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

by Petro, Joseph

  Rocky inquired, “By the way, how much is it?” When he was told, sixty thousand dollars a year, he made a face, nodded several times, and said, “Sure, why not?”

  When we began protecting him, some agents were concerned that he and his family would be troublesome. He had two young sons—Nelson Jr. was about twelve, and Mark was about nine—and we feared they would expect to be waited on. Our misgivings were absolutely unfounded. There was nothing spoiled or haughty about them. The family was unbelievably down-to-earth, and at no time did any of them ever treat us with anything but the greatest respect. I can say, unequivocally, that Nelson Jr. and Mark were terrific kids, that Happy was a genuinely lovely lady, and that Nelson Rockefeller was the consummate gentleman.

  While the president flew on a 707, the vice president’s plane was a DC-9. It was comfortable; there was an open area up front set aside for him, his guests, and his staff and room enough for us, some staff, and some press in the back. But Rocky had his own Gulfstream. Not being an air force plane, its call sign was Executive Two. Needless to say, it was a very comfortable plane, which meant that, in the beginning, he didn’t bother with our DC-9. He thought he was saving the government money by using his Gulfstream, but we couldn’t get enough agents onto Exec Two to keep the detail stocked. Whatever money he was saving us, we spent on flying the agents back and forth commercially. It was only after Jimmy Taylor, the head of the detail, explained the situation that Rocky agreed to use the DC-9.

  He was constantly commuting back and forth from New York to Washington, spending as little time as possible in the capital. During his confirmation hearings, for example, he would fly down to Washington in the morning and fly back to New York at night. He was sworn in on December 19, 1974, and for the next two years, we didn’t spend a single weekend in Washington. We would leave town with him on Thursday night and not come back until Monday.

  My daughter, Michelle, was born in 1973, and from the time she was two until she was six, I didn’t see as much of her as I wanted. I missed birthdays and school plays and have regretted every lost minute. It’s a common lament of agents working details. We all suffer through the same feelings of guilt. When Michelle was very small, she and her mother would drop me off for a plane to somewhere and days later would pick me up on my return. When people asked Michelle where her dad worked, she would answer, “The airport.”

  The Rockefellers had a huge apartment in New York on Fifth Avenue, a wonderful house on Foxhall Road in Washington, a large summer home in Seal Harbor, Maine, an eighty-thousand-acre ranch in Texas, a ranch in Venezuela, and a magnificent five-thousand-acre estate overlooking the Hudson River in the Pocantico Hills near Tarrytown, New York, about forty-five minutes north of Manhattan, called Kykuit. Rocky took up residence there in 1960, and along with him came a good part of his art collection. Our office was in the basement, next to the kitchen, facing the storage area for his surplus art. More than one agent commented on the fact that any one of the paintings outside our cramped little office was probably worth more than our combined salaries. When Rocky saw our setup and realized how much time we spent down there, he moved his collection of priceless Picassos and tapestries aside and in their place installed a pool table and a Ping-Pong table for us.

  Mark and Nelson Jr. had discovered some long disused garbage dumps on the estate that had been covered up sometime in the nineteenth century. They would dig through them looking for old bottles, and sometimes their father would join them. That’s how, one day, we lost the vice president.

  Rocky had a Jeep he loved to drive, with his sons bouncing around on the seats, and we’d follow behind in our own cars. That particular day, we were waiting for him on one side of the house and, since it was a very big house, we didn’t spot him when he drove away on the other side. He didn’t know we weren’t with him, and we didn’t know he had left. After a while we wondered what was taking him so long and someone went around to the front and noticed that the Jeep was gone. Having no idea where he was, we mobilized all of our cars and headed out en masse at full speed to find him. We checked the places where the boys normally dug for bottles. When we didn’t find them there we began searching Tarrytown, stopping at every gas station, desperate to locate the vice president of the United States and his sons. There were a lot of very nervous supervisors trying to second-guess where they’d gone. I don’t know when we would have pushed the panic button, but half an hour after he vanished, Rocky and the boys pulled up to the house as if nothing had happened. They’d been at one of the old bottle sites. Jimmy Taylor, the agent in charge, was understandably upset, and, needless to say, that never happened again.

  The thing is, there’s no procedure for what to do if you lose a protectee. You’re just not supposed to do that. Later, when I was agent in charge of the vice president’s detail, I would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, dreaming that I couldn’t find him, that he was gone, that the vice president of the United States was somewhere and that I was somewhere else and didn’t know where he was. It is every agent’s worst nightmare.

  Our first big trip with Rockefeller occurred just after he was sworn in, when he took his sons hunting on his ranch near Port Mansfield, Texas. He had stocked the property with antelope and melji, which is an Indian water buffalo. The campsite was out in the middle of the range, and because this was going to be one of those rugged, father-son bonding trips, everyone slept in sleeping bags in tents. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he said the rich are different from you and me. Hunting with the Rockefellers wasn’t quite like hunting with most people. To begin with, they hunted off the back of the Jeep. No trekking for them. Rocky would spot an animal, tell the driver to stop, stand up, and shoot. Then dinner at the campsite was prepared and served by nine chefs and waiters. Everything was laid out on tables covered with white linen tablecloths and graced with candelabras. It might have been a terrific father-son bonding experience, but it wasn’t exactly rustic.

  In March 1975, my father, Joseph A. Petro, died from an unexpected heart attack while attending a sporting event in Allentown. He was only fifty-seven. He had been an All-American football player at St. Joseph’s College and remained involved in sports for his entire life. At the time, my youngest brother, Andy, was a freshman at Notre Dame while my middle brother, Tom, had just been married and was soon to move to Philadelphia to begin his own career in the Secret Service. I was in Washington. My mother never got over losing her life’s partner at so young an age.

  Three months later, I accompanied the vice president and Mrs. Rockefeller to Britain, where they were the guests of Lord Louis Mountbatten at his estate Broadlands, in Romsey, Hampshire. Agents were posted all around the house, and inside it, too, working in tandem with the Special Branch officers who protected Lord Mountbatten. I was working a four-to-twelve shift when, just before midnight, all the alarms started going off. None of us knew what it was about, but judging from the noise, it was a major crisis. Everything was ringing and clanging, lights were coming on all over the estate, and we mobilized to full alert with weapons drawn. That’s when someone looked up and saw Mrs. Rockefeller leaning out of her bedroom window. She liked to sleep with the windows open and had no idea that every window in the place was alarmed. Rocky ended the evening by shouting up to his wife in his familiar raspy voice, “Way to go, Happy.”

  When we got back to the States, the head of Happy’s detail was due for some time off, and he asked me if I’d take his place as supervisor in August, when Mrs. Rockefeller and her sons went to Seal Harbor. The Rockefeller compound sat right on the point, overlooking the sea, and was as luxurious as all their other places. Rocky told us he bought the property in the 1930s and paid $35,000 for it, then a pricey sum. There was an old farmhouse on the land, and before he ripped it down, he walked through it and decided there were a few things he wanted to keep. He had a great eye for art, saw something he liked about a vase, and when he built the new house, put it on a mantel. He said he never thought
much about it again, for the next twenty-five or thirty years, until sometime in the late 1950s. He needed an insurance evaluation of the property, and the appraisers valued the vase at $50,000.

  For the first three weeks of August, it was just Mrs. Rockefeller, the boys, one of their friends, and the detail at the estate. Rocky only came up for the last ten days of the month. I took Mrs. Rockefeller sailing on a small boat in the mornings and accompanied her every afternoon on a long walk through woods. I’d always start off behind her, but eventually she’d ask me to walk with her because she wanted someone to talk with. I never assumed that it would happen, but every day throughout that month, a few minutes into her walk, she’d motion, come walk with me. During one of our conversations I mentioned that my daughter was also in town. After that, every few days, Mrs. Rockefeller would hand me some of her children’s old books to give to Michelle, each inscribed to Nelson or Mark.

  In the middle of Gerald Ford’s vice presidency, Congress voted to fund a residence for the vice president. The house they chose was the former home of the chief of naval operations at the Naval Observatory, which is at the end of Embassy Row on Massachusetts Avenue in northwest Washington. Built originally for the superintendent of the observatory in 1893, it’s a wonderful three-story Victorian house with a turret and pointed roof at one corner. There’s a big entry hall with a fireplace, and off that are a dining room, living room, and library, all with fireplaces and twelve-foot ceilings. There’s a terrific staircase leading up to the main bedrooms, and smaller bedrooms on the top floor. Before the Fords could move in, however, he became president. So the Rockefellers would have been the first vice presidential occupants, except that they did not spend a single night there. They preferred instead to live at their twenty-seven-acre estate on Foxhall Road.

  In any case, we still set up protection around the residence. Since it was a naval base, the area was gated. So we established a command post across the street from the house, which sat on a big circle off the main road through the base, and set up posts around the house, including one at the front door and one at the rear door. What Rockefeller did, which I thought was magnanimous and patriotic, was to furnish the house and leave it that way for future vice presidents. He bought the huge eagle sculpture that had been used at Dwight Eisenhower’s inaugural in 1953 and installed it in the middle of the driveway circle in front of the house. Rockefeller thought it looked majestic there. So did many of us. Later, when Jimmy Carter was elected president, Vice President Walter “Fritz” Mondale decided it looked too militaristic, had it taken down and put in storage, and replaced it with a modern sculpture. Rockefeller, now out of public life, was incensed. He found out where the eagle was stored and got it back.

  Rocky could be generous to a fault, and there were times when money simply didn’t matter. He once ordered his Gulfstream back to Maine after it had landed in New York because they had forgotten to bring his sons’ bicycles. What could that trip have cost, compared to buying two new bikes? Yet there were other times when he bragged about how parsimonious he could be. We were at Foxhall Road one night, waiting by the cars to take him to a formal dinner, when he came out in his tuxedo and seemed especially pleased with himself. He pointed to his dinner jacket, “Boys, what do you think?” We didn’t know what to say, but he didn’t give us a chance. “Nineteen fifty-two. I haven’t worn this suit since 1952.”

  Then, too, for a man as sophisticated as he, there were times when Rocky had trouble coping with the real world. I was working at Foxhall Road along with Jim Huse, one of the smartest and most articulate agents I’ve ever known, when the phone rang. It was the vice president, sounding befuddled. “Boys, I’ve been trying to call the White House and get hold of the president, and the White House won’t let me through.”

  I think it was Jim who asked, “How are you calling?”

  He answered, “I’m dialing 456-1212,” which meant he was using an ordinary landline and dialing the main switchboard. “I looked up the number in the phone book.”

  I couldn’t believe it. There was a Signal phone in the house—what we call a “drop line”—so all he had to do was pick it up. No dialing was necessary.

  Rocky couldn’t understand why he wasn’t getting through. “Every time I tell the operator that I’m the vice president, she hangs up on me.”

  We promised him that if he used the Signal phone, which was just next to the one he’d been calling on, the White House operator would let him speak to the president. He thanked us and never phoned back, so I suppose he got through.

  Being as wealthy and as worldly as he was, Rocky definitely knew how to travel. When he married Tod in 1930, their honeymoon was a one-year, around-the-world trip. I traveled with the vice president extensively, and his trips were among the most leisurely I did with any protectee. He knew the best places to stay and built in the best rest stops. One of these trips was a state visit to Iran.

  Since oil was first discovered in the Persian Gulf, the region has had strategic importance to the United States. In the sixties and seventies, our best friend in the Gulf was the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. His father, Reza, an army sergeant, had staged a coup in 1921 and named himself emperor four years later. At the outbreak of World War II, fearing that the emperor might align oil-rich Iran with the Nazis, Britain and Russia moved in and forced him to resign in favor of his son. The new shah enjoyed power until 1953, when he was overthrown, but was quickly reinstated through the direct intervention of the Central Intelligence Agency. He remained a staunch ally—sometimes referred to as “our policeman in the Gulf”—up to the oil embargo and ensuing crises of 1973–1974, when his tone hardened noticeably in favor of the oil-producing nations. By modernizing Iran, he provoked conservative Muslims, and soon found that the only way he could retain power was with whatever brutal oppression he could exert through his secret police, the dreaded SAVAK. By 1979, fundamentalist forces drove him into exile. A radical regime led by the equally brutal Ayatollah Khomeini filled the void, establishing an Islamic republic and bringing about decades of upheaval throughout the Gulf. The shah fled to Latin America, took ill, was treated in the United States, but was refused permanent residence by President Carter, and died in Egypt in July 1980 at the age of sixty.

  Rockefeller’s visit to the shah in March 1976 came at a time when the United States desperately needed him on our side to assure that another oil crisis would not cripple the West. I was on the advance team that arrived in Iran a few days before the vice president, and from the moment we got there it was clear that the shah’s regime was doomed.

  One of our first meetings was at the U.S. embassy with a CIA agent who would only speak to us in “the bubble room.” That was a place, deep inside the embassy, totally encased in plastic so that no one outside using a microwave eavesdropper could hear what we were saying. He warned us that there were going to be big anti-shah demonstrations and suggested we return to our hotel. We followed his advice, and within a matter of minutes, I looked out my window and saw tens of thousands of agitated Iranians lining the streets for as far as I could see. They were chanting and shouting and marching down the block toward the hotel. The locked door of my room would never be enough to withstand them, and I knew that if they stormed the place, we would all be dead. Luckily, this time, the crowd went on past the hotel. In November 1979, the same kind of crowd stormed the embassy in Teheran and held fifty-two American hostages for 444 days.

  Next day, one of our agents went to Shiraz, one stayed in Tehran, and I flew out to Kish Island, in the middle of the Persian Gulf, where Rockefeller was going to spend three days. Today the island has been developed, but then it was a tiny, private preserve owned by the shah. We landed in a USAF Beachcraft, because there was no real airport, and were greeted by the landing strip caretaker, who was one of the few people on the island.

  It is a stunningly beautiful place, off-limits to ordinary Iranians. The shah had built a palace for himself there and small villas for his guests.
Rockefeller was going to stay in the prime minister’s villa, which sat right on a white beach with water lapping quietly on the sand and sharks swimming a hundred yards offshore. Besides the shah’s palace and guest houses, there was a tanker that had run aground at one end and lay rusting on its side, a handful of fisherman who lived in nearby huts, and one of the world’s great French restaurants.

  Down the island’s single road, past the guest villas, there was a modern one-story building where the shah had imported chefs and everything they needed to create fantastic meals. Because money was no object, and because he couldn’t take his guests to Paris, he simply brought Paris to his guests. It was the most gorgeous restaurant I’ve ever seen. The French chefs, and the French waiters in tuxedos, were in residence when the shah and his guests were in residence, and that’s where everyone ate all their meals. That first evening, I wandered down there not knowing what to expect, and was greeted with a full menu. The food was absolutely fantastic, and perhaps best of all, there was no bill at the end of the meal. The next morning, there wasn’t much to do in terms of advance work, because there was only that one road in from the tiny airstrip, so I drove around for a while, until I was suddenly stopped by a Jeep blocking the road. At that point, twelve men riding on horses came down the road, led by the shah.

  When the vice president arrived, I briefed the agents about the island and the French restaurant. I assured them that as far as their meals were concerned, I’d personally made all the proper arrangements and magnanimously told them to order anything they wanted on the menu. For our entire stay there, all of us—the whole entourage, including Rockefeller and the shah—ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner there.

  On our final evening, the shah threw a party for all of us. Somewhere along the way, Rocky had bought himself a tiny 35mm camera—they were new and cutting-edge in those days—and as the evening wore on, he started taking pictures. Here he was, one of the wealthiest and perhaps most sophisticated men in the world, not to mention vice president of the United States, and he was lining everybody up for a group photo like someone’s father at a wedding, barking out orders, “Hey, shah, move to your right. No, shah, get closer. Yeah, shah, stand there.”