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

by Petro, Joseph

  Dokuchayev thought about that for a moment, looked up at me and said, “Solution.” He crushed his right fist into his left palm. “Secret Service should do this to State Department.”

  I said, “General, we can’t do that. You could, but I can’t.” It was an interesting insight into him and what he thought the relationship should be. If the Secret Service was supposed to be in charge, either we got what we wanted immediately, or we crushed whoever defied us and then got what we wanted. “The last thing I want tomorrow morning is a fight with a State Department agent at the door.”

  He understood the position I’d been put into, and quite elegantly solved the problem. “I will make sure that Shevardnadze’s person is not in the room.”

  Later that evening, Dokucheyev caught me staring at the large suitcase his aide was carrying. It had a phone cradled on the top. The general very proudly announced, “Joe, I can call my wife on that phone in Moscow.”

  This was a long time before cell phones, so I said, “You’re kidding.”

  “Yes, I can.” He turned to his aide and ordered him to dial Moscow. A moment passed, the aide handed the phone to Dokuchayev, who started speaking to someone on the other end in Russian, then handed the phone to me and said, “Say hello to my wife.”

  There was a lot of noise on the line, and I had no idea who I was talking to, so I said Hello, how are you, I’m here with the general, it’s very nice to speak with you, and gave the phone back to Dokuchayev. When he hung up, I said, “That’s really great,” and he nodded several times to show me how proud he was of Russian technology. “But I can talk to my wife, too,” I told him, and went over to the president’s limousine. I opened the door and said to the driver, “Get Signal on the phone and ask them to dial my wife on my drop line.” As a branch of the Army Signal Corps, WHCA provided most senior people at the White House with these special, direct-line, no-dial phones at home. It was the one phone that everybody always answered.

  A minute or two went by and the driver nodded to me that my wife was on the line. I reached through the open window, grabbed the phone, said hello to my wife, just as the Swiss called for the motorcade. The limousine started moving. I walked alongside the car trying to motion to Dokuchayev to take the phone, but Dokuchayev wouldn’t budge. I kept motioning to him, “My wife is on this phone,” as the car picked up a little speed. Now I started running to keep up, “It’s my wife on the line,” but Dokuchayev stood still, and I had to hang up. I came back to where he was standing and said, “That was my wife on the phone in America, and you could have spoken to her from Geneva all the way to America. That’s American technology.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know that. I don’t know who was on the phone. Maybe it was your wife, maybe it wasn’t.” And then he added, “Soviets win first test.”

  President and Mrs. Reagan arrived in Geneva three days before the conference, on Saturday night, November 16, and we installed them in Aga Khan’s villa. But that November was the coldest to date in Swiss history—it was bitterly and brutally cold—and despite the fact that everything was set up and ready to go at the stables, there was just no way the president could go riding.

  The Aga Khan and his British-born former-model wife, Sally Croker-Poole, escorted the Reagans around the estate. Then, before leaving, she handed the president a note from one of her young sons. The boy asked the president if he would be so kind, while he was staying there, as to please remember to feed his goldfish.

  When the president read that, he assured the Aga Khan and his wife, “Absolutely.” He said he would be honored to do it and promised that he would do it himself. So one of the first things he did the next morning was feed the goldfish. And he did it every morning that they were there.

  On Monday morning, at Bill Henkel’s insistence, the president did a “rehearsal.” Although it was still bitter cold, and Mrs. Reagan wasn’t happy about him being exposed to this weather, Bill walked the president through Fleur d’Eau and down to the cabana so that he would be totally familiar with the setting. Just like an actor getting familiar with the set, Henkel knew how important it was for the president to “understand the surroundings” and be at ease within them.

  The following morning, Tuesday, November 19—the first morning of the summit—tragedy struck. The president went into the boy’s bedroom to sprinkle fish food into the bowl and one of the goldfish was belly up. Obviously it wasn’t the president’s fault, but he felt terrible about it and was genuinely upset. After all, he’d given his word that he would take care of the little boy’s goldfish, and now one of them was dead on his watch.

  He kept telling us how he felt responsible, which didn’t surprise any of us, because that’s the way he was. So he summoned a few people on his staff and told them that he needed to replace the goldfish. He sent a staffer to find a replacement goldfish, but it had to be one that looked just like the dead one. Later, he penned a handwritten note to the little boy, apologizing for what had happened, and put it in the boy’s room, himself. With all the other things he had on his mind, he was forever an old-school gentleman.

  We delivered the president to Fleur d’Eau with plenty of time to spare, and while we waited for the general secretary to arrive, Bill Henkel had a discussion with the president about what he should wear when he walked out the door to meet Gorbachev’s car. The president wanted to know what Gorbachev had been wearing the night before when he arrived in Geneva. Henkel told him, a heavy top coat, scarf, and hat. The president asked Bill what he thought Gorbachev would be wearing this morning. Bill answered, “Probably the same thing.” The president would only be outside a few minutes, and it was still freezing cold, yet he decided not to wear his top coat. That decision showed his innate sense of public image. He couldn’t be sure what Gorbachev would be wearing but realized that if he walked out that door in his coat and Gorbachev was only wearing a suit, he’d look like an old man, and certainly much older than Gorbachev. That’s not an image he ever wanted to project. He wanted to be seen as vigorous and healthy, so he stepped out of the door and into the cold morning in a beautiful blue suit with a white shirt, all pumped up, looking fifteen years younger than he was.

  The big Zil pulled up and Gorbachev stepped out wearing a huge topcoat, a hat, and a scarf. The two men greeted each other warmly, but by the expression on Gorbachev’s face, it was obvious what he was thinking—why didn’t somebody tell me that Reagan was dressed this way so I could have taken off my overcoat? Gorbachev even made a smiling gesture toward his coat, as if to say, you’re dressed like that and I’ve got this. The president gave him one of those friendly shrugs, but the message was clear.

  In his memoirs, President Reagan mentioned that moment. “There was something likable about Gorbachev. There was warmth in his face and his style, not the coldness bordering on hatred I’d seen in most senior Soviet officials I’d met until then.”

  The two leaders, along with the secretary of state and the foreign minister, went into the room, followed by one Secret Service agent, one KGB agent, and the fellow from SY. The principals sat down around a large table while the rest of us stood off to the side. The conversation stayed in broad, general terms about what everyone hoped to accomplish. After about twenty minutes or so, once the opening session formalities were over, Henkel and Reagan made their move. The president turned to the general secretary and invited him to take a walk down to the lake.

  I have no idea whether Shultz or Shevardnadze knew about this, but I could see that neither wanted this to happen, because both of them were excluded. It’s human nature, I suppose, that they both wanted to be involved in all the discussions, and I suspect that if Shultz could have stopped it, he would have. It was obvious that he wasn’t happy about it. Of course, I knew it was going to happen because it was all planned. I even had my coat with me because I would be standing outside the cabana for however long the president and Gorbachev would be inside.

  The entourage, which was the two of them, an interpreter
, the two military aides with the nuclear codes—ours was the “the football,” and because we didn’t know what the Russians called theirs, we dubbed it “the soccer ball”—and three agents from both sides, left the main house for the walk down the path toward the lake.

  The cabana was ready for them, with a blazing fire in the hearth, two large comfortable leather chairs facing each other, a small table in between them, and a seat just behind that for the interpreter. A steward was standing at the open door with a tray of coffee. The president and the general secretary took their coffee, walked into the room, and sat down in the large leather armchairs, and then the interpreter sat down facing them. I was standing inside with the KGB guy, waiting for him to leave, while everyone else was outside. But the KGB guy didn’t step out, and as long as he was there, I wasn’t going to leave. For all I knew, he was thinking the same thing, that if the American doesn’t leave, I’m not leaving either. All of a sudden, the doors closed behind us and we were in the room, with no place to go. The president wasn’t bothered, and neither was Gorbachev.

  Some years later I read that before coming to Geneva, he’d phoned two of his closest political allies—Margaret Thatcher in London and Brian Mulroney in Ottawa—both of whom assured him that he would like Gorbachev. He’d also been briefed that Gorbachev was an intelligent man with a good sense of humor, but that he was not the sort of man who would feel immediately comfortable being on a first-name basis with the president.

  So when the president took a brown manila envelope out of his pocket—it contained a letter that he’d handwritten—he leaned over to Gorbachev, handed it to him, and then, in that wonderfully warm and friendly voice of his, said, “Mr. General Secretary”—Gorbachev looked straight at the president, who smiled one of those Reagan smiles—“I’d like you to read this.”

  That was the moment, right there. The amiable tone of the president’s voice, those three words—“Mr. General Secretary”—and the way he smiled when he handed the envelope to him. That’s what set the stage for what they discussed in the cabana that morning in Geneva. And that’s what put these two men on the same track to end to the cold war.

  Gorbachev opened the envelope and read the letter. And then they began to talk. The president, as he himself reported later, pointed out that the two of them had been born into humble families in a rural part of their country. Now, as the leaders of their countries, these two men from the same background could, if they chose, start World War III. Or they could bring about a lasting peace. Gorbachev agreed that they had a lot of things in common, including a desire for peace. They spoke about the development of nuclear weapons in the years just after World War II, and about the Strategic Defense Initiative. After half an hour, they decided to go back to the main house.

  On the walk to the house, the president stopped Gorbachev to speak with him privately. He invited the Soviet leader to come to Washington. Gorbachev accepted immediately, and invited the president to visit Moscow. The Reagan memoirs noted, “Not once during our summit did he [Gorbachev] express support for the old Marxist-Leninist goal of a one-world Communist state or the Brezhnev doctrine of Soviet expansionism. He was the first Soviet leader I knew of who hadn’t done that.”

  Elsewhere it’s been written that the secretary general arrived in Geneva with a defensive attitude. That he didn’t trust the Americans. That he assumed the U.S. military-industrial complex had total control over the political system. Also, he was dealing with a former movie star and couldn’t be sure that the president wasn’t anything more than a front man for those military-industrial interests. That was the way things worked in his own country. There’s no doubt that he had a lot on his mind. He must have believed, as so many people did, that President Reagan and the pope were conspiring to topple Communism in Poland. If that happened, if the Solidarity movement could hold on, then political change throughout the eastern bloc was inevitable. He had to know that the tide was turning. He’d foreseen the headlines, and they made him nervous. It’s easy to believe that, in Gorbachev’s mind, he and his colleagues were fighting for their lives.

  But from the moment when Gorbachev got out of his car and throughout their meetings there was a rapport between the president and the Soviet leader and that clearly affected whatever conceptions Gorbachev brought to Geneva. I’m convinced that the president totally disarmed Gorbachev with his one-on-one charm, because as I stood in that cabana and watched his body language, it was clear to me that Mikhail Gorbachev liked Ronald Reagan.

  I’ve thought about that meeting in the cabana over the years, and about how Bill Henkel created the environment for it to happen. I’ve wondered, too, how the world might be different if that first encounter had taken place at the dour Soviet mission. The president was not someone who liked what the USSR stood for. He had been consistently very negative about the Soviets, and Gorbachev knew that. If that first meeting had been at the Soviet mission, and if Gorbachev had gone there expecting more of the same from President Reagan, perhaps he would have gotten it as part of some self-fulfilling prophesy. But the ambience of Fleur d’Eau’s stone cabana, Reagan’s warmth, and Gorbachev’s receptiveness made a difference.

  Once Gorbachev accepted the president’s invitation to Washington, the meeting in Geneva was only about going through the motions. And about Raisa Gorbachev. Until then, the wives of Soviet leaders were either not seen, or they looked drab. The contrast between Mrs. Khrushchev in a babushka and Jackie Kennedy in Dior was startling. The contrast between Mrs. Reagan in designer clothes and Mrs. Gorbachev in designer clothes made the world understand that Raisa Gorbachev’s husband was not like the others. She was the first Soviet leader’s wife with a public persona, and he was smart enough to bring her onto the world stage with him.

  Seeing the leaders and their wives together confirmed everyone’s excitement that these were new times. After one of the dinners at the Soviet mission, the Gorbachevs walked the Reagans to the door, and what I saw were not two world leaders and their spouses, but four friends saying good night to each other after a pleasant dinner. Both Reagans kissed Raisa goodnight and both Gorbachevs kissed Nancy good night, and as the Reagans walked out the door, all four of them were laughing about something because the president always ended everything with a laugh.

  I wasn’t in the room for the second meeting at Fleur d’Eau. Instead, I stayed in the joint command post we’d set up with the Russians. It was the first time anything like that ever happened. The Soviet military aide was sitting there with his “soccer ball” right next to Casey Bower, our military aide with “the football.” Looking at them, I realized that the codes in this room could blow up the entire planet several times over. For the first, and possibly the only time, the American nuclear codes were within a foot of the Soviet nuclear codes. I stared at them for the longest time, then asked both military-aides out loud, “What if we all have to leave in a hurry and you two guys grab the wrong suitcases?”

  Casey gave me a disapproving stare, which made me understand I’d said the wrong thing. Both men believed that the safety of the free world depended on each of them maintaining control over his suitcase. The retaliatory strike could only begin with that bag. The president couldn’t order a strike without the football, and Gorbachev couldn’t order a strike without his soccer ball.

  When we left Geneva, I made a point of saying a warm good-bye to Dokuchayev. I wanted him to know that I thought he was a special man. We’d spent a lot of time together and had spoken candidly about our hopes and our concerns, and how it didn’t make sense for us to be enemies. Just as the Secret Service reflects the man in the Oval Office, Dokuchayev was where he was because he reflected the new man in the Kremlin. Gorbachev understood that they needed to open up and deal on a different level with the United States. In a very real sense, Gen. Mikhail Dokuchayev of the KGB managed that quite well.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LEAVING THE PRESIDENT

  Every agent pays a very high price for the honor of being
with the president. Time is never your own.

  There were two occasions when I saw Ronald Reagan very down. One was political. One was a national tragedy.

  At the start of the 1984 presidential campaign, in a debate with Walter Mondale, he hadn’t done particularly well, and that depressed him. It was clear that the election was his to lose. But Mike Deaver knew what it took to get him back to being himself. He set up an old-fashioned whistle-stop tour through Ohio. He pulled “The Magellan” out of mothballs—that’s the armored train that presidents Roosevelt and Truman had used for their campaigns, the same one featured in the famous photo of Truman holding up the Chicago Daily Tribune with the headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

  The president stopped at fifteen cities, giving speeches off the back of the train, and as the crowds got bigger and more enthusiastic, a change came over him. Deaver reinvigorated the president with the tour, and the president reinvigorated his campaign by ending every speech with the famous line from his film Knute Rockne: All American, in which he played George Gipp. He’d look at the crowd and urge them, “Win one more for the Gipper.”

  The tragic occasion that deeply affected the President occurred in January 1986.

  On the twenty-eighth of that month, at 11:38 in the morning, NASA flight 51-L took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was the twenty-fifth launch of a space shuttle and the tenth time that the Challenger was used. Seventy-two seconds after liftoff, the Challenger exploded and all seven crew members were killed. The nation was plunged into mourning. Even the State of the Union address, which had been scheduled for that week, was postponed.