by Dan Emmett
GAUDY TREASURES
Almost every agent who has ever been on a foreign trip has in his or her home some hideous item purchased overseas and brought home on the car plane. A lot of these items looked great and had terrific novelty at the time of purchase. Upon getting them out of the country from which they were purchased and back home, many such items lost their shine almost immediately.
Once, in Turkey, I bought what I thought was a great-looking brass vase I thought my wife would love. After getting it home, I proudly presented it to her as a sign that although I had been halfway around the world, I was thinking of her. She took one look at the thing, and it was immediately relegated to the garage until picked up by Goodwill.
On the same trip, I purchased a giant water pipe. The enormous thing sat on the floor in our downstairs television room for about one day. In very short order, it joined the brass vase in the garage, along with an assortment of other tacky items, such as swords from Saudi Arabia recently rediscovered in our last move. Two men who did some work on our home are now the proud owners of these implements of destruction. The lethal-looking items may now adorn their respective residences, or lie under their beds to be used in the event of a home invasion. (Perfect, if a roving band of killer nomads break down the door demanding your women.) They could also quite possibly be in a garage awaiting the Goodwill truck.
GIFTS FROM CHINA
Not all souvenirs traveled via car plane. In 1998 my wife returned home from a three-week assignment to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with an unusual surprise. After Donnelle arrived home from her marathon flight, I asked what she had brought me from the land of Godless Communism. She said that the trip had been a busy one and that there had not been much shopping. She then produced several red metal butane lighters with Mao Zedong’s image emblazoned on the side. When opened, the lighters played the anthem of the PRC. She then produced a Chairman Mao cap complete with a red star on the front. Nice, but not memorable.
A week or so later the phone rang. It was a shipping company from Baltimore, calling to let us know that our item from China had arrived at the Port of Baltimore and was being trucked to our house. Item from China? I pressed my wife for information, but she was not talking.
About two hours later a moving truck arrived in front of our home. The rear door opened and the two-man crew struggled to unload a rather large and heavy crate. As they pulled free the packing nails and began to remove what appeared to be at least fifty pounds of foam and bubble wrap, a brown, earthenlike thing began to emerge. When the last of the packing was removed, I saw a … terra-cotta warrior. The thing was easily six feet tall and weighed several hundred pounds.
The site that Donnelle had advanced for President Clinton was the location where the terra-cotta statues had been discovered, and the area had been turned into a museum of sorts. The warrior that arrived at our home was a full-sized reproduction, and the Chinese were selling these things to anyone who had the cash.
For some reason that remains unknown even today, we named our warrior Frank. He was a bit hard to get used to. Walking through the house in the dark, I would sometimes forget he was there and nearly go into cardiac arrest as I bumped into him.
Frank protected three of our homes over the next several years. Unfortunately, due to being moved so many times, including his trek from China, his base had cracked. It was only a matter of time before he toppled over, crushing anyone who might be near. Our son was five at the time, and we feared that Frank might one day accidentally kill him. So we made the painful but sound decision to dismiss Frank from service and find him a new home.
Once the decision had been made to dismiss Frank, the big dilemma became what to do with him. We wanted him to go to a good home, one in which he would be appreciated, as he had been while in our charge.
Our next-door neighbors were lovely people from South America who had always loved Frank. Each time they came over, they remarked how great Frank was and how they wished they had their own terra-cotta warrior. When we offered up Frank to them, they were speechless. They insisted on buying Frank, but to sell him seemed immoral. We explained that we would not feel comfortable accepting money. Finally, they accepted him gratis. That was in the fall of 2003.
In 2008 my wife was in the area of our old home and, to her delight, there was Frank still standing tall in the open foyer of our former neighbors’ home. A smaller version of Frank that came with the full-sized statue still stands in front of our fireplace, a reminder of the most unusual overseas purchase in our combined forty-two years of service.
RUNNING WITH THE PRESIDENT
In addition to its normal protective duties, from 1992 until 1997 the Secret Service was dealt the challenge of keeping presidential candidate and later president of the United States Bill Clinton alive as he regularly pursued fitness on the open, unsecured streets of Washington, DC, and the world. Agents who ran with President Clinton were participating in what was potentially the most dangerous assignment they would perform while in the Secret Service. In this case the question would be: Would you take a bullet as well as a speeding car or a city bus for the president?
Bill Clinton became a candidate for president of the United States in 1992 and had not spent a great deal of his life in pursuit of fitness. During the 1992 campaign, he began to run as a form of exercise and a way to meet voters. One way to do this as a candidate was to run in public places, where the people were. His habit of running presented, over time, a large and unusual security challenge to the Secret Service.
In order to properly protect candidate Clinton during these public runs, at least one or two agents had to run alongside him, close enough to deal with any threat that might present itself. And they had to run with a pistol as well as a radio. In the beginning, this was not too difficult a challenge. Clinton was still a candidate, and only a couple of agents were needed, as his detail was much smaller than that of a sitting president. These two agents did not need to be especially fit, because Mr. Clinton did not run very far or fast.
The whole running thing with Clinton was as much about media coverage as it was about fitness. The important thing was for then Governor Clinton to get out and be seen, to appear fit, healthy, and energetic, all desirable traits in a president. As time progressed, he lost weight and actually began to get into a rudimentary level of fitness. He also began running farther and faster, and the Service was becoming concerned. Pretty soon the Service would need to find agents who were actually in good physical condition to run with him.
On January 20, 1993, William Jefferson Clinton, former governor of Arkansas and now a regular jogger, was sworn in as the forty-second president of the United States, and it appeared that he had no intention of stopping his runs. Prior to Bill Clinton’s presidency, no president in the history of the United States had engaged in any serious physical fitness activities. Their Secret Service agents did not need to be aerobically fit, they merely had to be in good health.
Most pre-Clinton PPD agents were generally healthy, with their weight in proportion to their height, but many did not work out to any great extent. Up until the Clinton years and the relatively new threat of terrorist attacks, PPD had been largely a gentleman’s assignment, where looking the part combined with good instincts and reactions was almost all that was needed. The mere practice of being perfectly groomed on PPD with a great-looking collar and tie knot was about to change, and the responsibilities of the PPD agent were about to expand to also include being physically fit. Agents would now be required to run as far as three to four miles with the president, bearing the extra weight of a gun and a radio.
Secret Service management had hoped that after inauguration, President Clinton would stop running, at least in public. To the contrary, however, and much to the concern of those responsible for his direct safety, not only did Clinton not stop running, he ran more. To double the horror, he insisted on conducting his runs not within the safe confines of the White House grounds Harry Truman described once
as “a prison” but in broad daylight on the streets of Washington, DC. The issue had now become deadly serious. The president was regularly running the mean and always potentially dangerous streets of Washington during morning rush hour. Anyone who wished could stand within a few feet of the president as he ran by.
There is always a degree of risk in trips, even when the president is leaving the White House encased in an armored vehicle. Taking the president running down Pennsylvania Avenue at peak rush hour, around the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial, or through Rock Creek Park, where anyone could be lying in ambush, was beyond dangerous; from a security standpoint it bordered on insanity.
The most concerning part of this morning ritual was that President Clinton was running regularly enough so that his routine was entirely predictable to all who cared to observe. Each year the Secret Service spent millions of dollars protecting the president utilizing metal detectors, K9 explosives-detecting dogs, counter assault teams, counter snipers, ballistic shields, armored vehicles, and by carefully screening guests. Yet anyone who wanted to harm the president did not need to defeat these complicated measures. They could simply sit on a bench having coffee and wait until the president ran by, at which time he would be completely vulnerable to attack. The odds were that eventually someone would be waiting.
Having fully digested the grim reality that the president had no intent of modifying his morning fitness regimen, the Secret Service set out to formulate a security plan that would give President Clinton some degree of protection as he ran among pedestrians and traffic with dangerous regularity. Even under perfect conditions it is impossible for the Secret Service to ensure the safety of the president 100 percent. In the running scenario this percentage dropped drastically.
If the president was intent on running, perhaps at least he could be persuaded to run in a safer, more controlled environment. One attempt to increase the president’s safety was the construction of a running track around the perimeter of the lower roadway on the south grounds of the White House. It was exactly a quarter mile around, and it was hoped that would satisfy the president’s needs. If he ran there, only one or two agents would be required to run with him. It would largely be a matter of posting a few agents in strategic locations—but President Clinton did not like the track and seldom used it.
After the running track idea failed, the next approach for providing better security was to try to steer President Clinton to venues such as nearby military bases. Half of his purpose in running, however, was to be out among the people and to escape the confines of the White House. While going to locations such as Fort McNair, a few miles from the White House, made sense and provided an excellent place for him to run, President Clinton would have none of it. He wanted to run in the streets and around the monuments, just like anyone else. The problem, of course, was that he was not like anyone else; he was the president of the United States, and, like all presidents, thousands around the world wished him ill.
The final plan devised by the Secret Service was to pre-stage large groups of agents borrowed form the various divisions in Washington around the morning’s proposed running site, then surround the president with agents who could run with him while hoping for the best.
Many citizens wanted to run with President Clinton. To be selected as a guest runner was very prestigious and good for a significant amount of boasting at the next Georgetown cocktail party. These invited runners usually had some notoriety socially or had contributed enough money to the DNC to earn an invitation. Some of these politically motivated fitness enthusiasts had obviously spent more time shopping for running apparel than actually running. While most had spent a great deal of money on perfectly coordinated running attire and the latest in high-tech shoes, many finished the run inside the Secret Service follow-up or the tail car while being tended to by the White House physician for heat exhaustion or other ailments found in first-time runners. The Secret Service was always happy to see these guests, however—in fact, the more the better, as they presented excellent ballistic insulation around the president during these outings.
Each shift had some agents who could run three miles with equipment at President Clinton’s usual nine-minute-per-mile pace. The problem was that this number was not sufficient. At a minimum, four shift agents and a supervisor were needed for each run, and all had to possess not just the endurance to finish but also enough reserve energy for responding to an emergency during or at the end of the run.
It was at this point that the mission of CAT expanded from being prepared to respond with speed, surprise, and violence of action against attacks on the president to also running with the president. While many PPD supervisors seemed to be at a loss about how to make the best use of CAT, there was one clear advantage to having buffed weapons experts around: Each could run forever while burdened with weapons and radios. Until each shift could field the sufficient number of runners, the decision was made that every morning CAT would provide runners to augment the shift.
Because CAT agents could run while simultaneously surveying the area for possible ambush sites, not merely keep up on the runs. CAT saved PPD and possibly the life of the president during the first year of the Clinton administration.
The utilization of CAT for the morning runs was, however, a stopgap measure only. The job of running with POTUS was really a shift responsibility. With a total of thirty to thirty-six agents in CAT during this period, pulling between two and four agents each morning for the run placed a strain on CAT operational readiness. Still, until enough shift agents were up to speed, CAT would continue to pull double duty.
On many mornings the CAT midnight shift that had already been up all night providing coverage at the White House was held over for another four hours to cover the run. Exhausted CAT staff watched their working shift colleagues depart the White House for home and sleep but soldiered on without complaint.
One day the SAIC of PPD called a meeting with all available PPD agents in an auditorium of the Old Executive Office Building. The purpose of the meeting was to lay down the law to agents that this president ran almost every morning, that it was the responsibility of agents to run with him, and that everyone, not just CAT and a few fit shift agents, was going to be required to help out by taking turns running.
Soon every agent who could run was training to help with this new PPD responsibility. As the weeks progressed, many agents joined the ranks. Others discovered that running on older knees and ankles was not a pleasant experience and were medically excused from the challenge.
There was no such thing as an uneventful run with President Clinton. It seemed that on almost every outing there was an incident of some sort that reinforced the opinion, held by most, that a public running POTUS was not the best of ideas. It was unsafe not only for him but, in some cases, for the public as well.
On one outing, we had begun the run at the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, dismounting the motorcade on Seventeenth Street in the middle of morning rush hour. This was a particularly memorable run for several reasons. The first thing that happened, even before the run began, was that a motorist driving south on Seventeenth Street looked to his right, where he was amazed to see the president of the United States in running apparel. Astounded, the motorist stared at the president until he rear-ended the car in front of him.
Our route that morning took us around the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial. The run was going as it normally did, with the president plodding along at his usual nine- to ten-minute-per-mile pace. After one lap around the pool, President Clinton, to the surprise and horror of all, crossed Seventeenth Street without the benefit of the crosswalk and ran toward the Washington Monument. After crossing Seventeenth Street, he continued to run up the gradual but increasingly steep incline toward the Washington Monument and multitudes of tourists. At least he had not been run over crossing the street. This was not his usual routine of two or three times around the reflecting pool and then home.
I wa
s one of two agents running trail that morning. As President Clinton ascended the hill toward the monument, the supervisor who was running next to him began to slow, then turned and signaled for me to take the off-shoulder position with the president. This required me to sprint uphill a good seventy-five yards to close the distance between my position and that of POTUS, who was now totally without agent coverage and seemingly unconcerned about it. I ran past the supervisor with a reserve energy born of adrenaline and extreme urgency as much as aerobic fitness, trying to catch up before POTUS disappeared over the top of the hill and into the unknown. Staff Sergeant McLean from my Quantico days was subliminally in my head at this point, reminding me that I could rest after I was dead and to get to the top of the god-damned hill now.
Just as POTUS reached the crest of the hill, I caught up with him, and we came face-to-face with about thirty unbelieving tourists standing at the base of the monument. Each began scrambling for what I hoped were cameras as I moved between them and POTUS while placing my right hand inside my running jacket around the grip of my pistol. As we descended the hill, with me now running while looking over my shoulder to keep an eye on the tourists at the monument, there was no other agent in sight.
Not long after topping the hill, President Clinton said to me, “Okay, Dan, let’s go home.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, trying not to appear as out of breath as I actually was. As he reversed course, heading back to the top of the hill toward the waiting tourists now aiming cameras, my biggest concern was that he would stop and work the crowd. On this day, however, he merely waved and continued down the side of the hill back toward Seventeenth Street and the waiting cars.
After arriving back at the motorcade, parked on Seventeenth Street, President Clinton performed his usual stretching exercises next to the limo. This was the most dangerous time of the run—we had been in this general area for about thirty-five minutes, and our presence was well known. The police had just finished working the accident that had occurred at the beginning of the run, and traffic on Seventeenth Street was beginning to back up. Many people were beginning to converge on the area as the president finally got back into the limo for the short trip back to the White House. This scenario was the norm three to four days per week.
