Within Arm's Length: A Secret Service Agent's Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President

by Dan Emmett

  As I began planning for a house-hunting trip to Washington, my supervisor approached me and asked if I had contacted the movers yet. I said I had not, and he told me to hold off. I told him what he already knew, which was that I had a T-number. My orders were official. He said that while headquarters had cut a set of orders with my name on them, the deputy special agent in charge (DSAIC) of New York had not approved the transfer, and for the moment, at least, I was not leaving.

  My T-number was retracted as quickly as it had appeared. I was not going anywhere for the moment, and I was, understandably, disappointed. This was a power play by the DSAIC designed to prove a point. He was the number-two man in New York and could dictate when people would leave, and no one was going anywhere without his approval. With so many agents wanting out of New York, I suppose he felt the need to display this fact.

  Later, the DSAIC who had rescinded my orders called me into his paneled inner sanctum, which overlooked the Hudson River. Not inviting me to sit, he demanded to know whom I knew in Washington at Protective Operations, the directorate in charge of all protective details. In light of my having received orders without his approval, he was led to believe I was somehow connected to someone in Washington. I told him I knew no one and that, if I did, I wouldn’t still be sitting in New York.

  I suggested that the answer to the mystery of my receiving orders without his being consulted by Washington was that I was a CAT school graduate, and CAT agents were needed to protect the president. After throwing an icy stare my way, the DSAIC dismissed me with the wave of a hand.

  After I went home that day, my group leader, who was also somewhat exasperated with the situation, explained to the DSAIC that canceling my orders was damaging the morale of the entire office. Almost everyone wanted out, except perhaps the kids still living at home with their parents, and to see a man given orders only to have them practically torn up in front of him was causing trouble within the ranks. If a man could not escape from New York even with orders, what chance did anyone have of ever getting out? He apparently saw the logic in my group leader’s presentation.

  In August 1989, three years almost to the day that I had checked into the NYFO, I attended my going-away party. It was a fairly large turnout, and most of the people there were those I had, over the course of the past three years, drunk with, broken down doors with, suffered common hardships with, and risked all with. I would miss each of them. In spite of my southern heritage, which dated back to before the Civil War, there was no doubt that I had become part New Yorker and always would be.

  After the party, I departed New York, watching the Holland Tunnel in my rearview mirror for what felt like the last time. I was finally on my way to Washington, DC, where I would protect the president of the United States as a member of one of the most elite counterterrorism units in the world: the United States Secret Service Counter Assault Team.

  THE PROTECTION OF FORMER PRESIDENTS

  As I headed to Washington, others, some by choice, others by force, were on their way to the protective details of former presidents Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson. This courtesy offered to former presidents began with President Truman and continues today. I was extremely grateful to be headed for CAT.

  I had nothing against any of these former leaders of our country or their agents; I simply had no interest in spending three years of my life and career providing quasi protection for private citizens who, in my view, should be paying for their own private security, an opinion I still hold today.

  When a sitting president transitions into a former president, his Secret Service coverage takes on a completely different set of dynamics. Due to the conspicuous lack of threats against formers, his detail moves from a protective mission to more of a caretaker role. The offering of a full-blown 24/7 Secret Service detail to ex-presidents is a very expensive courtesy, not a necessity, as with a sitting president.

  One of my instructors in agent school summed it up quite well by saying that, as long as an agent has to stand for hours in front of a door, wet, starving and freezing to death, the sitting president, not a former president, should be on the other side of that door. He also pointed out that, as a general rule, when an assassin awakens in the morning, he does not plan to kill a former president. He wants to kill the sitting president of the United States. Those words, spoken by a PPD veteran, confirmed what I already felt.

  While law mandates that each former POTUS be offered protection until death, none is required to accept this service. Only the sitting president and vice president are required to have Secret Service protection, with Richard Nixon the only former president to have voluntarily given up his Secret Service detail in favor of private security paid for by him. Shortly after this historical event, the media asked former president Ford why he, too, did not give up his detail. He said that he had twice been the target of an assassination attempt. “Yes, sir, while president,” said the reporter. When reminded of the fact, President Ford would move on to another topic. After leaving office in 1977, he suffered no more such attempts on his life and died of natural causes in 2006 at the age of ninety-three.

  As of this writing, no former presidents in the history of the republic other than Teddy Roosevelt and George Herbert Walker Bush have had attempts made on their lives, and the one on Bush was weak at best. President Roosevelt had left office and was running again for the presidency, this time as a member of the Bull Moose Party. He was actually shot while preparing to give a speech on the back of a train. The round hit his speech, contained in a jacket pocket, before slightly entering his chest. With no Secret Service protection and after being shot, Teddy went on to give the speech.

  As for the attempt on President Bush, it is a small footnote in history hardly worth mentioning. In 1993, after leaving office, George H. W. Bush was visiting Kuwait after Desert Storm when Saddam Hussein’s forces made a very halfhearted attempt to blow him up by placing an explosive in the doors of a car he was to ride in. It was such a poor job they might as well have placed signs on the car that read, “Bomb in door.” The usual suspects were rounded up and heads did roll in the literal sense. In keeping with the Kuwait government’s interpretation of the speedy trial act, there were no appeals.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Counter Assault Team

  SOME BACKGROUND AND BRIEF HISTORY OF CAT

  CAT, the Counter Assault Team, is the tactical unit of the Secret Service comprised of special agents whose stated mission is to neutralize organized attacks, multiple attackers, snipers from a known location, and rocket attacks against the president of the United States through the use of speed, surprise, and violence of action. The agents who comprise CAT are a unique group of individuals, arguably some of the best agents in the Secret Service. Each is physically hard and highly disciplined, and most delight (at times) in being politically incorrect when the opportunity presents itself. Some of the more genteel personnel in the Service feel that these are agents who should be locked away out of sight and released only in times of life-threatening crisis.

  In addition to being Iron Man–fit, each CAT agent is an accomplished expert with all issued weapons, as well as small unit and individual tactics, and prepared to protect the office of the presidency by any means necessary. Each is a mission-oriented extremist. Upward mobility was not a concern for these men: When I joined the program, promotion was not possible within the unit. Of all the agents in the Secret Service, these men’s motives for being there were perhaps the purist of all.

  During my CAT tenure, while mutual respect between team members was always the norm, there was no political correctness in our small, highly selective group, and all had thick skins. Things were either good to go or not, with very little in between, and everyone was free to speak his mind to this end. If an agent was FUBAR (fucked-up beyond all recognition), he was made aware of this fact, usually in a very direct and insensitive manner. He could then unscrew himself or find another assignment.
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  Because of the physical prowess of these men, many people mistakenly underestimated their cerebral abilities. CAT agents are an eclectic lot in terms of background, education, and interests. Some speak a second language, and all hold degrees in a wide range of disciplines, including accounting, engineering, and law, with more possessing advanced degrees than not. Among their ranks are pilots, combat veterans, former teachers, military officers, and noncommissioned officers. One CAT agent and good friend actually built an airplane in the garage of his home and flew it for many years. This agent was of German heritage, and his airplane was adorned with correct German aircraft markings from World War I. On some days he could be seen flying low over the training center at Beltsville, waving from the cockpit, a white scarf streaming behind with the black cross of the German armed forces painted on the wings.

  In contrast to their sometimes colorful demeanor, CAT agents also have impeccable party manners and look immaculate in a business suit, presenting an image all would expect Secret Service agents to portray.

  With the constant threat of attack on America by radical Islam and other terrorist organizations, the United States Secret Service Counter Assault Team enjoys a reputation in the international law enforcement and counterterrorist communities as one of the most elite units of its kind in the world. In spite of this highly respected status, its beginnings were uncertain, and in the early 1980s many at the highest levels of the Secret Service lobbied for CAT’s abolishment. Gaining acceptance in an organization such as the Secret Service, which had for years resisted the idea of an elite within an elite, was a long and painful process. The Secret Service is a very old and traditional organization, which for many years fought significant change of any sort, and for decades its mission remained essentially the same. It was a conservative, compact organization that had few missions, did them all exceptionally well, and considered protection strictly a gentleman’s assignment rather than one for a paramilitary unit. Many did not feel the need for an expansion of mission by adding counterterrorism to the matrix.

  As a result, some of the gentlemen of the Secret Service were not overly concerned with the threat of terrorism. Many had been on the job since Harry Truman or even Franklin D. Roosevelt, and there was not much progressive thinking going on during this time at the headquarters level. The feeling was that, during an attack on the president, the agents of the Presidential Protective Division could handle anything that came along.

  Consequently, since assuming its mandate to protect the president with the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, the Service had not changed a great deal in its methods. It used more agents, performed complex advances, and now had jets and armored limos to move POTUS about, but it primarily still only trained for the lone gunman scenario or perhaps a sniper. That was the way the Service elders saw the threat, and, just as the Service retained its use of revolvers until after almost every organization in law enforcement had transitioned to semiautomatic pistols, that was the way it would remain for a very long time.

  While most at Secret Service headquarters saw no need for a centralized counterterrorist unit, in the late 1970s, it gave the authorization to large field offices, such as New York and Washington, to create their own versions of such a unit. These teams were field agents who worked their cases and performed normal investigative activities until a presidential visit or high-threat protectee came to their city. Then these agents would deploy in any vehicle that could hold five large agents and not embarrass the Service. This car would be positioned in the motorcade several vehicles behind the limo, and was used in the event of an organized attack. It was known as simply the “muscle car” and was the predecessor to modern-day CAT.

  The initial CAT selection course conducted at the Secret Service training center in Maryland was primitive at best and only lasted one or two weeks. Some attack scenarios were conducted, but they consisted mostly of Uniformed Division firearms instructors firing blanks from the woods. CAT’s early weapons were Smith & Wesson revolvers augmented by Uzi submachine guns, with one M16-wielding agent. That was the general composition, but there was no real standardization, from training to uniforms to weapons.

  With no strong support from HQ for money and training, early CAT was a very haphazard affair. Training and focus of mission centered almost entirely on responding to an attack on a motorcade or airport tactics. There was little to no emphasis on urban deployment or countering an attack from inside a building. Retraining was left up to the agents, for the most part, back at their field offices, and was hit-or-miss. It was truly half-assed in every way, but it was a start and better than nothing.

  The early teams that rode in the muscle cars did not really have to be tactical geniuses or even good at tactics. Their real mission was to deploy in case of an attack, to draw fire away from the protectees onto themselves, while the shift evacuated POTUS. Their true purpose was to be sacrificed, if necessary, in order to give POTUS time and the opportunity to escape from the kill zone. From the beginning of the program, the assignment attracted those with a sense of adventure and with a seemingly total disregard for danger, and there has never been a shortage of volunteers.

  By the 1980s, terrorist attacks around the world were on the rise, and our brethren at the FBI saw the future far better than we. In 1982, the FBI established HRT, the Hostage Rescue Team. HRT was something of a SWAT team but with a much broader mission. In addition to the centralized HRT, based out of the FBI academy in Quantico, there were similar but less specialized teams in the major field offices. They had the budget, the personnel, and the all-important backing from FBI HQ. From the beginning, it was a first-rate operation.

  The Secret Service was about one tenth the size of the FBI and seemingly always at odds with the Bureau over one thing or another, but there were those in the director’s office who wanted to be seen as a smaller version of the FBI. While this vision was totally unrealistic, the Service had one thing the Bureau did not yet wanted desperately: presidential protection. And while its budget was comparatively small to that of the FBI, the Service always got the funds it needed by citing security concerns for POTUS. That was good, because it was going to need a lot of cash for a new program coming down the alley known as CAT.

  Not wanting to be outdone by the FBI in this new field of counterterrorism, the Service responded by creating a new branch within the Special Services Division (SSD) called Special Programs Branch (SPB), also to be known as the Counter Assault Team (CAT). While SSD’s main responsibility was taking care of the protective fleet of vehicles and had nothing to do with guns and killing terrorists, this newly created branch had to be put somewhere in the table of organization. CAT, an unconventional force, would answer to the SAIC of SSD, a completely conventional division that had no idea how to utilize its new, potentially highly lethal, group of men.

  With the establishment of the Special Programs Branch, CAT had become a permanent protective assignment lasting two years, on average. The agents who comprised it would come from all over the country and would be based out of Washington, DC, with the muscle car concept now scrapped. After the two-year assignment, a CAT agent would usually move to the presidential or vice presidential detail, depending on the needs of the service. Later, CAT would attain divisional status, with its own SAIC, for a few years. Then it moved to PPD and, still later, back to its own division.

  By the mid-1980s, training had improved immensely, as had the weapons carried. Now everyone in CAT would have an M16 assault rifle and the new Sig Sauer P226, a 9 mm pistol. Instead of six rounds (like the revolver), it held sixteen rounds. In an organization that still issued revolvers to its agents, carrying a Sig was a status symbol envied by all. Only CAT carried them, adding to the mystique of the program.

  Although CAT now officially existed, the proper utilization of this new resource was an enigma to some supervisors. As a result, CAT in the early years was sometimes either improperly used or not used at all. For example, it did not accompany the
president on all movements, and its presence was at the discretion of the presidential detail supervisor running the movement. It was not uncommon for PPD operations to call CAT notifying them of a POTUS movement but without requesting CAT assistance. CAT was being deliberately left out when its presence didn’t suit the White House bosses or when its proper use was beyond the tactical knowledge of the conventional supervisor.

  Especially frustrating was the fact that CAT was sometimes not used because of its threatening appearance. Some supervisors did not feel a Suburban full of muscular men armed with assault rifles was aesthetically pleasing and preferred CAT not be included in the motorcade. Since we normally operated with our windows down, upon arrival at a site, CAT agents usually had one arm hanging out the window. This sight so displeased some at high-level PPD management that we were ordered to procure lower short-sleeved shirts that would not accentuate the well-developed male bicep/deltoid musculature.

  These exclusions and this attitude began to create friction between PPD and CAT. There were several additional causes for this friction. Much of it came down to the fact that many at PPD distrusted CAT, did not feel its massive firepower was needed, and were ignorant of its capabilities. Things had been fine for almost a century of protection without CAT, and many felt it was not needed now. Another reason PPD did not like CAT in the early days was the freedom we enjoyed. We were totally on our own, for the most part, and were having entirely too much fun for some on the detail. We were an unconventional, independent lot, and almost everything we did spoke to that side of us. There was also some old-fashioned jealousy involved. On the road and away from Washington, CAT began to take over from PPD the reputation of being the Secret Service social elite.