by Crisis of Character- A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience
One Palestinian delegate looked just like my mother. I broke my own ice with their group by mentioning it. That was my two seconds of diplomacy as I mentioned that my mother was Lebanese. Looking beyond each delegation’s smiles and surface formality, the Service reported to us that they believed that both diplomatic staffs were actually highly trained operatives. The Palestinians, we were told, were crazy enough to try anything. As far as I was concerned, they’d made it to the negotiating table by having their henchmen explode suicide vests. I wouldn’t put anything past them. Each person maneuvered through the rooms and hallways as if they were just finding a spot. All of us were thinking: Who will my partners kill? Who I am responsible for putting down?
My stomach always twists when I get nervous, but my palms don’t sweat anymore after those meetings. I’ve never since had reason to sweat as much as I did watching those sessions. I knew two things really existed from then on: pure hate and spies.
This was the West Wing; the country was run from here. The most sensitive information in the world passed through it. Confidential, Secret, Classified, and Top Secret documents were commonplace. The UD helped create a secure environment. We had to ensure that sensitive documents stayed “eyes only.” Just because someone enjoyed a clearance level didn’t mean that person was deemed “need to know.” This is why UD personnel needed to be impeccably trustworthy—trusted to secure documents, not to read them, and especially not to leak them.
Staffers might lack maturity, but it wasn’t as though we could surveil them. When Clinton’s administration gave way to George W. Bush’s, we knew—and I even saw—that some staffers were stealing the antique brass caps on the ends of the stairwells in the Old Executive Office Building. The administration dismissed this as office pranks, but lunches and even an agent’s gun had been put in the incinerator burn bags.
What are burn bags? After a document had been left in the open or after a staffer was finished with it, it was locked up in a safe or placed in a burn bag. To newcomers, burn bags looked odd. They were the size of fall cleanup leaf bags, but marked with bright white and orange letters and stripes. A UD officer would swing by (I had that duty occasionally), make small talk, and load the bags onto a flat cart, take them to another location, and destroy them in a custom incinerator.
All classified documents had to be in a properly cleared person’s immediate possession or locked in a safe—in other words, handled pretty much like firearms. Some documents were so hush-hush they had no electronic duplicates. Some staffers, usually policy makers, had the nasty habit of placing sensitive documents in their safes but not closing or locking them, or of leaving them in places that, while still in the White House, were vulnerable to the hundreds of other staffers, employees, visitors, tourists, and other people who worked there or simply passed through. At each shift start or when the president left the room, I ensured that safes were locked and their latches turned. If a classified document was left in the open—let’s say the president dashed out for a quick photo op—a UD officer like myself secured it in our weapons locker until Betty Currie or the president returned.
Military men hardly ever left items unattended. Some of Vice President Al Gore’s staffers—though not Gore himself—were notorious for such behavior, as well as for not closing or locking their safes. Per protocol, we’d secure these documents and report any infraction up the chain of command. Early on, I was even asked by my colleagues to talk to one staffer to reiterate the importance of closing up the office. Afterward staff really got on board, even checking with UD to ensure security.
The secretary of the Treasury notoriously abandoned materials on the Oval Office couch, in bathrooms, the Roosevelt Room, the Cabinet Room, and elsewhere. I secured his dossiers in my gun box a few times. That was our job. We were his safety net. A great deal weighed on high-level staffers’ minds, but while they were in the West Wing, we were there to protect their sensitive materials. Each document—down to each page—had its protocols.
But soon the nation would witness the most sensational leaks—ones never anticipated by any protocol.
10.
MOLE
The November 1995 federal shutdown was great, at least for me. The White House was empty; our jobs were cake. We read or even snacked in plain view because no one saw us—though we never sat down. Well, maybe we sat just a little. You try standing for hours on end. Being able to sit at times felt like a gift from God. It is!
The shutdown meant that that nonessential federal workers temporarily hit the bricks—and temporarily lost their paychecks. None of this applied to White House interns. As unpaid labor, they were welcomed with open arms. Moreover, they now received greater responsibilities. I hoped they wouldn’t be trusted with anything important, but they were.
Unfortunately, President Clinton, to his detriment, was left to his own devices. His wife was always the business partner, never the supporter. Before the shutdown, President Clinton was a complete opposite of his wife; he was unwaveringly jovial, a true extrovert. But once the shutdown arrived, he found himself surrounded by fair-weather friends or those who for professional reasons had to keep him at arm’s length.
President Clinton had no support group. I always had my friends and my family. Even better, I never mixed family and friends with my profession. The president had clearly sacrificed whatever real friends and family he might have had. I’ve mentioned that I never saw the First Couple so much as hold hands without cameras present. Once in the spotlight, they were warm. But that was a lie. Portraying the Clintons as a warm, middle-class family was a calculated marketing ploy, mere political theater. And that was never clearer than during the shutdown.
Without his cheerleaders, President Clinton was alone and looked it. Every president gets gray, but the president’s salt-and-pepper hair turned white. His eyes—the windows to his soul—aged even faster. I wished so badly, as a man to a man, to give him a pat on the back. But he wasn’t our friend, and surely he wasn’t mine. He needed to find his own bootstraps.
Pre-shutdown, interns were no strangers to us, though I rarely interacted with most of them. Because of necessary security clearances and the sensitive things being decided, they had no reason to be in my sector nor elsewhere in the West Wing.
Unauthorized personnel and classified materials don’t mix. As for the interns—especially one of them—we knew their ways. They pretended to be more important than they were. To gain West Wing access they’d stretch the truth, claiming they were delivering staffers’ messages as a favor or were “just seeing a friend”—or my favorite, they were “just looking for a bathroom.”
We called them straphangers and loiterers. Some tried to befriend us, even date or seduce us, to gain access to restricted areas and to power players. They were gold diggers as much as power diggers. They got their jobs thanks to political connections—that’s all. I was suspicious of the whole gig.
One in particular—just a nobody, another pretty face to us—quickly became a series of UD red flags. Monica Lewinsky thought she was slick, but man, she was obvious. She played dumb to make friends with White House staffers, Navy stewards, and even UD officers—anything to get closer to her target, President Clinton. I was often her biggest hurdle, but other officers also stood in her way and soon wearied of her weaseling.
During the shutdown, Monica visited Betty Currie’s office, and because of the president’s own failings, Monica gained the access she coveted. We soon figured out her motives. So did he, and soon they were having private “mentorship” meetings. He took her under his wing—grooming her for politics.
Sure.
Some dismissed her as young, naïve, and “chatty.” She even invited one officer to her family beach house. She had often been a straphanger when we were on break, but only for people in the president’s path despite officially working nowhere near us. On break, officers would remove their earpieces, unplug their mics, and crank up the volume on their radios. UD and SAs knew the president’s eve
ry move (well, maybe not every move) and location, so Monica hung around us batting her eyes until she overheard the president’s position or direction of travel, then bolted to maneuver into his path. She lived for even his passing glance.
What (if anything) she did all day as an intern mystified me. Some days she seemingly had nothing better to do than play I Spy the President. I didn’t care for her games but couldn’t fully anticipate where they’d lead. Still, I knew this: Monica Lewinsky was serious trouble.
Nobody had the right to move about the White House on his or her volition. The building revolved around a high-security, compartmentalized system coordinated down to each individual. Monica was probing each avenue toward the president, and each UD officer in the rotations knew it.
“Ms. Lewinsky, without a specific reason or on the task of a staffer, you cannot be in the area,” we’d lecture her.
She’d keep playing dumb, drawing from her well-thumbed playbook of lame excuses:
“I’m just here to use the bathroom.”
“You mean I have to walk all the way around?”
“I just thought I’d check in on Betty.”
“They asked me to deliver something here.”
“I’m just here to see Nel [a White House steward].”
“I’m just here to see a friend.”
She was maddening. Her excuses were insulting. Still, I tried never to take my work personally. Working the fence line I’d grown a thick skin against crackpots demanding to see the president. But did she really think her sorry pretexts would work? She was supposedly a smart person—hey, someone let her have her internship. But she was initially stationed at the East Wing or Old Executive Office Building—on the opposite side of the complex!
“Unless you have one of these [blue White House passes], you cannot be here,” I scolded her, as if she were a misbehaving child. “Monica… Monica, you know you can’t be here.”
Eventually she would catch sight of me and swing a quick U-turn. That’s how I knew she was probing the West Wing. Never knowing who was on shift, she was always scheming for a way in. If I was there, she’d just try again some other time. Or she’d try sneaking in via neighboring offices and corridors—a real red flag. Mostly by word of mouth, through radios, post meetings, and briefings, UD officers communicated her actions, yet she persisted. A few UD officers besides myself (particularly a female officer named Sandy) butted heads with her.
A UD officer would block her. She’d go around to another hallway. A different UD officer would check, and she’d give them a different excuse for her presence—as if we didn’t have radios. I made my notes but couldn’t do any more than that. Meanwhile, she was establishing ties with the presidential staff, other White House staff, and Navy stewards.
Pre-shutdown, Monica and I had numerous awkward run-ins but apparently not enough for her to back off or for me to realize just whom I was dealing with. Then Monica—and other women—kept appearing even more. Initially I assumed it was all work, though with Monica that was very hard to believe. Eventually I didn’t.
A new guy entered our rotation, and we didn’t fill him in on anything beyond what was official. A White House switchboard operator would phone our post to have us get the president for an important call. On such a mission, he discovered Monica and the president in a compromising position, as we by then all had, either unprofessionally close, embracing each other, making out, or on the Oval Office desk. He was furious that we hadn’t warned him. But we played matters very carefully. Everyone’s post notes were as cryptic as mine. We feared for our careers, and with good reason.
It was incredibly awkward to be roped into the president’s cheating. I was a married man; many of us were. Professionally this was just very bad. The Clintons had enemies; Ken Starr was honing in on Whitewater. How could President Clinton so willfully involve us in his sordid games? What a far cry he was from his predecessor. Why would a supposedly brilliant Rhodes scholar like Bill Clinton embark on such risks?
Once Monica appeared wearing a borderline unprofessional dress, a bit too short, if you asked me. I could only think, Who does she think she is? She was straphanging around George Stephanopoulos, and I shooed her like a stray cat. She hissed another lame excuse. I was fed up with her games, but at this moment the president arrived, easily catching her sight (or scent—I don’t know which). They made small talk. She walked away. Her mission was complete; she had caught the president’s wandering eye. She turned back to ensure she had his attention—and flipped up her black-and-white print dress to reveal her blue thong.
The president laughingly exclaimed something to the effect of “Hey, there!”
I wanted to vomit but ended up nervously laughing myself once the president disappeared into George’s office. Were we invisible to them? Or did they feel they were invisible to us? Was all of this nonsense worth destroying his image? His very presidency?
And where was Mrs. Clinton? I couldn’t be sure. PPD and FLOTUS detail agents coordinated their respective protectees’ movements so as to avoid one another. They carefully communicated when the president was “with company.”
I was sick of being put in awkward positions.
One weekend, the president was alone in the Oval Office. Monica appeared—on a weekend—with a stack of papers she claimed the president had requested. I snatched them from her hands. It was just a copy of his morning briefings, a collection of news articles. I informed her the president already had a set on his desk and that she had no business there. I handed them back to her. Her lying pissed me off. She departed, but about five minutes later, President Clinton emerged.
“Hey, Officer.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Did someone come by here with some files for me?”
He wasn’t asking. I knew the game. Let the girl through, idiot!
“No, sir, but if I see someone I’ll let them know.”
“Thanks,” he said in his charming accent, adding a thumbs-up and a nod. His door shut.
“Was that as obvious to you as it was to me?” I asked another agent.
“I told you. That’s how it is with them,” he answered.
Soon I saw Monica peeking out from the nearby Roosevelt Room. The room had a phone, and she had clearly used it to call the president and alert him that she had just failed on her mission to reach the Oval Office.
But people don’t just call the president. If she, as an intern, picked up the phone and said to a White House operator, “This is Monica the intern, I’d like to speak to the president, please,” they’d hang up in disbelief. Most likely, they would inform their superior that some arrogant intern should be reprimanded for thinking she was worth even a second of the president’s time.
So, something was going on… something ominous.
The White House Communications Agency (WHCA) maintains a top-secret phone line connecting senior military brass directly to the president. On Sundays, the WHCA calls to test it, and the officer on post, like myself, answers to ensure that it works. I usually answered, “Pizza Hut,” and the WHCA guy would laugh.
But this was no laughing matter. The only way Monica could have reached the Oval Office from the Roosevelt Room phone was to dial that same secret number.
The president had provided Monica Lewinsky with access to his direct line. He had given her a number so secret that it required not only a four-digit pass code but a rhythmically coded one, that is, one not just depending on the right numbers being entered but also for how long each digit key is depressed and even how long the pauses between digits last.
A PPD agent advised me to leave the matter alone. I should have listened, but I didn’t. Why should I? I had a job to do. I was supposed to protect the president!
“You have no idea what it’s like on the road,” the agent would say with a smile. Was he warning me?
Every time I stopped Monica, I stuck my neck out. What the president did in the privacy of the Executive Mansion was his private business, b
ut workplace ethics were involved here. Simultaneously, a new PPD agent bragged to me that he was “seeing” Monica. That stunned me, and I pulled him aside.
“She and the president have a behind-closed-doors kind of relationship,” I warned him.
I was learning. Our mandatory, nauseatingly boring HR sexual harassment courses taught us that people like Monica were trouble. They cautioned that unless males and females worked together, they should avoid-avoid-avoid prolonged contact. They advised us to make notes of everything. Seemingly mundane matters might later prove vital. Make that note! Write down the date and time! Cover your ass, dammit!
Matters only got worse. On the behest of the other officers—and to cover my own ass—I approached a staff member for White House Deputy Chief of Staff Evelyn Lieberman. Evelyn was not only the first female in her position, she was top-notch.
I didn’t dare reveal to her staffer the nature of my concern. I could only tell her that I needed five minutes of her boss’s time for an off-the-record talk. Lieberman and I conferred the very next day.
“What can I do for you, Gary?”
It was just me and her. She had work to do, and her tone said to cut to the chase.
My shoulders rose as I stammered, “I’m gonna ask you to do something, and I need you not to ask me why—I can’t give you any details. If you want to do it, fine, but please don’t ask me why. I think I’m overstepping my position, but I’m going to ask this anyway. Do you know the intern Monica?”
Arms folded, Evelyn responded, “Yeah?”
“You need to get her removed from here. She shouldn’t be here. And it’s not personal. But you should just get her removed from the West Wing. If you think I’ve overstepped, and you need to report me to the Secret Service, that’s fine, too. But you should know I believe I have your—the administration’s—best interest in mind.”