Within Arm's Length: A Secret Service Agent's Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President (6 page)

Mr. Coates gave me three possible report dates and informed me that I would have to pay for my own move to Charlotte, North Carolina. In that I owned virtually nothing this presented no problem. I took the first available report date, May 16, 1983. We hung up, and I sat at my desk in a total daze. After eighteen months of trying I had made it. Barring any unforeseen catastrophe, I was going to be a Secret Service agent.

CHAPTER 4

The Charlotte Field Office

On Monday, May 16, 1983, I appeared at the front door of the Charlotte field office, United States Secret Service, for my first day as a special agent. I wore a gray pinstripe suit recently purchased from J. C. Penney and presented as a gift from my parents. As one might expect, I had slept little the night before. It was almost 8:30 a.m., and no one answered when I pushed the buzzer at a door located at the end of a short hallway. Unlike the large offices, such as New York, which have a 24/7 presence, small offices such as Charlotte operate regular business hours, usually 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. There is a duty agent who locks up at night and sets the alarms. He then fields any duty calls that occur during non-duty hours forwarded to him by an answering service.

Finally, at 8:35 a.m., a short, compact man who resembled the actor Robert Conrad, dressed in a blue sports jacket and gray slacks, appeared from the elevator bank just outside the office. He looked at me and asked if he could help as he placed a strange-looking key in the door of the office. I said, “Hi, I am Dan Emmett, first day on the job.” The seasoned-looking agent offered his hand, introduced himself as Paul and invited me in, directing me to take a seat.

Other agents began filing in with their coffee and stopped to introduce themselves as well as get a look at the new guy. Another agent named Ron and I were the first hired in Charlotte since the late 1970s, and everyone wanted a look at the new meat. I rose as each of my new colleagues and mentors came by to say hello.

The office manager arrived. She was matronly and friendly, at the same time possessing a hard appearance, giving the impression she took no static from anyone. She had worked for the Secret Service since the 1950s and knew everything there was to know about administration within the organization. She had also seen every new agent to walk through the door at Charlotte for the past thirty years. In terms of the Secret Service, she had seen it all.

She escorted me across the hall to the office of the special agent in charge, who directed me to remain standing and hold up my right hand in order that I might be sworn in as an employee and special agent of the Secret Service. In those days new hires were sworn in as agents on the very first day, not at the end of all training, as they are now. I was familiar with the words of the oath, as it was the exact same oath of office I had taken as a marine officer seven years earlier: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so help me God.”

After my swearing in, which lasted less than a minute, the SAIC, as expected, briefed me on things in general, including his philosophy of good agent work ethic. As I sat in his office I continued to sneak peeks at the walls for photos of him with politicians. There were none. He then lectured me on an unexpected theme that I discovered later was of universal concern throughout the Secret Service.

BOOZE, BROADS, AND BUICKS

The SAIC stared at me for a moment and then proceeded to tell me that the fastest way for an agent to get into trouble was by abusing the three Bs: booze, broads, and Buicks. Roughly translated, this meant combining infractions involving alcohol, women, and misuse of the government car.

Each Secret Service agent in a field office was given a government car to use, not only while working but also at night. It could be taken home. This benefit of the job was known as “home to work,” and the Secret Service was one of the few agencies that offered it. Home to work was a tremendous privilege, and the rules were clear: No use of the car was authorized other than for official business, which included going directly from home to work and work to home. No one was allowed to ride in the car other than on official business—no children, no wife. There was to be no stopping at the grocery store, dry cleaners, or bars—especially bars. The SAIC tied it all together by saying that, while circumstances sometimes necessitated the bending of these rules, I was never, ever to combine all three of the Bs in one event. By this he meant going out for drinks and then driving the government car with an unauthorized passenger, such as a woman. He ended the briefing by stating that any misuse of the government car, or the “G-ride,” as it was known, meant an automatic thirty-day suspension without pay. Warning received.

After my swearing in and lecture on the evils of alcohol, cars, and women, I was handed off to an agent who took me to the part of the office where suspects were fingerprinted and photographed. He took what would be my official Secret Service photo. It would appear in my coveted commission book and would be kept on file at HQ. I still have a copy of it. I had another taken at the twenty-year mark. Side by side, the photos scarcely resemble the same person, although I still had most of my hair twenty years on.

The next morning, after being introduced to the daily ritual of morning coffee in the downstairs coffee shop, run by a very nice old man named George, I was introduced to Frank, one of the firearms instructors in the office and one of the oldest agents still on the job. His protection experience went back to the Eisenhower days, when Frank walked the links of Burning Tree Country Club with Ike while carrying a Thompson submachine gun in a golf bag. On this day in 1983, Frank’s job was to qualify me with the Smith & Wesson standard issue revolver, if possible, and help get me ready for upcoming agent training.

The course of fire a new agent was required to pass in order to carry a weapon was not a combat course but rather a bull’s-eye-type course called the SQC, or Standard Qualification Course. It was fired all single-action, meaning the hammer had to be pulled to the rear and cocked in order to fire each round. It was only a thirty-round course and designed to teach the fundamentals of shooting.

Frank and I drove to the Charlotte Police Academy range in his G-ride. Upon arriving, he explained the course of fire. After allowing me to dry-fire the weapon, meaning cycle it with no ammunition to get the feel of the revolver, Frank produced live ammunition and allowed me to try my luck.

I qualified on my first attempt, with a score of 290 out of a possible 300. Frank was very pleased with me and with himself. I did not reveal the fact that I had been firing handguns since the age of thirteen and was the top shooter with the .45 pistol in my marine unit. I liked Frank and had no problem with letting him believe it was his instruction that had carried the day. All organizations need men like Frank, and all new guys should listen to them.

Satisfied I was competent to at least carry a gun, Frank handed me the weapon along with twelve rounds of .38 special
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ammunition, a holster, and one speedloader, which carried an additional six cartridges. I was now armed and dangerous, although probably more so to myself than anyone else. While obviously proficient in the use of a weapon, I had yet to receive any instruction on the legalities of when I could and could not use it. This was standard procedure in the old days but was changed sometime in the 1990s. Today, agents do not carry weapons until they graduate from agent training.

The following week, the entire Charlotte field office and the smaller satellite offices of Wilmington and Raleigh converged on the same police academy range. The purpose of this gathering was for the mandatory quarterly firearms requalification for all agents in the state of North Carolina.

At the end of the training day and after qualifying with the revolver, Uzi submachine gun, and Remington 870 shotgun, I met with Paul, the agent I had met on my first day, and we headed for his road district of western North Carolina for some basic criminal investigative work. It was a part of on-the-job training, where a new agent was passed around from senior agent to senior agent to learn how things worked.

We checked into our respective hotel rooms, where we would live for the next three days, and then met at the bar to plan the evening’s activities, which included my introduction to the covert world of how to bend the three Bs a bit without repercussions.

THE NOT SO GLAMOROUS WORLD OF CHECK FORGERY INVESTIGATIONS

When a government check is stolen, the thief usually forges the payee’s signature and cashes the check. This becomes a federal violation investigated by the Secret Service. Today these investigations are largely unneeded, due to direct deposit, but in 1983 they made up the majority of investigations conducted by the Secret Service.

Check investigations were truly at the dull end of the Secret Service mission spectrum. At the other end was the all-important protection of the president, which took a very special person to accomplish. Any junior detective could succeed at check investigations. Until 2002 the Secret Service fell under the Department of the Treasury, and because all government checks are drawn on the US Treasury, investigations were assigned to the Secret Service.

While the Secret Service still has jurisdiction over these cases, today there are few compared to the 1980s. Today’s Secret Service, in addition to the staple investigation of counterfeit currency, also investigates credit card and bank fraud. Even though check forgery cases are rare, these new types of investigations keep every field agent more than occupied. In a sense it is a shame that the check forgery cases have all but gone extinct: They were how every new agent was broken in, and they offered what amounted to basic training in the field of investigations. The new Secret Service agent of today will never know the down-in-the-gutter experience of working them.

The danger these cases presented to the agent far outweighed the importance of the cases themselves. Investigating federal crimes in rural America was as dangerous as working in a large city, and it was easy to imagine that an agent could be made to disappear in this setting.

In the mountains of North Carolina, for example, you frequently worked alone. Many of the people who lived in extreme rural North Carolina existed in their own world and did not recognize federal law or the legitimacy of an agent’s authority. While an agent had complete legal authority to be on a person’s property in order to ask for cooperation in an investigation, many of those who needed to be interviewed believed that agents were trespassing.

To ensure his own safety, the wise agent would befriend a local deputy to accompany him on these cases. Each deputy knew almost everyone in the county, and the chances of being shot by a check forgery suspect were far less with the deputy along. This sometimes backfired—a deputy who was related to or friends with the suspect would call ahead and warn of the agent’s visit. It seemed that almost everyone in the extreme rural areas of North Carolina was related either by blood or marriage. It was almost the norm rather than the exception to arrive at the residence of a suspect to find no one home, even though the suspect was unemployed.

On my first day of working these cases, Paul and I interviewed one or two payees and obtained some handwriting samples. Most of these individuals were living in deplorable conditions that smelled of stale urine, and each seemed to have an army of mongrel dogs that guarded the mobile home or shack he resided in. I learned the lesson of the rural dog the hard way.

Paul and I had pulled up in front of a mobile home off a dirt road with a typical narrow dirt driveway. The first advice Paul offered was always to back the car in rather than to park nose first—for an expedient getaway if things went wrong. The second was to dress appropriately for such assignments. I was dressed in a three-piece pinstriped suit I incorrectly thought appropriate for criminal investigations, while Paul was dressed in a sports jacket with wash-and-wear pants. It was on this day that I discovered an agent needed two different sets of work attire: one for dress-up events such as protection, the other for days when getting dirty is a distinct possibility.

As we exited Paul’s car I heard distant barking and saw the fast approach of a large, mud-caked mongrel. The owner who had seen our arrival stood in the doorway of his aluminum castle and told us not to worry: “The dog don’t bite.” He did not say anything about not jumping on a rookie Secret Service agent. As the dog ran toward us, he decided that I would be the best person to soil. He happily jumped on me, his front paws leaving a bounty of mud and who knows what else on my starched white shirt and suit and tie. Having now had his fun, the owner called the dog back. Paul was having a bit of fun, too, holding back laugher over my predicament.

Paul identified us, stated our business, and said that we needed some handwriting samples. The dog’s owner agreed to provide them. Inside, at the kitchen table, as I slid a form in front of the man to complete, a large drop of tobacco juice dripped from his mouth, staining the handwriting form. Seeing my quiet but noticeable disgust, Paul could barely contain himself. When we got back into his car he burst out laughing until tears ran from his eyes. Between gasps of air he said, “Welcome to the glamorous world of the Secret Service.” In every profession there is a period of paying one’s dues, and these cases amounted to that for a new agent.

As much as I disliked these investigations, I soon realized that check cases were the main activity in a small office like Charlotte. If I was ever to get to the presidential detail, I had to do them and do them well. But agent school was coming soon, and I would be, at least for the time being, delivered from these less than glamorous investigations.