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

by Dan Emmett

  A NEW ADMINISTRATION

  On January 20, 1993, William Jefferson Clinton moved into the White House, and along with him came a staff so different from that of George Herbert Walker Bush’s that they could have been from another planet. This was my first experience with a Democratic presidential staff. Starched white shirts, conservative hairstyles, and blue suits had given way to denim, long hair, and Dockers.

  In direct contrast to the departing Republicans, most of whom were at least forty years of age, President Clinton’s staff had a mere handful of experienced, mature professionals. The remainder were young people possessing no significant work experience. Some were younger than us by a decade or more, and many were initially disrespectful of the Secret Service. Much of this attitude had to do with their youth and immaturity. Unlike their outgoing Republican counterparts, none seemed to own a watch.

  To many of these young people, who were now in charge of planning POTUS’s schedule and who played a large part in the day-to-day running of the White House, this seemed to be nothing more than a grand adventure not to be taken too seriously.

  On top of their seemingly youthful arrogance, the junior staff could also be dangerous in an adolescent sort of way. President Clinton was visiting Russia in December 1993, and I was along for the trip as a member of my shift. I had been preposted at an event. A young staffer walked by and into the secure area about to be occupied by POTUS. This was not a concern, as I knew the staffer, who was wearing the proper lapel pin identification that allowed total access to the area. The rub was that the Russian KGB agents assisting us did not understand our identification system and had no idea who this young man was.

  As the staffer was walking by, a KGB officer named Yuri grabbed him by the arm to stop him. The staffer jerked away from Yuri and continued on his way, as if he were dealing with a Wackenhut security officer in Toledo. As Yuri was about to do his worst, I put my hand on his shoulder (gently) and explained to him (he spoke English, as most do) that the young man was one of the president’s staff and that he had access to the area. I also asked that he not officially detain or confront the young man. Out of professional courtesy he reluctantly agreed, but first he said, in a heavy Russian accent, “Dan, he is big asshole.” I had to laugh, and while I certainly agreed with Yuri’s assessment of the young staffer, I withheld comment. This request on my part to leave the neophyte unmolested by the KGB would cost me several rounds of vodka later when I was off duty with my Russian friend. I always appreciated the directness of the Russians.

  I later confronted the young staffer and in a tactful manner told him he had come very close to being taken into custody by the KGB for his immature, unprofessional behavior. He glared at me and replied that they couldn’t do that to him because of his position on the presidential staff. I informed him that he was in Russia, not America, and that they could most certainly detain him if they wished. He stared at me for a moment and then rolled his eyes and walked away. Resisting the impulse to grab him by the collar and shake him around a bit, I maintained my professional decorum. I then thought of Yuri’s comment regarding the young man and smiled.

  While the young staffer offered no gratitude for my having plucked him from certain embarrassment and physical discomfort, I did not intervene in the situation for his sake. In fact, it would have been entertaining to watch the KGB agent teach the young man a lesson in humility. While it is every agent’s job to protect the president from physical harm, it is also every agent’s unofficial duty to protect the president from potential embarrassment when possible. For one of the president’s staffers to be hauled away by the Russian authorities would have created embarrassment for President Clinton and would have required Department of State intervention as well as resulting in a media event. Even so, from that point on, I decided to never again intercede in any matter on behalf of this boy trying so desperately yet unsuccessfully to be accepted as a man in a world of which he had no understanding.

  Another example of the maturity issues the Secret Service encountered with junior staff occurred in 1993, when I was sent to conduct an advance for POTUS to Hilton Head, South Carolina. The site was a hotel ballroom where President Clinton would address a group of supporters from a stage. Secret Service doctrine is, and probably has been since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, that there will always be a means of evacuating POTUS from the rear of any stage he occupies. This is not negotiable in any way, and staff is well aware of the doctrine.

  I was working well with a young female staff counterpart, and all was going according to plan until I left her unattended for a few minutes. When I returned, I found that she had blocked the rear of the stage, our avenue of escape, with a movie-like set made of plywood. I had just explained to her not one hour earlier that we needed a clear exit to the rear of the stage, and she had agreed. Perhaps she had not understood. This is when I came to realize that young volunteer staffers were not unlike first graders: You should not turn your back on them for more than a few seconds.

  I patiently explained that the set had to be moved and why. She crossed her arms and proceeded to raise her voice and tell me that the set was going to remain where it was and she was not going to move it. This was probably some sort of verbal judo nonsense learned in a classroom, but she was about to learn that much of life is learned outside academia and that there was no school solution for what was coming her way.

  I once again tried to explain why the set had to go, or at least be modified to give us a way out using the rear of the stage. I used the word modified, hinting that we could compromise but that we needed our way out. Once again, my patient attempts to reason with her were met with childlike emotion born of a past where no one in authority (probably beginning with her parents) had ever said no to her about anything. I was now dealing with a spoiled child rather than a presidential staff person, and I was very quickly losing what patience I had remaining. Finally I said, “Okay, I am going to go call the lead staff advance.” This was her boss. One could assume that the lead staff advance would be a little older than the site counterparts. I would turn the matter over to the two of them. They could battle it out.

  As I walked away to make the call, I heard the sound of running footsteps behind me. I turned to see my assertive counterpart in tears, begging me not to call her boss. This young woman had tried to intimidate and bully a security professional with her drama-queen performance to get what she wanted. She had been testing me. It had probably worked most of her life with college professors, boys, and her parents. It did not work against the Secret Service, and I was unmoved by her tears. While I had first agreed to compromise, I was no longer in the mood and directed her, in a voice that could be heard for some distance, to get rid of the entire god-damned set—all of it, and right now! She did, and from that point on, we had no more issues.

  She began to really work for me, doing whatever I directed, as I was no longer asking or suggesting but telling. I was also teaching her, and without realizing it, she was learning. I suspected she was probably a nice person, but like most of the staff was young and immature and just needed some discipline, someone to say no occasionally. In this case, the task fell to me.

  The visit went well, and when POTUS departed, the lead staffer congratulated her. The young woman hugged me and thanked me for all my help—and then asked if we could get together later on. I declined.

  As fate would have it, I worked with this same woman again a few months later at a major site much more complicated than the one in Hilton Head. She was a totally different person—much more mature, confident, and emotionally stable. This time we worked together instead of me directing her or her trying to roll me. There were no problems during the advance or at the site. This staffer had begun to grow up and would be an asset to the president and the Service, but there were still too few like her.

  The young staff’s worst quality by far was total disorganization, which for the Secret Service was a major issue. They seldom had even a basic idea of POTUS’
s itinerary or sequence of events on the first several days of any advance. As a result of the staff’s total inefficiency, we had a lot of time to roam around for the first few days of the advance. You always paid at the other end, however. About two days before POTUS’s arrival, staff would come up with at least a half-assed itinerary, at which time we would put it all together. The result was that, although we had been in place for days, we now had only about forty-eight hours to do our advance.

  Before agents could do a motorcade advance, for example, they had to run the routes to be used on game day, which required having to have a point of origin and a destination. To do a site advance you had to have a site. We usually had neither for the first several days of the advance. Other than the date and place of Air Force One’s arrival, we had no idea where the president was going to go, what he was going to do, or whom he was going to meet with. The only person, then, who could really even begin his advance was the agent responsible for the airport arrival.

  My most memorable journey plagued by disorganization was a trip to England for the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1994. President Clinton was going to do a swing through Europe, a trip that included visiting the Normandy beaches where so many Americans had died in the effort to save the world from Adolf Hitler. My job was to do the motorcade advance for President Clinton’s trip to Cambridge, England. Eventually he would visit the American cemetery there, where there were several thousand empty graves of American airmen lost over Europe. They had taken off from English airfields. One of the most noteworthy names on the wall was that of Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Joe had been killed on a mission to take out German submarine pens in France. His name was on the wall because there had been no body to bury. He had been blown to pieces along with his Martin PB4Y, the navy version of the B-24 Liberator. Cambridge cemetery was primarily for aircrews, and most of the graves held nothing.

  The advance team arrived in the beautiful town of Cambridge in the middle of the afternoon two weeks prior to the visit. We had the usual meeting with staff and received the usual announcement that there was no itinerary as yet. We took the news as we always did, then moved across the street from the hotel to a pub where we decompressed from the flight over. After a couple of drinks I traded the bartender a Secret Service baseball cap for a porcelain water pitcher bearing the logo of Famous Grouse Scotch. The trip slogan became a line from a W. E. B. Griffin novel: “If you are going to drink you have to get on the bird,” meaning the Famous Grouse.

  With not much to do until staff pulled an itinerary out of the air, I decided to call my wife and invite her to come over and visit. Another agent invited his wife, and we all had a great time touring the English countryside. Our driver was from Cambridge and one evening he invited us for dinner at his home, where we enjoyed his wife’s cooking and his daughter played the clarinet. These were intelligent, well-educated people who lived a happy, simple life with few amenities. I envied them.

  Finally the staff came up with a schedule, enough at least for us to go to work. My wife and the other agent’s wife spent the days visiting Buckingham Palace and other sites while the advance team tried our best to put together a security plan in a very short amount of time.

  This lack of purpose and organization by staff never seemed to change, although the Service and the staff eventually grew used to each other and the relationships began to improve. There were fewer and fewer instances like the one in Hilton Head as the staff matured somewhat, thanks in no small part to being around adult professionals in the Secret Service. They began to understand the reasons for the things we did, and some even began to develop a basic respect of authority. They realized that we were anything but the hired help, and that a smart staffer would befriend an agent as much as possible, whenever possible. They were learning that with power comes responsibility. This change also occurred because the POTUS chief of staff worked well with the SAIC of PPD, laying down the law among the junior staff to stop being adolescent pains in the collective ass of the Service and start playing ball. If anything, junior staff was an intelligent lot. In the end, albeit somewhat reluctantly, most got on board the team bus.

  FOREIGN COUNTERPARTS

  Advance counterparts on foreign trips could be anyone, including hastily vetted foreign nationals, but the advance was still coordinated by the presidential staff. One such trip was to Aqaba, Jordan, where I coordinated motorcades for President Clinton’s visit to the region.

  The C-141 flight with the president’s cars and some advance agents to Jordan was the roughest of my career. Prior to leaving Andrews Air Force Base, I had lunch with agent Charlie White, who had been on the Korean DMZ adventure, at a dive in Washington named Stoney’s. Stoney’s was demolished not long after, probably due to substandard sanitary conditions. I picked up a bug there that rendered me practically useless for the next forty-eight hours. I spent the entire flight from Andrews to Spain moving between my less than comfortable seat and what passed as a lavatory on the C-141. By the time we landed in Spain I was so dehydrated and weak from expending all bodily fluids from every orifice that walking was a chore. The flight from Spain to Aqaba was hardly better.

  Our hotel in Aqaba overlooked the Dead Sea and looked like something out of a 1939 Humphrey Bogart movie. Upon arrival we had a quick meeting with all the advance personnel and presidential staff to try to get an idea what President Clinton’s itinerary would be. As usual, the staff did not know, and their ineptness in this case worked to my benefit, as I slept a full twenty-four hours trying to recover from my visit to Stoney’s. Had we been back in the United States, I would probably have been hospitalized, but this was PPD and the show had to go on.

  Being the motorcade advance on this trip, a large part of my job was the planning and running of routes that the POTUS motorcade would be using. I was issued a Jordanian counterpart who had been vetted by the American embassy and bore an amazing resemblance to Sirhan Sirhan, the man who had killed Bobby Kennedy.

  In the States, you usually did your advance with a local cop who knew every street and every possible way to move from point A to point B. In this case, I had the young Jordanian, who always needed a shave and wore the same dirty T-shirt and jeans each day. He had dark, piercing eyes and a two-inch scar running down his right cheek. His demeanor suggested he was capable of cutting a man’s throat and leaving him for the vultures should it become necessary. As with any foreign counterpart, the Secret Service had to assume that people such as this were part of the host country’s intelligence service or, worst-case, a terrorist organization. I never trusted him entirely and was never comfortable with the amount of sensitive information he was acquiring.

  After two full days with my Jordanian counterpart running all of the routes the president of the United States would actually be traveling the day of the visit, including routes to the hospital, police stations, and possible safe houses, my assistant disappeared and was replaced with a Jordanian policeman. I asked our main Jordanian counterpart from the US embassy what had happened to my guy. I reminded him that this young man knew every inch of the POTUS motorcade routes, that it was too late to change them, and that it was perhaps not a good idea for him to be at large.

  The Jordanian diplomat, smoking a cigarette that would make a Lucky Strike seem tame, informed me that his government had acquired some information that had caused them to be concerned about my counterpart’s allegiances. “But not to worry,” he said, “he has been taken care of.”

  I was never sure what that meant exactly but had a good idea what it might mean in that part of the world. I guess my counterpart had not been vetted well enough.

  On the day of the visit, as the presidential motorcade navigated its way through the narrow ancient streets of Aqaba, I could not help but scan the open windows of the stucco homes. I half expected to see one of my former counterpart’s clones lean out of a window with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and put a rocket into the limo. I never saw him again, however, and maybe no one else ever di
d either.

  VELVET COVERED STEEL

  When POTUS’s visit to Jordan ended, our advance team was put on a bus at the Jordanian-Israeli border and driven all night to Jerusalem, where we would assist with a second visit. The good shepherd provided to watch over us by the Israeli government was a female Shin Bet or perhaps Mossad agent. She gave her name as Rachel.

  Rachel was quite different from most women I had ever met in the security field. She had wild, wavy brown hair and a dark tan from the Israeli sun. She also had the most unusual scar running down her perfectly sculpted right bicep. It was jagged and uneven—not a surgical scar but one caused by something from her unknown past. Although we were all armed, she was our protector as we rode in our bus on a brilliantly moonlit night through the Israeli desert.

  Growing up in a country that had fought for its survival on more than one occasion and was surrounded by countries that wished their homeland exterminated, Israeli women were raised somewhat differently from American women—or women from almost anywhere. A certain number of Israeli girls grew up learning how to use weapons, load ammunition magazines, and kill their country’s enemies, while many American girls grew up playing with dolls. Biologically, Israeli women and those from other countries were the same, but that is where the similarities ended.

  At some point, we stopped at a small country store in the middle of nowhere. Rachel told us to get whatever we wanted, including beer. Back on the bus, almost everyone had a couple of beers. We had just completed one of the most stressful and dangerous advances of our careers, and we needed to relax a little. I had finally gotten rid of my bacterial friend from Stoney’s, and the cold beer went down very well. The bus was not large, but there were only ten or so of us, so we each had our own row. It was a great time to reflect on the last mission and just enjoy traveling through the land where Jesus once walked.