Over the next four years, Bill and I worked advance trips around the world, ate a lot of meals together, and shared a lot of down time together. He reminded me often of how I’d invited him out on that loading dock next to the garbage cans. But that’s how we came to understand that we could always negotiate. When politics and protection clashed, we could always find a compromise. On those occasions when Bill went off on a tangent, making all sorts of demands, I never questioned him in front of other people. We’d talk about it alone, off to the side, where he’d explain what he wanted to achieve, and with the president’s safety foremost in my mind, I’d find a way to do it. The most dangerous thing I can think of that any president has done for a photo op was George W. Bush in 2003, landing a jet on an aircraft carrier. I have to assume that the Secret Service strongly objected to it. I would have, because it was a very dangerous stunt and posed a totally unnecessary risk.
Short of anything like that, if Bill Henkel had wanted the president to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge at high noon, it would be okay with us, as long as everyone understood the implications: we’d shut down the Brooklyn Bridge six hours ahead of time; we’d make sure every window in every building on both sides of the bridge was closed; we’d need hundreds of policemen to help us do this; and he would be the one to take the heat from the predictable outcry, “Why did you close down the Brooklyn Bridge and gridlock New York traffic?” As long as he understood what this was going to entail and still wanted to do it, we’d make it happen. Luckily, when faced with anything even remotely close to that, Henkel’s cool head would prevail and he’d say, Forget it, let’s do something else.
A few months after Kansas City, having established the tone for our relationship, we set out together for a trip throughout the Pacific. The president was scheduled to make an autumn 1983 visit to Japan, Korea, and other locations, so ten weeks before his departure, we did “the survey,” the first of three long and stressful trips that need to take place before the president travels overseas.
Bill and Mike Deaver, along with Mark Weinberg, who was assistant press secretary, U.S. Army major Casey Bower, who was one of the president’s military aides, Jeannie Bull, from the State Department, someone from the National Security Council, an Air Force One pilot who needed to check out airports, a speechwriter who was looking to get the feel of the venues, and I flew out of Andrews Air Force Base on the most famous of the White House Boeing 707s—tail number 26000. That was John Kennedy’s Air Force One, the plane that took him to Dallas and brought his body home and on which Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president of the United States. The first few times I flew on that plane, I thought about the emotional and historical significance of it. But after a while it was just another airplane, and as part of this group, we flew hundreds of thousands of miles on it.
It was identical to the president’s plane, which bore the tail number 27000 and was nicknamed the Spirit of ’76. In fact, 26000 was the backup. To the right, as you walked in the front door, there was a communications station where the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) made sure the president could speak on the phone from the plane to anyone in the world, and that everyone on the plane could get in touch with the White House. Along the corridor, which ran down the right side of the plane, the first compartment on the left belonged to the president. It was just large enough for facing sofas that turned into beds, a desk, some chairs, and a private bath. On 26000, even though he wasn’t there, we still considered his quarters off-limits, and none of us went up there.
Right behind the president’s cabin, there was a conference room with a round table, some nice armchairs, and a small television where we played movies that were hard to watch and, because of the engine noise, difficult to hear. Behind that was a small compartment with a table for four and a table for six that was used by the staff, and then there was the Secret Service compartment with two tables. On one side, at the rear of the plane, there were ten seats for the press, and on the other there was a galley where our food was prepared. There was also a small galley up forward, just behind the cockpit, which was where stewards prepared the president’s meals. There were seats for only forty-two people.
Our flights on 26000 were usually very long, and all too often, because we crammed so much into those trips, flying time was our only down time. We heard each other’s war stories a hundred times, and the best of them belonged to Bill Henkel. He’d been on a Moscow trip with Nixon, staying in guest quarters at the Kremlin. Jeannie Bull was on that trip, too, and confirmed the story. One night after work, they all got together in one of the rooms for a nightcap and started looking around the room to see if they could find the listening device that they knew the KGB had invariably planted somewhere. They looked under the lamps and under the tables and finally pulled back the rug to find something very strange. It was a brass plate held in place by a screw. Having decided that this was the bug, they took it apart to see what it looked like. They used a coin to unscrew the cover, and all of a sudden they heard a huge crash, as the chandelier in the room below came loose from its fixture and fell to the floor.
After we got bored with war stories, we got into the habit of playing Trivial Pursuit and charades. Jeannie was my Trivial Pursuit partner, and together we knew a lot of trivial stuff. She was the State Department administration person who handled all the logistics for White House trips. It’s a little-known fact that the State Department pays for these trips. It’s an even more obscure fact that the president has a passport. It was Jeannie who turned over the president’s passport, and all our passports, to immigration control wherever we landed and saw to it that the formalities of a visit were properly dealt with. It’s a bureaucratic procedure, but everybody’s passport has to get processed. Jeannie skillfully handled the endless administrative tasks associated with these visits. But as far as we were concerned, her most important task on these advance trips was the trunk that became known as “Chez Jean-nay.” It followed us on every trip—except when we were with the president—and was our own portable cocktail bar. We made sure it was the first thing off the airplane and was delivered promptly to Jeannie’s room. She’d only open the trunk in the evenings, especially those nights when we’d fly in late from somewhere else and not have anything scheduled until the next day. Once it was open, we would have some drinks and the next game of charades could begin. Those evenings and those games helped to create a cohesiveness among us. On the plane, between games and war stories, we ironed out all the issues. We came to understand what everyone in the group needed to do, and that made solving problems among ourselves easier. We represented different entities and had our own agendas, and sometimes those objectives clashed, but we blended into a pretty solid team, and the results showed in the quality of the Reagan White House advances.
On that first trip together we stopped in Hawaii, then went on to Guam, where Air Force One would refuel with the president. At the far end of the Anderson Air Force Base runway were four B-52s on round-the-clock alert, with engines running, pilots in ready rooms nearby, and bomb bays loaded with nuclear weapons. Those huge planes just sat there, wings drooping like vultures, awaiting the command that we all prayed would never come. This was still the days of the cold war, and those B-52s were part of America’s frontline deterrence. No matter how many times I flew into or out of Guam, they were always there, and seeing them always provided a sobering moment.
Otherwise, Anderson AFB was a treat, a far cry from the naval stations I’d known during the Vietnam war. The navy doesn’t live as well as the air force, and a four-star general there once told me why. “When we get an appropriation from Congress to build an air force base,” he said, “we build the Officers’ Club, the Enlisted Men’s Club, the NCO Club, the commissary, the movie theater, and all the other creature comforts. Then we go back to Congress for a supplemental to build the runway. What can they say?” He was probably being facetious, although I’ve never been sure, because from what I know about how the government pays for th
ings, it might well have worked like that.
From Guam we flew to Tokyo to meet with the host committee, the foreign ministry people, and representatives from the Imperial Palace. There’s always a lot of backdoor maneuvering on survey trips because the staff wants events where the president will be extremely visible, and the Secret Service wants to limit his exposure to safe sites. This is also where we have our first run-in with the host country. The Japanese are always difficult, because they know what they want and have their own ideas about how to get it. This part of the trip was going to be a state visit, which meant it was protocol driven, and when it comes to protocol, the Japanese are especially rigid. They came to our meetings prepared with books that spelled out exactly how everything was supposed to happen—the president would use Akasaka Palace as his residence; the emperor would greet him there on the first night; the president would dine with the emperor at the Imperial Palace the following night, and so forth. We viewed the sites, decided they could work, then studied the routes from the airport to Akasaka Palace and from Akasaka Palace to the emperor’s palace. Included in the plans was an obligatory stop at the highly revered Meiji Shrine, in the heart of Tokyo, which honors the emperor who opened Japan to the forces of modernization in 1868. I didn’t know it yet, but the shrine was going to become a huge problem.
After Tokyo we flew to Seoul. The Korean leg of the president’s trip was also a state visit, but Mrs. Reagan had mentioned to Mike Deaver that she was nervous about the president going there, so we became very restrictive about what we would let him do. To begin with, we wouldn’t do anything in public or in the open air. Even the arrival ceremonies at Kimpo Airport would happen inside the terminal. The Koreans didn’t like that. Not only was this unprecedented, they saw it as a reflection of their ability to provide safety for the president. They argued, but we refused to budge.
Without consulting us, the Koreans had decided that the president would stay at the brand-new Chosun Hotel. They didn’t like it when we informed them that that wasn’t going to happen either.
We have inherent issues with hotels. Given a choice, we prefer not to use a hotel if it can be avoided. In many hotels, the presidential or royal suite is up high, which always worried me. If something happened, we might not be able to get him out quickly enough. As a young agent, I remember being told never to put a protectee above the ninth floor, because that’s the maximum height a hook and ladder can reach. But the president isn’t going to stay in a single room, and there may not be any large suites below the ninth floor. There are times when the president is forced to share a hotel with guests who are not associated with the visit, which means we have to segregate the entourage as best as we can from the general public. It’s better when the official entourage is so large that we can take over the entire hotel. Even then hotels are risky. Anytime we stayed in one with President Reagan, I was uneasy. On those occasions, we’d take over three entire floors, put him on the middle floor, and put staff and agents on the floors above and below. Not even that alleviated my concerns, because I still worried about rooms four or five floors below. Making matters more difficult, hotel managers don’t much like us. We’re a major disruption to their business. We shut down elevators, we close off corridors, we block entrances and exits, we station people all over the place, inside and out, and totally unsettle the service staff. So for everybody’s sake, especially ours, we eventually decided that because we could do an event with the president just about anywhere in the States and still get back to the White House that same evening, that’s what we would do. The exceptions were late events in New York and trips to the West Coast.
Overseas, using hotels is almost always avoidable, and the president rarely stays in one. Our first choice is usually our ambassador’s residence. They’re generally comfortable enough for him and secure enough for us. I’m sure some presidents have stayed in foreign hotels, but I never stayed in one with President Reagan, and letting him stay at the Chosun was completely out of the question. The presidential suite was in the midst of renovation, and all the walls were down. It was bad enough that everyone knew the president was coming—which offered too many people too much time to make plans—but there was no way we could control what was being put into those walls. Anyone could hide anything in there, from listening devices to explosives, and we might not find it until it was too late. So the Koreans were politely advised that the president would stay at our ambassador’s residence.
From there we moved on to an event that the staff insisted would be the highlight of the trip—the president’s visit to Camp Liberty, along the demilitarized zone on the border with North Korea, the American outpost closest to the communist north. The idea was to let the president look across no-man’s-land toward Panmunjom. Needless to say, everyone was extremely nervous about this, because it posed a genuine risk to his safety. Despite our insistence that we would not do outdoor visits, here we were doing an outdoor visit within firing range of the North Korean army. The event particularly irked our Korean hosts, who were deeply insulted that we didn’t trust them to protect the president in the south, and now we were making him a fitting target for their communist enemies in the north.
Of course, taking the president to the DMZ didn’t mean we were going to allow the North Koreans to take potshots at him. So, from the moment we arrived on that survey trip, we set about guaranteeing that the president would be virtually invisible from the north side of the DMZ. We scouted lookout points until we settled on one that was close, but not the closest, then made plans to camouflage everything. The army didn’t have enough camouflage netting in Korea, so they commandeered it from all over the Far East—literally by the ton—and strung it on every telephone pole and on every tree. By the time we arrived with the president, they’d covered everything with netting, completely concealing the view from North Korea.
From Korea we went to Indonesia, and there we ran into insurmountable problems. Deaver wasn’t happy about the political environment. Suharto was still in power, and we were concerned that the Indonesians were demanding too much control. We sat down with the Indonesian general in charge of security, who insisted that we use their cars. He pointed out that they’d bought their limousines from Cadillac and had them armored at Hess and Eisenhart in Cincinnati, the same outfit that armored our Cadillacs. For the Indonesians, this was obviously an issue of credibility, honor, and pride. For us, it was not negotiable.
When the president travels, we bring our own cars—especially the limousines—because that’s where the president can safely speak with someone. We don’t trust any place else, not even an ambassador’s residence, as there is always the risk of listening devices. We control the limousines all the time and can guarantee privacy. They comfortably seat four people, but handle up to six, with two bench seats facing each other in the back. For those of us over six feet tall, there isn’t a lot of room in the front seat because of all the communications equipment between the supervising agent and the driver. There is a glass partition that can be raised to give the president privacy if he wants it, but in my four years of sitting in the right front seat of the president’s limousine, and three years sitting in the same seat of the vice president’s limousine, the glass partition was never up. Which is just as well, because in an emergency the agent in front might need to get into the back fast. We practice climbing over that front seat, an awkward movement if you’re very tall.
I tried to explain to the Indonesian general why we needed to use our own cars, but he took a tough stance. When I told him about our communications equipment, he wanted us to install it in their car. When I mentioned tires and drivers, he insisted, “Our tires are the same as yours, and our drivers are equally well trained, and you can have your person in the car with him.” As a matter of course, we always put local license plates on the cars wherever we go—whether it’s Indiana or Italy—and I explained that to the general as well. I said that the cars would have Indonesian plates, so that if the object of the exercise
was to show the people that we were using Indonesian limousines, the license plates would do the trick. But he was intractable. By the time we were on the plane for the Philippines, Indonesia was getting scratched from the president’s itinerary. Although I don’t think the cars were the only reason for canceling the visit. Interestingly enough, two years later, we took the president to Bali, and this time our cars came along. I can only surmise that the Indonesians believed our cars would be less of an issue in Bali than in Jakarta, their capital.
There were problems in the Philippines, too. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were soon to leave for exile in Hawaii, and the man who had intended to lead the country, Benigno Aquino, had just returned to Manila, only to be shot on arrival at the airport. Security was on the top of the agenda for our discussions with our ambassador and his staff at a working dinner on our first night there. We left our hotel on our way to that dinner, got caught in downtown traffic, and that’s when I heard an all too recognizable sound—one I can never forget—shots being fired from an M-16 rifle. From where we sat we could just see a policeman shooting into a taxicab. The street was a mess. The embassy driver got us out of there fast. Ultimately the decision was made to cancel Manila.
Our final stop was Bangkok, which went smoothly, except for one moment when, according to Mike Deaver, I personally set back United States-Thai relations. On our first morning there, I was standing at the window of my room watching the river twenty stories below, totally intrigued and fascinated by the water taxis, boats, and junks moving chaotically up- and downstream, when I spotted a PBR, the same type of river gunboat that I’d skippered in the navy in Vietnam. The Thais were using this one to escort the royal barge, which was carrying our little group to the palace. I went to the dock with one of our embassy people who spoke Thai, told the officer in command of the PBR that I’d served on them during the war, and asked permission to come aboard. It had been fourteen years since I’d stood on the deck of a PBR, and I felt a flood of memories and nostalgia. While the others climbed onto the barge, the captain asked me if I’d like to drive the PBR to the palace. I pulled her out into the river, the royal barge pulled out too, and our small flotilla headed upstream.
Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service Page 4