Within Arm's Length: A Secret Service Agent's Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President (28 page)

When the Secret Service was aboard their airplanes, the air force always went the extra mile to be as accommodating as possible. To ride in a C-141 Starlifter or even the newer C-5 Galaxy was uncomfortable at best for overseas flights lasting ten or more hours, and we always appreciated the courtesy and professionalism of the Military Airlift Command.

After takeoff, we would walk around the airplane and visit with each other, while those who discreetly brought their own beverages onboard would indulge in quiet moderation to help the sleep process. After tiring of yelling over the noise of the engines, we would return to our seats, which were either standard airline seating that could be put in or taken out on pallets depending on the mission or—God forbid—the dreaded nylon web sling seats that folded down from the longitudinal axis of the airplane. Eventually everyone would try to sleep for a while until arriving at the next location.

Sleep did not come easily going to our destinations but coming back to the United States, everyone always went out immediately. Going back to my marine days, I could always sleep anywhere, either sitting up or lying down. One did not lie down to sleep on the floor of a car plane, however—it could be fatal.

These airplanes were very cold close to the floor. There was virtually no insulation between the thin skin of the airplane and the subzero outside air temperature. Returning from one overseas trip, an agent lay down in the aisle to get some sleep. He did sleep, almost forever. While sleeping on the freezer-temperature floor, his body lost a great deal of heat, and he suffered hypothermia. He was discovered shivering uncontrollably, and the airplane had to land as soon as possible in order to get him to a hospital. Had the air force not done such a great job of getting the plane to an alternate landing field where the agent could receive immediate attention, he would not have survived.

A FLYING TREASURE SHIP

There were two major advantages to flying the car plane on overseas trips. One was that you did not have to bother with the annoying process of clearing foreign customs and immigration, as the American Embassy handled that formality. The other was that it provided the perfect means of getting all of your shopping items, no matter how bulky, back to the United States. Once you got your purchases back to the plane, the air force would load them all for you as long as nothing was alive, illegal, or potentially harmful to the plane, crew, and passengers.

Many places we visited around the world offered excellent shopping at great prices. In places such as Korea, the Philippines, and Europe, there were great deals on almost any item you could think of. In some countries, you could buy anything from machine guns to people. Of course, we stuck to things that would be legal to have in the United States. We were, after all, federal law enforcement officers who valued our great jobs. No one was going to risk losing that job trying to smuggle contraband back home.

On one trip, an agent brought home an entire brass bed. Another lugged home enough wine to keep him from going to the package store for quite some time. Most of us settled for smaller things we could carry on the plane or store in one of the cars transported on the plane. In CAT, we usually took our own Suburban on overseas trips. The vehicle would be loaded up with all types of great merchandise acquired while on the trip.

CAT always became instantly popular on such trips, as everyone wanted to use our truck to store their purchases. We were all in this together, so we usually allowed other agents the use of the truck, unless by team vote it was decided that for any number of reasons the person making the request should not be allowed to use it. The criteria included, first and foremost, whether the person was a CAT hater or CAT supporter. In a case where the supplicant was voted to be a CAT hater, he would be told that there was no room for his purchases. Once such a decision had been made, there was no possibility of reversing it other than by unanimous team vote.

On one such occasion after we rendered our opinion, a rebuffed agent became indignant, claiming that the truck did not belong to us but to the government, and that he could store his things in it if he wanted. We, in turn, reminded this young GS-7, who still had wet ink on his graduation diploma from agent school, that while the truck technically belonged to the government, it was assigned to CAT. He stormed away, mumbling something about CAT guys, and found storage for his items elsewhere.

Upon our return to Andrews Air Force Base we would clear customs with our purchases just like other international travelers, then head to our homes, where we would present our latest acquisitions to our significant others. The responses to some of these purchases did not always go as expected.

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.