Within Arm's Length: A Secret Service Agent's Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President (25 page)

The relationship between a PPD supervisor and POTUS is entirely different from that of the worker agent. The agent who rides in the right front seat of the limousine occupies a completely unique place in the universe than that of his subordinates. The PPD supervisor is a senior agent who, in addition to being in charge of the detail, is the main contact between POTUS and the Secret Service. Cordial conversations between this agent and POTUS frequently occur, usually in the limo, although I have seen this relationship stretched on occasion. Just as the shift agent must know his place in the hierarchy of things at the White House, so must the senior supervisory agent in charge know his place. This relationship by its very nature draws POTUS and his senior agents closer than that of the working shift, but it still should not be misconstrued as friendship.

Familiarity between POTUS and FLOTUS and their agents can become a detriment to security and should be avoided. While presidents and First Ladies are well aware of what their agents’ jobs are in terms of security, and each has paid staff that attends to their personal needs, agents can sometimes be placed in difficult positions requiring tact and diplomacy. For example, I am aware of a situation in which a First Lady asked her agent in charge to have an agent retrieve her makeup bag from the limousine. This, of course, is a staff function, but for whatever reason, the staffer was not as close at hand as the agent. Rather than the agent saying, “Sorry, that is not a Secret Service function,” which would undoubtedly have caused unnecessary friction, he nodded, then sent out a radio call to his detail to locate the First Lady’s staffer and pass along the request.

Contrary to popular belief, the Secret Service does not work for the president and is, at least in theory, the most apolitical of all government agencies. This detachment serves a purpose. If an agent becomes too close to a president, closeness may cloud the professional judgment of the agent during crisis. Also, as law enforcement officers, it should not appear as if the Secret Service is the president’s personal police force. Unlike staff who do work for POTUS, although paid with taxpayer dollars, Secret Service agents work for the director of the Secret Service and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. While a POTUS staff member’s job is tied directly to POTUS, an agent’s career will eventually move from PPD to other parts of the Secret Service.

An agent is assigned to PPD, not to the man who is president. When a president leaves office, the agents who have protected him do not then move on to his former presidential detail but rather remain on PPD, where they protect the new president. I saw this firsthand in 1992 as a PPD agent in the George H. W. Bush administration. When President Bush lost the general election to President Clinton, he picked up an entirely new group of agents, while his old protectors, including me, watched over President Clinton.

Some agents on PPD protect people other than the president. In spite of these smaller details within the main presidential detail, all have one thing in common: Each protectee has a direct line to the president, and some are not hesitant to use it.

In this regard, agents who watch over the president and First Lady’s children have a particularly difficult task at times. Historically, children of POTUS have represented a wide range of ages and temperaments, from the very young, such as Caroline Kennedy, John Kennedy Jr., and Amy Carter, to adults, such as the Reagan, Ford, Johnson, Nixon, and Bush children. In between are teenage and college-age children such as Jenna and Barbara Bush and Natasha and Malia Obama. Each one of these famous children of presidents has his or her own distinct personality. They may not wish to be controlled by the Secret Service in any manner. While POTUS may not always enjoy the restrictions placed upon his activities by the Secret Service, he understands the necessity for it. Children of POTUS sometimes do not.

Most of these individuals have Secret Service protection not through their own wishes but rather because their father, the president of the United States, has directed it. As such, some are resentful of the sometimes imposing always felt presence of the Secret Service in their lives, a presence that makes a normal existence all but impossible. The threat against these children of POTUS is not so much assassination as kidnapping. One can imagine the impossible situation a POTUS would be placed in should his child be abducted and held in return for demands that could never be met. In this sense agents assigned to the seemingly more benign children’s details must be as vigilant as those assigned to POTUS. It can be difficult when a child calls his or her father—the president—to complain that the Secret Service is ruining his personal life, and the president, in turn, asks the Secret Service to give his child more space. Too much space can be the same as no protection at all, and the agents will bear the responsibility should something happen to his charge.

A PPD agent must be a hybrid of bodyguard and diplomat and must be prepared to handle any crisis that might arise, be it a gunshot or a complaining adolescent.

AROUND THE WORLD WITH POTUS

Most think of traveling to locations such as Europe with the president while staying in the finest hotels as being glamorous and exciting. If you are an agent on PPD, however, traveling to exotic, faraway places means working long hours while experiencing jet lag and sleep deprivation and trying to keep your nutrition level to a point where you can function. Biorhythms get totally out of phase, and regularity habits kick in at the worst possible times.

On one such trip to Europe, I had been preposted by my shift leader in a large ballroom of a hotel where POTUS was to have a private, off-the-record meeting, meaning no press. It was a grand room and hotel, very old and ornate, with enormously high ceilings and priceless artwork—all very European.

As I waited in the empty room for POTUS, my internal mechanisms began to rumble. This was trouble on a large scale. I knew I had to find a men’s room, or even a ladies’ room. For the first and only time in my Secret Service career, I abandoned my post and fled to the men’s room across the hall from the room POTUS was due to arrive at any minute. The odds that an assassin would appear in the next two minutes were probably zero, while the certainty that I had to find a men’s room during that time was 100 percent.

I rushed into the ornate men’s room and found a beautiful stall. Two minutes later, back in phase, I quickly reassembled equipment and myself and then ran to the door of the men’s room to return to my post. I flung open the door and literally ran into the president of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, almost knocking him down. It seems his internal clock was still on Washington time, the same as mine. As I moved aside to allow him into the men’s room, I quickly thought of a cover for action and blurted out in my most professional voice, “All clear, sir.” He said, “Thanks, Dan,” and entered to tend to his presidential business. My shift leader nodded to me, and we left the leader of the free world alone in his now-private bathroom.

As I moved back to my post across the hall, it occurred to me that my shift leader thought I was checking out the men’s room for POTUS. It was too perfect, and I let him continue to think that forever.

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I quickly learned that foreign trips on PPD were seldom exotic or exciting. On some trips, we could be in one of the most beautiful cities in the world and never really see the place, depending on what shift we were working. On one such trip to Budapest, I was working the shift from 4:00 p.m. to midnight. It was already dark when we arrived, and we never left the hotel during my shift. We could just as easily have been in Cleveland and not known the difference.

After the anticipation of looking forward to a foreign trip to a nice part of the world, I frequently found that, after the flight and working twelve or more hours, in some cases all I wanted to do was sleep in the too-small beds in the too-small European hotel rooms. Once I had to store my bags in the hallway of the hotel, as there was not enough space in the Barbie doll–sized room.

The saying in the Service was that no matter where you go, once you arrive, there you are. Generally speaking, that summed it up for me as far as foreign travel went.

SKORPIONS AND SYRIANS

All Secret Service agents constantly live with the reality that their lives are expendable and can be exchanged at any time for that of the president. That reality permanently resides in the back of an agent’s mind, where it is not dwelled upon yet is always there.

In every Secret Service agent’s career, however, there are incidents that bring this reality home. One such incident occurred on a trip to Switzerland in 1993. President Clinton was meeting with various heads of state, including the Syrian president and dictator Hafez al-Assad.

While the president of the United States traveled with just the number of agents needed to efficiently protect him, Assad, it seemed, traveled with every armed agent in Syria, most of whom were probably related to him.

Dictators such as Assad also traveled overseas with almost all of their military leaders. These men dressed in uniforms resembling something out of a cartoon, with more medals and awards than Audie Murphy, although not as well deserved. The idea was that if all his military leaders were with him, there would be no one to overthrow the government in his absence, although I saw this happen once while protecting the president of Sudan in 1983.

With regard to the meeting between President Clinton and Assad, the Secret Service was concerned about having so many armed Syrians in a relatively small room just feet from POTUS. Because of this concern, an agreement had been reached with the head of Syrian security that Assad’s detail would not be armed during the meeting. The thought behind this request was twofold. One, we did not trust the Syrians in general. Two, in any situation where gunfire might erupt, Syrian protocol was to empty magazines indiscriminately in all directions. With the Syrians unarmed, neither of these things would be an issue.

The problem was that the Syrians, would as almost all people from the region, outwardly agree to almost anything and say, “No problem, no problem,” when in fact they had no intention of following through with whatever it was they had no problem with. In most cases, they were not even listening to what was being proposed.

As a result of this known trait in their culture, my shift leader ordered me to prepost in the room with President Clinton and Assad, for the express purpose of neutralizing any threat to POTUS regardless of who posed it. Translated, that meant kill the Syrians if necessary. When I asked for clarification of his instructions, he merely nodded. I suppose I should have been flattered to be chosen for such an assignment, but I realized that if I did have to shoot the Syrians, like them, I would be experiencing the last day of my life.

As directed, I preposted in the conference room, and as Assad entered, so did his security detail. As expected, they were not unarmed. Nor were they even trying to conceal the fact. It was as I slowly moved behind them into the best possible firing position that I noticed their Skorpion machine pistols.

The Skorpion was a .32-caliber weapon with a ten- or twenty-round curved magazine that fired fully automatically, giving it little accuracy in any situation, especially in a packed room. It had a small folding stock that, when extended, came down over the forearm for added stability. The weapon itself was prone to malfunctioning and was really a piece of junk, but in such a venue, it would be deadly, and many individuals would be shot, including, perhaps, the president of the United States.

As President Clinton and Assad sat at the front of the room side by side and I stood behind the Syrian security agents, all of my senses were on full alert, peaking and then receding with every movement of my potential targets. If I had to respond to the Syrians, it would be the quintessential example of surgical shooting, taking out specific targets one by one in a room packed with innocents as well as the leader of the free world. In CAT, I had practiced this type of scenario many times and had fired thousands of rounds of ammunition preparing for such a challenge.

I repositioned a bit in order to ensure that POTUS and Assad would not be in my line of fire in the event I was forced to shoot and actually missed. As bad as a shootout in this small room would be, it would, of course, be catastrophic beyond imagination if a Secret Service bullet from my pistol struck either POTUS or Assad.

Due to the exceptional training received through the years from both the Marine Corps and the Secret Service, I felt confident. As in similar situations I had encountered, I knew I had done all I could do to prepare for whatever might now occur. A calm came over me as I stood ready to do what was necessary to protect the life of the president of the United States.

After what seemed like an eternity, the meeting finally ended uneventfully. I held my position until each of the Syrian security agents had exited the room and then returned to our command post, where I sat in the first chair I saw. This incident left me knowing two things for certain: The Syrians were not to be trusted, and, had they drawn their Skorpions, it would have been quite a mess.

AIR FORCE ONE

When it was time for PPD to travel, we traveled in a style that even the wealthiest could not buy a ticket for. We traveled on Air Force One, operated by the US Air Force Special Air Mission (SAM) squadron.

The call sign “Air Force One” for presidential aircraft was first used by the Eisenhower administration in 1953 after an incident in which a commercial aircraft operating in the same airspace as Ike’s had the same call sign. Since that time, the call sign Air Force One has applied to any air force aircraft carrying POTUS. It makes no difference if the plane is one of the Boeing 747s built specifically for POTUS or a smaller Grumman Gulfstream business-type jet sometimes used by POTUS for short hops, when using a full-size 747 is not practical. Technically the call sign could apply to a Cessna Bird Dog two-seat single-engine aircraft if POTUS were aboard. If it is an air force plane and POTUS is aboard, it is Air Force One. If POTUS is not aboard, the airplane will have a normal air force call sign.