by Crisis of Character- A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience
“Well, put yourself in my position,” I said. “When I came on in 1991 we had a competitive shotgun team, rifle team, and pistol team. The UD would host an annual pistol match with police officers from around the world. It was a morale and pride booster and conveyed a sense of appreciation to local police departments across the country for their assistance. Everyone felt better. For a while, the Secret Service was the best. We couldn’t be beat!
“Then they squashed that competition because the UD ran it. They ended Uniformed Division Benefit Fund and USSS director Brian Stafford even closed our gift shop. Kaput! They pulled elaborate strings and gypped us out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. They kicked us out of the White House to start their own gift shop. And this doesn’t bother you? The agents treat us like shit. It’s not typical government behavior. It’s vindictive. It’s designed to be demoralizing—and it’s working!”
I was rolling, going on to tell of an internal agency audit of UD-acquired vehicles. Some were missing! Vanished! These weren’t paper clips or file cabinets, these were cars. Missing! They turned up eventually—as take-home cars for agents (not officers) in Seattle.
The list went on.
“They could spin it any way they wanted to stay out of jail,” I fumed, “and I don’t expect the Federal Air Marshal Service to be any different—I don’t. A shit sandwich is a shit sandwich, but for more money it goes down easier.”
He stormed off too but came back furious. I had opened his eyes. “G-ddamn it, you’re right!” he now agreed.
“We’re like the frog in a pot of boiling water,” I continued. “Turn up the heat slowly enough, and the frog never knows the difference until he’s cooked.” I let that sink in.
I showed my SAC (Special Agent in Charge) my FAMS contract. I asked him straight-up: “How could I refuse that?”
The SAC eyed its numbers, pored over its details: $72,000 a year before OT; $20,000 more to my annual retirement. He sighed heavily but couldn’t help agree. “I can’t believe they’ll pay you guys agents’ wages!”
I wanted to say, Oh—you mean living wages.
In the few days it took for my transfer paperwork to clear, he simmered down. He didn’t hold a grudge; he even gave me two memorabilia plaques. Everybody posed for a group picture. My fellow UD instructors respected my decision and took me out to a Mexican joint. Lunch was great—and added a sombrero to my going-away stash.
Genny and I decided to max out our retirement payments. We’d move to a better neighborhood with better schools once I got the posting I wanted.
The president is still only one American. I was protecting hundreds—if not thousands. What good was any OT at the White House if our airlines remained unprotected, soft targets? The White House was only as secure as the weakest plane. What better way to serve the country than by going to FAMS?
International terrorists and even domestic criminals would still employ tactics dating from the 1960s and 1970s, when any number of planes were bombed or hijacked. Pre-9/11 there were plenty of attacks, bombings, and hijackings. Once one ended, the nation just clicked off its radios and TVs, went back to business, and forgot a crisis ever existed.
Shit happens. We can either learn from it or suffer the consequences. Some of my colleagues doubted that air marshals could do the job, no matter what they were paid. Air marshal tryouts demanded rigorous physical fitness standards, but the job required marshals to stay in a sedentary, seated position all the time—a potentially lethal assignment. The dramatic shift between extreme training and unending, repeated, hours-long inaction can cripple both body and mind and even cause a pulmonary embolism—a sudden, deadly blood clot.
NBC News’ David Bloom died during the April 2003 Iraq invasion in Iraq just that way. As a frontline reporter embedded with the military, he spent most of his days confined inside armored vehicles. He developed a blood clot, deep-vein thrombosis, and pulmonary embolism. The human body is not designed to be restricted, reclined, confined, or prone for hours on end.
Most of us former UD officers turned air marshals didn’t worry too much about that, though. We worried about a guy named Tom Quinn, a former U.S. Secret Service agent appointed to head the newly augmented FAMS. Quinn had a reputation for strongly disliking UD. Crazy stories circulated about him when he retired from the USSS in 1998. It gave many of us pause that they dug him up in 2001 to integrate FAMS into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security.
“If you think UD has gotten bad, Gary, with FAMS you’re jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire with Quinn,” many UD warned me.
I didn’t listen.
No agency is perfect. Nobody’s perfect. Bureaucracies certainly aren’t. I learned that a long time ago. But I believed wholeheartedly in the FAMS mission. I also believed in FAMS because a few months after 9/11, as a JJRTC firearms instructor I got a call from the lead instructor that we were to recertify agents from the New York City field office. They were in New York during 9/11, and from a very frank discussion I knew it wouldn’t be a normal certification.
Terrorists didn’t just destroy the World Trade Center’s north and south towers on 9/11, they also destroyed the forty-seven-story Seven World Trade Center, which housed a USSS field office. At JJRTC today, there’s a display of a German-made Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine pistol and a revolver—or what’s left of them—from 9/11. The inferno reached sufficient temperatures to melt the Secret Service’s fire-resistant safe and twist the barrels of weapons inside like pretzels.
If only it was just metal that Osama bin Laden (whom Bill Clinton had a chance to capture) and his thugs destroyed.
A new technician at our Trade Center field office had just been assigned there a few days previously. On September 11 he raced from the safety of his room at the Marriott World Trade Center hotel into the fires of One Trade Center to tend to the injured. In the Army he had been a medic, and saving lives was his business.
We do not know how many lives he saved before he lost his own. A Port Authority Police officer was the last person to see him alive.
I wasn’t at the Trade Center that day, but I was later one of several instructors tasked with recertifying agents from our vanished field office in regard to their service pistols. These men and women had been caught up in the chaos and buried alive for three hours under a pile of tower rubble in a wrecked New York City Fire Department truck. A fireman who helped pull them out was never seen again, one of the nearly three thousand persons who died that day.
Our people still looked traumatized from their experience. We saw it in their demeanor. It pulled at my stomach. Agents are masters of confidence, bravado, and tactical ability. These men and women weren’t trainees; they’d confronted all sorts of New York criminals in the worst areas. But they were so visibly emotionally scarred.
Their hands shook noticeably—even before they picked up their pistols. Their bodies seemed frail, low, and bent. I had trouble keeping my composure because I never expected to see agents in this condition. What had they seen to render them so fragile? We avoided betraying our astonishment. This was shell shock. If these agents were ever to function again, they’d have to grab the bull by the horns, pick up their firearms, and master them again. It was going to be a long and painful day.
We violated normal protocol and checked and cleared their firearms before shooting commenced. Our supervisor had warned us to do that—and he was damn right! Each pistol was completely occluded with gray dust that came from 9/11’s holocaust. Our armorer had to take each gun apart to clear it. Fire a gun in that condition, and it could explode and blow off your hand. The sorry condition of those handguns betrayed their owners’ sorry mental state, perhaps even more than their haunted expressions and shaking hands did. With each round fired they actually shuddered, some a little, some a great deal. Each shot startled them. I’ll never forget that day. But slowly they regained their confidence. We hoped so much that we had been helpful in reacclimating them to their old lives, their old selves.
When I started at FAMS, air marshals enjoyed a reputation as elite combat-pistol marksmen and experts in close quarter combat (CQC), in part because of incredibly high air marshal quarterly qualifications. Every law enforcement agency, from the most elite Special Forces down to local police, possesses special assets and abilities that others either lack or possess in more limited quantities. Instead of every agency reinventing the wheel, we needed to cross-train.
Law enforcement and the military finally stopped being selfish with specialized training. Law enforcement agencies and military schools held competitions and training events. They called each other to tap other’s knowledge. For the USSS, I’d demonstrated the Uzi and the Belgian-made P-90 personal defense weapon to other law enforcement groups. In turn, for example, Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technicians trained us. If a unit or agency needed to learn hostage negotiations (or how to run a press conference), they went to the FBI; for drug-related training, they turned to DEA; for protective details, they went to USSS.
Ultimately, we’re all protecting Americans from harm.
For close-quarter pistol marksmanship on an airplane, the best were the original sky marshals who eventually turned into air marshals. They were respected by all agencies and military branches. But whenever an agency expands dramatically, a danger exists that standards may plunge.
As it expanded, FAMS contracted with a private firearms contractor and also recruited a cadre of retired mid- to high-level USSS agents to “modernize” FAMS training. It reminded me of when the Clintons wanted to make us more “user friendly.” I always have to ask myself: Modernize and be user friendly for whom? I was apprehensive. At my age, would I be able to hack yet another training school and survive stricter physical, marksmanship, and classroom standards? If I couldn’t—I didn’t want to think about that. I had to commit everything I had to make it through.
Before 9/11 the Tactical Pistol Course (TPC) was the standard annual certification for in-flight air marshals. But when former USSS agents arrived, “modernization” translated into dumbing down and diluting established air marshal standards. The Tactical Pistol Course became the Practical Pistol Course (PPC), which remains a joke—but which is now the standard course for all federal law enforcement agencies. It might suffice for some agency’s missions, but it’s a far cry from what’s required for qualifying competent air marshals. Not a sufficient standard to foil 9/11-style four-man hijacking teams at thirty thousand feet with no backup in a 530-mph flying aluminum tube! In fact, it’s the same course that was used to qualify D.C.’s Federal Building Police forty years ago. We needed to heighten standards after 9/11, not lower them.
How could this have happened?
Simple. Arrogant agents became FAMS supervisors, and management all the way up the chain couldn’t pass the TPC, so they just lowered the standards across the board. The PPC isn’t much of a standard. With practice, just about anyone can meet it. And the physical standard? I couldn’t find anyone who knew about it. It was all a mystery, which made me extremely nervous. But I didn’t know that going into FAMS. (I did have a heads-up warning when I heard the name Quinn. But more on that in the pages ahead.)
Just before I left for FAMS training on December 24, 2002, a baby boy entered our world. The place hasn’t been the same since. He’s my little man, and if UD didn’t appreciate how I wanted to spend more time with my wife, my daughter, and my son and raise them right, then they could find someone else. Even more, I was thinking of what kind of world I wanted my kids to grow up in; I wanted them to look up at tall buildings and say “Whoa,” to look at airplanes and think of vacation and business trips, not how fast they could all come tumbling down. It inspired me to train and shoot harder.
While waiting for FAMS training to begin, I continued my JJRTC protective details at or near the White House. But I took time to prepare myself for whatever FAMS might have in store. I drilled and drilled, putting several hundred rounds of ammunition through my service pistol each day. Reloading during a training session, I noticed a piece of hot metal drop from its magazine well onto the cement. I knew exactly what that part was: the back end of the trigger bar. I reloaded, aimed, and engaged the next target. BAM! Click. Click. But I didn’t miss a beat and unorthodoxly turned it upside down and fired with one hand.
“What the hell kind of gangster shit is that, Gary?” asked the armorer as I passed him the broken gun.
I explained that how on my reload, the trigger bar’s back portion had fallen out of the gun—something just unheard-of. But I was pushing my firearm and myself to the limits even with my gun incredibly hot. Even with a piece of my service pistol AWOL I was going to take the fight to the enemy. I explained to the armorer how I immediately diagnosed and addressed the issue. I had learned it from a JJRTC range master. By turning the gun upside down, I could continue using it. I’d never tried that before, but it worked.
Good armorers love broken guns—broken from being worked so hard. “Damn, Gary, good job!” he said, and a little crowd of officers formed, ogling my broken firearm and learning for themselves.
I’d logged so many hours of advanced service pistol training that I knew it would work. I knew that firearm intimately because that’s what professionalism requires. As the saying goes, “You won’t know your limits until you push yourself to them.” I was confident—or maybe just hopeful—that even at my age, even with older knees and eyes, I wasn’t just going to meet FAMS limits, I was going to push them. The enemy wouldn’t find a chink in the chain mail of any plane I guarded.
After I was accepted into FAMS, two experienced sky marshals grilled me in hypothetical scenarios before I packed for Artesia, New Mexico, and my first day at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC).
Part of our training involved a shoot house. A typical shoot house consists of a warren of thick-walled rooms and hallways lined with old tires, thick wood, and other materials to absorb live-fire bullets. Most shoot houses have furniture similar to that found in a house or drug den, a sofa and other furniture as obstacles with spaces like closets or hallways a suspect or even an innocent person could hide in or shoot from. A mix of noncombatants and bad-guy dummy targets are concealed or in the open, even behind doorways. The idea is that training should be as realistic as possible to best condition the tactical mindset and to ready trainees for real-life situations. When clearing an airplane or airport of Tangos (our lingo for terrorists), we have to be able to rapidly discern between Tangos, innocents, and our partners. Then we either issue verbal commands or engage Tangos with as little collateral damage as possible.
It may seem funny, but when thrown into a shoot house lots of guys end up concentrating on so many things that they trip over stuff, run into others, and do really dumb or dangerous stuff like freezing up and blocking doorways, obstructing their partners, or even pointing their firearms at corners of the room that are obviously no longer a threat. That’s because they can’t focus under the stress of absorbing so much stimuli while following the mission. Shoot house instructors keep changing the position and quantity of bad and good guys in each session. It keeps students thinking under stress as they move. After all, this is no written exam.
It can all be very dangerous. JJRTC training starts with dry fire—no one has live ammunition. Students slowly go through the drills, saying, “Bang!” Afterward, the instructor asks why you did the things you did. It’s excruciatingly methodical. The next step is paintball rounds. Only after that do we employ live ammunition. If you can’t do your job in a shoot house, you can’t do it in real life—an absolute truth for an air marshal in midflight.
As an instructor at JJRTC, I understood when trainees told me they were nervous and had trouble concentrating; it’s a lot for a rookie’s brain to wrangle. I called them distraction issues but tried to keep instruction reassuring.
“Instead of remembering and thinking about all the different things all at once, just focus on the mission only. Let muscle memory and tr
aining kick in. Don’t think—do! Ask yourself, ‘What am I trying to do? What is my mission?’ Then do that and think of nothing else. Focus on that and the rest will take care of itself. Don’t sweat the small stuff, and ninety percent of life is small stuff. Don’t focus on not failing, focus on succeeding,” I would say. Sometimes I’d give them a minute to settle down. Sometimes I’d throw them right back in.
But for FAMS, the shoot house was, instead of a drug den, an airplane.
In a shoot house, there was trash and crap on the floor, tripping hazards, people everywhere, just as in real life. Tangos can use corners and doorways as fatal funnels, kill zones whereby it’s easy to annihilate you. On a plane the whole thing is a giant funnel toward the flight deck. We could use fatal funnels to our advantage, too, especially since our job was to protect the passengers second, maintain control of the aircraft first. We aimed to be as clandestine as the enemy, but they had to reveal themselves first. Once they revealed themselves, we let them stab themselves with our swords; we used the fatal funnels against them.
But here, I noticed, these arrogant old fart instructors, former USSS special agent desk jockeys, were screwing it up for old guys and new alike. It was one of our first drills in the shoot house, and we jumped right into live fire. Many of these students had just handled a gun for the first time and were still concentrating on managing recoil. Not surprisingly, the first guy to enter the shoot house airplane bungled it badly.
The instructor, whom I’ll call Timmy, started demonstrating how to “unf—ourselves.” We sat in the passenger seats of the shoot house airplane. Timmy stood like a flight attendant giving a preflight safety briefing to passengers. Timmy, like many FAMS instructors, had never actually been an instructor before being hired here. Timmy gestured with his firearm as he was talking and then started pointing his firearm at us, as if we were the Tango targets or passengers on the plane! Even a little kid is taught when he’s at the dinner table, he shouldn’t gesture with a fork or knife. It’s rude and potentially dangerous. A child given a BB gun knows the three basics of firearm safety. The very first is to never point a loaded firearm at anything you’re not willing to kill or destroy.