In the President's Secret Service
By Ronald Kessler
6
Daro
ALMOST DAILY, SOMEONE comes to the White House gates and demands to see the
president or causes a disturbance requiring the Secret Service's Uniformed Division to
intervene. Each year, twenty-five to thirty people try to ram the White House gates in
cars, scale the eight-foot-high reinforced steel fence, shoot their way in, set themselves
on fire at the gates, or cause other disruptions. Most of the people who cause
disturbances around the White House are mentally ill. "For the same reason that people stalk the president, the White House is a magnet for the psychotic," says former agent Pete Dowling. "The president is an authority figure, and many people who have psychoses or have paranoid schizophrenia think that the government is transmitting rays at them or interrupting their thought processes. And what is the ultimate symbol of the government? It's the White House. So, many of these people come to the gate at the White House and say they want to have an appointment to see the president or they want to see the president."
"The White House is a mecca for what we call M.O.'s mental observation nuts," says a former Uniformed Division officer. "Sometimes almost every day there was what we call a White House collar. You'd have people that show up and say 'Listen, I demand to talk to the president now. My son's in Iraq, and it's his fault.'"
Unlike Secret Service agents, uniformed officers are required to have only high school diplomas. Nor do they have the background and training of Secret Service agents. To apply, they must be U.S. citizens. At the time of their appointment, they must be at least twenty-one years of age and younger than forty. They also must have excellent health, be in excellent physical condition, and have uncorrected vision no worse than 20/60. Besides a background check, they are given drug and polygraph tests before being hired. In addition to their White House duties, the Uniformed Division protects foreign embassies.
In protecting the White House and providing security at events, the Uniformed Division employs canine units. Mainly Belgian Malinois, most of the dogs are cross-trained to sniff out explosives and to attack an intruder. Much like German shepherds in appearance, the breed is believed to be higher energy and more agile. The dogs are prey driven, and ball play is their reward after they locate their "prey." The Secret Service pays forty-five hundred dollars for each trained canine unit. In all, the agency has seventy-five of them.
While waiting to check cleared vehicles that arrive at the White House's southwest gate, the dogs stand on a white concrete pad that is refrigerated in summer so their paws don't get hot. Each dog eagerly checks about a hundred cars a day.
Demonstrating how a canine unit operates, a technician in the underground garage at Secret Service headquarters proudly introduces Daro, a brawny eighty-seven-pound Czech shepherd. The dog is presented with a real-world scenario: Hidden from view, a metal canister holding real dynamite has been planted behind a dryer, which is used in laundering the rags that polish the president's limos. Because the dynamite is not connected to a blasting cap or fuse, it is considered safe to bring it into headquarters.
Daro races around the parked cars, sniffing. Then he walks up to the dryer, stops, and sits. At this point, some explosives-sniffing dogs are trained to bark, but Daro sits down, as he has been trained to do. After his success, his reward is not the usual doggie treat but a hard red rubber ball, which he ravages, chewing off bits of red rubber.
The dogs are certified once a month. For new recruits, there's a seventeen-week canine school at the Secret Service training facility in Laurel, Maryland, where the dogs are paired up with their handlers. The dogs come with a lot of training already, but the Secret Service gives them more-in explosives detection and in emergency response to incidents such as a fence jumper at the White House.
"You know right away if there's a fence jumper," a Secret Service agent says. "There are electronic eyes and ground sensors six feet back [from the sidewalk] that are monitored twenty-four hours a day. They sense movement and weight. Infrared detectors are installed closer to the house. You have audio detectors. Every angle is covered by cameras and recorded."
Uniformed Division officers and the Uniformed Division's Emergency Response Team, armed with P90 submachine guns, are the first line of defense.
"If somebody jumps that fence, ERT is going to get them right away, either with a dog or just themselves," an agent says. "They'll give the dog a command, and that dog will knock over a two-hundred-fifty-pound man. It will hit him dead center and take him down. The countersniper guys within the Uniformed Division are always watching their backs."
A suspect who is armed and has jumped the fence may get a warning to drop the weapon. If he does not immediately obey the command, the Secret Service is under orders to take the person out quickly rather than risk any kind of hostage-taking situation.
As part of their work in developing criminal profiling, FBI agents under the direction of Dr. Roger Depue interviewed assassins and would-be assassins in prison, including Sirhan B. Sirhan, who killed Bobby Kennedy, and Sara Jane Moore and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, both of whom tried to kill President Ford.
The FBI profilers found that in recent years, assassins generally have been unstable individuals looking for attention and notoriety. In many cases, assassins keep diaries as a way of enhancing the importance of their acts. Like most celebrity stalkers, assassins tend to be paranoid and lack trust in other people.
"Usually loners, they are not relaxed in the presence of others and not practiced or skilled in social interaction," John Douglas, one of the profilers who did the interviews, wrote in his book Obsession. Often detailing their thoughts and fantasies in a diary, assassins "keep a running dialogue with themselves," Douglas said. Before an assassination attempt, the perpetrator fantasizes that "this one big event will prove once and for all that he has worth, that he can do and be something. It provides an identity and purpose," Douglas said. As a result, assassins rarely have an escape plan. Often, they want to be arrested.
When interviewed in prison, Sirhan told profiler Robert Ressler that he had heard voices telling him to assassinate Senator Kennedy. Once, when looking in a mirror, he said he felt his face cracking and falling in pieces to the floor. Both are manifestations of paranoid schizophrenia, Ressler wrote in his book Whoever Fights Monsters.
Sirhan would refer to himself in the third person. An Arab born in Jerusalem of Christian parents, Sirhan asked Ressler if FBI official Mark Felt-later identified as Deep Throat was a Jew. He said he had heard that Kennedy supported the sale of more fighter jets to Israel. By assassinating him, he believed he would snuff out a potential president who would be a friend of Israel, Sirhan told Ressler.
When John Hinckley tried to assassinate President Reagan, the FBI's Washington field office called on the FBI profilers for help. While the Secret Service is in charge of protecting the president, the FBI is in charge of investigating assassinations and assassination attempts.
Douglas and Ressler had identified typical characteristics of the assassin. Based on that research, Ressler told the FBI that Hinckley would have had a fantasy about being an important assassin and would have photographs of himself for the history books, records of his activities kept in a journal or a scrapbook, materials about assassinations, and audio tapes of his exploits. The agents were able to use the tips in drawing up search warrants for Hinckley's home. They found all of the items Ressler had described.
Sometimes if would-be assassins decide security at the White House looks too tight, they try the Capitol instead. That was the path taken by Russell E. Weston, who shot up the Capitol on July 24, 1998. Weston walked into the Capitol through a doorway on the east side and shot and killed Capitol Police Officer Jacob J. Chestnut, who manned a security post there. Then Weston burst through a side door leading into the offices of Republican Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the majority whip. Weston then shot Capitol Police Detective John M. Gibson, who returned fire and wounded the assailant.
The two Capitol Police officers died. Republican Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, a medical doctor, raced across the Capitol and helped save Weston's life.
Weeks earlier, Weston had called the Secret Service in Montana, where he lived. He spoke with agent Norm Jarvis, claiming he was John F. Kennedy's illegitimate son and was entitled to share in the Kennedy family trusts. Jarvis let him ramble on.
"I asked if he was being threatened by anybody in the government," Jarvis recalls. "Did he have any feelings towards the president? What was getting him upset at this time? Because psychotics have these episodes. Suddenly something sparks them, and they get wound up."
Weston did not express any anger toward the president, who at the time was Bill Clinton. But years earlier, he had penned a non-threatening but disturbing letter to the president, and as a result, Jarvis's predecessor in Montana interviewed him. While that agent, Leroy Scott, concluded then that Weston did not represent a threat to the president, he established a relationship with the man, as good agents do.
"Weston would call and speak to Leroy now and then whenever he was upset about something," Jarvis says. "He was an on-call counselor, if you will. We acquire pet psychos along the way during a career. You'd get a call from another agent from somewhere in the country once in a while looking for background information. It was not uncommon for repeat psych cases to carry an agent's business card with them. They would usually produce those cards at some point during an interview if they had a repeat episode."
After the shooting at the Capitol, Secret Service agents discovered a tape Weston had made of his conversation with Jarvis, and the agent eerily got to review his own performance. In retrospect, he wouldn't have done anything differently. After the shooting, Weston was committed to a federal mental health facility near Raleigh, North Carolina.
If an individual causes a disruption at the White House, Secret Service agents detain the person and interview him at the field office at Thirteenth and L Streets NW in Washington or at a Metropolitan Police station. Agents would never bring them anywhere near the White House. Yet in his book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, Ron Suskind relates a story about Usman Khosa, a Pakistani national who graduated from Connecticut College.
As Suskind tells it, on July 27, 2006, Khosa was leisurely strolling by the White House as he was "fiddling" with his iPod, which was playing tunes in Arabic. Suddenly, Khosa found himself confronted by a "large uniformed officer" who lunged at him.
"The backpack!" the officer yelled as he pushed Khosa against the gates in front of the nearby treasury building and ripped off the man's backpack. Other Secret Service uniformed officers swarmed him. "Another officer on a bicycle arrives from somewhere and tears the backpack open, dumping its contents on the sidewalk," Suskind writes breathlessly in his first chapter.
The Secret Service then allegedly escorted Khosa, who now works for the International Monetary Fund, through one of the perimeter gates and onto the grounds of the White House.
"No one speaks as the agents walk him behind the gate's security station, down a stairwell, along an underground passage, and into a room-cement-walled box with a table, two chairs, a hanging light with a bare bulb, and a mounted video camera," Suskind writes. "Even after all the astonishing turns of the past hour, Khosa can't quite believe there's actually an interrogation room beneath the White House, dark and dank and horrific."
There, the frightened Khosa is asked if he is in league with "Mr. Zawahiri and his types," referring to Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy. Meanwhile, Suskind claims, President George W. Bush is receiving an intelligence briefing one floor above. It was, Suskind said in interviews, a "day literally in hell," but Khosa apparently never noted the names of the officers, which were displayed on tags pinned to their shirts.
As anyone familiar with security and law enforcement knows, if a person is acting suspiciously in front of the White House, the last place the Secret Service would want to take him is inside the tightly guarded White House grounds. Such individuals may have explosive devices strapped to their bodies. Even if they were thoroughly searched, they could have deadly pathogens in their clothing. If Khosa's tale was not implausible enough, Suskind claims that Khosa agreed to go with the Secret Service officers initially only if he could make a few calls.
"Then, I promise, I'll go with you," Suskind quotes him as saying.
Khosa then called the Pakistani embassy and friends and family, according to Suskind. No doubt the Secret Service trusted Khosa not to call possible co-conspirators or remotely controlled bombs to detonate them.
Rather than being "dark and dank" and illuminated with a bare light bulb, the room under the Oval Office-W-16-is brightly lit with fluorescent lights. It's where Secret Service agents spend their downtime. Agents use computers in the room to fill out reports. In the room, they also store formal wear they may need for an event that evening. So they can check their appearance, the room is outfitted with full-length mirrors.
Khosa declined to comment. Suskind told me that in researching the book, he spoke with a Secret Service spokeswoman, who searched records but found nothing on Khosa. Suskind quoted her as saying it is not uncommon if the individual was "in and out that we don't find a permanent record."
As for the question of whether the Secret Service would ever take a suspicious person into the White House, Suskind told me, "It seems like that was just a matter of convenience. It was a block from where they were questioning him for a half hour on the street." What about explosives and pathogens? "They patted him down," Suskind said.
When asked why he did not include in the book the fact that the Secret Service has no record of questioning and detaining Khosa, Suskind said he did not consider it "pertinent."
Asked for comment on Suskind's account, Edwin Donovan, assistant special agent in charge of government and public affairs at the Secret Service, told me, "We have no record of the incident or the individual referenced [Khosa]." He added, "Bringing an individual inside the White House for questioning defies standard security and protocols and safety procedures. We would not bring a 'suspicious person,' potential prisoner, prisoner, or any person who has not been properly vetted, onto the White House grounds."
7
Passkey
IN CONTRAST TO Richard Nixon, Secret Service agents found Gerald Ford-codenamed Passkey-to be a decent man who valued their service. But agents were amazed at
how cheap Ford was. After he left the White House, "He would want his newspaper in
the morning at hotels, and he'd walk to the counter," says an agent on his detail. "Lo and
behold, he would not have any money on him. If his staff wasn't with him, he would ask
agents for money." The agent remembers Ford checking in at the chic Pierre hotel in New York. A bellboy loaded his cart with the Fords' bags and took them into their room.
"After the bellboy was through, he came out holding this one-dollar bill in front of him, swearing in Spanish," the former agent says.
At Rancho Mirage, where Ford lived after leaving the White House, "You'd go to a golf course, and it's an exclusive country club, and the normal tip for a caddy is twenty-five dollars to fifty dollars," another agent says. "Ford tipped a dollar, if at all."
On September 5, 1975, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, twenty-six, drew a Colt .45 automatic pistol and squeezed the trigger as President Ford shook hands with a smiling crowd outside the Senator Hotel in Sacramento, California. Bystanders said Ford was shaking hands with everyone and smiling when suddenly he turned ashen and froze as he saw a gun being raised only a few feet away.
"I saw a hand coming up behind several others in the front row, and obviously there was a pistol in that hand," Ford said later.
Secret Service Agent Larry Buendorf had already noticed the woman moving along with the president. As Fromme pulled the trigger, Buendorf jumped in front of Ford to shield him. He then grabbed the gun and wrestled her to the ground. It was later determined that she had cocked the hammer of the gun. Fortunately, there was no bullet in the firing chamber. There were four in the gun's magazine. Fromme later claimed she had deliberately ejected the cartridge from the weapon's chamber, and she showed agents the cartridge at her home.
Fromme was a disciple of Charles M. Manson, who had been convicted of the ritualistic murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others. Two months before the assassination attempt, Fromme had issued a statement saying she had received letters from Manson blaming Nixon for his imprisonment.
Just seventeen days after this incident, Ford was leaving the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco when Sara Jane Moore, a forty-five-year-old political activist, fired a .38 revolver at him from forty feet away. At the report of the shot, Ford looked stunned. Color drained from his face, and his knees appeared to buckle.
Oliver Sipple, a disabled former U.S. Marine and Vietnam veteran, was standing next to the assailant. He pushed up her arm as the gun discharged. Although Ford doubled over, the bullet flew several feet over the president's head. It ricocheted off the side of the hotel and slightly wounded a cab driver in the crowd.
Secret Service agents Ron Pontius and Jack Merchant quickly pushed Moore to the sidewalk and arrested her. As bystanders screamed, the agents pushed the uninjured Ford into his limousine and onto the floor, covering his body with theirs.
For more than three hours, Moore had waited for Ford outside the hotel. Wearing baggy pants and a blue raincoat, she had stood with her hands in her pockets the entire time. Agents will sometimes ask people to remove their hands from their pockets, but this time, as people milled around her, agents did not notice her.
Moore is the only presidential assailant who was listed as a possible threat in the Secret Service data bank before the assassination attempt. Two days before the attempt, Moore had called the San Francisco police and said she had a gun and was considering a "test" of the presidential security system. The next morning, police interviewed her and confiscated her gun.
The police reported her to the Secret Service, and the night before Ford's visit, Secret Service agents interviewed her. They concluded she did not pose a threat that would justify surveillance during Ford's visit. By definition, evaluating anyone's intentions is an inexact science. Indeed, the next morning, she purchased another weapon.
Agents ask themselves, "Did that interview trigger it?" a Secret Service agent says. "By giving them a feeling of importance, we may prompt them to think, 'I better follow through.' The rational person would say, 'Holy s-. I almost got arrested.'"
The following month, another incident convinced Ford he was jinxed. His motorcade was returning to the airport on October 14, 1975, after he gave a speech at a GOP fund- raiser in Hartford, Connecticut. Motorcycle policemen were supposed to block side streets, the teams leapfrogging each other from block to block. By the time the motorcade passed a narrow street, the police officers had left. James Salamites, nineteen, barreled through the intersection on a green light in a Buick sedan and crashed into the president's limousine.
Andrew Hutch, the Secret Service driver, swerved sharply left. The maneuver blunted the impact of the collision, but Ford was still knocked to the floor. When Ford's car halted with a dented right front fender, Secret Service agents with guns drawn surrounded the Buick and hauled out its shaken driver.
"I looked at the other car, and looking at me is President Ford. I recognized him right away. I just couldn't believe it," Salamites recalls.
At first, agents were sure the crash was an attempt on Ford's life. But after Salamites was questioned for a few hours, he was released, and Hartford police said he was not to blame for the accident.
The press portrayed Ford as a dullard and a klutz, but agents say he was neither. A University of Michigan football player who was voted most valuable player, Ford was an expert skier who taunted agents who could not keep up with him. Finally, the Secret Service assigned a world-class skier to his detail. The agent would ski backward and wave as the president tried to catch up with him.
"Ford was a very athletic guy" says Dennis Chomicki, who was on his detail. "He used to swim every day, he was a good golfer, and he was an outstanding skier."
But one day after he left office, Ford was driving an electric golf cart in Palm Springs, California, when he accidentally crashed into an electric panel hanging on the wall of a shack for golf carts.
"The whole panel came off its fasteners and fell down on top of the carts," Chomicki says. "He was mad as hell, and he looked at me and said, 'You know, after all those years, they were all right. All the reporters used to say I was awkward. Well, they're right. I'm just one big clumsy sonofabitch.' And he walked away."
Unlike many other presidents, Ford never engaged in any dalliances. Until The Miami Herald revealed Gary Hart's fling with Donna Rice in May 1987, the media had not exposed extramarital affairs of presidents and presidential candidates. Indeed, throughout American history, the press had been aware of presidential affairs and covered up for occupants of the White House. Yet the hypocrisy and lack of judgment exhibited by a politician engaging in extramarital relations is a clue to character that the electorate needs to consider.
Ironically, the press's record was broken only because The Miami Herald's political editor Tom Fiedler wrote a column defending Hart, the Democratic Party's leading contender, against unsubstantiated rumors of being a womanizer. A woman who refused to identify herself called Fiedler to say she disagreed with his column. In fact, she said a friend of hers who was a part-time model in Miami was flying to Washington that Friday evening to spend the weekend with Hart. The caller described the woman as quite attractive and blond.
Fiedler, reporter Jim McGee, and investigations editor Jim Savage looked at airline schedules and picked out the most likely nonstop flight to Washington that Friday evening, May 1. McGee took the flight and spotted several women who matched the description. One was carrying a distinctive shiny purse. When they touched down in Washington, she disappeared into the crowd.
After taking a cab to Hart's townhouse, McGee saw the same young woman with the shiny purse walking arm in arm with Hart out the front door of his Washington home. Joined by Savage and Fiedler on Saturday, McGee watched their comings and goings at the town-house for the next twenty-four hours. When Hart came outside and seemed to have spotted them, they confronted him and asked about the beautiful young woman sitting inside his home.
Hart denied that anyone was staying with him.
"I have no personal relationship with the individual you are following," Hart said. He described the woman as "a friend of a friend of mine" who had come to Washington to visit her friends.
That night, after the story had been filed with Rice still unidentified, Savage, Fiedler, and McGee met with a Washington friend of Hart's who had introduced the candidate to Rice. Savage pointed out that the effort to identify the woman would create a media feeding frenzy, and it would be in Hart's interest to name her. The story ran in The Miami Herald on Sunday, May 3. That morning, a spokesman for Hart told the Associated Press that the unidentified woman was Donna Rice.
On the same Sunday, The New York Times ran a story quoting Hart as denying the allegations of affairs. He challenged the reporters to "follow me around ... it will be boring." Hart continued to deny he had been having an affair with Rice, but CBS ran an amateur video of them together aboard the luxury yacht Monkey Business in Bimini. CBS noted that Rice, who was not identified, later disembarked from the yacht to compete in a "Hot Bod" contest at a local bar. The National Enquirer followed with a photo of Rice sitting on Hart's knee on the boat. Hart was forced to withdraw as a presidential contender, a victim of his own arrogance and deceit.
In fact, there was more to the story. According to a former Secret Service agent who was on Hart's detail, well before his encounter with Rice, Hart routinely cavorted with stunning models and actresses in Los Angeles, courtesy of one of his political advisers, actor Warren Beatty.
"Warren Beatty gave him a key to his house on Mulholland Drive," the agent says. "It was near Jack Nicholson's house." Beatty would arrange to have twenty-year-old women-"tens," as the agent described them-meet Hart at Beatty's house.
"Hart would say, 'We're expecting a guest,'" the former agent says. "When it was warm, they would wear bikinis and jump in the hot tub in the back. Once in the tub, their tops would often come off. Then they would go into the house. The 'guests' stayed well into the night and often left just before sunrise. Beatty was a bachelor, but Hart was a senator running for president and was married."
Sometimes, the agent says, "There were two or three girls with him at a time. We would say, 'There goes a ten. There's a nine. Did you see that? Can you believe that?' Hart did not care. He was like a kid in a candy store."
Asked for comment, Gayle Samek, his spokesperson, said, "Senator Hart tends to focus on the present rather than the past, so there's no comment."
8
Crown
TO ENTER THE West Wing, a visitor presses a white button on an intercom mounted at
the northwest gate and announces himself. If the visitor appears legitimate, a uniformed
Secret Service officer electronically unlocks the gate, allowing the visitor to enter. He
then passes his driver's license or other government photo identification through a slot in
a bulletproof booth to one of four uniformed Secret Service officers. Before being allowed into the White House, a visitor with an appointment must provide his Social Security number and birth date in advance. The Uniformed Division checks to see if the individual is listed by the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) maintained by the FBI or by the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications Systems (NLETS) as having been arrested or as having violated laws.
Besides the threat list compiled by the Secret Service, the Uniformed Division maintains a Do Not Admit list of about a hundred people who are barred from the White House because they have caused embarrassment. For example, the White House press office may place a journalist on the list because he or she made it a practice of disobeying rules about where reporters may wander in the White House.
If a visitor is on the appointment list and has been cleared, he is given a pass and allowed into the security booth. The visitor swipes the pass and goes through a metal detector before being allowed to walk outside again toward the West Wing. For years, when most people thought of the White House, they thought of the main building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, which serves as the president's home and once served as his office. Abraham Lincoln had his office in what is now known as the Lincoln bedroom on the second floor of the White House. Only with the recent TV series has the public come to understand that the West Wing now houses the presidential offices.
The West Wing was added onto the White House in 1902. In 1909, the president's Oval Office was constructed in the center of the south side of the West Wing. In 1934, it was moved to its current location on the southeast corner, overlooking the Rose Garden. Finally, in 1942, the East Wing was built to house the offices of the first lady as well as the White House military office.
A visitor to the West Wing passes more than a dozen TV cameras on tripods sprouting along the driveway that leads to the entrance to the West Wing lobby. This strip, where correspondents broadcast from the White House, was once known as Pebble Beach. Now, because flagstone has replaced the pebbles, wags in the press corps call it Stonehenge. A separate entrance to the left of the lobby entrance goes directly to the James S. Brady press briefing room. White House correspondents must pass a Secret Service background check before being issued press credentials that let them go through the security booth when the pass is swiped.
Even with appointments, the Secret Service will not admit visitors if they have violations involving assaults or fraud. If an individual had a conviction for marijuana use ten years earlier, for example, officers will inform the White House employee who is expecting the guest. Then the decision to admit the person falls to the aide, who may invent an excuse to cancel the appointment.
Occasionally, a wanted fugitive makes the mistake of setting up an appointment at the White House, which is code-named Crown. During the administration of George H. W. Bush, a man who was wanted for grand larceny planned to enter the White House with a friend of Bush's. He submitted his Social Security number in advance of the appointment. The Secret Service arrested him on arrival.
"If there is a warrant, the [computer] screen says, 'There is a warrant for this man's arrest. Call an agent,'" a Secret Service agent says.
Richard C. Weaver, a self-proclaimed Christian minister, made it through all the security layers and walked right up to President George W. Bush during his inauguration in 2001. He proceeded to shake his hand and hand him an inaugural coin and a message from God. Known to the Secret Service as the Handshake Man, Weaver had pulled the same stunt when Bill Clinton was inaugurated. Apparently, he was on the inaugural committee's access list. After the Bush inaugural, he tried a few other times to gain access to presidents and senators.
"His picture is plastered in every security booth we have," a Secret Service agent says.
As with the question of how much protection a president should have, the amount of security around the White House has always been an issue of contention. For decades, the District of Columbia government resisted closing off Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. When a threat arose or a demonstration took place, the Secret Service would close off the street or encircle the White House with buses. During the Reagan administration, Jersey barriers were installed around the perimeter of the White House complex. In 1990, they were replaced with bollards. The gates were reinforced with steel beams that rise from the ground after the gates are closed. After 9/11, the Bush administration turned Pennsylvania Avenue into a pedestrian plaza.
"One reason we reinforced the gates is people have tried to drive their cars through the gates to see the president," a longtime agent says. "An iron beam comes out of the ground behind those gates when the gates close. A two-ton truck could slam them at forty miles per hour, and they will withstand it."
The Secret Service's Technical Security Division (TSD) installs devices at White House entrances to detect radiation and explosives. Populated with real-life versions of Q, James Bond's fictional gadget master, TSD sweeps the White House and hotel rooms for electronic bugs. While electronic bugs have never been found in the White House, they are occasionally found in hotel rooms because they were planted to pick up conversations of previous guests. When Ronald Reagan was to stay at a hotel in Los Angeles, for example, the Technical Security Division found a bug in the suite he was to occupy. It turned out the previous occupant was Elton John.
TSD samples the air and water in the White House for contaminants, radioactivity, and deadly bacteria. It keeps air in the White House at high pressure to expel possible contaminants. It provides agents with special hoods called expedient hoods to be placed over the president's head in the event of a chemical attack. Each year, TSD screens nearly a million pieces of mail sent to the White House for pathogens and other biological threats. In conjunction with Los Alamos National Laboratory or Sandia National Laboratories, it runs top secret risk assessments to find any holes in physical or cyber security measures.
In case an assassin manages to penetrate all the security to see the president, TSD installs panic buttons and alarms in the Oval Office and the residence part of the White House. They can be used if there is a medical emergency or physical threat. Many of the alarm triggers are small presidential seals that sit on tables or desks and are activated if knocked over.
The panic alarms bring Secret Service agents running, guns drawn. Besides agents and uniformed officers stationed around the Oval Office, the agents deployed to W-16 under the Oval Office can leap up the stairway in a few seconds.
As a last resort, the White House has emergency escape routes, including a tunnel that is ten feet wide and seven feet high. It extends from a subbasement of the White House under the East Wing to the basement of the Treasury Department adjacent to the White House grounds.
One of the more dramatic attacks took place on October 29, 1994, at two fifty-five P.M., when Francisco Martin Duran stood on the south sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue and began firing at the White House with a Chinese SKS semiautomatic rifle. As he ran toward Fifteenth Street, he paused to reload, and a tourist tackled him. Uniformed officers drew their weapons but held fire as more tourists grappled with Duran.
"I wish you had shot me," Duran said as the officers arrested him.
Since a white-haired man was coming out of the White House when Duran began firing, Secret Service agents concluded that Duran likely thought he was firing at President Clinton. He was convicted of attempting to assassinate the president and sentenced to forty years in prison. He was also ordered to pay the government thirty-two hundred dollars to repair damage to the White House, including replacing pressroom windows riddled with bullets.
In December 1994, four more such attacks-perhaps inspired by previous ones-occurred within a few days of one another. On December 20, Marcelino Corniel dashed across Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House brandishing a knife. Uniformed Division officers and Park Police ordered him to drop it. When he refused and lunged toward a Park Police officer, another Park Police officer shot and killed him.
What was not included in news reports was that the man had a "seven-inch knife taped to his arm, so when the officer told him to drop the knife, he couldn't," says former Secret Service agent Pete Dowling. "This was what they call 'suicide by cop.' The guy wanted to be killed. And unfortunately the police officer felt that his life was being threatened, and he shot and killed the man."
A day after that incident, Uniformed Division officers opened the southwest gate to admit an authorized vehicle. Just then, a man burst past them and ran toward the mansion. The officers tackled and arrested him. The man was a disturbed individual who had an obsession with the White House.
Two days later, a man fired at the mansion with a nine-millimeter pistol from the perimeter of the south lawn. While two shots fell short of the White House, one landed on the State Floor balcony, and another penetrated a window of the State Floor dining room. After a Uniformed Division officer scanning the south Executive Avenue sidewalk noticed a fidgety man, a Park Police officer ran after him, searched him, and confiscated the pistol.
A previous incident on September 11, 1994, demonstrated the White House's vulnerability. That evening, after drinking and smoking crack cocaine, Frank E. Corder found the keys to a Cessna P150 airplane that had been rented and returned to the Aldino Airport in Churchville, Maryland. Although the thirty-eight-year-old truck driver was not a licensed pilot, he had taken some lessons and had flown that particular aircraft several times.
Corder stole the plane and flew to the White House. He then dove directly toward it at a steep angle. While aircraft are not supposed to fly over the White House, airplanes periodically do so by mistake. As a result, the military must exercise judgment when deciding whether to shoot down aircraft that stray into White House airspace. Given that after 9/11, cockpits of commercial airliners were hardened, air marshals were added to most flights, and many pilots are now armed, it is unlikely that such a plane would again be commandeered. But after 9/11, any general aviation aircraft that violated restrictions on flights near the White House and did not respond to military commands would be shot down by missiles or fighter aircraft. Each year, about four hundred general aviation aircraft are intercepted across the country and forced to land on threat of being shot down.
The Joint Operations Center at Secret Service headquarters now interfaces twenty-four hours a day with the Federal Aviation Administration and the control tower at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Headquarters also views on radar any planes flying in the area.
Corder's plane crashed onto the White House lawn just south of the Executive Mansion at one forty-nine A.M. and skidded across the ground. What Corder did not plan for was the Sony JumboTron that had been set up on the south lawn in front of the White House for an event. It was a giant television screen measuring thirty-three feet by one hundred ten feet.
"There's no way he could have flown the plane into the White House," says Pete Dowling, who was on the president's protective detail at the time. "He couldn't have navigated the plane without hitting the JumboTron. So he had to land a little bit early, and what he did was, he just came to rest against one of the magnolias that was right in front of the south part of the White House."
Corder died of multiple, massive blunt-force injuries from the crash. At the time, the White House was undergoing renovations, and President Clinton and his family were staying at Blair House.
While Corder had expressed dissatisfaction with Clinton's policies, and his third marriage had just gone on the rocks, the Secret Service concluded that-like most assassins-his purpose had been to gain notoriety. He had told friends he wanted to "kill himself in a big way" by flying into the White House or the Capitol.
Corder's brother John said the pilot had expressed interest in Mathias Rust, a German teenager who flew a Cessna plane through five hundred fifty miles of heavily guarded Soviet airspace and landed in Red Square in 1987. John Corder quoted his brother as saying of the German: "The guy made a name for himself."
The greatest embarrassment to the Uniformed Division took place on February 17, 1974, when U.S. Army Private First Class Robert K. Preston stole an army helicopter from Fort Meade, Maryland, and landed on the south lawn at nine-thirty P.M.
Instead of firing at the helicopter, uniformed officers called a Secret Service official at home, asking him what they should do. He told them to shoot at the helicopter. By then, the helicopter had flown away. It returned fifty minutes later. This time, Uniformed Division officers and Secret Service agents fired at it with shotguns and submachine guns.
"They riddled it with bullets," a Secret Service agent says. "When he landed [the second time], he opened the door and rolled under the helicopter. It probably saved his life. They put seventy rounds through that. There were twenty rounds in the seat. He would have been shot to death [if he had not rolled under the chopper]. It was not going to take off this time."
Preston, twenty, had flunked out of flight school and perhaps wanted to show them all that he did have some flying skills. He was treated for a superficial gunshot wound. He was sentenced to a year at hard labor and fined twenty-four hundred dollars.
Neither President Nixon nor his wife, Pat, was at the White House at the time.
9
Jackal
IN THEIR IN-HOUSE jargon, agents refer to any possible assassin as "the jackal." Were
a jackal to strike, it would most likely be when the president has left the cocoon of the
White House. Every assassin has pounced when a president is most vulnerable-outside
the White House, usually when arriving or departing from an event. That window of
vulnerability opens several times a week when the president leaves the White House for
an event in Washington or goes on a domestic or overseas trip. Even a visit to a friend's home requires elaborate preparation. When George W. Bush was president, he and Laura had dinner at the home of Anne and Clay Johnson, a close friend from high school. Guests included Bush's Yale friend Roland W. Betts and FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, and his wife, Ann. Checking out the Spring Valley home in Washington beforehand, the Secret Service set up a command post in the basement.
"They asked that drapes be put up in the dining room and suggested a chair in which the president should be seated," Anne Johnson recalls. "Agents were posted around the yard, and no-parking cones were put up in front of the house."
The Secret Service asked the Johnsons to clear a closet that was big enough for at least two people.
"In case of an emergency, an agent was going to grab the president, and the two of them were going to dive in," Anne Johnson says. "That would have been an interesting dive, because GWB would have had Laura by the hair, at the very least."
Anne Johnson asked an agent, "What should everyone else do in case of an emergency?"
"I only have one client: the president," the agent replied.
Ten days before a presidential trip, at least eight to twelve agents fly to the intended destination. That is in contrast to the two-man advance team sent for President Kennedy's trip to Dallas. Back then, the Secret Service had about 300 special agents, compared with 3,404 today.
Now an advance team includes a lead agent, a transportation agent, airport agent, agents assigned to each event site, a hotel advance agent, one or two logistics agents, a technical security agent, and an intelligence agent. As part of advance preparations, a team of military communications personnel from the White House Communications Agency is sent to handle radios, phones, and faxes. They ship their equipment and additional personnel on Air Force C-130 cargo planes. The Uniformed Division's counter sniper team and the counterassault team from the Secret Service's Special Operations division may also send agents on an advance.
The counterassault team, or CAT, as it is referred to, is critical to providing protection outside the White House. A heavily armed tactical unit, it is assigned to the president, vice president, foreign heads of state, or any other protectee, such as a presidential candidate, deemed to require extra coverage. In the event of an attack, CAT's mission is to divert the attack away from a protectee, allowing the working shift of agents to shield and evacuate the individual. Once the "problem," as Secret Service agents put it, is dealt with, CAT members regroup, and the shift leader directs them to their next position.
The Secret Service first started using the teams on a limited basis in 1979. They were formed after several agents involved in training were having lunch and began asking themselves how the Secret Service would deal with a terrorist attack, according to Taylor Rudd, one of the agents. After President Reagan was shot in 1981, the teams were expanded and eventually centralized at headquarters in 1983. CAT differs from a special weapons and tactics team (SWAT), which the police or Secret Service may deploy once an attack occurs. Code-named Hawkeye, CAT takes action as the attack occurs.
"Depending on the circumstances, before 1979, besides agents riding with the president, we had five or six agents in a muscle car with Uzi submachine guns," says William Albracht, a founding member of the counterassault teams. "If something happened, they were supposed to lay down a base of fire or have firepower available. They added another layer of protection to the principal. If they came under attack, they would have returned fire. The job of the agents with the protectee is always to cover and evacuate. Get him the hell out of there. So they would try to cover a withdrawal, or if they're in a kill zone, try in some way to get him out with extra firepower."
The muscle car concept was "very loose, and the criteria for engaging hostile fire was somewhat unclear," Albracht says. "The CAT program, which replaced it, was designed to codify and standardize the Secret Service's response to terrorist-type attacks."
Clad in black battle-dress uniform, known as BDU, CAT members travel with the president. They are trained in close-quarter battle-when small units engage the enemy with weapons at very close range. They are also trained in motorcade ambush tactics and building defense tactics.
Each CAT team member is equipped with a fully automatic SR-16 rifle, a SIG Sauer P229 pistol, flash bang grenades for diversionary tactics, and smoke grenades. CAT agents also may be armed with Remington breaching shotguns, a weapon that has been modified with a short barrel. The shotgun may be loaded with nonlethal Hatton rounds to blow the lock off a door.
One time a CAT team had to deploy was January 12, 1992, when a protest rally got out of hand during a visit by President George H. W. Bush to Panama City, Panama. Agents rushed Bush and his wife back into their limousine, and they sped away unharmed. No shots were fired by the Secret Service.
In August 1995, CAT deployed again when President Clinton was playing golf at the Jackson Hole Golf & Tennis Club in Wyoming. Secret Service agents spotted a worker aiming a rifle at Clinton from the rooftop of a home under construction on the edge of the golf course. It turned out that the man was using the rifle's telescopic site to watch the presidential party up close. Agents held him for questioning and then released him.
In contrast to the CAT team, the counter sniper team, also dressed in BDUs, does not travel in the motorcade. Instead, the counter-snipers-code-named Hercules and long used by the Secret Service-take positions at key exit and entrance points. For instance, when the president is leaving or entering the White House, they position themselves on the roof and on balconies across the street.
Thus, the counter snipers are observers and can respond to a distant threat with their .300 Winchester Magnum-known as Win Mag-rifles. The rifle is customized for the shooter who is assigned the weapon. Each team is also equipped with one Stoner SR-25 rifle. Counter-snipers are required to qualify shooting out to a thousand yards each month. If they don't qualify, they don't travel or work.
The counter snipers work hand in hand with the counterassault team. If CAT is in a building and wants to leave for the motorcade, the CAT team leader calls out to the countersniper unit to ask if the area is clear.
In contrast to the cursory look given to Kennedy's planned Dallas parade route, the Secret Service's Forensic Services Division now creates virtual three-dimensional models of buildings along a motorcade route so that agents will know what to expect and can plan what to do at spots where the motorcade may be more vulnerable to attack.
The division also produces slide shows of the floor plans of buildings where the president will speak.
As part of advance work, the Secret Service designates safe houses, such as fire stations, to be used in case of a threat. It also plots the best routes to local hospitals and alerts them to an impending presidential visit.
If the president plans to stay in a hotel, the Secret Service takes over the entire floor where his room will be, as well as the floors above and below. Agents examine carpeting to check for concealed objects. They check picture frames that might be hollow and conceal explosives. They plan escape routes from every room that the president will enter.
"In the hotel, if the president will stay overnight, we secure the suite and floor he will stay on and make it as safe as the White House," an agent says. "We seal it off. No other guests can be on the floor. If the floor is huge, we will separate it. But no outside people will be on the floor, guaranteed."
Before the president walks into a hotel room, a Secret Service countermeasures team sweeps it for radioactivity and electronic bugging and video devices. Permanent hotel residents pose a special problem. Agents ask them to move temporarily to other rooms in the same hotel. Hotels usually offer their residents better accommodations free of charge. But some refuse to take them.
"If they say, 'We are absolutely not going,' then we will not bring the president," an agent says.
Like the rest of us, presidents hate the thought of getting stuck in elevators, so the Secret Service pays a local elevator repair company a daily fee to station a service person in a hotel where the president is staying.
The Secret Service checks on the backgrounds of employees preparing food for the president. If they have been convicted of an assault or drug violation, agents will ask the establishment to give the employees a day off. To ensure that no one slips any poison into food served the president at a hotel or restaurant, an agent watches the preparation, randomly selects a prepared dish, and watches as the dish is served. Employees who have been cleared are given color-coded pins to wear. On overseas trips, navy stewards might prepare dishes for the president. With food prepared at the White House, the Secret Service does not get directly involved.
"You can't watch everything," a Secret Service agent says. "But the majority of stuff is checked. We have lists of the suppliers. We check the employees once and go back randomly and check them again to see if anyone has been added."
10
Deacon
IF THE SECRET Service considered Richard Nixon the strangest modern president,
Jimmy Carter was known as the least likeable. If the true measure of a man is how he
treats the little people, Carter flunked the test. Inside the White House, Carter treated
with contempt the little people who helped and protected him. "When Carter first came there, he didn't want the police officers and agents looking at him or speaking to him when he went to the office," says Nelson Pierce, an assistant White House usher. "He didn't want them to pay attention to him going by. I never could understand why. He was not going to the Oval Office without shoes or a robe."
"We never spoke unless spoken to," says Fred Walzel, who was chief of the White House branch of the Secret Service Uniformed Division. "Carter complained that he didn't want them [the officers] to say hello."
For three and a half years, agent John Piasecky was on Carter's detail-including seven months of driving him in the presidential limousine-and Carter never spoke to him, he says. At the same time, Carter tried to project an image of himself as man of the people by carrying his own luggage when traveling. But that was often for show. When he was a candidate in 1976, Carter would carry his own bags when the press was around but ask the Secret Service to carry them the rest of the time.
"Carter would have us carry his luggage from the trunk to the airport," says former Secret Service agent John F. Collins. "But that is not our job, and we finally stopped doing it." On one occasion, says Collins, "We opened the trunk and shut it, leaving his luggage in the trunk. He was without clothes for two days."
As president, Carter engaged in more ruses involving his luggage. "When he was traveling, he would get on the helicopter and fly to Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base," says former Secret Service agent Clifford R. Baranowski. "He would roll up his sleeves and carry his bag over his shoulder, but it was empty. He wanted people to think he was carrying his own bag."
"Carter made a big show about taking a hang-up carry-on out of the trunk of the limo when he'd go someplace, and there was nothing in it," says another agent who was on his detail. "It was empty; it was just all show."
On the first Christmas morning after his election, Carter strode out of the front door of his home in Plains, Georgia, to get the newspaper. Instead of saying "Merry Christmas" to the Secret Service agent standing post, he ignored him. After church and a Christmas brunch, Carter's wife, Rosalynn, put some leftovers out for their Siamese cat. According to agent John Collins, the detail had befriended a stray Jack Russell terrier and given him the code name Dolphin. "Dolphin" conformed with the Secret Service code names beginning with D assigned to the Carters.
Seeing the food, Dolphin began gobbling it up, pushing away the cat. According to another agent who was there, Carter got a bow saw-the kind that is used to saw down trees-and actually tried to attack the dog with the saw.
"Carter got the bow saw off a woodpile near the family room patio and in full view of his family-including his mother, Miss Lillian-tried to kill the dog," says the agent who was there. "Dolphin, who was much faster than Carter, playfully dodged the president elect's efforts. Carter then called the detail leader and demanded that the dog be removed from Plains. The Secret Service gave the dog to the press corps covering Carter."
Incredibly, Carter refused to carry out the biggest responsibility a president has-to be available to take action in case of nuclear attack. When he went on vacation, "Carter did not want the nuclear football at Plains," a Secret Service agent says. "There was no place to stay in Plains. The military wanted a trailer there. He didn't want that. So the military aide who carries the football had to stay in Americus," a fifteen minute drive from Carter's home.
Because of the agreed-upon protocols, in the event of a nuclear attack, Carter could not have launched a counterattack by calling the aide in Americus. By the time the military aide drove to Carter's home, the United States would have been within five minutes of being wiped out by nuclear-tipped missiles.
"He would have had to drive ten miles," an agent says. "Carter didn't want anyone bothering him on his property. He wanted his privacy. He was really different."
Through his lawyer, Terrence B. Adamson, Carter denied that he refused to keep the nuclear football near him in Plains and that he instructed uniformed officers not to say hello to him in the White House. But Bill Gulley who, as director of the White House Military Office, was in charge of the operation, confirmed that Carter refused to let the military aide stay near his residence. "We tried to put a trailer in Plains near the residence for the doctor [who travels with the president] and the aide with the football," Gulley says. "But Carter wouldn't permit that. Carter didn't care at all."
Carter-code-named Deacon-was moody and mistrustful.
"When he was in a bad mood, you didn't want to bring him anything," a former Secret Service agent says. "It was this hunkered-down attitude: 'I'm running the show' It was as if he didn't trust anyone around him. He had that big smile, but when he was in the White House, it was a different story."
"The only time I saw a smile on Carter's face was when the cameras were going," says former agent George Schmalhofer, who was periodically on his detail.
"Carter said, 'I'm in charge,'" a former Secret Service agent says. "'Everything is my way' He tried to micromanage everything. You had to go to him about playing on the tennis court. It was ridiculous."
One day, Carter noticed water gushing out of a grate outside the White House.
"It was the emergency generating system," says William Cuff, the assistant chief of the White House Military Office. "Carter got interested in that and micromanaged it. He would zoom in on an area and manage the hell out of it. He asked questions of the chief usher every day: 'How much does this cost? Which part is needed? When is it coming? Which bolt ties to which flange?'"
At a press conference, Carter denied reports that White House aides had to ask him for permission to use the tennis courts. But that was more dissembling. In fact, even when he was traveling on Air Force One, Carter insisted that aides ask him for permission to play on the courts.
"It is a true story about the tennis courts," says Charles Palmer, who was chief of the Air Force One stewards. Because other aides were afraid to give Carter the messages asking for permission, Palmer often wound up doing it.
"He [Carter] approved who played from on the plane," Palmer says. "Mostly people used them when he was out of town. If the president was in a bad mood, the aides said, 'You carry the message in.' On the bad days when we were having problems, no one wanted to talk to the president. It was always, 'I have a note to deliver to the president. I don't want him hollering at me.'"
Palmer says Carter seemed to relish the power. At times, Carter would delay his response, smugly saying, "I'll let them know," Palmer says. "Other times, he would look at me and smile and say, 'Tell them yes.' I felt he felt it was a big deal. I didn't understand why that had to happen."
Early in his presidency, Carter proclaimed that the White House would be "dry." Each time a state dinner was held, the White House made a point of telling reporters that no liquor-only wine-would be served.
"The Carters were the biggest liars in the world," Gulley says. "The word was passed to get rid of all the booze. There can't be any on Air Force One, in Camp David, or in the White House. This was coming from close associates of the Carter family."
Gulley told White House military aides, "Hide the booze, and let's find out what happens."
According to Gulley, "The first Sunday they are in the White House, I get a call from the mess saying, 'They want Bloody Marys before going to church. What should I do?' I said, 'Find some booze and take it up to them.'"
"We never cut out liquor under Carter," Palmer says. "Occasionally Carter had a martini," Palmer adds. He also had a Michelob Light. Rosalynn-code-named Dancer would have a screwdriver.
Lillian Carter, Carter's own mother, contradicted her son's claim. In a 1977 interview with The New York Times, she said that, even though the White House was officially "dry," she managed to have a nip of bourbon every afternoon when she stayed there.
"She said one evening to one of the butlers, 'I'm kind of used to having a little nip before going to bed. Do you think you could arrange to give me a little brandy each night?'" says Shirley Bender, the White House executive housekeeper.
When Vice President Walter "Fritz" Mondale visited Carter at Plains for the first time, Miss Lillian knocked on the door of a Winnebago the Secret Service was using as a command post.
"I opened the door, and there's Miss Lillian standing there with a paper bag with two six packs of beer in it," says David Curtis, an agent on the Mondale detail.
"I've got something for the boys," Lillian Carter said. "Don't tell Jimmy."
"I appreciate that, Miss Lillian, but we can't accept that," Curtis said.
When he was in the White House, Carter would regularly make a show of going to the Oval Office at five A.M. or six A.M. to call attention to how hard he was working for the American people.
"He would walk into the Oval Office at six A.M., do a little work for half an hour, then close the curtains and take a nap," says Robert B. Sulliman, Jr., who was on Carter's detail. "His staff would tell the press he was working."
Another agent says that at other times, he could see Carter through the Oval Office windows dozing off in his desk chair while pretending he was working.
Carter claimed to the press that he was saving energy by having solar panels installed on the roof of the White House to heat hot water. "It would not generate enough hot water to run the dishwasher in the staff mess," Cuff says. "It was a fiasco. The staff mess had to go out and buy new equipment to keep the water hot enough. That blew any savings."
Carter even tried to cut back the crew on Air Force One.
"Air Force One is an airplane, and you need a minimum number of people to fly it," Cuff notes. "You have to have a pilot, copilot, and others. They never understood that. The presidential pilot and the vice chief of staff of the air force had to argue with them."
Carter found out that after a catering company put on parties at Blair House for foreign dignitaries, instead of throwing away any leftovers as it normally would, the company would offer the food to Secret Service agents standing post.
"The guys were working shifts of twelve to fourteen hours a day," a former agent says. "Sometimes you could not break away to get food."
Carter insisted that the catering firm figure out the cost of the extra food and charge agents for the leftovers they ate in the future, the former agent says.
Gulley the head of the military office, says Carter became so involved in micromanaging the White House that he would veto the replacement of carpets.
"He wouldn't allow them to change the carpeting where the public went through the White House," Gulley says. "The White House looked like a peanut warehouse when I left," referring to Carter's business enterprise. "Thousands of people pass through there, and it requires a high degree of maintenance. Carter himself got involved in that. It [the carpeting] was worn and dirty."
Carter thought of himself as a better runner than his Secret Service agents and would challenge them to races. The Secret Service began assigning its best runners to his detail. One day at Camp David, Carter collapsed into the arms of an agent as he was trying to outrun them.
"He wasn't in bad shape, but he never warmed up," agent Dennis Chomicki says. "It was an exceptionally hot day, and he took off real fast and kind of burned himself out. He basically lost it."
On another occasion, agents warned Carter that cross-country skiing at Camp David would be dangerous because there was not enough snow on the ground and there were a lot of bare spots. Carter ignored the advice.
"Yeah, okay, I'll decide on that," Carter said, according to agent Chomicki.
"He went out, and sure enough, he fell on his face and broke his collarbone," Chomicki says.
In Washington, the Secret Service tried to find secluded routes so Carter could run. One beautiful fall morning, Carter went running on the towpath along the C&O Canal. He planned to run from Key Bridge to Chain Bridge, then back to Fletcher's Boat House, where Secret Service agents had been instructed to wait in their vehicles to pick him up. Because of a miscommunication, when Carter and his detail got to the boathouse, agents were nowhere to be seen.
Stephen Garmon, the detail leader, and other agents had been following Carter on bicycles. Garmon, who later became deputy director of the Secret Service, tried to radio to the Secret Service vehicles, but his transmission was not getting through.
"The president said he was getting cold," Garmon recalls. "I asked if he would mind running back to Key Bridge, and we could flag a cab if necessary. Then I saw a pay phone, but I didn't have any change." Garmon decided to try calling the 911 emergency number. Identifying himself as a Secret Service agent, he asked to be connected to the White House Communications Agency switchboard.
"The 911 operator connected me, and I was able to communicate to the vehicles so agents would pick us up," Garmon says.
Besides seeing what presidents and first families are really like, Secret Service agents get to see the real face of the White House political staff. When Carter was meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat at Camp David, former agent Cliff Baranowski heard a strange noise in the woods around midnight.
"Then Hamilton Jordan, Carter's chief of staff, came out of the woods with a pretty intern," Baranowski says. "They were parked in the woods, and his car got stuck. The noise was the spinning of wheels."
As a micromanager, Carter gave his vice president, Walter Mondale, few duties. So Mondale was able to spend much of his time playing tennis and traveling.
Toward the end of his term, Carter became suspicious that people were stealing things and eavesdropping on his conversations in the Oval Office.
Carter and his staff were becoming "very paranoid," says a General Services Administration (GSA) building manager in charge of maintenance of the West Wing. "They thought GSA or the Secret Service were listening in."
One afternoon, Susan Clough, Carter's secretary, insisted that someone had stolen a vial of crude oil from the Oval Office. The vial was a gift to Carter from an Arab leader.
"Susan Clough swore up and down that someone poured some of it out," a GSA manager says. Even though the vial was sealed, "There was a big fuss over it. The Secret Service photographs everything in the president's suite. They photographed it [again], and it hadn't been touched. It shows the paranoia."
Before going on a fishing trip in Georgia one morning, Carter accused a Secret Service agent of stealing fried chicken that stewards had prepared. In fact, White House aides Jody Powell and Hamilton Jordan had eaten it.
After Reagan was inaugurated, GSA discovered that the Carter staff had left garbage in the White House and had trashed furniture in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
GSA saw "furniture, desks, and file cabinets turned over," a GSA building manager says. "They shoved over desks. We had to straighten it out. It was fifteen or twenty desks in one area. It was enough to look like a cyclone had hit."
After he was voted out of office, Carter occasionally stayed in the townhouse GSA maintains for former presidents at 1716 Jackson Place. On the walls of the townhouse are photos of former presidents.
Checking the premises, GSA managers found that when Carter was visiting, he would take down the photos of Republican presidents Ford and Nixon and decorate the townhouse with another half dozen sixteen-inch by twenty-four-inch photos of himself. Each time, Charles B. "Buddy" Respass, then the GSA manager in charge of the White House, became irate because GSA had to find the old photos and hang them again.
Through his lawyer Adamson, Carter denied this. He also denied that he thought people were listening to his conversations in the Oval Office.
But Lucille Price, the GSA manager who then reported to Respass, says, "Carter changed the photos.... He didn't like them [Ford and Nixon] looking down at him. We would find out he would put photos of himself up." Then, she says, Carter "would take the photos of himself back with him."
For all his bizarre behavior and shams, Carter was genuinely religious, did not swear, and had a loving relationship with his wife, Rosalynn, who acted as an adviser.
Says Richard Repasky who was on Carter's detail, "Rosalynn really was the brains of the outfit."
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