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

by Petro, Joseph

  I also faced a situation with her that was not of her own creation. One of her agents had become too ingratiating. It reached the point where his familiarity was inappropriate. Mrs. Quayle was the innocent party, being naturally friendly and pleasant, and I think that the agent might have been reading that wrong. He never called her Marilyn in front of other agents, but he might have been doing so in private. I didn’t like his body language and the way he handled himself. So I transferred him. I brought in Ed Russell to run her detail, an agent I respected. He could be tough and smooth at the same time, and the problem never recurred.

  There was one time, however, when Mrs. Quayle went too far. We were in New Hampshire with the “formal” follow-up car. That’s the black Cadillac convertible that was popular in the Kennedy days. A touch of Hollywood, it was a great-looking show of force, with agents hanging off the sideboards. It’s not used anymore because the philosophy these days is that shift agents shouldn’t be exposed like that. So today the follow-up cars are armored. But we still occasionally used the convertible for parades as late as the 1990s, and we had it with us on that trip.

  At the hotel before the vice president’s speech, Mrs. Quayle asked if she and her husband could ride in it to the airport. I told her no, because it was too risky. She asked if she could do it alone. I told her no, for the same reason. Later that day she asked again, and again I told her no. By the time we were ready to leave, she was still pestering me about it. I had to get her off my back, so I promised that one day I’d arrange a ride for her. My plan was to bring the car to the residence and let her ride around in it there.

  That was a Thursday. On the following Monday, I took the vice president out of town for the night, got back Tuesday morning, and promptly received a phone call from the director demanding to know, “Did you authorize Mrs. Quayle to take the open follow-up car to Manassas?”

  I had not. Without permission, she’d taken the car from the observatory nearly thirty miles to go horseback riding. What’s more, she’d told her agents that I’d authorized it. I got her on the phone, and from the tone of my voice she knew she’d stepped over the line and began apologizing. What she couldn’t have known was that her foolishness had damaged some of my credibility with certain people at headquarters. According to them, I’d allowed her to do something that was clearly inappropriate. Her escapade affected my reputation within the service for a long time.

  Those matters aside, we traveled all over the world with the Quayles, and I saw firsthand how the two of them worked tirelessly as ambassadors for American interests. The vice president was actually very capable in this area, although he seldom got public credit for it. We took him to virtually every country in Latin and Central America at a time when democracy in many of those places was still developing. Despite Dan Quayle’s image in the media, he had an easygoing, person-to-person style and was able to establish a relaxed rapport with several leaders, many of whom were his age. More important was his apparent grasp of the issues. In those face-to-face meetings with world leaders, he was nobody’s fool.

  Not that every such meeting was comfortable. In Santiago, Chile, after calling on the newly elected president, we went to see the former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. We arrived at a gated one-story house and were met by two military guards. They escorted us into a foyer and stood at attention in front of two large sliding wooden doors. Several minutes passed, and none of us knew what to expect next. Then, at some secret signal, the guards snapped back and with military precision yanked the doors open. It was like “What’s behind curtain number one?” There was Pinochet, standing at attention, in full dress uniform.

  On a trip to Brazil in 1991, Quayle was suddenly confronted with the dilemma of dealing with Fidel Castro. We were there for the inauguration of the Brazilian president, and at a staff briefing, Quayle was advised that Castro would also be attending. He understood that Castro would see the event as a way to embarrass the United States, and he wasn’t going to allow that to happen. He said to me, “I don’t want to have to be in a position where I have to acknowledge him.” Quayle’s worry was that, if Castro got close enough, he would try to shake hands and a photographer would snap a picture of that. Quayle said, “Help me stay away from him.” So I spent that day on the radio with advance agents all over Brasilia making sure that wherever Castro went, we were someplace else. Later, at the official reception, I spent the evening jockeying Quayle around the room to keep him at a distance from Castro.

  We also took Quayle to Africa, where he insisted on seeing life as it really was. Most of the time when the president and the vice president travel, they only see the opulent. Here Quayle was very much the exception. He made it a point to see the underbelly of a country, even when his host didn’t want him to. On his visit to the Ivory Coast, Quayle insisted on going to an AIDS hospital, which was pretty grim. People were dying in hallways while their families were camped outside, waiting to take their bodies home. He never hesitated to see real poverty on any of these trips, and he was good at drawing attention to it.

  The president of the Ivory Coast was Felix Houphouët-Boigny, who’d ruled since 1960. Having been born in the city of Yamoussoukro, he decided to move the capital there from Abidjan, and built himself a palace that comes complete with a moat filled with crocodiles. But even more spectacularly, he built the largest church in Christendom—Notre-Dame de la Paix Basilica—which is a slightly larger, but otherwise exact, replica of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. And it, too, comes complete with a piazza in front.

  At his meeting with Houphouët-Boigny, Quayle didn’t hide the fact that he was upset with the incongruity of such excessive opulence and the stark poverty and illness he’d seen elsewhere in the country. He told the ruler that there had to be reforms and that the United States would not let up in its efforts to bring about those reforms, regardless of Houphouët-Boigny’s self-interest. Quayle’s message of democratic freedom and economic reform was a consistent theme in his meetings with leaders around the world. He always pressed home the fact that the United States government would support efforts in that direction, and he criticized political and economic oppression.

  Those meetings were difficult and sometimes less than friendly. The trips themselves were always physically demanding. We flew to the Ivory Coast in a 707, but the runway at Yamoussoukro was too short for us to take off with the plane fully fueled for the flight back to Washington, so we went from there to the old capital, Abidjan, to fuel up. But as we were landing there, a bird hit an engine. The pilot wouldn’t take off with three engines, which wouldn’t normally have been an issue if it had been a presidential visit, because he always has a backup plane. But the vice president didn’t. There was talk of getting onto a commercial flight, which was a really bad choice, or spending the night waiting for Andrews Air Force Base to send us a new 707. Quayle made it very clear to me that was an equally bad choice. “I do not want to spend the night here.” He did not want to be Houphouët-Boigny’s guest. What’s more, I didn’t want us to spend the night there for security reasons.

  I looked down the tarmac and spotted our C-141 Starlifter. It was waiting for us to leave so that they could load up the cars and fly them back to Andrews. It’s a big, noisy, four-engine cargo plane. In a flash, knowing that Mrs. Quayle would love this, I asked the vice president, “Can I interest you in a car plane?”

  “Let’s do it,” he said. So I went over to the C-141 to tell the pilot, an air force captain who was probably only twenty-five years old, that he was about to fly Air Force Two. On the way to Africa, we’d stopped at Cape Verde so that Quayle could meet with the prime minister. Our plan was now to fly back to Cape Verde, which would take three hours, and hook up there with the new 707 coming from Andrews. We’d leave the cars in Abidjan, because it would take an hour or two to get them on board, along with enough agents to protect them. The Starlifter could come back for the cars and the agents after dropping us at Cape Verde.

  We loaded the whol
e entourage onto the C-141—into the cold, empty cargo hold where there were thirty seats facing backward—installed Quayle in the cockpit, and took off. A few hours later, as we were heading into Cape Verde, a diplomatic issue arose. The prime minister found out we were landing there and asked to come out to see the vice president again, so his staff had to go through all sorts of diplomatic discussions to handle that. Eventually the 707 from Andrews arrived carrying the parts to fix the engine of the 707 stranded in the Ivory Coast. The C-141 took those parts back to Abidjan while we headed home on the new 707.

  Talk about physically demanding trips: In May 1991, we’d just come from Singapore and were swinging through Jakarta when word came from Washington that former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi had been assassinated. The White House wanted Quayle to go to the funeral. Instead of sending the Singapore advance team home—it was headed by two of our best agents, Keith Prewitt and Mark Enright—I dispatched them along with cars to India, giving them just twenty-four hours on the ground before we arrived. When we got there, the vice president made an official condolence call on the Indian prime minister before setting off to the hall where Gandhi’s coffin was lying in state.

  Before we arrive anywhere, we get a site report. So three minutes before we pulled up at the Indian equivalent of a funeral parlor, Mark radioed me, “We have three hundred press uncontained, two thousand people uncontained, fourteen greeters uncontained. It’s a mess. And it’s not going to get any better. Come on in.”

  It was a mess, but there wasn’t much we could do about it, so I told the shift to work in very tight. We stayed shoulder to shoulder with Quayle and, as soon as we could, got him back to the car. That’s when Keith advised me there was no lead car. He said he thought the police car that was supposed to be leading us might be down the block, so he started running along the street. The motorcade followed him. Just like that, he became the lead car. He was a great athlete—he had played football and basketball at Memphis State—but even he couldn’t run to the next site. Luckily, he found the lead car, we put the motorcade back together and headed out of there. We stopped at the embassy to put the vice president in his armored vest, then went to the site of the funeral pyre.

  Hundreds of thousands of people were gathered there. There were some plush seats for the foreign dignitaries in front of the pyre, and our advance team managed to get our motorcade within thirty feet of it. It wasn’t an ideal escape route, but it was better than nothing. We got out of the limousine to find that only three seats had been blocked off for the American delegation: one for the vice president, one for Mrs. Quayle, and, theoretically, one for the ambassador. I told Quayle, “I don’t want to leave you alone. Would you ask the ambassador to sit someplace else?” He did, and the three of us sat down. Minute by minute, as they piled wood onto the fire, the sun grew more intense. It was soon close to 110 degrees in the sun, and we wound up being there for two and a half hours. More worryingly, we were surrounded by foreign dignitaries—such as Yassir Arafat and Benazir Bhutto—whose bodyguards were armed to the teeth. There were also heavily armed Indian police and soldiers wherever we looked.

  Shrill music blared from huge speakers. It was a hot, noisy, and crowded situation, made all the more tense by having so many automatic weapons in the hands of people we didn’t know so close to the vice president. It made us all very edgy. At one point Quayle leaned over and whispered to me, “What would you do if Arafat stood up and pulled his gun on me?”

  I told him without hesitation, “I’d shoot him.”

  He asked, “If you did, what do you think would happen?”

  I assured him, “It would not be a pretty picture.”

  The instant the funeral ended, we got out of there.

  One thing that annoyed me about Dan Quayle was how fast he did everything. He walked faster than anybody I knew, and he ran so fast that I had trouble keeping up with him. But what really annoyed me was how fast he showered. We’d be traveling and put in a very long day and we’d end up at night in a hotel somewhere and at ten o’clock I’d walk him into his suite. He’d turn around and say, Want to run in the morning? I’d say, Okay, what time? He’d say, six. Now, that’s fine for him. But it meant I had to get up at five to make sure the detail was set up and ready to run with us. Afterward, he’d take the fastest shower of anyone on the planet. In under ten minutes, he’d be dressed and out. Which meant all the agents would have to hurry back to their rooms and rush around to get ready so that we didn’t have to make him wait for us. Keeping up with Quayle was always a struggle.

  But then, keeping up with the rest of the family was not easy either. We used to joke that their vacations were five sports a day. Often, it was literally that. I divided their sports into two categories—observer and participatory. For agents, golf was an observer sport. We didn’t have to play to protect them. Same with tennis. But skiing, scuba diving, horseback riding, running, and white-water rafting were participatory, and we had to take part with them. Fortunately, the Secret Service has such a variety of athletic people that I had no trouble finding great skiers, great riders, and highly qualified scuba divers on the detail. So we ran with them, and we skied with them—all five were double-diamond, black-slope skiers who skied from first run in the morning until last run in the evening and came down mountains at top speed—and we scuba dived with them.

  But the Quayle family adventure to beat all family adventures was a trip through the Grand Canyon in a paddleboat.

  This was a trip we could never have done with the president. We were going to be isolated. The president needs instant communications because he’s responsible for nuclear retaliation. But the vice president doesn’t have that responsibility and therefore has more leeway in where he can go and what he can do. Still, WHCA officers came with us to set up satellite dishes, so we had communications. We also had contingency plans in place if we needed to get out of there fast. To accompany the family I only took one shift and one other supervisor. I’d argue that no vice presidential family in American history had ever done anything quite like this.

  Over the course of four days, we trekked and rafted from the south rim of the Grand Canyon ninety-six miles down the Colorado River. The Park Service provided four eight-to-nine-passenger inflatable powerboats and one seven-passenger paddleboat. They also set up camp for us and handled all the food. But each agent had to deal with his or her own equipment, guns, and radios. It was physically exhausting.

  On the first day, we practiced flipping rafts and scrambling back in. The water was freezing. When we thought we were ready for a level-five rapids, I climbed into the front of the boat on the port side, and Quayle got into the starboard front. I put two agents on each side of the boat behind Quayle and me. We hit the rapids and the boat went under water, then popped out, launching us into the air. I’d never done rapids before and wasn’t prepared to find myself, literally, in midair. As the boat dropped out from under me, boom, I went into the water. I grabbed one of the straps along the side of the boat and held on for dear life. Quayle and one of the agents pulled me back in. It was embarrassing when, that evening, Ben commented to me, “What’s this, the protector gets saved by the protectee?”

  In camp that night, I was faced with a very unique problem: How were we going to handle sleeping arrangements? We were at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, all by ourselves, and it was pitch dark. I was assured by the Park Service that it would be impossible for anybody to get near to us. There were sheer cliffs on one side, and rapids on the other. Nobody could go through the river at night without killing themselves. Anyway, you couldn’t be in the Grand Canyon without a permit, so we knew that there was no one around for dozens of miles. My options were simple: Keep agents awake throughout the night or let them sleep. Because it had been such a strenuous day, and would be another equally strenuous day tomorrow, I opted for sleep. We put the Quayles up by the base of the Canyon, and established perimeters. The agents bedded down next to them, and the Park Service bedded dow
n between us and the river. It was too dark to see anything, and because it was cold, everyone had his head inside his or her sleeping bag. Even if somebody could have infiltrated the camp—and I was entirely confident that was impossible—he would have had to stumble over twenty-five identical sleeping bags. There was no way he could possibly figure out who anybody was. This was not a security issue. I’m sure it was the first time in the history of the Secret Service that, at some moments in the night, all of the protectees and all of the agents were asleep.

  The second night was different. Another group was camped a hundred yards away. We posted agents. The third night we were alone again, and everyone slept.

  On the last day we did another big level-five rapids. Mrs. Quayle wanted to be on the boat with us, so we put her behind me and put an agent behind her. As soon as we hit those rapids, she came off the boat. I didn’t see her go, but when I looked down into the water, there she was, clinging to the side of the boat. By that time, a very courageous agent, John Orloff, was in the water with her. I grabbed her by the life jacket, and we hauled her in. It wasn’t as dangerous as it might have looked, but having gone overboard myself, I felt that her getting wet vindicated me a little bit. Unfortunately, the vice president never saw a thing. Years later, when he wrote his autobiography, all he said about me was that I’d fallen into the water and he had pulled me out.

  When the old house used by the chief of naval operations was first designated the vice presidential residence, we fenced it in. But the main gate at the observatory, the Thirty-fourth Street entrance, runs between the residence and our three-story command post. The navy controlled the gate, using contract guards. Although we were permitted to post a UD officer there, he had no authority. He couldn’t open or close the gate. What concerned me was that someone could get onto the property and separate the agents at the command post from the residence. Hubie Bell tried to get it changed through channels and couldn’t, and until January 17, 1991, I couldn’t get it changed through channels either. The date is significant because it was the morning after Operation Desert Storm began, at the start of the Gulf War. I phoned our command post at the observatory and told the shift supervisor, “Get two uniformed officers and seize the gate.”