Within Arm's Length: A Secret Service Agent's Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President (36 page)

I came to a door with a sign reading SAIC/PPD and walked into the waiting area, where the boss immediately greeted me. I sat down and told him of my plans to retire and where I was going. Although this was against CIA regulations regarding cover, I felt I owed him an explanation as to my departure, and I knew he could be trusted to keep the secret. He said he was sorry to see me retire, asked if I was sure this was what I wanted to do, and added that he and the Service would miss me. Although he outranked me by two grades I always considered him a friend first and a boss second. He was understanding and wished me luck at the CIA. We shook hands and I went home.

I later learned that my SAIC did in fact reveal the secret of my new employer. He informed President George W. Bush, who was reportedly happy to hear that upon retirement, I was going to the CIA.

I was initially brought into the CIA under cover. This meant that I was to tell virtually no one of my CIA affiliation. Being brought into the CIA under cover made leaving the Secret Service a bit touchy—when an agent announces retirement, all wish to know where he is going.

Living under CIA cover is a very slippery endeavor until one gets the hang of it. CIA officers under cover must be able to discuss with a degree of convincing detail a job that in some instances does not actually exist. The CIA in effect takes very honest people of the highest integrity and by necessity teaches them in certain cases to lie and lie convincingly. Living under CIA cover is the most prevalent example of this, and a great deal of a CIA officer’s life is a lie. For the past twenty-five years I had been able to truthfully answer what I did for a living; now I had to lie to friends, family, and strangers alike.

Just prior to my retirement I was having lunch one day with another agent and his wife, who wanted to know what my new job was going to be. I had yet to receive a detailed cover briefing from the CIA and stumbled through her questions as best I could but probably did not fool her. I later learned that she had worked with her share of spooks, and, while she had been able to guess where I was headed, out of professional courtesy she had dropped her line of questioning.

LAST NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE

My final two weeks in the Secret Service were spent as an acting shift leader on the midnight shift at the White House and on weekends at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland. It was the perfect way to bring my Secret Service career to a close.

I had first entered the White House as a CAT agent fifteen years earlier. Now I was responsible for the safety of the president and First Lady, who slept upstairs in the second-floor residence. Should anything, from an attack on the White House to a medical emergency, occur between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., I would be responsible for directing the immediate action of getting the president and First Lady to safety.

On the last night of my operational existence as a Secret Service agent, after things had settled into their usual midnight routine, I walked about the quiet dimness of the mansion, thinking about all the years I had spent there. In many ways, the White House felt like home. During various periods of my career I had spent more time there than at home. I thought of the three presidents I had directly protected there, my years in CAT, the working shift, running with and driving President Clinton, and the Christmas parties Donnelle and I had attended. And I thought of all the friends I had made there, some no longer living. When the morning came, it was difficult to imagine that I was walking out for the last time. I had known it would be difficult.

THE OLD EBBITT AND SAYING GOOD-BYE

My retirement party was held a few days later at the Old Ebbitt Grill. The Old Ebbitt was the place to drink and have dinner in Washington if you were anywhere close to the White House. It was and still is a classy place, where most of the men wear suits and the women dresses, with pantsuits being in noticeably short supply. It features a long mahogany bar in the main area. My party was held to the left, in a newer addition. The Old Ebbitt in a sense was as much a part of my career in Washington as the White House had been. It had been the unofficial HQ and gathering place for all Washington-area agents, especially those on PPD.

I took a cab to the party and back home because I knew that there would be a lot of old friends to see and the night would run late. There were, and it did. There were at least a hundred or so agents in attendance, most of whom had passed in and out of my life and career for the past twenty-one years. Others I did not know; they were there simply because Secret Service retirement parties were usually a lot of fun.

There were many former students I had helped train. They seemed to enjoy telling stories of how hard the fitness sessions were and how much they had appreciated what they had been subjected to. With each story told and each drink knocked back, the run distances increased by miles and the heat increased or decreased to levels unendurable by humans, until I had trouble recognizing truth from fantasy.

At about 2:00 a.m., as I moved through the almost empty bar en route to the front door, my cab, and my departure from the Secret Service, I thought of all the fun I’d had there over the years. I walked past the bar stool where I had pre-proposed to my wife fourteen years earlier and the table my parents and I had shared one evening for dinner. I took one last look around the place and walked out to my waiting ride.

The following day, in a small ceremony at the Old Executive Office Building, with my wife and son present, I officially retired from the Secret Service. It was May 16, 2004, twenty-one years to the day I took the oath of office in Charlotte, North Carolina. Many of my friends from PPD were there, as well as some young agents from CAT whom I had supervised and helped train. My good friend John Mrha was also there and presented each award and plaque due an agent at retirement. The main retirement plaque, which is the Secret Service equivalent of a gold watch, reads, in part:

Your 21 years of dedication and contributions to the missions and goals of the United States Secret Service are hereby gratefully acknowledged and affirm you to be worthy of trust and confidence.

My family and I left the proceedings and walked to our car outside the White House, parked on West Executive Avenue. The Secret Service was behind me, and new adventures and challenges awaited me at the CIA. It was an exciting time.

TAKING THE OATH AT THE CIA

On June 27, 2004, I stood in a room just off the food court at CIA headquarters in Langley with a group of new officers. A deputy director told us to raise our right hand, and we repeated back to him the oath of office. It was the same oath I had taken in 1977, to become a Marine Corps officer, and in 1983, to become a Secret Service agent.

During my first twenty months at the CIA, most of my time was spent assigned to the Directorate of Operations, first within the Counterintelligence Center (CIC) helping to ferret out those whose motives for being in the CIA and gaining entrance into the CIA were questionable, then in the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), where my work was exclusively focused on the current war.

A CIA education in the ungentlemanly art of espionage is unique, and while I would never become a master spy, I had during those twenty months learned at minimum the rudiments of espionage, tradecraft, CIA weaponry, and how to incapacitate the enemy in any number of ways.

In the Secret Service, a law enforcement agency, agents are trained in what are known as defensive tactics, or the use of minimum force in order to subdue an opponent. At the CIA, an intelligence service, we were trained in offensive tactics, or how to kill quickly and efficiently using any object at our disposal. We learned that there were no rules of engagement or concerns over legal issues to be faced for killing an enemy in a foreign land. After twenty-one years of being held accountable to the escalation of force model that has cost more than one law enforcement officer his life, this new doctrine of kill rather than subdue was quite refreshing.

OFF TO WAR

After training and learning some of the basics of the business, I was made a deputy branch chief in the Counterterrorism Center. The group in which I worked was very active in the war, and I knew it was only a matter of time now before I would be, as the agency likes to say, “on the tip of the spear.” This is what I had asked for.

One quiet morning in Potomac, Maryland, after Donnelle had gone to her job at Secret Service headquarters and I had taken our son to day care, I watched as all of my neighbors went about their lives doing whatever people who are not in the Secret Service or CIA do. Sitting in the same chair I had sat in when making the decision to retire from the Secret Service and join the CIA, I listened as the grandfather clock ticked away in the hall. I wrote a letter to my wife and son and became so engrossed in my thoughts that I failed to notice a taxi as it pulled into my driveway. The sound of the taxi driver blowing his horn snapped me back into the moment. I walked over to the front door, picked up my bag, and headed for Afghanistan and the CIA’s war there.

AFGHANISTAN 2006

The Tip of the Spear

Uncomfortably cold on a dreary morning in late winter of 2006, I stood drinking the world’s worst coffee with two other members of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, formerly the Directorate of Operations, at a CIA base camp somewhere in the seemingly infinite expanse of Afghanistan.

As a deputy branch chief, I was in Afghanistan to aid in the mission of my branch while assessing its needs. In order to do this I needed to get dirty and function as a working member of the group. Not long in country and still suffering from the mother of all jet lags (we were 9.5 hours later than Washington, DC, time), I shook the cobwebs out of my head and prepared myself for what was not exactly your normal day at the office.

While temperatures were beginning to rise as spring approached in this primitive land, there was still much snow on the mountain peaks surrounding the northeastern part of the country that divided Afghanistan and Pakistan. The mountains were of a rugged beauty not found in other parts of the world, and I marveled at their majestic appearance while continuing to prepare for the day’s work. With their jagged peaks covered in snow and shaped by the winds of millions of years, their beauty was deceiving. These ancient mountains were the home of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. All throughout this terrain existed countless caves and sites seemingly custom-made for these terrorists, enabling them to ambush their enemies by small-arms fire, rocket attack, and the IED. Then they would disappear back into the holes from where they had emerged.

Today, the enemy was America and the CIA, which had aided some of these same people in their war against the Soviets from 1979 until 1989. But that was then and this was now. It was the classic example of how certain events can cause old friends to become enemies and how loyalties fade with time. Twenty-five years earlier in their struggle against the Soviets, these people would have welcomed my colleagues and me. Now they would cut our heads off with rusty blades if given the chance.

This was not the gentleman’s CIA of cocktail parties, martinis, and tuxedos. In that CIA, if an officer was apprehended by the opposition he would simply be sent back to the United States. Afghanistan was the workingman’s CIA, where dirt, cold, heat, bad food, and never-ending danger were the officer’s constant companions. If captured, my group and I would be tortured, used for propaganda purposes, and slaughtered like goats and sheep.

After dumping the last of my cold coffee on the cold Afghan ground, I slipped into body armor and shrugged on the load-bearing vest containing spare ammunition magazines, knife, radios, and a Glock pistol. Joints and ligaments made stiff from decades of abuse in the name of physical fitness protested as I pulled on my equipment in the cold Near East dawn. Making sure I also had my all-important Snickers bars in one pouch, I placed my Colt M4 carbine—loaded with a magazine of thirty rounds, stock collapsed and muzzle down—between the driver’s seat and the right front seat of our lightly armored SUV. Climbing into the driver’s seat, I started the engine of the vehicle that would carry our group on a potentially lethal assignment. A silent prayer and off we went into the breach.

After leaving the relative safety of our covert base and avoiding the many mortar impact craters on the road, some dating back to the Soviet occupation, I scanned the terrain for potential ambush sites as well as performing the prescribed procedures for the detection of anyone who might have followed us from base. This was important, as the only thing keeping us alive on a daily basis was the secrecy of our location. I recalled our group chief’s final pre-deployment mission briefing, delivered in the safety of CIA headquarters.

Prior to departing for the most dangerous country in the world, we had been reminded that our primary mission was not to seek out the enemy for a fight but to gather intelligence that would prevent another 9/11. We were further reminded that our secondary mission was to capture or kill any top-level members of al-Qaeda should the proper set of circumstances present themselves. During the time of its existence, our group was very successful in those stated missions both primary and secondary.

As the boss was walking out of the briefing, he looked back over his right shoulder and said, “One final thing, never get caught by this enemy.” Having seen video and still photos of others who had been captured, I thought it was excellent advice.

Al-Qaeda had of late begun to use the age-old tactic of placing spurious checkpoints along routes traveled by Americans and their allies in the region. Once a vehicle had stopped, it was then either lit up with automatic weapons fire or the occupants abducted and later executed. While legitimate members of the Afghan security forces manned some of the area checkpoints, there was no way to tell if certain checkpoints were a trap. Consequently we never stopped at any checkpoint unless it was clearly manned by Americans or UN forces.