Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service

by Petro, Joseph

  The next day, I spent a couple of hours at Franklin Field throwing passes to receivers. At the end of the session, the great Eagles wide receiver Pete Retzlaff, who was then the general manager, came up to me to say that he remembered me from college and invited me to camp. In those days, rookies didn’t get paid. They only got $12 a day. Pete said he was going to offer me $200 a week plus per diem, but didn’t want any of the other rookies to know about it. That was a lot of money in those days, certainly $200 a week more than I was making at the time, so I said sure.

  Not being in shape to play football meant that the Eagles’ training camp was a lot tougher for me than it was for the rest of the rookies, and it took several days before I started feeling good about being there. I had no idea whether I’d make the team, but I knew that when the strike ended, Norm Snead, the regular quarterback, would step into his old job. So I started thinking about what would happen if I didn’t get to play. My father had an old school friend named Leo Cramsey who worked for the State Department, and he suggested I look into a career there. I got permission from the Eagles to leave for a day and went to Washington to see Leo, but just as I got there, Leo was on his way to Guatemala. With nothing else to do, I called on another friend of my dad’s, Jack Yohe, who worked for the Federal Aviation Administration. His offices were across the street from the Hilton Hotel on Connecticut Avenue, the same place where Ronald Reagan would be shot. Jack and I chatted about football until he asked me what I wanted to do. When I confessed that I didn’t know, he wondered, “How about the Secret Service?”

  I told him I’d thought about it when I was in college, but never looked into how to start the process. Jack had a friend named Bob Snow, who was then the agent in charge of the special investigations division. His offices were at Secret Service headquarters, and on Jack’s advice, I went to see him. Bob was a sharp young guy whose enthusiasm for the Secret Service rubbed off on me. I mentioned that I was currently at the Eagles’ training camp, and he offered to arrange an appointment for me with the agent in charge of the Philadelphia field office.

  At the end of August, the players strike ended, Norm Snead returned as first-string quarterback, and George Mira returned as his backup. I found myself standing around a lot. I concluded that even if I made the team, I’d have to wait three or four years before Snead and Mira moved on. Sadly, I came to accept that at the age of twenty-six, I probably didn’t have much of a future with the Eagles. I went to Retzlaff and said, Thanks anyway but I’ve missed my time. He paid me all my money and even added an extra $200.

  The Secret Service was now my priority. I drove down to Philadelphia for my interview. I thought it went well, and was told, We’ll be in touch. As long as I was in town, I went up to Temple to see one of my old teammates, Frank Massino, who was on the coaching staff. They had a new head coach, Wayne Hardin, who’d just come from coaching at Annapolis. I’d never met him but, of course, knew of his terrific reputation. I was sitting with Massino and another old teammate, Earl Cleghorn, when Hardin walked in, said hello, and asked what I was doing these days. I told him I was home from Vietnam, that I was waiting to hear from the Secret Service, and had just left the Eagles’ training camp. Just like that, he offered, “I need a quarterback coach. How would you like to work for me?”

  I spent the next four and a half months coaching for Hardin, and wishing I could have played for him, because he was an outstanding coach and would have made me a much better quarterback. I loved every minute of being back in the game, with one very notable exception.

  About a week after I started, the whole team got together at preseason training camp in Valley Forge. I was on the field when I glanced over to the sidelines and spotted Andy Arge. I knew the look on his face, and we stared at each other for a very long time. When I walked over to him, we didn’t even shake hands. All he said was “It’s John.”

  I took the rest of the day off. John Poe could have left Vietnam in June, when I did, but he had extended for two months to be an admiral’s aide in Saigon. The night before he was supposed to leave, he went out and had a couple of beers, and on his way back to his quarters, he got mugged. He was taken to a field hospital where the doctors felt he should spend a few more days. The flights out of Saigon for home usually left at six or seven in the morning, and if you missed yours, you could wait a week or two before getting onto another manifest. John decided he wasn’t going to miss the plane, so he got out of bed and walked out of the hospital. A little while later he collapsed and died from a blood clot.

  My friend John Poe was thirty-one.

  By the beginning of 1971, I was phoning the Secret Service field office almost every day. But it was weeks before anyone said, “You’re hired.” From start to finish, getting in had been a six-month ordeal. On the evening of February 21, I phoned my cousin Jim Martin, who was an FBI agent, and told him, “I start tomorrow. What should I wear?”

  He answered, “Lead off with a white shirt.”

  It’s advice I’ve never forgotten. On the morning of February 22, that’s exactly what I did. Since then, whenever I do anything for the first time, I always lead off with a white shirt.

  I reported in to the Philadelphia Field Office and for the first few days did nothing more than sit around and read the manuals. Then they took me downstairs to the firing range to qualify with a service revolver. The agent who was “babysitting” me thought of himself as a hotshot, and just before taking me to the range, he asked in front of the whole staff, “Petro, you ever use a weapon?” I said I had. Playing the macho wise guy, he smirked, “Ever kill anybody?”

  Instead of answering him directly, I stared for a moment, then said, “I got back from Vietnam last year.”

  He never taunted me again.

  That week someone handed me a badge and someone else issued me a .357 Magnum. These days you go into training and don’t get the badge and the gun until you graduate. That’s not how it worked then, and just like that, I was a full-fledged special agent in the United States Secret Service.

  It was a couple of weeks later before I got shipped off to the Treasury Law Enforcement Training Center in Washington. Again, it was different then than it is now; in those days they grouped all of the Treasury agents together. Only six of us were there from the Secret Service, and three of those guys became my lifelong friends: Bob Hast, Phil Keifer, and Earl Devaney. The classes covered the basics of law enforcement, search and seizure, and how to arrest people. At the same time, Bob Hast introduced me to a young woman from Pennsylvania named Barbara Coccia, and we started dating.

  After graduation, I returned to Philadelphia for a few weeks, then came back to Washington for Secret Service school. They were trying to get as many agents as possible through the protective courses before the 1972 presidential election campaign, so my class was the first one where we only did protective training. They planned to bring us back later for the investigative courses.

  As a new agent on protective duty, I was a lowly post stander, one of dozens of agents who formed the second perimeter around a site. We never got close to the president because his detail came with him and left with him. We manned checkpoints at doors, entranceways, exits, and hallways, a physical presence wherever the Secret Service needed to display a physical presence. It’s a very necessary thing, and the vital middle part of our “three perimeter” strategy.

  I saw President Nixon’s Secret Service detail on several occasions and thought to myself, these are impressive guys. They knew what they were doing, and everything happened very fast. The president was whisked in, and he was whisked out. I wouldn’t learn for some time how a detail reflects the personality of the protectee and that this bunch was not only very aggressive, but also disturbingly arrogant.

  The first time I personally encountered that arrogance was in Akron, Ohio. For some strange reason, Nixon was staying at a Holiday Inn. I was one of the post standers surrounding the hotel. The agent in charge of the site informed us that protesters across the street
were carrying a North Vietnamese flag and ordered another agent and me to take it away from them. The other young agent was also a Vietnam veteran. I looked at him, then back at the agent in charge and asked, “Why?”

  He answered, “Because it’s an embarrassment to the president.”

  I thought to myself, Those protesters have a right to be doing what they are doing. It didn’t matter that I’d fought against that flag for a year. Taking the flag away from them was wrong, and I said so to the agent in charge. In the end, nobody would do it.

  The war had created an enormous amount of emotion in the United States—running the gamut from extreme hawk to extreme dove—and one of the people who came to national prominence during that time was John Kerry.

  Thirty-three years later, after he had secured the Democratic nomination for president in the 2004 race, CNN revealed that the FBI had placed Kerry under surveillance. He’d returned home from Vietnam to take his stance as national spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). The story of how undercover FBI agents shadowed Kerry in 1971 came to light when a historian obtained some twenty thousand pages of FBI files on the VVAW. According to press reports, they revealed how Richard Nixon saw the VVAW as a major threat to the United States and, at one point, actually feared that Kerry’s group might be plotting an armed coup d’état. What didn’t come out in the CNN reports was that the Secret Service had been called in on this, too.

  I’d just graduated from the protective course and had returned to Philadelphia to work for Myron “Mike” Weinstein, who was then agent in charge in Philadelphia and would later became deputy director of the Secret Service. He called me into his office to say the service was looking for some agents recently home from Vietnam to do an undercover assignment in Washington. Two days later I was back in D.C., partnered with Rick Zaino, who’d been in the army in Vietnam, and Holly Huffschmidt, who’d been a nurse in Vietnam. She was also one of the first female agents in the Secret Service. Our assignment was to infiltrate the VVAW.

  Here I was, only two years after hearing John Kerry’s name in Vietnam, trying to get inside his organization. Unlike Richard Nixon and the FBI, we weren’t concerned with him. Instead, we were acting on intelligence about certain group members who might otherwise be planning to use the VVAW as a front for violent actions against the president of the United States.

  Rick, Holly, and I donned our old greens and grew our hair. Rick and I also grew beards. The three of us were moved into the Park Central Hotel, which was, bizarrely, right across from Secret Service headquarters. They must have gotten a good rate. But it meant that we had to sneak in and out of the back of the hotel because we didn’t want our fellow protesters to see us staying there. We joined Kerry’s group and over the course of the next two months, we became protesters. Rick, Holly, and I had fake names and fake driver’s licenses. I used Joe, but my last name was my mother’s maiden name. Because we were legitimate veterans, we could talk the talk and tell our own stories. No one in the Secret Service seemed to worry that we might run into someone we’d served with over there. But then, almost three million men and women had served in Vietnam, so I guess the odds of that happening were pretty slim.

  I met Kerry a couple of times, talked to him about PBRs and PCFs, and remember thinking that he was a very good speaker, that he had a real presence, and that he clearly had political aspirations. Honestly, I thought to myself at the time, this guy is going to run for president.

  We handed out leaflets in front of the White House and went to meetings in bars and churches. We only really got two instructions from the Secret Service. The first was what to do if we got arrested. The Washington police had a habit of beating up protesters before they yanked them away, but we had a secret signal. When the cops started swinging their billy clubs, we were supposed to cross our hands in front of us. In theory, they’d all been briefed that anybody who did that was a good guy. Luckily, we never had to test that theory.

  The second instruction was to check in a couple of times a day with our control agent, Rad Jones, which we could do easily from pay phones. However, I’m not sure how much anyone back at headquarters truly understood about what we were going through because one day, during a huge protest at the Washington Monument, Jones announced that he’d set up a meeting for us with an undercover FBI agent. Holly stayed with the protesters while Rick and I strolled close enough to the meeting point to spot a guy in khaki slacks, a button-down white shirt, wing-tip shoes, and a wind breaker. Everyone for miles around looked scruffy, except this guy. I said to Rick, There is no way we’re going over there, and that was the extent of our meeting with the FBI.

  In the end, we managed to identify a couple of guys who were nasty, but the organization itself did not appear to be involved in any violent activities.

  Back in Philadelphia, I asked Mr. Weinstein—who was a great boss and a wonderful person, but very intimidating to me at the time—if I could keep my long hair and beard. He said he didn’t mind, except that I knew he did. And the way he told me he did was typical of him. One day, he happened to mention a temporary assignment available in Florida protecting the prime minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley. It was only four days, but the weather in Miami was great, and it would be particularly easy because Mr. Manley intended to spend most of his time in his hotel suite. I said I’d take it. He said, “Great, but you’ll have to shave and get a haircut.”

  Freshly trimmed, I spent four days at a nice hotel in Miami as part of the detail protecting Manley, who made one speech and never came out of his suite after that. Food for two went into his room, empty trays came out of his room, and we never saw him again until the day he left.

  I returned to Washington for investigation school, which was four weeks of learning how to deal with counterfeiting and checkforging cases. Without a doubt, counterfeiting is the sexy side of our investigative function. The theft and forging of government checks is decidedly less glamorous. Because I was the new kid on the block in Philadelphia, I was assigned to the check squad, which is, all too often, a lot of down and dirty stuff. I spent months knocking on doors, dealing with drug addicts, looking for government check forgers. The counterfeiting guys thumbed their noses, but the check squad was great fun, and I stayed on it for three years. In tandem with a U.S. postal inspector named Ryland Saxby, I averaged sixty to seventy arrests a year, which is a lot, and I guess the highlight of those three years was when I arrested Johnny Sample.

  Sample played eleven seasons in the National Football League, with Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Washington, and won himself a championship ring in 1969 as the New York Jets left cornerback in their Super Bowl III upset of the Colts. Sample, however, was considered a troublemaker for much of his career and didn’t do a lot to change his image when he wrote a book titled Confessions of a Dirty Ballplayer. By the early 1970s, he owned a travel agency in West Philadelphia, through which he was running stolen government checks. Another agent and I went out to interview him, and I admit that I was somewhat flattered when he said he remembered me playing football at Temple. Over the next few weeks I interviewed him several more times, and we struck up a rapport. That didn’t stop me, however, from handing the U.S. attorney enough evidence to warrant an arrest.

  Because of Sample’s tough reputation—and he was a very physical guy—some people in our office were nervous about hauling him in. So six of us, well armed, drove out to his travel agency prepared for the worst. My mistake was having told the others about how well Johnny and I got along. They elected me to go inside and break the news to him.

  As I walked into his office, Johnny gave me a big greeting. “Hey, man, sit down.” Getting comfortable wasn’t a good idea, so I said, “No, Johnny, I can’t sit down because you and I have to go outside. I’m afraid I have to put the cuffs on you.” He wasn’t pleased about it, but he let me do it. The next day when we took him to his arraignment, some photographers shot a picture of Johnny and me together. The caption referred to both of us as football
players, and actually mentioned that I’d played at Temple. It was a good picture, and I still have it, but it put an abrupt end to any undercover work. Johnny was convicted and sentenced to three years’ probation. In 1974 he violated probation and served one year in Allenwood.

  Another big case I got involved with was in 1973. Basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar owned a town house in Washington that he’d lent to his friend Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, the leader of the Hanafi sect of Muslims. Khaalis was involved in a political battle with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Black Muslims, when gunmen showed up at the town house—neither Abdul-Jabbar nor Khaalis was there—and murdered five people, including four children. Two women were severely wounded and left for dead. Not long afterward, one of my check-case informants said that some of men involved in those murders were holed up on the sixteenth floor of a tenement on Diamond Street—he indicated Apartment G—and warned that they had weapons with them. I alerted the Philadelphia police homicide squad and assured them that our informant was reliable. Based on that, they got a warrant to break down the door.

  As the informant was ours, Saxby and I went along. The police hit the apartment with a SWAT team, stormed in with weapons drawn, and scared the hell out of four little old ladies. That’s when someone noticed a Black Muslim symbol next door on Apartment H. I frantically tried to phone my informant while some Philadelphia cops rushed off to get a new warrant. We had the building surrounded, so no one was going to get in or get out, and there we waited until the second warrant arrived. When it did, the police hit Apartment H, and, sure enough, inside were four guys with weapons. Unfortunately, no one ever connected those weapons with the Washington murders, but it was a good collar, and the police knew that some of those guys had been involved.