In the President's Secret Service (12 page)

Back in 1915, the lawyer had become heartbroken when his son, who’d been riding to see him, fell off his horse, hit his head on a well, and died. The lawyer never entered his office again and directed that his heirs never open it. However, at Saleeba’s request, the lawyer’s granddaughter agreed to open the office. Saleeba found the man’s desk covered with dust. A brown bag on top of the desk looked as if it had contained his lunch, now disintegrated.

Secret Service agents believe that simply being there, scanning crowds with a ferocious look, often wearing sunglasses, deters would-be
assassins. Agents are looking for signs of danger—people who don’t seem to fit in, have their hands in their pockets, are sweating or look nervous, or appear as if they have mental problems. Agents lock in on movements, objects, or situations that are out of place.

“We look for a guy wearing an overcoat on a warm day,” says former agent William Albracht, who was a senior instructor at the Secret Service’s James J. Rowley Training Center. “A guy not wearing an overcoat on a cold day. A guy with hands in his pockets. A guy carrying a bag. Anybody that is overenthusiastic, or not enthusiastic. Anybody that stands out, or is constantly looking around. You’re looking at the eyes and most importantly the hands. Because where those hands go is the key.”

If an agent sees a bystander at a rope line with his hands in his pockets, he will say, “Sir, take your hands out of your pockets, take your hands out of your pockets NOW.”

“If he doesn’t, you literally reach out and grab the individual’s hands and hold them there,” Albracht says. “You have agents in the crowd who will then see you’re having problems. They’ll come up to the crowd, and they’ll grab the guy and toss him. They will take him out of there, frisk him, pat him down, and see what his problem is. You are allowed to do that in exigent circumstances in protection because it’s so immediate. You don’t have time to say, ‘Hey would you mind removing your hands?’ I mean if this guy’s got a weapon, you need to know right then.”

An agent who sees a weapon screams to fellow agents: “Gun! Gun!”

To identify themselves to other agents and to police helping during events, Secret Service agents wear color-coded pins on their left lapels. The pins, which bear the five-pointed star of the Secret Service, come in four colors. Each week, agents change to one of the four prescribed colors so they can recognize one another in crowds. On
the back of the pin is a four-digit number. If the pin is stolen, the number can be entered on the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the computerized database that police use when they stop cars to see if they are stolen or if the occupants are fugitives. If the pin is found, police return it to the Secret Service.

When on protection duty, Secret Service agents wear trademark radio earpieces tuned to one of the encrypted channels the Secret Service uses. Known as a surveillance kit, the device includes a radio transmitter and receiver that agents keep in their pockets.

As for the sunglasses, “In training, they would give us clear Ray-Ban glasses,” former agent Pete Dowling says. “The reason they did that was eye protection, in case somebody threw something at the protectee. Most of the guys had them shaded. But the stereotype is the Secret Service guy always has sunglasses on, even when he is indoors.”

In practice, some agents wear sunglasses so people do not see where they are looking. Others prefer not to wear them.

Agents wearing plain clothes and no earpieces infiltrate crowds and patrol around the White House. If they spot a problem or vulnerability, they use a cell phone to notify the Joint Ops Center at Secret Service headquarters.

“They’re the guys in the crowd,” an agent says. “You wouldn’t know they were there, and they’re on the outside looking in during an event and during an advance.”

These agents try to think like assassins: How can they breach the security?

“It’s their job to take apart our plan prior to game day,” the agent says. “It’s their job to basically say, here are the holes, here are your vulnerabilities, tell us how you’re going to plug these holes.”

Technicians take photos of the crowds at presidential events. The images are compared with photos taken at other events—sometimes
using facial recognition software—to see if a particular individual keeps showing up.

Since the attempts on Ford’s life, presidents have generally worn bulletproof vests at public events. They are currently Kevlar Type Three vests that will stop rounds from most handguns and rifles but not from more powerful weapons. Agents on the president’s and vice president’s details are now supposed to wear them at public events, but some agents prefer not to wear them. While the vests have been improved, they are uncomfortable and can make life unbearable on a hot day.

“You have to be hypervigilant,” says former agent Jerry Parr, who headed President Reagan’s detail when he was shot. In the twenty years before the attempt on Reagan’s life, “You had one president murdered, one shot and wounded, a governor shot and wounded and paralyzed, two attempts on Ford, and you had Martin Luther King killed. You know it’s out there. You just don’t know where.”

I
N CONTRAST TO Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan treated Secret Service agents, the Air Force One crew, and the maids and butlers in the White House with respect.

“Carter came into the cockpit once in the two years I was on with him,” says James A. Buzzelli, an Air Force One flight engineer. “But [Ronald] Reagan never got on or off without sticking his head in the cockpit and saying, ‘Thanks, fellas,’ or ‘Have a nice day’ He [Reagan] was just as personable in person as he came across to the public.”

“One Christmas when we were at the ranch, he came up to me and apologized to me for having to be away from my family on a holiday,” former agent Cliff Baranowski says. “A lot of times they would give us food from a party. I certainly did not expect it, but sometimes they insisted.”

Former agent Thomas Blecha remembers that when Reagan was running for president the first time, he came out of his home in Bel Air to drive to Rancho del Cielo, the seven-hundred-acre Reagan ranch north of Santa Barbara. Another agent noticed that he was wearing a pistol and asked what that was for.

“Well, just in case you guys can’t do the job, I can help out,” Reagan—code-named Rawhide—replied. Reagan confided to one agent that on his first presidential trip to the Soviet Union in May 1988, he had carried a gun in his briefcase.

For a time, East Executive Avenue was closed, and when Reagan’s motorcade left the White House, it would go along E Street onto Fifteenth Street instead of using Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. As a result, unless he looked out a window of the White House, Reagan did not see demonstrators opposed to nuclear arms who camped out across Pennsylvania Avenue in Lafayette Park. After East Executive Avenue reopened, Agent Patrick Sullivan was driving when Reagan looked out the window of his limo. Reagan saw a perennial demonstrator in Lafayette Park give him a “Heil Hitler” salute as the vehicle passed him.

“This one gentleman was there all the time, and he had posters,” Sullivan recalls. “He was a nonviolent protester. We pulled the president’s motorcade up East Exec and made the left turn on Pennsylvania. The demonstrator was so shocked, because he had been there for a year and had never seen the motorcade go that way.”

The demonstrator jumped up.

“He starts giving President Reagan the Nazi salute,” Sullivan says. “He starts yelling ‘Heil Reagan! Heil Reagan!’ The president sees him standing up giving him the Nazi salute. The president was so shocked and hurt, he said to us, ‘Did you see that man giving me the Nazi salute? Why would he do that?’”

While it seemed to be a rhetorical question, Reagan clearly wanted a response.

“Mr. President, he’s out there all the time. He’s a nut,” Sullivan said to Reagan. “That’s all he does. He camps out there; he’s there every day.”

“Oh, okay,” Reagan said.

“That’s just the way he was,” Sullivan says. “Once he realized he was a nut, he was okay with him. He just didn’t want this guy to be a regular citizen. Reagan was just a sincere, down-to-earth gentleman. And I think it hurt his feelings that this guy was giving him the Nazi salute.”

Quite often, Reagan quietly wrote personal checks to people who had written him with hard-luck stories.

“Reagan was famous for firing up air force jets on behalf of children who needed transport for kidney operations,” says Frank J. Kelly, who drafted presidential messages. “These are things you never knew about. He never bragged about it. I hand-carried checks for four thousand or five thousand dollars to people who had written him. He would say, ‘Don’t tell people. I was poor myself.’”

While Reagan liked to look for the best in people, he was not a Boy Scout. On one occasion, Reagan gave a speech at Georgetown University. As the motorcade drove down M Street toward the White House, Reagan noticed a man in a crowd.

“Fellows, look,” Reagan said to his agents. “A guy over there’s giving me the finger, can you believe that?”

Reagan started waving back, smiling.

“We’re going by, and he’s still waving and smiling, and he goes, ‘Hi there, you son of a bitch,’” agent Dennis Chomicki remembers, imitating Reagan’s buttery-smooth delivery.

One late Friday afternoon, Reagan had left the White House for Camp David. Agent Sullivan was working W-16, the Secret Service’s office under the Oval Office.

“A guy came up to the northwest gate carrying a live chicken, demanding to see the president,” Sullivan says. “He said he wanted to do a sacrifice for President Reagan. And he impaled the chicken on the fence of the White House. He took the chicken and stuck him on a point on top.”

Uniformed officers arrested the man, and he was sent to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for observation.

When Reagan was to go to Spokane, Washington, in 1986, Pete Dowling was part of the advance team sent to scope things out. Besides reviewing all known threats, he met with the Spokane police department, the FBI, and other agencies that might have intelligence on possible threats.

One night, the police department called Dowling to report that an older couple staying at a Best Western downtown had found a large paper dinner napkin on the floor of an elevator. The napkin appeared to have writing on it, so they looked closer. The napkin apparently had a diagram of the Spokane Coliseum, where Reagan was going to speak in four days.

“I went to the police department, I got the napkin, and sure enough, it was a diagram of the coliseum,” Dowling recalls. “And it had a legend; it had
Xs
around the exterior of the coliseum, and then in the legend it said
X
equals security post. Then it had all of our license plates of the cars we were using. Clearly somebody was conducting surveillance of us.”

At the time, a neo-Nazi group called the Aryan Nations was headquartered at Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a drive of about forty-five minutes from Spokane. Among other things, the group objected to the tax system and was threatening to assassinate public officials. Dowling thought the napkin could have originated from the group. He drove to the Best Western and asked the clerk to show him all the sign-in cards.

“He gave me a little wooden box that contained index cards,” Dowling says. “There were four hundred rooms in the hotel, so I started thumbing through the index cards, and when I got to the sixtieth one, bingo. It was the exact handwriting and hand printing that I saw on the napkin.”

Dowling noted the license plate listed on the card. He walked into the parking lot and saw a four-door sedan with the same license plate number. Looking inside, he saw blankets neatly piled in the back and two pillows on top of the blankets. Some books were piled on the floor. Obviously, someone was living in the car. Dowling thought it odd that someone living in a car would be so tidy. He called the police and asked for two backup cars.

“We went up to the room, and I knocked on the door, and the guy said, ‘Who is it?’” Dowling says.

“It’s me, open up,” Dowling replied.

“The idiot opened the door. He was just in his underpants. I grabbed him by his hair, and I pulled him out into the hallway,” Dowling says. “One of the officers grabbed him, and we all went in and did what we call a protective sweep of the room, just to ensure that nobody else was in there armed.”

Dowling noticed a bullet on top of the dresser. Attached to the bullet was a string, and attached to the string was a little white piece of paper.

“Reagan will die,” the paper said.

The suspect gave Dowling permission to search the room but not his car.

“I’m going to be up all night anyway, so to do an application for a search warrant and to bring it to a judge at his home at three o’clock in the morning, that’s no sweat for me,” Dowling said to the man. “Either way, it doesn’t matter.”

“You can search my car,” the man said. “The gun’s in the car.”

It turned out the man had just gotten out of prison after being convicted of bank robbery. While he was in jail, he had had a romantic relationship with another male inmate. The other inmate had just been transferred to another prison, and the suspect heard that his former lover was romantically involved with somebody else.