In the President's Secret Service
By Ronald Kessler
16
The Big Show
TO SIGN UP to take a bullet for the president requires extraordinary commitment.
Besides the glamour and the travel, "I see being in the Secret Service as a calling for me
to serve my country and do good at a higher level," one agent says.
"Agents do not protect any individual but rather the integrity of the office, so the bullet
we may take is for the office-not the person," another agent says.
The job requires not only protecting the president but safeguarding the lives of other
agents.
"When I walked into an event with the president as part of the protective detail, I knew
and trusted that everybody would do their job," former agent Norm Jarvis says. "The
formation has shift agents, and each has responsibilities unique to each position. So if
everybody takes care of their position, then you don't have to worry about your back, or
who's looking out over your shoulder. Somebody is. You just have to focus on what your
job is at the time. Agents build up an awful lot of trust and appreciation for each other."
The reverse is true as well.
"If you detect that somebody's lazy or not thorough or not doing the job, it means more
than just 'Hey, this guy's a bum and I've got to spend my time with him,'" Jarvis says.
"You feel like your life could possibly be in danger. Certainly the president's life would
be in danger. So there's a lot of us within the detail policing ourselves and using positive
and negative sanctions to get people to do the right thing all the time."
Agents recognize that the job entails long hours and extensive travel. In describing job
opportunities, the Secret Service's website makes a point of that.
"Agents have a certain drive," a Secret Service agent says. "They're all kind of wired the
same; they all want to see the job get done, and they want to get it done the right way."
But many say that the agency's management needlessly makes the job tougher. In
particular, the Secret Service's senseless transfer policies drive agents to quit before
retirement, adding to the government's costs. This comes at a time when, because of
threats from terrorists, the need for the Secret Service has never been greater.
Agents cite numerous situations where fellow agents are denied transfers to cities where
their spouses work, while others are forced to transfer to those same cities. Often, the
agents who want to transfer have offered to pay their own moving costs. Instead, the
Secret Service pays fifty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars each to move agents
who do not want to be transferred to those cities.
"We sign up to take a bullet, but that's not the hardest part of the job," Jessica Johnson, a
former Secret Service agent, says. "It's not anything that we normally face. The risk is
there. But what makes the job very difficult is the mismanagement. If the Secret Service
were better managed, you'd have a lot better workforce, a lot more people who don't
quit."
Since 9/11, the private sector has been offering hefty salaries to anyone with a federal
law enforcement background. Typically, former Secret Service agents sign up as vice
president for security of a major corporation or start their own security firms. For those
who want to remain vested to earn full government pensions, opportunities have
expanded as well at other federal law enforcement agencies.
Until 1984, under a previous retirement system, Secret Service agents could not keep
their pensions if they transferred to another government agency. Now they can. Agents
can retire at any age after twenty-five years with the agency. They can retire at age fifty
if they have served twenty years. For both government agencies and private companies,
a Secret Service or FBI agent is a prize catch.
The FBI has taken steps to retain agents, while the Secret Service has not. In contrast to
the Secret Service, after three years with the bureau, unless he or she chooses to go into
management, an FBI agent can stay in the same city for the rest of his or her career. An
agent going into management can remain in the same city for five years.
The Secret Service, on the other hand, typically transfers agents three to four times
during a twenty-five-year career. An agent who enters management may move five to six
times. The rationale is that agents need to acquire experience in different offices. But
experience in one office does not translate into another. Decades ago, the FBI had the
same policy. The bureau scrapped it because the constant moves were not necessary and
resulted in many agents leaving the bureau. In turn, that led to high costs both for
moving families and for training new agents to replace those who left.
Not having to transfer as often, FBI agents can better work out living arrangements with
spouses. The FBI at least tries to take into account situations where a spouse must work
in a particular city, sometimes addressing these as hardship cases.
Essentially, according to agents, the Secret Service moves agents around like checkers
on a board without regard to their wishes. Rather than explaining the reasoning behind
transfers or other policies that impinge on the agents' personal lives, the Secret Service
will typically give the high-handed response that the change is necessary because of the
"needs of the service." The exception is when an agent has "juice," meaning connections
to higher-ups, a situation that contributes to poor morale.
After two years on the Clinton detail based at the Clintons' home in Chappaqua, New
York, Johnson wanted to transfer back to California, where she grew up.
"All of a sudden, they said they can't transfer anyone out of New York," she says. "They
said they have no one to replace me. At the same time, they're sending out an email that
says anyone, regardless of where you are in your career track, if you would like to go to
Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco, raise your hand and you're there. So I write
the little memo and I raise my hand. I jump up and down, and they tell me, 'Oh, well, we
can't replace you. So you can't go.'"
At the same time, Johnson says, friends in the Los Angeles office were sending her
copies of emails they were receiving from management saying they had to leave Los
Angeles to go to protective details.
"A year later when I went to my management, they said, 'Oh, well, L.A.'s full. How
about the New York field office?'" she says.
When the Secret Service finally agreed to transfer her to Los Angeles after three years in
New York, "I find out that we were eleven bodies short in L.A. So how did we go from
being full to being eleven bodies short in four months?"
In other cases, the Secret Service disregards situations where a spouse has a job in
another city. Johnson and others describe one situation where an agent based in Los
Angeles began dating a doctor in Hawaii. Eventually, they married, and the agent put in
for a transfer to Hawaii, where his wife had an established medical practice.
"We have an office in Hawaii, so it's easier for him to transfer than it is for her," Johnson
says. "But the management we had in L.A. at the time had no juice. He was told he
couldn't be transferred to Hawaii. He quit because he said his marriage was more
important."
About a month later, after he moved to Hawaii, he applied to return to the Secret
Service. The head of the Hawaii office, who had juice, rehired him.
"Here you're being told you can't transfer, and the bottom line was, it was all about who
your boss is," Johnson says.
In another case, agent Dan Klish was issued orders to transfer to Los Angeles. His wife's
career as a radiation oncologist made it difficult for her to find a position there. Finally,
she obtained a job near Denver. Klish asked for a transfer to Denver or Cheyenne and
offered to pay for the move himself. That would have saved the government about
seventy-five thousand dollars in moving costs. The transfer was denied. For more than
two years, they lived apart, and the agent flew to Denver once or twice a month to see
his wife and young daughter.
During that time, the service asked for volunteers to transfer to Denver. Approximately
ten other agents were transferred to Denver, some with less seniority, at a cost to the
government of seventy-five to one hundred thousand dollars for each move.
"If the opening isn't available at that moment, then the service can say, 'Oh, sorry, that
office is overstaffed. Here are your only options,'" Klish says. "Then, sure enough, while
you're still on orders to move somewhere else but haven't moved yet, an opening in a
city that would work for you comes out, and you can't even put in for it because you're
already on orders to go elsewhere. Later, after you've moved, they transfer several others
to that city. There is a strong bond among agents, but unless you have the right
connections, the Secret Service doesn't care about the agents."
After eight years with the Secret Services, Klish finally quit to join another federal
agency in Colorado.
Joel Mullen, an agent who was based in Washington, D.C., is married to a navy lawyer.
When the navy gave her orders to transfer to San Diego, Mullen asked to transfer to the
Secret Service field office there, saying the navy would pay the cost. After initially
approving the transfer, headquarters blocked it, even though San Diego had openings.
Mullen and his wife had started building a home near San Diego. The Secret Service
told Mullen to transfer to the Los Angeles office instead.
"I commuted ninety-six miles one way from my door to the office," Mullen says. "I did
that for fourteen months. Then I left and went with the Naval Criminal Investigative
Service."
Besides losing an agent with ten years' experience, the Secret Service wound up paying
out $240,000 for the transfer to cover Mullen's costs, including the decline in the value
of his house in the Washington area.
Nor does the agency have an open process for listing anticipated vacancies and agents'
preferences for transfers. All are kept secret. If an agent has "juice," he or she is bumped
ahead of others.
In contrast, the FBI, which has 12,500 agents, maintains online lists of requested
transfers to each field office so that agents can see who is ahead of them. FBI agents say
connections play no role in transfers. Because of the open lists, if the FBI did engage in
such under-the-table preferential treatment, the agents would know it.
That the Secret Service's computer program for listing transfer preferences and bidding
on promotions is an antiquated DOS-based program symbolizes how much the Secret
Service cares about agents' wishes.
Resignations before retirement have increased substantially in recent years. In all, the
Secret Service has 3,404 special agents. More than half their man-hours are devoted to
protection of the president and other national leaders, as well as visiting foreign
dignitaries. Attrition rates are increasing. As the trend accelerated, the Secret Service
declined to provide full yearly figures, but the rate is roughly 5 percent a year. Turnover
rates are as high as 12 percent a year in the Uniformed Division, which has 1,288
officers. More alarming, agents who have been in the service ten years say a third to half
of the agents who were in their initial training class have left.
"These people who are leaving are very qualified agents who are doing a really good job
and are held in high esteem," an agent says. "That's what really hurts us."
The Secret Service asked an analyst then based in Washington to study the problem of
retention and the costs associated with agent turnover. She found it was an increasingly
serious problem. The incremental cost to the government of training a new agent is
eighty thousand dollars for the agent's salary and the cost of equipment and travel. That
excludes the fixed costs of the training facilities and the salaries of instructors.
"The higher-ups basically dismissed her findings, saying, 'Oh, we don't have any kind of
retention problem,'" says a current agent. "They didn't want to hear it."
Johnson, who is now a real estate investor, describes trying to raise the issue during her
exit interview.
"The supervisor who was giving me the exit interview was literally saying, 'Tell me if
there are any problems we should know about' as he was starting to escort me out the
door," Johnson says. "I said, 'Well, yes, I'm sure you hear this a lot,' and I began to lay
out examples of unnecessary burdens imposed on agents."
The supervisor became defensive.
"He started going on about how the military does more, and there are civilians who
sacrifice more than we do in the service," she says. "He couldn't even listen to what I
had to say."
In a rare move, an agent raised the issue at a meeting of Secret Service officials at the
agency's Washington field office.
"You've got a bunch of Generation X agents," he said. "We're concerned about our
families; we're concerned about our wives and our kids. Something has to change."
Shortly after that, the agent resigned.
In recent years, agents say a dismissive, insular culture and a disregard for the need to
retain agents have remained constant.
"Our leadership is in absolute denial that there's a problem," an agent says. "They don't
want to do anything to fix it."
Agents say the Secret Service promotes those who have a similar mind-set and that
agency directors stay for two or three years, then leave without changing the culture. As
one example of poor management practices, they cite a statement made by a special
agent in charge of the vice president's protective detail. The supervisor said that no
agents on the detail would ever be promoted because of the number of agents who are
seeking promotions.
"The best you can hope for is to get to an office you can make the most of, because the
next move will probably be your last," the official told his own agents.
"Needless to say, morale went from low to rock bottom with that," says an agent who
was at the meeting. "Several agents left saying they were done, time to move on."
Johnson says she accepts that by its very nature, a Secret Service agent's job is
demanding. While she was assigned to protect former president Clinton, he was
constantly traveling all over the world. She could hardly ever plan anything in her
personal life, because her schedule was his schedule.
What Johnson and others resented was that the Secret Service ignored simple
opportunities to lessen the necessary burdens of the job. For example, the Secret Service
lets agents know their schedules for the coming week late Friday afternoon, just before
the weekend starts. As a result, agents are prevented from planning social and family
events.
On trips, agents are expected to work virtually around the clock. In the past several
years, the Secret Service imposed limits on overtime pay, offering compensatory time
instead. But the agency often denies agents the opportunity to use compensatory or
flextime they have earned in lieu of overtime pay. When flextime is taken, it usually
must be taken within a week. If an agent has other duties already scheduled, the agent
may be forced to forfeit the flextime. After seven years, an agent based in a major city
might make upward of $110,000 a year without overtime.
"When you're doing foreign advances, you're working eighteen-and twenty-hour days,
seven days a week, yet the schedule says you are working nine to five," says an agent.
What this means is that the Secret Service pays overtime for weekends worked but not
for additional hours during the week. In another twist, the agency, as a matter of practice
delays paying out overtime earned for two or three years. In the fall of 2008, supervisors
on the president's protective detail even began refusing to record agents' overtime pay.
When agents began complaining to the financial management division, they were told
by supervisors not to make further inquiries.
Paid or not, agents end up working eighteen-hour days.
"How tired do you get? Just imagine sleeping three or four hours a night for a week,"
says an agent.
"Pilots have mandatory rest periods," says a former agent. "But you've got a guy
standing next to the president with a loaded gun who hasn't had sleep in three days and
has traveled through four different time zones."
One night, the agent and his wife had an argument.
"You have no right to discipline your children, because you're not their father," his wife
said to him. "You don't act like their father; you're never around."
She was right, the former agent says.
"I was never around," he says. "I was missing everything. I was missing Christmas, I
was missing Thanksgiving."
The agent quit.
The agency's rigidity extends to administrative personnel. An investigative assistant who
was a crackerjack at her job of providing agents with the data they needed asked for a
schedule change. She wanted to come to work a half hour earlier than her current
schedule called for and leave a half hour earlier so she could pick up her child at day
care.
The Secret Service refused, so she left for the Department of Housing and Urban
Development. There, she got the schedule she wanted. She even got to work at home on
Fridays.
After being a Secret Service agent for almost ten years, Johnson finally quit. She says
the agency is mostly run by agents who are "old-school" and think everyone wants to
join the Secret Service at any cost.
"In the old days, the Secret Service was a great gig," Johnson says. "People lined up to
join. They had applications on the shelves for years. People would drop everything at the
drop of a hat to get a Secret Service job. It was great pay and offered stability. Well,
times have changed, but their mentality hasn't. People can go out and make a lot more
money in the private sector, a lot more money on their own, for much less risk.
Management's attitude is almost as though we should literally be thanking them every
day we wake up and have a job."
The Secret Service has trouble finding qualified applicants to replace those who are
driven away.
"Getting a number of applicants is not a problem. Getting qualified applicants is always
a problem," Johnson says. "Because of the service's high standard, a large portion of
the population wouldn't qualify to be an agent. They've done various things trying to
recruit good people, but the bottom line is that their policies are driving away the good
people they already have."
"They chew their people up," says a former agent. "They treat agents like the Apache
Indians treated their horses: They would take their best horse and ride it and ride it, and
when it dies, they finally eat it."
17
Timberwolf
THE VICE PRESIDENT'S residence is a handsome 9,150-square-foot three-story
mansion overlooking Massachusetts Avenue NW Complete with pool, pool house, and
indoor gym, the white brick house was built in 1893 as the home of the superintendent
of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Congress turned it into the official residence of the vice
president in 1974 and gave it the address One Observatory Circle.
Vice President Mondale was the first to live at the residence. While Mondale's
predecessor Nelson Rockefeller could have moved there, he chose to remain in his
Foxhall Road estate in Washington and use the vice president's residence for
entertaining.
During the day, at least five navy stewards attend to every personal need of the second
family, including cooking, shopping for food, cleaning, and doing the laundry. At night,
the stewards-known as navy enlisted aides-bake chocolate chip cookies and other
goodies for the second family. They also stash leftovers from parties in the refrigerator.
The Secret Service has a separate building-code-named Tower-on the grounds. The vice
president's residence itself is referred to by agents simply as "the res."
Back when George H. W. Bush was vice president, Agent William Albracht was on the
midnight shift at the vice president's residence. Agents refer to the president's protective
detail as "the big show" and to the vice president's protective detail as "the little show
with free parking," because unlike the White House, the vice president's residence
provides parking for agents.
New to the post, Albracht was told by Secret Service Agent Pete Dowling, "Well, Bill,
every day the stewards bake the cookies, and that is their job, and that is their
responsibility. And then our responsibility on midnights is to find those cookies or those
left from the previous day and eat as many of them as possible."
At three A.M., Albracht, assigned to the basement post, was getting hungry.
"We never had permission to take food from the kitchen, but sometimes you get very
hungry on midnights," Albracht says. "I walked into the kitchen that was located in the
basement and opened up the refrigerator. I'm hoping that there are some leftover snacks
from that day's reception," the former agent says. "It was slim pickin's. All of a sudden,
there's a voice over my shoulder."
"Hey, anything good in there to eat?" the man asked.
"No. Looks like they cleaned it out," Albracht said.
"I turned around to see George Bush off my right shoulder," Albracht says. "After I get
over the shock of who it was, Bush says, 'Hey I was really hoping there would be
something to eat.' And I said, 'Well, sir, every day the stewards bake cookies, but every
night they hide them from us.' With a wink of his eye he says, 'Let's find 'em.' So we tore
the kitchen apart, and sure enough we did find them. He took a stack of chocolate chip
cookies and a glass of milk and went back up to bed, and I took a stack and a glass of
milk and went back to the basement post."
When Albracht returned to the post, Dowling asked, "Who the hell were you in there
talking to?"
"Oh, yeah, sure, right," Dowling said when Albracht told him.
Bush's regular vice presidential detail played a prank on an agent who was on temporary
assignment, telling him that it was okay to wash his clothes in the vice president's
laundry room.
"He went down and used the vice president's washing machine and dryer," former agent
Patrick Sullivan recalls. "Mrs. Bush came down and said to the other agents, 'He's doing
his laundry!'"
A supervisor heard about the incident. Mortified, he told Barbara Bush that it had all
been a practical joke.
"Oh, don't worry about it," she said.
In fact, at the Bush home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Barbara Bush once strode to the
Secret Service post and asked if agents had any laundry they would like her to do, since
she was about to do a load anyway. She was so close to the agents that when Pete
Dowling's wife, Lindy was expecting a baby, the first lady instructed him to call her
when the baby arrived, day or night.
As vice president, Bush flew to a fund-raiser in Boise, Idaho, during the 1982 election
campaign. He was to have dinner at the Chart House seafood restaurant on North
Garden Street on the banks of the Colorado River.
"The way we protected him, we had some agents inside, but typically what we'd do was
situate ourselves at dining tables near him," says former agent Dowling.
Dowling had been seated a few minutes when he heard a radio transmission that two
white males in camouflage outfits with long weapons were low-crawling around the
back toward their location. They had their weapons in their hands and were crawling on
their bellies, moving themselves along with their elbows.
Just then, Dowling looked up and saw the two bad guys. He recalled intelligence reports
that Libya had sent a hit squad to the United States to kill American officials. The agent
instinctively jumped out of his chair and tackled Bush to protect him. As food flew
everywhere, Dowling threw the vice president onto the ground and flopped on top of
him.
"What's going on here?" Bush asked.
"I don't know, but just keep your head down," Dowling replied.
Dowling looked up. He saw about a hundred law enforcement officers with their guns
drawn-Secret Service agents, sheriff's department deputies, and state troopers. They
were on the scene as part of routine protection for a visit by the vice president. The two
bad guys were kneeling with their hands clasped behind their heads.
"We evacuated the VP out of the restaurant to get him away from whatever danger may
have still been there," Dowling says. "You would think I had just thwarted an
assassination attempt."
As it turned out, the restaurant was near an apartment complex where the girlfriend of
one of the two men lived.
"The guy had gone to see his girlfriend, and she was there with another guy," Dowling
says. "So the boyfriend got very angry. The other guy who was there with his girlfriend
pulled out a knife, kind of slashed him, didn't hurt him badly. So this fellow who had
been cut decided that he and another guy were going to go back and kill the guy that
night."
Not knowing that the vice president was coming, they parked in the lot at the Chart
House and decided to sneak through the woods to get to the apartment complex. They
were tried and convicted on illegal weapons and attempted assault charges.
In contrast to many other presidents, Bush-code-named Timberwolf-treated Secret
Service agents and everyone else around him with respect and consideration, as did his
wife, Barbara. After Bush 41 became president, his twelve-year-old grandson, George
Prescott Bush, was hitting tennis balls off the back of the White House tennis court. J.
Bonnie Newman, assistant to the president for management and administration, and
Joseph W. Hagin, deputy assistant to the president for scheduling, approached the court
to play. The two White House aides had earlier reserved the court, but when they saw the
president's grandson playing, they turned away and began walking back toward the
White House.
Just then, Barbara Bush-code named Tranquility-came along and told George, son of Jeb
Bush, to get off the court.
"When we went down and saw the president's grandson, there was no question he should
be the one playing on the court," Newman says. "But Mrs. Bush saw it and just plucked
him off. She really sent the message not only to staff but to family as well that you
remember your manners."
"Bush 41 is a great man, just an all-around nice person," an agent says. "Both he and
Mrs. Bush are very thoughtful, and they think outside their own little world. They think
of other people."
Bush "made it clear to all his staff that none of them was a security expert, and if the
Secret Service made a decision, he was the one to sign off on it, and they were never to
question our decisions or make life difficult," Dowling says. "So consequently it was
kind of a moment in time, because all the entities really worked well together to make
his protection and the activities that he participated in successful."
Bush was so considerate of the agents who protected him that he would stay in town on
Christmas Eve so agents could spend it with their families. Then he would fly to Texas
the day after Christmas. The Secret Service's only complaint about Bush is that, to this
day, he is hyperactive.
"He can't sit still," an agent says. "He is in perpetual motion."
In every hotel, the Secret Service had to make sure Bush had an exercise bike in his
suite. If the hotel did not have one, the agency rented one.
"He can't read a book," the agent says. "He has to be on a treadmill or StairMaster. It's
go, go, go. For the Secret Service, that meant more work. The tennis court, horseshoes,
the golf course, the boat. Always something."
Early on, Bush chafed at protection.
"Most people have difficulty adjusting to having protection," says former Secret Service
deputy director Danny Spriggs. "These folks do it because it goes with the job. However,
it's nothing they embrace initially. You infringe on their private lives. Even though I did
it for twenty-eight years, I can't imagine what it would be like to be told I can't go to a
movie or amusement park whenever I want, or to be told that friends I have known for
years must submit their name, Social Security number, and date of birth before they can
visit me."
One week, with motorcycle sirens screaming, the motorcade twice took him to events
just a few blocks from the White House. Bush fussed about the precautions and wanted
to know why he couldn't simply walk to the events. His protective detail decided to play
a joke on him. While the president's limousine and backup are driven by agents, other
Secret Service vehicles in the motorcade are driven by what are called physical support
technicians. Billy Ingram, one of these drivers, was a grizzled Korean War veteran.
"He always had a cigarette dangling from his lips with ashes dropping all over," says Joe
Funk, an agent who was on Bush's detail. "His personal car was twenty years old and
dented. It reeked of cigarette smoke."
Agents affixed the presidential seal and American flag to Ingram's car. When the
president came out for the next motorcade ride, his limousine was nowhere in sight.
Instead, Ingram's car was at the head of the procession.
"He looked at it," Funk says. "He turned to Barbara and said, 'What's going on?'"
"Well, you're always complaining about the limos. Let's go," the first lady said.
Bush got into Ingram's beat-up car and said to the agents, "You win."
"They drove him to the gate, and that's where the presidential limo was," Funk says.
Despite warnings from his detail, Bush had a habit of leaving the Oval Office through
the door to the Rose Garden and greeting tourists lined up along the fence on
Pennsylvania Avenue. The detail assigned agents to rush to the fence as soon as an alarm
notified them that Bush had opened the door to the outside. Soon, The Washington Post
ran a story reporting that onlookers were delighted at their unexpected greetings from
the president. Right after that, when Bush again greeted fans at the fence, agents spotted
what agent Glenn Smith calls a "textbook" possible assassin.
"The man had on a coat in the summer, he looked disheveled, and his eyes were darting
in all directions," Smith says. "We patted him down, and it turned out he had a nine millimeter pistol on him and probably intended to use it on the president."
The head of the detail pointed out to Bush that by greeting people spontaneously, he was
not only endangering himself but his agents. After that, "Bush would give us time to set
up a secure zone at the fence."
As a courtesy, Secret Service agents try to preset the radio in the limousine to the
stations the president or vice president likes. Bush is a country-western fan, so agents
preset the radio to country-western stations in whatever town they happened to be in.
"One time, Bush 41 got into the limo and turned on the radio, and, of course, a country western station came on immediately, and one of his favorite songs was playing,"
Albracht says. "He started singing along with it. The agent who was driving looked up in
the rearview mirror and saw Bush."
"Larry, what do you think?" Bush asked the driver.
Without hesitation, Larry answered, "Don't give up the day job, boss."
Secret Service agents are instructed to ignore any conversations that take place in their
presence, but of course they hear everything. At one point, the Secret Service was
driving President Bush and Barbara Bush, along with two of their children, who were in
the backseat of the limo.
"They were engaged in a deep conversation about something, and suddenly they were
distracted," Albracht says. "When they asked each other what they had been talking
about, they couldn't remember, and the agent who was driving said 'Y'all talkin' about
Social Security'"
That was a violation of Secret Service protocol, and the supervisor in the right-front seat
later reprimanded the agent. The agent's tenure in the transportation section was about to
end, but Bush liked him. When he hadn't seen him for a while, Bush asked the Secret
Service to assign him as his driver. That did not sit well with supervisors.
When Bush was president, the Secret Service obtained intelligence that a Colombian
drug cartel had put out a contract on his family. As a result, Secret Service agents began
protecting future president George W. Bush, his children, and his sister and brothers.
"He [George W. Bush] had just bought a new Lincoln, and we were following him
closely," former agent John Golden says. "He stopped quickly when a traffic light turned
yellow. We plowed into his car, but it turned out there was no damage."
Because Bush's entire family would converge on his summer home in Kennebunkport,
agents referred to it as Camp Timberwolf Because the home is on the water, the Secret
Service enlisted the military to search for underwater explosives and patrolled the ocean
in boats.
"Our cigarette boat at Kennebunkport was faster than his boat, but if we told him that, he
would go out and buy a faster boat," says Andrew Gruler, who was on the president's
detail.
At one point, Bush and Barbara flew to their Kennebunkport home in the winter. It was
freezing cold, and the president and his wife came out for a walk.
"I had a hat on, and two of the other agents had hats on, but the one agent assigned to the
first lady didn't bring a hat with him," says former agent Sullivan, who was on the
president's detail. "So the president came out with Mrs. Bush, and we started to walk."
"Where's your hat?" Mrs. Bush asked the hatless agent.
"Oh, Mrs. Bush, I didn't bring one. I didn't realize it was going to be so cold here," he
said.
"George, we need to get this agent a hat," Barbara said.
"Okay, Bar," he replied.
She walked back into the house, got one of President Bush's furry hats, and gave it to the
agent.
"No, Mrs. Bush, that's fine," the agent said.
"Hey, don't argue with Mrs. Bush," Bush said.
The agent put on the president's hat.
"That was Mrs. Bush," Sullivan says. "She was everyone's mother, and she didn't want
this forty-year-old man walking around at Kennebunkport without a hat on. She was a
sweetheart."
"Barbara and George Bush were genuinely in love," former agent Albracht says. "They
share a special bond of being married and being each other's best friends that you don't
really see a lot of. I know there was a woman on the staff that Bush was always rumored
to be having an affair with, but I'm telling you, I never saw it, and I was with the guy for
four years."
While Barbara "can be sweet and nice, you do anything to cross anybody in the family,
and you are written off," says a former agent on Bush's detail. "I remember the Bushes
had some friends that would come to visit them, and one of them had decided to vote for
Ross Perot, and she wrote that person off. And President Bush would say, 'Aw, Barb,
that's just politics.' And she'd say, 'No, that's just not right.' And if somebody divorced
his wife and married a younger woman, she didn't like that at all."
18
A Psychic's Vision
RUNNING FOR REELECTION against Bill Clinton, Bush 41 was to give a speech on
September 17, 1992, at the civic auditorium in Enid, Oklahoma. Agent Norm Jarvis was
assigned to run intelligence investigations for the visit, and a detective from the
Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation called him. "He said that a woman who was a psychic had told her police contact, whom she worked with on a homicide case in Texas, that she had had a vision that President Bush was going to be assassinated by a sniper," Jarvis says.
People call the Secret Service all the time reporting a vision they have just had about the president being shot. They are usually self-promoters. But in this case, the detective told Jarvis that this psychic's visions had actually helped police find buried bodies and had provided useful leads in criminal investigations. Another seasoned law enforcement homicide investigator from Texas also told Jarvis that he needed to pay attention to her.
"She's the real deal," the Oklahoma detective said.
Jarvis remembered seeing the psychic on television. Sporting a beehive hairdo, she would don what she called a special pair of cowboy boots and then tell police not only where bodies were buried but how the victims had been murdered. The evening before Bush's visit, Jarvis and his partner drove to the woman's home in Enid. She invited them in, and Jarvis told her why they were there. The psychic confirmed that she had had a vision that Bush 41 was about to be assassinated.
"About that time, her husband comes walking into the house, and he looks at me and he says, 'Has she had another one of them visions?'" Jarvis says.
"Yeah," Jarvis said.
The man shook his head and walked through the living room and into the kitchen. "I gave my partner the nod to go in and talk to him," Jarvis says. "My impression was he was disgusted because he didn't believe her."
Jarvis asked the psychic what she had seen in her vision. The woman said the president was going to come to Oklahoma: He was going to get off the plane, and he was going to get in a limousine.
"I see him sitting behind the driver," she said. "As they start to drive by an overpass, the passenger window is shattered, and he is killed." The next thing she saw was Bush in front of the family home in Kennebunkport. At that point, he is no longer the president.
"How could he be killed, and then your vision down the line is that he's no longer the president and he's at Kennebunkport?" Jarvis asked her.
The woman wasn't sure, but as Jarvis questioned her, she offered more details of her premonition. When Bush gets into his limousine, he does not have a suit on, she said. Instead, he is wearing a light jacket and an open-collar shirt.
Jarvis knew that when the president flew in on Air Force One, he always came out in a suit and tie, and the dress code for the visit was suit and tie. Moreover, when the president is in the limousine, he is not behind the driver; he is on the right rear side, the position of honor.
Just then, Jarvis's partner came out of the kitchen.
"What did he say?" Jarvis asked.
"The husband said if she's seen a vision, it's going to happen," the other agent said.
As a chill went up Jarvis's spine, he asked the woman to describe the limo. She correctly said the car was already in Enid. The Secret Service always flies its vehicles to the sites of presidential visits on a cargo plane prior to the visit, storing them in fire stations or in hangars at the airport where Air Force One is to land. At that point, Jarvis himself did not know where the limo was being stored.
Jarvis asked her to pinpoint where the limo was. She said it was at the air force base near Enid. He asked if she could take him to it; she agreed.
As they drove to the base, Jarvis asked the woman a series of questions to see if she had learned the location of the vehicle through some other means besides her clairvoyance: Did she know anyone who worked at the base? Had anyone told her that they had seen a cargo plane unload a limousine at the base?
As they drove toward the five hangars on the base, the woman gave Jarvis directions.
"As we got close to this one hangar, she said to slow down," Jarvis says.
"Something is in that building right there," the woman said.
"What do you mean?" Jarvis asked.
"Something important is in that building there."
"Okay, but not the limo?"
"No," the woman said.
As they drove past another hangar, the woman said it contained the limo. She then identified another hangar as containing something important.
Jarvis's hunch was that the limo was in the firehouse bordering the runways. As it turned out, he was wrong and the psychic was right. Secret Service agents guard the president's limo until he steps into it. Jarvis checked with them and learned that the hangar identified by the psychic as housing the limo did indeed contain two presidential limousines.
Jarvis mentioned to the woman that the president usually sits on the right side. She insisted that he would be sitting behind the driver. As the woman walked back to Jarvis's car, he asked the special officer in charge of security for the limos what was in the other two hangars she had identified as containing something important.
"He said one contains Marine One, and the other contains other important assets for the president in case of emergencies," Jarvis says.
Jarvis immediately briefed supervisors at the Secret Service Intelligence Division duty desk in Washington.
"You guys are going to think I'm crazy," he said, and then related the information about the vision and how the woman had correctly led him to the president's limo.
As Jarvis saw it, "We deal in the bizarre all the time. Nothing's too wacky that hasn't come across the duty desk report sheet. You're just straight up and lay it out the way you see it. And together you examine and turn the thing over and make a determination."
At one A.M., Jarvis called the head of the advance team and briefed him. However, since the psychic seemed to have been wrong about what clothes Bush would be wearing and about where he would be sitting, they dismissed their concerns. Still, that morning before Bush left for Oklahoma, the head of the advance team informed detail leaders based in W-16 at the White House about the bizarre tale.
Jarvis then discussed the matter with the agent in charge of the motorcade. He asked if the motorcade route would take the president by an overpass. The agent said it would.
"Do you have an alternate motorcade route?"
"Sure. We always do," the agent replied.
That morning, Air Force One landed. Known by the Secret Service code name Angel, Air Force One got its name when Dwight D. Eisenhower-code-named Providence-was president. Prior to that, the aircraft used by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman had been known by air force designations. Because a flight controller mistook the president's plane for a commercial one, the pilot suggested calling the plane the president was using Air Force One.
The current presidential plane is a Boeing 747-200B bubble top jumbo jet acquired in 1990 when George H. W. Bush was president. It has a range of 9,600 miles and a maximum cruising altitude of 45,100 feet. It cruises at six hundred miles per hour but can achieve speeds of seven hundred one miles per hour. In addition to two pilots, a navigator, and a flight engineer, the 231-foot-long plane carries Air Force One stewards and seventy-six passengers. The plane has eighty-seven telephones.
While the average 747 has 485,000 feet of electrical wire, the presidential plane has 1.2 million feet, all shielded from the electromagnetic pulses that would be emitted during a nuclear blast. Near the front of the six-story-high plane, the president has an executive suite with a stateroom, dressing room, and bathroom with shower. The president also has a private office near the stateroom and a combination dining room and conference room. Toward the back are areas for the staff, Secret Service, guests, and the press.
Under Federal Aviation Administration regulations, Air Force One takes precedence over all other aircraft. When approaching an airport, it bumps other planes that preceded it into the airspace. Before it lands, Secret Service agents on the ground check the runway for explosives or objects such as stray tires. Generally, other aircraft may not land on the same runway for fifteen or twenty minutes before Air Force One lands.
As Bush walked out to the ramp, Jarvis stared at him in amazement. Bush was not wearing a suit. He had on an outdoor jacket and an open-collar shirt, just as the psychic had said he would. Jarvis exchanged glances with the advance leader, who had a shocked look on his face. Then Bush walked down the steps and got into the limousine's right side, his usual position. Jarvis started to relax. But after giving a short speech in Enid, Bush invited some friends to sit with him in the limo for the drive back to the airport. They got in first-on the right side. So Bush walked around the limo and sat down on the left side behind the driver. Again, the psychic had been right.
The advance leader decided the psychic could not be ignored. Never mind if anyone thought they were crazy. Better safe than sorry, he and Jarvis thought.
The advance leader ordered the motorcade to take the alternate route, which did not go by the overpass. No harm befell Bush.
The president was never told what had happened.
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