might be seated far from the candidate and often behind a buffer zone, “Someone could still fire a gun, make their way to the front, or detonate explosives,” the agent says.

  Other agents say magnetometers have also been waived for events attended by President George W. Bush, John Edwards, John Kerry, and others. Agents attribute such obvious lapses in security to the fact that the Secret Service does not have enough manpower to screen everyone properly.

  “It’s complacency,” says the agent who was on Obama’s detail. “They say we can make do with less.”

  On top of that, the Secret Service not only slashed the number of agents on counterassault teams assigned to the candidates from the necessary five or six agents to two, it delayed assigning them a CAT team. Then, when the candidates insisted that the CAT teams stay out of sight, the Secret Service caved.

  During the 2008 campaign, “The agents assigned to the candidates were told to stay at least one terrain feature away from the working shift,” an agent says. “Most of the time, that means a street block away from the protectee.”

  While CAT agents need to be kept out of the kill zone, they should have the candidate directly in sight.

  “An attack, from beginning to end, could sometimes last no more than ten or twenty seconds,” a current agent says. “If you are a block away, you cannot identify the threat, know where the protectee is, respond to the threat, engage the threat, and then respond to wherever the working shift leader orders you to go.”

  In a stadium or auditorium, the CAT team is stationed at the point where the protectee leaves the stage. In that situation, the audience cannot see the team, so the candidates did not object to its presence. But when the CAT team is outside, stationing it at a distance renders the team “completely ineffective,” an agent who was once on the CAT team says. “It is basically window dressing. The attack would be over before the tactical element could even respond.”

  Many agents trace cutting corners to the Secret Service’s absorption into DHS. Being submerged in what many view as a dysfunctional agency, and having to compete for funds with other national security agencies, led to a lowering of standards. The fact that the Bush White House itself periodically asked the Secret Service to skip magnetometer screening undoubtedly contributed to an indulgent attitude. Indeed, Michael Chertoff himself, secretary of DHS, contributed to the lowering of standards in a very personal way.

  In October 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within DHS fined James D. Reid $22,880 for allegedly employing illegal immigrants when his Maryland cleaning company worked at Chertoff’s home and at other Washington homes. On the face of it, that did not make sense, since Secret Service agents protecting Chertoff would have been expected to check the background—including citizenship—of anyone allowed in the DHS secretary’s home. Indeed, in response to a December 11, 2008, Washington Post story reporting the violations, a Secret Service spokesman said that agents protecting Chertoff would have “run the appropriate checks, screened, and escorted people as appropriate in order to maintain the security of the residence and our protectee’s security.”

  But an agent who was periodically on Chertoff’s detail says that while the Secret Service initially performed routine screening of workers, the secretary’s wife, Meryl J. Chertoff, an adjunct law professor at Georgetown law school, in recent years “admonished agents for ‘hassling’ the workers.”

  Agents in charge bowed to Mrs. Chertoff’s wishes. As a result, “no name checks [were] done for some time,” the current agent says. When checks were done at times, “It was obvious the workers were providing bogus identifying information to agents, but [the agents], out of fear of Mrs. Chertoff, allowed them through,” the agent says. “The workers also were rarely escorted, as that pissed her off, too.”

  “Mrs. Chertoff would belittle the agents for trying to do their jobs by doing the name checks before the workers entered the residence,” another agent confirms.

  Asked for comment, William R. Knocke, a DHS spokesman, said, “These are baseless and sensational allegations that I’m not going to dignify with a response.”

  Knocke referred to his previous statement to The Washington Post that every contractor has the responsibility of ensuring his workers are legal.

  “As customers, the Chertoffs obtaine
d assurances from Mr. Reid that any personnel he dispatched to their home were authorized to work in the United States,” Knocke said. “As soon as the Chertoffs learned that Mr. Reid deceived them by employing some unauthorized workers, they fired him.”

  That the Secret Service allowed itself to become complicit in flouting immigration laws and even directed its agents to ignore violations is shocking. But skipping magnetometer screening when the lives of the president, vice president, and presidential candidates are at stake is far more shocking.

  Retired agents who served in prior years before the Secret Service began cutting corners after its absorption into DHS say they have never heard of stopping magnetometer screening. When told of the practice, they assert that the Secret Service would never do such a thing.

  “The [political] staff sometimes would propose stopping the magnetometers when an event was about to start,” says former agent William Albracht, who retired in 2001 and was an instructor. “I don’t know of any agent that has ever done that. That’s just not what we do. It doesn’t matter to us how your person looks in the media or to the crowds. It’s not really our concern. Our concern is that person’s safety.”

  “You face pressure from political staffs all the time, but you don’t stop magnetometer screening,” says Norm Jarvis, who also taught new agents, was on Bill Clinton’s protective detail, and left the Secret Service in 2005 as a special agent in charge. “Sometimes things happen and the flow rate is a little slow. But nobody in the Secret Service would allow the staff to impair security and jeopardize the life of the president by stopping magnetometer screening.”

  “Requests were made by staff to expedite or stop magnetometer screening,” says Danny Spriggs, who headed protection and retired as deputy director of the Secret Service in 2004. “I would never have acquiesced to that.”

  23

  Trailblazer

  ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, the Secret Service rushed President Bush to Air Force One from a school in Sarasota, Florida, where he was reading to children in a classroom. Usually a Boeing 747 known as the doomsday plane accompanies Air Force One and is parked nearby when the president lands. Packed with ultrasensitive communications gear and military hardware, it is designed as a mobile command post in case of a devastating attack, such as a nuclear one. Consideration was given to transferring Bush to the doomsday plane after the 9/11 attack. The idea was rejected because just the sight of him entering the plane could have created panic.

  “I spoke to him about not going back to Washington,” recalls Brian Stafford, the Secret Service director at the time. “The first time he was agreeable. Later when I spoke with him, he wasn’t as agreeable. By that time, we owned the skies. Even though we didn’t have all the answers we wanted, we were more comfortable about his going back than [we had been] earlier in the day.”

  After landing at Andrews Air Force Base, Bush rode on Marine One to the White House.

  Agents took Laura Bush from Capitol Hill to the basement of Secret Service headquarters. During such national emergencies, the Secret Service works with the military to ensure continuity of government and coordinates protection of those in the line of succession to the presidency. Because of that coordination function, even if officials in the line of succession receive protection from the State Department, as is usually the case with the secretary of state, or from the Capitol Police, as is the case with the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate, they receive a Secret Service code name. The secretary of labor, for example, was code-named Firebird after Elaine Chao objected to her assigned code name, Fireplug.

  At the time of the attack, Laura traveled with only two cars and four agents. Before driving her to headquarters, the agents called for additional cars and backup. After 9/11, the number of agents on Laura’s detail was more than doubled.

  Bush entered the White House at six fifty-four P.M. to find it surrounded by agents in black carrying submachine guns. Laura met him in the Emergency Operations Center, a bunker of rooms deep underground. That night, they were sleeping in their bedroom on the second floor at eleven-thirty when a Secret Service agent, breathing heavily from running, woke them up.

  “Mr. President! Mr. President!” the agent said. “There’s an unidentified aircraft heading toward the White House!”

  In their bathrobes, the Bushes returned to the underground bunker, where an aide pointed out a roll-out bed. Then word came that it had been a false alarm. The plane was friendly.

  “George had to literally lead her to go downstairs,” Nancy Weiss, a close friend of the Bushes, says. “She can’t even find the bathroom without her contacts. She is very, very blind. She wears hard lenses because the correction is so much better.”

  More than a month after 9/11, Laura Bush was at the Crawford ranch with her close friend Debbie Francis while Bush was in China. Laura’s Secret Service detail informed them of a threat they had picked up.

  “They had me move from the guesthouse into the main house in case we had to evacuate quickly” Debbie Francis recalls. “I stayed in one of the girls’ rooms. For that one night, they didn’t want us to have any lights on in the house. So we closed all the curtains and just had a little candle burning.” Throughout the ordeal, Laura remained “totally calm,” Francis says.

  Because of the extensive Secret Service preparations that precede his trips outside the White House, Bush preferred not to go out to restaurants. At one point, he told Laura he didn’t like to be stared at while he was eating. Laura laughed and said, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have run for president.”

  In contrast to her husband, Laura regularly slipped out of the White House to have lunch with friends at places such as Cafe Deluxe, Zola, or Old Ebbitt Grill. Her Secret Service detail would sit at nearby tables.

  Presidents are required to pay for the incremental cost of their personal meals and personal parties—the cost of a lamb chop, for example. The White House or the State Department pays for official entertaining. The political party in power pays for Christmas events and cards. In all, twelve thousand people typically attend White House Christmas events. During a recent Christmas season, guests invited by the Bushes consumed a thousand pounds of shrimp, three hundred twenty gallons of eggnog, ten thousand tamales, and seven hundred cakes. That does not include the display-only three-hundred-pound gingerbread White House painted in white chocolate.

  A buffet dinner for the press included roast lamb chops, chicken-fried steak with gravy, fruitwood smoked salmon, cocktail shrimp, Maryland crab cakes, bourbon-glazed Virginia ham, cheesy stone-ground grits, and tamales with roasted poblanos and Vidalia onions. Not to mention chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream frosting, chocolate truffles, apple and cherry cobblers, and countless glazed sugar cookies shaped like woodland creatures.

  The government’s real annual cost of running the White House is anybody’s guess. The president receives a salary of $450,000 a year plus an expense allowance of $50,000 and $100,000 for travel. The White House and the Executive Office of the President receive $202 million a year. But these figures are a mere token of what the White House costs. The real costs—totaling more than a billion dollars—are unknown even to Congress and the Government Accountability Office, the audit arm of Congress, because dozens of other agencies help support the White House and detail employees to it.

  “The total cost of the White House isn’t in any records,” says John Cronin, Jr., who directed the GAO’s audits of the White House for twelve years. “The navy runs the mess and Camp David, the army provides the cars and drivers, the Defense Department provides communications, the air force provides airplanes, the marine corps provides the helicopters. The State Department pays for state functions, the National Park Service maintains the grounds, the Secret Service provides protection, and the General Services Administration [GSA] maintains the East and West Wings and the Old Executive Office Building and provides heat.”

  The mythology often conveyed by the press was that Bush was a pu
ppet of Dick Cheney or, alternatively, that he was so stubborn he listened to no one. In fact, he made his own decisions and would let aides go if they were too timid to disagree with him. Thus, according to former chief of staff Andy Card, it was Bush who came up with the idea of paying a surprise visit to troops in Baghdad for Thanksgiving in 2003. Card says the first thing Bush wanted to know was whether the Secret Service thought it could be done safely. More than a month before the trip, Card met at the White House with Director Mark Sullivan and other Secret Service officials to begin planning the trip. The White House informed the Defense Department of the plans later.

  To be sure, as Bush himself joked, he often did not speak English. His close friend Clay Johnson was in the Oval Office a few days before Bush was to speak at a radio and television correspondents dinner.

  “I’m going to give the funniest speech you’ve ever heard,” Bush told “Big Man,” as he called Johnson. “They have this tape of ridiculous phrases I used in the [2001] campaign. I can’t believe that a candidate for president said those things.”

  Bush recited some of the examples:

  “Africa is a nation that…”

  “Dick Cheney and I do not want this nation to be in a recession. We want anybody who can find work to be able to find work.”

  “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”

  “The woman who knew that I had dyslexia—I never interviewed her.”

  “I’ve never seen him laugh that hard,” Johnson says.

  Secret Service agents appreciate the fact that Bush is punctual.

  “Bush is down to earth, caring,” an agent says. The Bushes offer food to agents. “They are always thinking of people around them.”

  But agents were always amazed at the difference between Bush in person and the way he came across at press conferences.