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

by Petro, Joseph

  A few weeks later, my informant came up with the name of the triggerman for the murders, plus a phone number in Chicago where he could be located. He asked if he could have some money for his trouble. I took his information upstairs to the FBI, handed them the triggerman’s name and phone number, and added that they needed to pay my informant. An agent asked how much. I suggested a couple of thousand dollars. He said yeah, sure, and I assumed that meant the bureau would take care of it. Several weeks went by and I heard nothing, until I read in the newspaper that the guy in Chicago had been caught. So I went upstairs again to remind the agent that they owed my informant two grand. He confirmed that they’d arrested the triggerman, but insisted that they’d nabbed him on the street and not in the apartment, which meant they didn’t owe my informant anything. I said, Hold on a second, he led you right to the guy; if all you had to do was sit there and wait until he came out, you still owe my informant his money. The bureau never did pay up.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ROCKY

  A year after winning reelection in 1972, Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign for taking $29,500 in bribes. Under the terms of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, President Nixon appointed Congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan to serve as vice president.

  The most polite word I can use to describe post standing is “routine.” Officially, no one says it can be downright dead-boring, but it can be downright dead-boring. Although not all posts are created equal. It’s not too bad standing just inside the front door of a nice hotel, it’s another thing to be stuck outside somewhere at night during a snowstorm, or in the corner of a noisy, smoky kitchen, or on a loading dock next to the garbage cans.

  Every few weeks my check investigations would be put on hold and I’d be shipped off somewhere to stand post. They were forgettable experiences, with a few exceptions. I was a post stander at Richard Nixon’s inauguration in 1973, positioned on the corner of Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in the freezing cold for six hours. There’s a famous panoramic photo of the inaugural parade taken from a rooftop. In the background of that photo, as the motorcade made its way along the avenue, there’s a guy in a black overcoat standing in the street in front of the Justice Department. That’s me.

  The weather was warmer when I was a post stander in New Orleans for a Nixon visit, but that’s when he famously shoved his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, down a ramp. And I was a post stander for Vice President Spiro Agnew one night in San Juan, Puerto Rico. A dozen of us were assigned to eleven posts outside the San Juan Hilton. It was hot, there were mosquitoes, and I was miserable. We stayed at each post for half an hour, then rotated to the next one, until we had made one full circuit and earned a half-hour break. As I came in after my circuit, somebody in the command post said, “The vice president’s coming back. We need you on the roof.” So my half-hour break was spent on the roof, after which I had to start another five-and-a-half-hour circuit. The lead advance agent for that visit was Dick Stiener. He and I would next work together twenty-four years later, for the Travelers Group.

  During the 1972 presidential primary campaign season, I was assigned to the detail protecting Maine senator Edmund Muskie, who was making his bid for the Democratic nomination. He was a terrific guy. Because the detail was small, those of us who were very junior got to do a lot of things that are usually reserved for more senior agents, like advance work. My first trip was to St. Louis with an experienced agent. In those days, budget requirements forced agents to room together, and this one snored. I don’t mean he made a little noise, I mean this guy could snore for his country; he was famous throughout the Secret Service. By midnight, he was making sounds like a locomotive. My only recourse was to get out of bed, go downstairs, and rent myself another room. It cost forty dollars, which was a lot of money for me. Still, I learned about advances during those six weeks, and the knowledge served me well later on.

  The other memorable thing that happened during that detail was that I got married.

  It was a Wednesday afternoon when Barbara and I decided to get married, and two days later, on June 23, 1972, we did. The ceremony was held at eleven o’clock at St. Mary’s Church in Alexandria, Virginia. We had lunch at a restaurant afterward, and because I was working from four to twelve, I had to leave at 2:30. Two days later, I was off to Miami to do Muskie’s advance for the Democratic convention. That was how our marriage began, and I guess we both saw right away that with all the traveling I had to do, it was going to be difficult.

  One of the guys with me on the Muskie detail was Cliff Dietrich, and his death was a low point in my early career. We have had, over the years, all too many agents die on the job. Most of them have died in car accidents, like my friend Pat Lebarge, who was killed along with three other agents in a crash in California. They were assigned to a detail protecting the queen of England on her 1982 visit to the West Coast. They had worked a midnight shift and were tired, and their car went off a mountain road. Six Secret Service personnel were killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. One of them was Don Leonard, who was with me on the Rockefeller detail. No agent on a protective detail has ever died in the line of fire—although many have been shot—and several have been killed doing investigative work. In 1973, Cliff’s death was the first I’d encountered in the service, and it brought back traumatic memories of Vietnam.

  He’d been reassigned to the president’s detail. Nixon was in the Bahamas with his friend Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, and Cliff was on the midnight shift with six other agents, being helicoptered out from Key Biscayne, Florida. The pilot came up short on his landing and went into the sea. When helicopter rotors hit water, the helicopter usually flips over and sinks upside down. The guys inside managed to open a window, and six of the agents got out. Cliff was disoriented and never made it. I heard about it shortly after it happened. One of the agents who got out was named Steve Petro. We weren’t related, but friends of mine who saw the name thought it was me.

  As a direct result of Cliff’s death, the Secret Service devised a helicopter survival training course. At first we worked with the Dilbert Dunker, which is what the navy uses for its pilots. It’s a cock-pit that slides down a track, hits the water, flips over, and sinks. You have to get out of your harness, climb out, and swim to the surface. It’s a very stressful experience. Being upside down in water and in the dark quickly disorients you, and you may think you’re going up when you’re actually going deeper. You have to learn to follow your bubbles, because they always go up. After a time, the Secret Service got a larger helicopter simulator and required all agents who flew in helicopters to go through that training. In the end, Cliff’s death may someday save other lives.

  By the fall of 1973, with the war in Vietnam still lingering, and war in the Middle East a real possibility, President Nixon promoted Dr. Henry Kissinger from national security advisor to secretary of state, and the Secret Service was ordered to protect him. Normally, State Department Security—known then as SY—provides protection for the secretary, but for some reason Kissinger wanted the Secret Service to do it, and as far as I know, that’s the only time we’ve ever protected the secretary of state. I was assigned as a temporary agent to that detail. What I remember most about Henry Kissinger is how good he was to the agents. The shift leader, Dick Jagen, and I would spend nights sitting on the couch in the den of Kissinger’s town house on Waterside Drive, watching Yankee games with him, while he sat at his desk in his pajamas eating sandwiches and drinking coffee. It wasn’t buddy-buddy, but it was the sort of situation that can be uncomfortable for agents. However, our presence didn’t bother him. He was easy enough to be around, and because we maintained our professional distance, it worked fine. Most of the time I was with Kissinger, he was either at the State Department until late at night or at the White House. Ordinarily, agents didn’t go in the building with him. They’d take him to the door and leave him there, but Jagen—who had a reputation in the Secret Service as a tough guy—decided we had to know where o
ur protectee was and ordered us to stay with him. It was my first day on the job with Kissinger and my first time inside the White House.

  I followed the secretary of state through the entrance at the lower level of the West Wing and into the reception area called F-1. He went into the Situation Room, which is just past a desk where a uniformed division officer checks everyone’s passes. There was a couch next to the desk, and because I didn’t know what else to do, I sat down. It couldn’t have been five minutes later when someone stormed up to me, demanding to know who I was and what I was doing there. In those days people working in the White House didn’t wear ID cards around their necks, and agents working PPD didn’t wear pins in their lapels. But I had my pin in my lapel, so this fellow knew who I was. And I knew that he was the assistant agent in charge of presidential protection. He had a big job, and I was just a new agent, but many agents on Nixon’s PPD were prima donnas and never hesitated to remind everyone else that they were the elite. He barked, “Who are you?”

  Slowly standing up, I thought to myself, You can see that I am an agent. I answered his question with one of my own. “Who are you?”

  He said, “I’m from PPD.”

  I said, “How do you do. I’m from Philadelphia.”

  “What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be inside the White House.”

  “I’m here with Dr. Kissinger. My protectee is here, and I’m going to stay here in case he needs me.”

  He pointed to the door. “You need to go outside.”

  There was no way I was going to let him throw me out of the White House, certainly not on my first day inside, so I told him, “If you want me to leave, you’ll have to walk outside and explain that to Dick Jagen, my shift leader, who’s waiting in the car.”

  I can only presume that the fellow knew of Jagen’s reputation, because he marched off. He was, of course, merely reflecting the bellicose culture of the Nixon White House. Over the next twenty years, I walked past that couch several thousand times, and always remembered how rude the supervisor from Nixon’s PPD had been. When I became a senior agent, I decided that, because young agents didn’t know how the White House functioned, we needed to take them under our wings and show them what the White House was all about instead of ordering them out. That necessity was driven home to me one day while I was walking through the West Wing with Dr. Kissinger. I didn’t know where I was, which says a lot about our training, so when we turned into a hallway and he moved toward a door, I thought we were about to leave and instinctively opened that door. It was a closet. Even Kissinger laughed.

  Later that fall, sitting again on the couch at F-1, I couldn’t help but notice there was a lot more activity than usual. Just after I arrived with the secretary of state, all the other cabinet secretaries showed up. Clearly, there was some sort of crisis, as the entire government was gathering. I worried that we were going to war. The moment another agent came in to relieve me, I hurried outside to the car and turned on the radio to hear that Vice President Agnew had just resigned. I sat there thinking to myself, I was ten feet away from where it was happening.

  When my time with Kissinger ended, I returned to Philadelphia. Six months later, I was permanently transferred back to Washington. I did three weeks’ training with the Protective Support Division, in preparation for an assignment to either the president’s or the vice president’s detail. Who’s to say which one is better? The PPD means that you’re with the president of the United States. The VPPD is smaller, and therefore seemingly less important, but you get a lot more direct hands-on time with the protectee, and you do a lot more advance work. I was assigned to Vice President Gerald Ford.

  There was no official vice president’s residence at the time, so Ford lived with his family in their own split-level ranch house in Alexandria, Virginia. We turned the garage, which was right under his bedroom, into our command post. What I didn’t know when I joined the detail was that new agents had to suffer a kind of hazing. Toward the end of my first night on the job, the shift leader told me to “do the follow-up,” which meant I had to make certain the follow-up car was ready to go. It was just before six AM when I got in, switched on the ignition, and all hell broke loose. The radio was as loud as it could go, the red lights went, the sirens blasted, the air conditioner was on, everything was turned to maximum. I should have cut off the ignition, but in a moment like that you don’t necessarily do what’s best; you tend to do what’s obvious, which is to turn off everything individually. I know that I woke the vice president—and probably half the neighborhood, too. Rumor had it that, whenever this happened, Ford turned over to his wife Betty and said, “Another new agent.”

  On August 8, 1974, at about 7:30 in the evening, I was standing post in front of the vice president’s office on the second floor of the Executive Office Building. It had been announced that President Nixon would make a speech to the nation that night, and it was expected that he would resign. When the time came for Ford to leave, Bob DeProspero, who was the shift leader, and I stepped into the elevator with the vice president. Before the door closed, Ford turned to me and said, “You’re new on the detail, aren’t you?” I told him I was and introduced myself. He extended his hand and said, “I’m Jerry Ford.” As we shook hands, I thought to myself, this man is two hours away from becoming the president of the United States and he has the presence of mind to introduce himself to me.

  To drive him home that night, instead of using just the limousine and a follow-up car, we added a lead car, a tail car, and a police escort. As we made the turn onto his block, there were thousands of people lining the street. Agents working out of the command post in the garage had cordoned off the area as best they could and placed the media across the street. But there were cameras everywhere, and the excitement was incredible. We got him into the house and watched Nixon’s resignation speech from the command post.

  The next day, with Ford getting ready to be sworn in, the old Nixon PPD showed up to take over. That strained what civility existed between the two details. Some of us stayed with Ford for a few days, which wasn’t easy, because the PPD guys had no respect for us. On a few occasions, “discussions” with them came close to fistfights. They finally got rid of us, and because there now was no vice president, we had no place to go. After a while, I was sent to the detail protecting Carl Albert, who was Speaker of the House, and therefore next in line to succeed Ford.

  A week or so later, when the Fords moved into the White House, the first reception he hosted as president of the United States was for his Vice Presidential Protection Detail and their wives. To say that the PPD guys were seriously annoyed about this is an understatement. They worked while we sipped cocktails with the president. Then, to show what a truly nice man Ford was, he took us all upstairs to the second floor and gave us a guided tour of the residence. The highlight was the Lincoln Bedroom, where Nixon had burnt holes in the carpet with ashes from his pipe.

  Gerald Ford was not only the first man to be appointed vice president under the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, but also the nation’s first unelected president. Now required to appoint someone to serve as his vice president, Ford turned to an old Republican stalwart, Nelson Rockefeller.

  Rockefeller was born in 1908, and the silver spoon in his mouth had been inherited from his grandfather, the legendary “robber baron” John D. Rockefeller, founder of the Standard Oil Company. Nelson Rockefeller was a unique mix of entrepreneur, art collector, benefactor, and public servant. Known to everyone as Rocky, he was appointed to office in 1940 when President Franklin Roosevelt made him assistant secretary of state. In 1950, President Harry Truman named him chairman of the International Development Advisory Board. Three years later, President Dwight Eisenhower selected him to chair his Advisory Committee on Government Organization. In 1958, Rockefeller was elected to the first of four terms as governor of New York State. Two years after establishing himself in Albany, he tried to win the Republican nomination for president but was defe
ated by Richard Nixon. He tried again in 1964 and was defeated by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.

  Rocky’s first wife was Mary Todhunter Clark, known as “Tod,” with whom he had five children. After thirty-two years of marriage, they divorced in 1962, and he very quickly married Margaretta Fitler Murphy, known as “Happy.” A tall blonde who had, until then, been married to someone else, she was eighteen years his junior. Their marriage produced two sons. During his second attempt to run for president, it was said that a divorced man could never reach the White House, and it was not until Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 that the old adage was cast aside. Rockefeller’s third and final shot at the presidency was foiled in 1968 when Nixon again became the Republican nominee. He resigned as governor in December 1973 to organize a conservative think tank, and eight months later was chosen to be vice president.

  During his confirmation hearings, there was great interest in his financial resources. One senator wanted to know, “How much are you worth?”

  Rocky’s answer was “I don’t know,” and he probably didn’t. The figures being bandied about ranged from $30 million to $1 billion.

  Logically assuming that he didn’t need a government paycheck, another senator asked, “Are you going to take a salary as vice president?”