by Crisis of Character- A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience
“Yeah, there’s no reason for that,” they kept reaffirming.
“It’s just a simple in-and-out.”
Meanwhile, President Clinton was riding (and still rides) in an armored limousine that rivalled any APC. It just enjoyed the funding to make it look like a Cadillac.
In early 1993 military brass suddenly started scurrying in and out of the West Wing situation room. A Sit Room (Situation Room) operative alerted me, “We got major troops in contact in Somalia. The first reports are that we’ve already taken some casualties, so there’s going to be a lot of guys coming and going around here. It’s bad.”
Only then did I realized the context of Les Aspin’s briefing and what George, Rahm, and others were discussing.
“Shit,” I said with a sigh as he walked off. “Well, where the hell is Somalia?” I said to myself. I was working so many hours I couldn’t even tell what day of the week it was.
A coworker and I wheeled some globes into the Roosevelt Room and located Somalia in eastern Africa. My heart ached for the guys there. Whenever there’s a terrorist attack or “troops in contact” (jargon for our soldiers being engaged by the enemy), every veteran’s adrenaline and anger spike.
Tension ratcheted up around the White House. Sundays were usually very slow and popular with tourists, but dignitaries and higher-ups from all over descended in droves. All tours were canceled, and nonessentials were sent home. The atmosphere was silent except for the grinding of teeth and biting of nails.
The Battle of Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, was part of Operation Restore Hope. We remember it now as “Black Hawk Down” from the novel (and subsequent film) of that name by an on-the-scene journalist, Mark Bowden. Army Rangers paid a heavy price for not looking “too intimidating” or “like invaders,” valiantly fighting while stripped of the equipment they requested. Had the administration not ignorantly meddled with events, the 160 Special Forces operators of Army Rangers and Delta wouldn’t have taken so many casualties. And here is what the Clinton Machine didn’t comprehend: Our guys wouldn’t have had to inflict as many casualties either, shooting their way out against 4,000–6,000 Somalis with an entire city of civilians trapped in the crossfire. The Rangers became a legend that day but lost eighteen fine men and suffered seventy-three wounded.
Years later, I realized why this always bothered me so. The Clinton leadership style had conflicting ideologies: They wanted to help but never hurt, like a doctor wanting to heal but never use a scalpel or draw blood. He misses both goals abysmally.
Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon, two Delta operators, won posthumous Medals of Honor for taking the initiative to secure one of the Black Hawk helicopter crash sites until Rangers could reinforce them. They knew the risk. They saw the enemy closing in before they even landed.
At the White House during their Medal of Honor ceremony, the father of a Delta operator became unglued, furious that he was to receive the Medal of Honor from President Clinton, who in the father’s words was too cowardly to accept a draft to the Vietnam War at the behest of the president at the time, Lyndon Johnson. He believed President Clinton unworthy to bestow the award on his late son. His wife apologized to me and the other officers for her husband. But we felt the same way.
“Ma’am, you don’t have to apologize. We completely understand. Take as much time as you need,” I told her as I allowed them a buffer of privacy from the press.
Yes, we totally understood, and we were getting choked up, too. Their anguish was a horrendous sight and started to change the way I looked at things. It struck me so profoundly. That father wanted his son back—and I knew this ceremony was merely part of the administration’s political strategy to tamp down its Somalian “scandal.” Little did I know that a few of the guys who knew Shughart and Gordon—and were present that day—would later become so important to my life and influential in the tactical world as well.
Black Hawk Down never really left me.
7.
“BILLARY”
As soon as Mr. Clinton became the president, Mrs. Clinton and her staff sought to repair the Clinton brand among groups they thought had been damaged during the campaign, scheduling galas, balls, and dinners. They hosted open house tours day and night, especially around Christmas and for the military. What she and her staffers failed to realize was that the White House had a budget like any other government entity. Each shindig still had to be paid either from the Executive Residence budget or the Democratic Party’s purse.
Event planners dropped the ball on costs. One Rose Garden event required big, rented, air-conditioned tents that ruined the lawn. Landscaping crews and the National Park Service tore up all the dead grass, installed new sod, and sent them the bill. That’s expensive. But you can’t just have a whole White House lawn muddy and looking like crap. “Just get it done,” staffers would say.
Party rental companies refused future events until they were paid. The discussions were plain embarrassing, but when I heard them I wasn’t eavesdropping. They were shouted in the hallway. The Clintons believed that a magic royal pot of money somehow existed for their every whim.
The Bush administration had upgraded the White House telecommunications system. It wasn’t easy. Imagine an elaborate phone system wired into a building built when the only common utility was plumbing. The Clinton staff upgraded it yet again. The catch: The Clinton administration hadn’t anticipated that it had to actually pay for things, and the bill blindsided them. We heard about this both from the West Wing staffers talking or yelling about it and from the AT&T technicians we escorted about the building. These technicians further revealed to us that the new administration believed that Republicans in the Bush operation had tapped the White House system to listen in on them.
The Vice President’s Residence is at the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue, a few blocks from the White House. Technicians at the Control Center of the Technical Service were surprised to see alarms going off at the house. First carbon monoxide, then heat alarms, then other alarms. Even the radiation alarm! Something was seriously amiss. SAs and UD officers immediately responded, letting themselves in. They found Vice President Al Gore standing on a chair, pulling an alarm out of the ceiling, looking for hidden cameras and listening devices.
Early on, the staff kept promising payments but it was common knowledge that they had no idea of where they were coming from. But the buck kept getting passed because Mrs. Clinton didn’t want to hear “no,” and no one wanted to be the bearer of bad news. Evergreen was spoiled. Her doting, barely post-adolescent staffers resembled enabling, weak-willed parents. She threw massive tantrums. As her husband’s term continued, those tantrums and her attitude toward us and various White House staff worsened.
Years later I read George Stephanopoulos’s memoir, All Too Human. I was amazed at how candid it was. It was a page-turner, bringing many bad memories rushing back. He wrote:
When Hillary was angry, you didn’t always know it right away—a calculated chill would descend over time. [Bill] Clinton’s anger was a more impersonal physical force, like a tornado. The tantrum would form in an instant and exhaust itself in a violent rush. Whoever happened to be in the way would have to deal with it; more often than not, that person was me.*
While I often saw the president fume, I rarely saw him become irate. Meanwhile I often saw, heard, or heard about the First Lady’s volcanic eruptions at UD officers, SAs (especially on her own detail), and all the people who worked at the White House. I laughed at Stephanopoulos’s take because it seemed we witnessed opposite things. While the president must have vented his frustrations to the staff, Mrs. Clinton vented on everyone, and it got worse the more at home she felt in the White House. Most of us knew to brace for her inevitable eruptions. They didn’t happen every day, but behind closed doors we learned about them fast. In public she was everyone’s best friend. Privately, she was her normal self.
It was early September 1995. I had seen the news like everyone else. The night before,
a Metro police officer had alleged that George Stephanopoulos was in the midst of a hit-and-run when the officer stopped him and administered a Breathalyzer test for alcohol. George’s car was usually parked on West Executive, for weeks at a time it seemed, because he hardly drove. It had dings all around and a busted taillight. The past night, he’d busted another. George arrived in his office, attracting a group of young straphanger female staffers along with his assistant, Laura. According to George in Almost Human:
I had been arrested in Georgetown. The charge was “hit and run”; the truth was that I couldn’t maneuver my car out of a tight parking spot on M Street. When I scraped the bumper ahead of me, an excitable police officer who happened by recognized me and made a scene—patting me down as a crowd gathered around. More bad luck, I had carelessly let my license expire. He cuffed my hands behind my back and called in four cars to take me to the station. Although my car never left the curb, I was cited for leaving the scene of an accident. Several hours later, I was released with an apology from the station chief, and the charges were dropped. But the damage was done: Video footage of my arrest was all over the morning news.
“I mean, who does this cop think he is? You know, typical A-hole cop,” he continued in the office. “I barely nudged the car. They just had to call four cars over!”
He was just like all the other staffers we had either kicked out or had an issue with: They had pushed the envelope too far and the LEOs knew it was going to be a political heavyweight battle afterward.
George blustered—which was typical. It never surprised me. The Clinton people seemed to regard police and military personnel as if we had some grand conspiracy on them, as if we had a “most wanted” deck of playing cards with their faces on it. From the way I knew George, I was sure instead of the officer’s recognizing George, it was George who played the “Do you know who I am?” game. George kept dragging out the story, talking so loudly that everyone in the hallway could hear him. Laura saw me snickering in the hallway, tensed up, and tried to flag George off the story, which made it even funnier for me.
“Hey, George,” I said. “I understand that you had an interesting weekend.”
All the girls looked so awkward. He shrugged me off, and I left laughing. He didn’t care, and I knew he, like so many others in the White House, had lost the ability to see themselves through others’ eyes. Laura visited me afterward, ostensibly for small talk, but probably really to apologize. I preempted her by saying that I thought of George’s self-importance as merely comical.
In a way it was almost guaranteed that the president would vent to George, while Mrs. Clinton would vent to whoever happened to pull the short straw that day. Take, for example, the morning of Tuesday, June 13, 1995.
Just another day at the White House. I answered my phone outside the Oval Office.
“Heads up, there’s a shit storm coming your way.”
“I knew it!” I laughed. I’d grown used to such warnings. “Here we go.”
“Evergreen moving toward West Wing,” I heard in my ear.
Her detail stormed in. I always avoided eye contact when she was on the warpath. Everyone got the hell out of her way.
Mrs. Clinton was a joke, taking herself and the entire administration’s minutiae so seriously. Her “brand” was her only concern. She was a faux leader, all bark, no bite, but in a very real power position as First Lady. I thanked God that the Secret Service answered to the Treasury Department and wasn’t some private presidential army.
“They f—ed us, Bill!” Hillary screamed.
I stifled a laugh.
The president tried his best to calm her down. He couldn’t. Hillary Clinton possessed no perspective.
“We need to get rid of these assholes, Bill!”
She thought she was being tough—in command—but the issue commanded her.
She fumed that the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division, my branch, disloyal leftovers from Papa Bush, conspired against the administration. “They’ve had it out for us from the beginning!” she kept yelling.
She continued screaming about how we had treated campaign event attendees, a festering, deep-seated grudge that she and many administration types harbored against us and the entire Secret Service. Members of the Presidential Protection Division and her own First Lady Protection Division agent—as well as I, the UD officer posted to the Oval Office—stood silently by, hearing wave after wave of vitriol wash over us.
The door shut.
We remained outside exchanging chuckles and exasperated looks. It’s inappropriate to eavesdrop, but with the old building acoustics and how loudly she yelled, it was impossible not to hear. White House acoustics are very strange. Scream inside a room, and everyone in the hallway hears it. Maybe she knew that, but no one dared tell her.
Hillary’s antics made my job interesting. She’d explode in my face without reservation or decorum, then confide in some visiting VIP, “This is one of my favorite officers, Gary Byrne.” She’d put her hand on my shoulder for good measure. I’d smile and nod. But we were like furniture to them.
The day of Hillary’s screaming, I moved to the edge of my post, not wanting to hear anything or be seen in eavesdrop territory. For forty-five minutes she berated the president.
“Man, she hates you guys,” whispered one agent.
“Of course it’s us,” I said sarcastically—it was never their fault.
“I can’t believe he’s defending you guys,” said the other.
I couldn’t believe it, either.
“You can’t just do that,” the president kept repeating. She wouldn’t take no for an answer—even from him!
When she left, I poked my head into Betty Currie’s office. “So, how’d that go?” I asked.
Betty Currie, the president’s discreet personal secretary, did her best to ignore the issue. I ducked back outside.
Neither the First Lady nor the administration staffers possessed any desire to understand our role—or even their own. Mountains of bureaucracy, protocols, and very different American experiences separated us. Name the incident, and instead of trying to understand, she’d yell. But if she’d had her way, we’d have been gone that day.
Inconsequential events surrounding a visit from a forty-strong gay-rights delegation led by openly gay Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank had ignited this morning’s rage. They had come to lobby the president, Vice President Gore, and senior staff. During his campaign, President Clinton had promised gays much. Once in office, he delivered “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” They weren’t satisfied. The Clintons had to balance their demands with those of the military.
But people like Barney Frank and Bill Clinton discredited their own causes. Clinton was secretive, corrupt, and a womanizer. Congressman Frank hired a male prostitute and sexual partner as an aide and driver, albeit with personal funds, not taxpayers’. His attaché later ran a male escort service out of the congressman’s house in Washington. The House Ethics Committee slapped Congressman Frank on the wrist for fixing some parking tickets and lying about knowing his attaché had a criminal record. That didn’t prevent Frank’s reelection and he kept pushing for his cause. But his notoriety was a lightning rod. That prostitution scandal didn’t help his reputation.
Each member of Frank’s delegation was listed as usual in my paperwork. The title of the delegation itself was boldly marked: “HIV Positive.” Our screeners took note of this, and their usual safety precautions immediately increased.
As a trained first responder, each day I checked my FAT (First Aid and Trauma) kit and had my UD-issued blue nitride gloves designed to protect me. It wasn’t for AIDS. Casual physical contact doesn’t spread the disease. We needed gloves to inspect visitors’ bags. Worker’s compensation and Department of Health and Human Services rules required us to use this protection because we came in daily contact with tampons, tissues, and certain personal vibrating devices. People’s bags were gross. But we had to search them.
A prick from a
syringe hidden in someone’s bag could be life threatening—it had happened. UD had tried obtaining ballistic search gloves, but the administrators deemed them too expensive and unnecessary. If they had done our jobs, they’d have been wearing astronaut suits. Some guys bought their own search gloves.
That morning a couple of UD officers overdid it, donning their gloves as if they were about to perform a rectal exam. One (I’ll call him Crusty—an old-school Vietnam combat veteran, a great guy) made a show of slapping on his blue gloves.
“Why are you doing that?” a visitor demanded.
“You know why.”
So the day started off on the wrong foot. But the delegation’s real ire resulted from the Clintons’ having made promises they couldn’t keep. Representative Frank’s delegation wanted to make waves; they loved being offended. With the glove incident they got their chance, the PR opportunity of a lifetime.
I knew the guys who had checked in Frank’s delegation. I’d worked their rotation myself, checking thousands of bags. Joking kept us vigilant—it’s counterintuitive, but somehow it kept us alert. Yes, this time it was a bit much. On an outrage scale of 1–10, however, this should have been a 1. But remember: If we didn’t check everyone for everything, maybe a John Hinckley would get through.
That didn’t stop the charge of the Politically Correct Brigade. The Baltimore Sun headlined, “Guards Don Gloves as Gay Officials Visit White House.” Other papers screamed similar headlines. Careers were on the line. Our UD leadership promised better training. The Clinton administration demanded that the Secret Service be more “user friendly.”
Better training? It never happened. Just a big grab-ass in the media, nothing on the ground level. The insinuation of homophobia by the Secret Service as a whole was reckless. And in the push for staying politically correct they nearly jettisoned the funding for the real training we needed, specifically on how to save lives in truly dangerous “friendly fire” situations. That wasn’t a joke. We’d nearly lost an officer, Scott Giambattista, to friendly fire the previous year. (See Chapter 9 for details.)