I could never convince someone that I didn’t say what I’d been quoted as saying because the journalists were always in control. Part of the problem was the fact that I was a Secret Service agent, not a journalist. The rest of the problem was that the Service didn’t approach public affairs the way I thought it should. We needed to be out there telling our story. Instead, we were holding back, emphasizing the word “secret” in Secret Service. We needed to have a professional do this job, not an agent. We wouldn’t allow a journalist to protect the president, so why did we have agents fuctioning as journalists?
After almost two years in public affairs, John Simpson promoted me to assistant special agent in charge of Ronald Reagan’s protective detail. And so began four amazing years.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WORKING FOR THE PRESIDENT
As hard as we try to plan for every possible problem, each trip creates new problems.
I met Ronald Reagan on Easter Monday, April 3, 1983. It was my first day on the detail. I was ushered into the Oval Office just before he went outside to the south grounds for the traditional Easter Egg Roll. Bob DeProspero introduced us and asked me to escort the president. He was very gracious, but it was a perfunctory meeting, and after shaking hands with me, all he said was, “Welcome and good luck.” There was nothing historical about it, except that it was the beginning of our four-year relationship.
This was the third time I’d worked for Bob, and I’m sure he had some influence over the director’s decision to bring me to PPD. He’d been my shift leader briefly on the Ford vice presidential detail and my supervisor on the Rockefeller detail. He’d been deputy agent in charge of the PPD when the president was shot, and was given the top job when Jerry Parr was appointed assistant director of the Secret Service.
Bob was a short, good-looking fellow, serious and dignified, from West Virginia who was only a few years older than me. He’d been a wrestler in high school and at the University of West Virginia. A strictly-by-the-book kind of guy who rarely smiled, he joined the Secret Service right after college and was as good a protection agent as the Secret Service has ever had. I learned a lot from him and found that on those occasions when we disagreed, Bob usually ended up being right. This was a man who set such high standards for himself that even those agents who felt intimidated by him worked doubly hard.
Bob took over the PPD at a time when everyone was determined that there simply could not be another attempt on the president’s life. He was the perfect guy at the perfect time to do that job. A mutual friend, Tom Quinn, who is one of the most thoughtful and innovative agents I’ve ever known—and who looks strikingly like Clint Eastwood—always referred to PPD as “the tip of the javelin.” It’s the sharp end of the Secret Service and performs the single most important task that we do. Bob innately understood that and had a well-defined, unalterable, and well-respected philosophy about how to protect the president. He knew what was necessary to achieve what he wanted and very quickly instituted a lot of new procedures and policies. For example, he determined that everyone who could get a view of the president should be put through metal detectors. It was a political issue, a budget issue, a logistical issue, and a civil liberties issue, but he maneuvered through and got what he wanted. Today, screening everybody in every crowd is standard operating procedure. He also invented “the hospital agent.” Whenever the president was moving, Bob stationed an agent at the primary trauma hospital just in case we had to go there. That decision was controversial because a lot of guys on the investigative side thought that it was unnecessary. Yet Bob was not going to leave any stone unturned and the more he tightened procedures, the more he was criticized by investigative agents in the field for overdoing it.
I’d like to think that one of the reasons the director and Bob brought me in was to help him create a better relationship with the presidential staff. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Bob used to tell people that I was his “ambassador to the staff.” There’s no question that the immediate relationship we share with the president is important, but our effectiveness depends to a large extent on our relationship with the people closest to the president. There are negotiations that go on every day, for every event and every trip, and that’s done with the staff. Bill Henkel had only just come to the White House the year before I did. Even though he sometimes strutted around with the air of “the best political advance guy ever,” he discovered in Kansas City that I was on his side, that I would help him get what he wanted, and that he couldn’t intimidate me. In turn, I quickly came to see that underneath the arrogance, he was the best political advance guy ever.
Mike Deaver was another one with whom we needed to establish common ground. He knew what he wanted and how to get it and didn’t much care what any of us thought. If we agreed with him, that was fine; if we didn’t, that wasn’t going to get in his way. He had flawless political instincts and the president’s confidence. Deaver’s genius was in knowing how to emphasize the president’s strengths and how to build an image for him by creating situations that highlighted those strengths. Years later, in a documentary about the Reagan era, Deaver explained to PBS, “All you wanted to do is fix the camera on his head and let him talk. You didn’t need him to walk around the desk or sit on the corner and do all of those things that people have to do to make politicians interesting.”
I saw Deaver up close for the first time on a survey trip to La Paz, on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. It was a fairly simple trip, only one city, but it gave me the opportunity to study Deaver and begin to figure out what motivated him. I needed to know how he viewed the Secret Service. I watched closely to see how he introduced me, to see where he wanted me to sit, to see if he asked me questions, to see if he gave everyone on the other side of the table the impression that the Secret Service was important. And he did all those things. Security was significant, and he considered my views important. The complex trips that followed were made so much easier by having established this common ground.
During those first few weeks at the White House, I worked hard to form relationships with the staff that would carry us through the next four years. I came to see that I was dealing with two very impressive guys and that the Deaver-Henkel combination was unbeatable. On that trip to Japan, where I had my run-in with Mr. Motoishi, the Reagans visited Prime Minister Nakasone and his wife at their country home. Marine One landed on a school playground where the greeting committee was a school full of adorable children, dressed in their best school uniforms, carrying flowers. The photo op was foolproof, except that when the president, Mrs. Reagan, the prime minister, and Mrs. Nakasone went over to meet the children, the Japanese police moved in to separate them from the White House entourage. The cops weren’t going to allow anyone to get too close, and they crowded out the White House photographer, Pete Souza.
Never one to let anything get in the way of what he wanted to accomplish, Deaver tried to hurry the photographer through the crowd. But the police weren’t having it. They grabbed Souza and threw him out of the group. Deaver pushed him straight back into the melee, and again, the cops shoved him away. I worried because the Japanese police were getting too physical with Pete. I couldn’t get over there to help, but Henkel, who was always very quick and could probably read Deaver’s mind, saw his opportunity. As Deaver continued trying to get Pete past the police, and with the Reagans and the Nakasones now walking away from the kids, Henkel grabbed a little boy and a little girl, maneuvered himself in front of the Reagans and plunked the two children down right there. The president and first lady greeted the kids with huge smiles while Souza did an end run to a spot where he could get his photographs. Those pictures ran in newspapers around the world.
On that same trip, Deaver, Henkel, and I, along with several others, did not fly home with the president. Instead, we went on to China to do the survey for a scheduled Reagan visit five months down the line. None of us knew what to expect, other than that we’d need to be flexible, which turned out to be the case. It was all rig
ht for us to fly into Beijing on our own plane, but the Chinese decided that our plane had to stay in Beijing. They would fly us anywhere we wanted to go. We courteously accepted their offer, because we had no other choice, and wound up touring the country on a vintage Russian-built, Chinese Air Force turboprop. We were all seasoned fliers and knew enough to be extremely nervous from takeoff to landing.
We scouted several cities and wound up at Xian, where the ancient terra-cotta figures are displayed. It’s a grim place. We stayed at a Russian-built hotel and were presented with unappetizing meals. In central China, they do not eat the Chinese food we know in America. Every night, dinner would be presented on a lazy Susan overflowing with food that none of us recognized. The foreign ministry people were wining and dining us the best way they knew how, but the food worried us as much as their airplane. At the risk of insulting them, I made this rule for myself, and it became a kind of dictum for the rest of the group: If you can’t tell us in English what it is, we won’t eat it. If someone said, that’s duck, that was fine. But when they answered, I’m not sure how to say that in English, that wasn’t fine. Although sea slug and camel tendon soup translate easily into English, I kept hoping for mu shu pork.
Deaver had read an article in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine about the gorges on the Yangtze River. Sadly, many of them have disappeared under water now. But there was a possibility that we might take the president there, so we flew to Bagong—in the middle of nowhere—and got on a cruise boat that took us through the gorges. This was so remote that some of the people who came out to the locks to watch us had never seen Westerners. The gorges were absolutely spectacular. The walkways alongside the river had been carved into the rock. It must have taken these people hundreds of years to build the footpaths, which was the way they got coal down from the hills to the barges on the river. The food on the boat was better than it had been in Xian, although the Chinese sometimes made spelling mistakes on the menu. One night the menu read that we were having “crap soup” and “shrimp with crap.”
Realizing that the facilities outside Beijing were not up to American standards, Deaver decided the president would stay in the capital and in Shanghai, but that Xian would be a day trip. There were some obligatory things for the president to do in Beijing, like reviewing the troops in Tiananmen Square and the big banquet dinner in the Great Hall. That was fine. But our Secret Service radios apparently were not so fine. The Chinese didn’t understand why we were bringing our own cars, so we explained why. And they were slightly nervous about all the weapons we were bringing. We explained about those, too. But the radios really annoyed them. We tried to make them understand why we needed to be in constant communication, but they were adamant that we should not use our own radios. It turned out that the frequency we were using was the same frequency used by local taxicabs. So we changed our frequencies.
It was agreed that in Beijing the president would stay at the official guest compound where Richard Nixon had stayed when he first visited in 1971. The Chinese appreciated the symbolism. A whole series of buildings and cottages, the compound provided enough comfort that it would be acceptable. But just before the president arrived, I got pulled aside by one of the Technical Security Division (TSD) guys.
Made up of agents and technicians, the TSD is an elite hi-tech group that, among other things, maintains the integrity of the president’s communications. It’s a critical job that they do behind the scenes, running audio countermeasure operations. Because “the other side” has top-of-the-line equipment—mini-minicameras and state-of-the-art microwave receivers, and, who knows, goldfish that are also listening devices—the TSD is always trying to outdo those people by working with the spy agencies to develop their own equipment. They are constantly taking precautions, regardless of where the president is—including the White House—to assure that no one can eavesdrop on his conversations. Now, the word from the TSD agent in China was that they had found a bug in the nightstand between the twin beds in the President’s bedroom. In line with procedure, they had left it in place.
This discovery was nothing new, neither startling nor particularly dangerous. Listening devices get found regularly throughout the political world, and throughout the corporate world, too. People in positions of power come to expect that someone somewhere will try to eavesdrop. Witness the events in 2003 when a bug was found in the Philadelphia mayor’s office, and the next year when one was planted in the office of the secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. There are even some people who jokingly complain when the other side doesn’t consider them important enough to invest in a listening device.
Though listening devices are common, it’s rare that video cameras show up in rooms because, generally speaking, governments are more interested in what a president has to say than in his personal habits. And, in the end, foreign governments don’t usually bother taping everybody or on every occasion, even though they have the capability to do it. But when the president shows up, the countries where you would expect that he’d be bugged usually give it a try. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the Chinese still do it, or that the Russians still do it, or that it happens to U.S. diplomats all the time in the Middle East. Who knows, maybe even the French do it. I’d like to think our friends know better than to try it, but even in friendly countries we never take the president’s communications for granted.
The trip to Xian turned out to be a logistical nightmare. We needed to get the post standers in place before the president arrived, which meant flying them to Xian the night before. Bob DeProspero stayed with the president and I went on with thirty post standers—including my younger brother, Tom—to Xian. We were escorted to the hotel where the advance team, led by Rob Kasdon—it had been there for ten days—was in misery. A dust storm had come off the Mongolian desert and covered everything, everywhere, with orange soot. It was in the closets, on the beds, in the bathrooms, and very quickly under everyone’s fingernails. Next, the food the Chinese provided was inedible. So the guys had to arrange for canned goods to be shipped in from the States—baked beans and tuna and crackers—which was fine the first day, but after ten days of baked beans and tuna and crackers, mealtimes were wearing very thin. The post standers and I arrived at Xian at about eight o’clock at night, and I naively said, Surely there must be something to eat somewhere. The only place, someone answered, is “The Room of Much Happiness.” That’s where they’d stocked the canned goods. There was a hot plate and there were soft drinks and, granted, the room was filled with food, but lukewarm baked beans in a setting of orange soot wasn’t what I’d call a “happiness” experience.
The next day’s event went well, although one of the post standers got into a confrontation with some Chinese. He was guarding a door and wouldn’t let anybody in—it was a language problem—and we had to extract him from an obstreperous crowd. After we got the president onto his plane for the flight back to Beijing, my plans were to take the post standers on to Shanghai. That’s when I was told that the plane the Chinese had provided to get us from Xian to Shanghai had no baggage section. But I had thirty people, and each one had two suitcases.
One of our C-130 car planes was waiting to take the limousines to Shanghai, so I got a couple of guys to help me find two trucks and load up the luggage. I delivered them to the plane and appealed to the pilot. “There’s no way to get this stuff from here to there without you, and if we have to leave the bags here, they’ll never be seen again.” He agreed to take them. That was the easy part. I decided to load the suitcases inside the cars—front seat, back seat, trunks, wherever—figuring we could then just drive the cars onto the plane and that we could stow any remaining bags wherever there was room.
But a mechanic from the Secret Service garage showed up with other ideas. “You can’t do that.” I asked why? He said, “Because you’ll scratch my cars.”
I acknowledged that he was responsible for the cars, but asked him to understand that we were dealing with a major probl
em. I promised we would not scratch his cars. He guaranteed that we would, especially when the bags started shifting around in flight. I had to inform him, “I don’t particularly care, because I need to get these bags to Shanghai and this is the only way I can do that.”
“No,” he said, “you cannot do that. I won’t allow it.”
I overruled his objection by ordering the agents to keep loading bags into the cars and onto the plane, and that’s how the luggage got to Shanghai.
As hard as we try to plan for every possible problem, each trip presents us with plenty of new ones.
In the early hours of October 25, 1983, Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. There’d been a bloody and violent Marxist coup d’état directly supported by Cuba, and Reagan believed he needed to act. Among his reasons for invading the island to liberate it from the Marxists and Cubans was that nearly a thousand American students were on Grenada. Six weeks after the rangers, navy SEALS, and marines landed, the students were safe, the American soldiers came home, and a pro-American government established itself on the island.
A few months later, the government invited the president to visit the island and planned to greet him as a conquering hero. But when we did the survey trip, we quickly concluded that this poor Caribbean island simply could not support the logistics of a presidential visit. They didn’t have enough police, couldn’t build a stage, didn’t have enough barricades, and that was only the beginning of a list that went on for several pages. So we had to bring in everything, from wood for the stage to portable toilets for the crowds. The president was going to speak in a big field, and the government was telling us they expected forty thousand people to show up. That’s pretty major, considering that there were only about sixty thousand people on the island.
Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service Page 15