In the Secret Service

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In the Secret Service Page 2

by Jerry Parr


  Johnny Guy was the agent assigned to travel with the president to the Washington Hilton that afternoon, where he was to give a short speech to a labor union within the AFL-CIO. I talked to Guy sometime after ten in the morning to ask if I could take his place. He agreed.

  I called my wife, Carolyn, at her office to tell her that I would be accompanying the president to the Hilton and that if she wanted to see him, his motorcade would be across the street. She was a trial lawyer for the IRS at the time, and she had a fourth-floor office in the Universal North Building, with a window that looked down on T Street. She was glad I called and eager to see the president, if only for a moment.

  It was a routine route for a routine stop for a routine speech. But that’s the rub: routine is the enemy of every agent. With routine comes boredom. With boredom comes distraction and letting down your guard. When that happens, people die.

  We had taken presidents and vice presidents to the Washington Hilton 110 times since 1972, and nobody had died. Nobody had even come close. An advance search of the hotel had been done, along with the strategic assignment of agents, sixty-six for this event, plus police. Had we been scheduled for an out-of-Washington trip—say, in Baltimore—we would have used twice that number.

  Paul Mobley and Mary Ann Gordon headed up transportation. Both had done the route to the Hilton before, as well as numerous runs to the hospital. They had put the motorcade in place—a caravan of vehicles, each with different duties assigned to those riding in them. There was a lead car that set the pace at twenty-five miles per hour, which would stop for nothing unless it hit someone. There was a tail car, a van with eight agents, and a pilot car, all looking for suspicious vehicles along the route. There were a few ancillary cars, like a spare car with protective support and technicians, a communications car, and a staff car. There was the control car, which would include Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver. Finally, there was the president’s limousine, which was code-named Stagecoach. Every inch of it was bulletproof, covered in level-4 armor. It weighed six and a half tons and stretched nearly twenty-two feet. There was even an “emergency motorcade” of four vehicles parked at the hotel, should a quick escape be needed. All total, fifteen vehicles.

  We had plotted a protected route with police officers assigned to block off intersections along the way. The plan was to arrive at the VIP entrance; otherwise we would have to go to the hotel’s basement, where we would have some twelve hundred cars to check out. Then, when the motorcade stopped at the entrance, where uniformed police formed a perimeter of protection, the car doors would open with strategic synchronization, and the president would be whisked away to the hotel ballroom.

  It was all very regimented. And all very routine.

  In spite of how well rehearsed our responsibilities were, the risks were real. You know that danger is out there—real danger—you just don’t know where. Absence of evidence doesn’t mean evidence of absence. Just because there is no sign of a threat doesn’t mean there isn’t one. The problem isn’t what you know; it’s what you don’t know. Not what you see or hear, but what you don’t see, don’t hear. It’s the open window you don’t notice. Or the sound from a book depository that takes you a second too long to recognize as a gunshot.

  Not only do you have to be vigilant; you have to be hypervigilant.

  Ever since I joined the agency in 1962, a number of people had died. President Kennedy had been assassinated. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. Governor George Wallace survived an assassination attempt but was paralyzed. President Ford had escaped two attempts on his life. And civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated.

  President Kennedy, Wallace, and Ford had been under the protection of the Secret Service. The others were not.

  In some cases, agents were negligent. In others, they were vigilant.

  In all cases, life or death was determined by seconds.

  Sometimes split seconds.

  I had assigned Bill Green to work the advance on the president’s trip to the Hilton, which he started on March 25. His job was to draw up a security plan that pinpointed where each agent was to be stationed in and around the hotel. He was to make sure a background check was done on everyone scheduled to meet with the president during his visit, however briefly. He was also responsible for inspecting the ballroom, the hotel basement, the holding room, the stairwells, the elevators, and the VIP entrance.

  Though it was the first time Bill had done this at the Hilton, his preparations were thorough, down to the smallest detail. He visited the hotel on Friday for another inspection, then again on Saturday. On Sunday he made a few final calls before finishing his security report, which he handed in first thing on Monday, March 30. He checked the latest intel, and he was told that there was nothing on the radar in terms of threats to the president’s appearance that day.

  The trip to the Hilton was so routine that I decided bulletproof vests weren’t necessary. Besides, it was a muggy day, with rain, and vests were hot and uncomfortable. I sat in the front passenger seat; the president sat behind me. We drove down Connecticut Avenue, got on 18th Street, and made a left onto T Street, which took us to the hotel. When we stopped at the designated entrance, police and other agents were waiting for us. I got out of the car first to pull the coded switch on the president’s door—a tricky thing because if you don’t do it just right, the system has to be rebooted before you can open the door.

  President Reagan, a probusiness Republican, was at odds with the largely Democratic labor unions. But he had been invited to speak and felt a sense of responsibility to come. When Reagan had worked as an actor in Hollywood, he served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, a union under the auspices of the very group to which he was scheduled to speak. And so he felt a certain kinship with the audience.

  Once inside, I ushered the president into the elevator that led to the permanent holding room. As we ascended the platform, I picked another agent to stand near the president so I could sit behind him to survey the room. I had a good eye, trained to see trembling hands, darting eyes, sweat on the forehead . . . a disturbed look on the face . . . clothes or shoes that didn’t fit in . . . a bulge in an overcoat . . . a purse clutched a little too tightly.

  After Reagan was introduced, he stood behind the armored podium to speak. But I wasn’t paying attention to the speech; I was paying attention to the crowd, looking with eyes that could cut steel they were so intense. An agent’s eyes are weapons, every bit as intimidating as a semiautomatic. I sat with a face as cold and hard as if it had been cut from Mount Rushmore and scanned the ballroom, searching for a face that was every bit as cold and hard as mine, for eyes every bit as intense.

  One of the things agents are looking for is a gun. We are trained to shout whenever we see one—“Gun right” if an agent sees someone with a gun to the right or “Gun left” or “Gun in front.” Depending on the type of threat and where the threat is, I might push the president down behind the podium, cover him with my body on the stage, or evacuate him from the stage.

  When President Reagan finished speaking, the audience rose to applaud. But the speech wasn’t his best, and the gesture was more respectful than enthusiastic. With agents flanking his sides, the president stopped to shake a few hands, then we escorted him to the elevator.

  In the meantime, Carolyn had lost track of time. She had received a call at 1:45 and became so engrossed that she forgot all about seeing the president. When she suddenly realized what time it was, she looked out the window, and the motorcade was still parked across the street. Even though it was rainy, she grabbed her purse and rushed downstairs to the sidewalk, shortly before the president emerged from the Hilton.

  When the VIP elevator at the Hilton opened, the other agents and I surrounded the president in a human barricade we called the “diamond formation.” The diamond had four points. Tim McCarthy was positioned in front, Eric Littlejohn in the rear. Jim Varey was stationed at the right, Dale McIntosh at t
he left. Ray Shaddick and I were inside the diamond on either side of the president. Shaddick was in “POTUS Left” position, I was “POTUS Right,” eighteen inches behind the president. Shaddick carried a bulletproof steel slab to protect the president in case of an attack, coated with leather so as not to appear foreboding. Bringing up the rear was Bob Wanko, the gunman with an Uzi in a briefcase, again so as not to appear foreboding.

  As we opened the door to the outside, uniformed police in raincoats stood guard on the sidewalk that was wet from an earlier shower. Beyond them was the rope line, where a gaggle of around thirty onlookers and members of the press eagerly awaited an opportunity to shout out a greeting or a question. All my senses were keenly alert, scanning the surroundings for any possible threat—any person that seemed out of place or out of sorts, any door that might be ajar, any window that might be open, any sudden movement, any startling sound. All the while, I was plotting an ever-changing escape route if something did happen. If a threat presented itself as we walked out the door, I would pull the president into the building; if we were closer to the limousine, I would push him into the car.

  Carolyn was across the street, standing on the fringe of a small crowd that had gathered there, craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the new president.

  As the president approached the limousine, McCarthy got the door, which opened toward the crowd. The president raised his right arm and waved to the small line of spectators that had gathered on T Street. A woman on the rope line called out, “Mr. President! President Reagan!” The president paused a second—only a second—turning his head to the left to acknowledge her, raising his left hand, and mouthing what seemed to be the word hi.

  In that moment, I moved instinctively to the president’s left side to strengthen the barricade between him and the crowd.

  CHAPTER 2

  INAUSPICIOUS BEGINNINGS

  The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

  WILLIAM FAULKNER, Requiem for a Nun

  SPRING AND SUMMER, 1962

  On a cold Nashville day in February 1962, I dropped into the Peabody College snack shop between classes to warm up with a cup of hot coffee. I was a thirty-one-year-old college senior lost in liminal space, leaving something familiar and, like Abraham of the Bible, “not knowing whither he went.”[4]

  I was about to graduate from Peabody-Vanderbilt, about to become a father, and about to begin a new career . . . I hoped. Carolyn was eight months pregnant and unemployed. She’d had to stop teaching high school English and Spanish when her pregnancy became obvious. The Nashville School Board thought it unseemly for teachers to show visible signs of procreation. I thought, What a crock!

  Sipping my coffee, I flipped through the student paper, The Vanderbilt Hustler. I would graduate in May with a BA in English and a minor in philosophy. English teachers were lucky to make $3,000 a year, and there was no market for students of philosophy. So I was looking for something else.

  I saw that Gulf Oil, Mobile Oil, Phillips 66, and General Electric were coming to interview graduating seniors. None of them excited me. I couldn’t see myself sitting at a desk.

  I was older than most students because of my time spent working as a power lineman and serving four years in the Air Force. I liked working outdoors, in all kinds of weather. In Miami I had worked in fierce storms right before and after hurricanes. In the Air Force I had stood post in Finland, Minnesota, when the temperature sank to minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit. I liked adventure. I liked challenge. The truth is, I was drawn to work that had a dangerous edge.

  I was closing the door on thirteen years as a lineman in Florida, Alaska, and Tennessee, work I had continued through my college years. You might say that during that time I had made friends with Death. I had already been a pallbearer for coworkers eight times, some of the dead having fallen from poles forty-five to fifty feet high. Other coworkers had been electrocuted.

  Vigilance was the difference between life and death.

  Often the ones who didn’t survive had circumvented protocol because they were impatient or too hot. To work the power lines, we donned hooks and helmets, our safety belts and tools. We covered our entire bodies—long pants, long sleeves, leather or rubber gloves—to protect ourselves from getting burned by the hot creosote that coated the wooden poles. Up on the poles we worked with secondary wires that carried from 120 to 240 volts and with primary lines carrying from 4,160 to 13,800 volts. The primaries were lethal. Linemen wore leather gloves to climb or handle dead or grounded wire. But we handled primaries with rubber gloves, rubber sleeves, and “hot sticks.” Wearing the wrong gloves could be a life-or-death mistake.

  I’d had my own near misses.

  In Alaska I worked on a line crew with the 5039th Air Installation Squadron. Some of the six or seven men were experienced; others weren’t. One time a lineman on the pole next to me cut a span guy-wire without telling me. That guy-wire was the only thing holding my pole upright—with two transformers of five hundred pounds each attached to it.

  Thirty-five feet up in the air, I felt the pole tilt gradually toward a slow-motion death. Thankfully, I spotted a covered walkway below, close enough to jump onto. But I still had to unbuckle my safety belt. There was just enough time—I leaped to the peaked roof of the walkway, slid down, and fell some ten feet farther to the ground. Throwing my arm across my face, I landed facedown. Right beside me a five-hundred-pound transformer crashed to the ground; on the other side sat an enormous one-thousand-gallon fuel tank that could have broken every bone if I’d struck it. Falling in the space right between, I suffered only two black eyes.

  Once an electrical fire broke out beneath me, and I had to climb down through it. Another time, on a pole in Key Biscayne, I stood on a pair of double arms (arms that project out on either side of the pole to hold wires) and absentmindedly leaned back in my safety belt, only to discover my belt was not around the pole. I grabbed a cross-arm brace to stop my fall. It wasn’t the first or the last time my quick reflexes came in handy.

  My mother tried vainly to persuade me to get out of line work. It scared her to death. One morning as I was buckling on my gear to go to work, she sighed, “I know you won’t give it up. All I can do is leave you in God’s hands.” I hoped God wasn’t getting tired of rescuing me.

  My final near-death lineman experience happened one summer after Carolyn and I had been married a couple of years and I was contracting for Mid-Tenn Electric in Nashville. I was up on an old pole one night, working alone in the spotlights, when another lineman cut some dead lines. The top ten feet of the pole broke off, flipping me upside down in the dark. I found myself staring at the starry Tennessee night sky, clinging to the rocking piece of pole supported only by the new and old wires.

  Everyone below was yelling, “Don’t move! Don’t move!” But I wasn’t about to stay there. I got my safety belt loose, grabbed a stable section of pole, somehow turned myself upright, and climbed down to safety. Finally on solid ground, I silently picked up the tools that had fallen out of my body belt. Nobody said a word.

  I didn’t tell Carolyn until I started twitching in bed and she asked if I was having a nightmare. I hated to tell her because, like my mom, she was praying for me to get another job.

  Maybe God was driving home a message: It’s time to hang up the spurs.

  The truth is, I loved line work. I loved the feel of my hooks as I climbed, skipping knotholes in the pole where the wood was stronger and might throw me off stride. I loved the view from being up high, and I liked literally being looked up to. I loved working high energy lines. I loved the image E. B. Kurtz used in The Lineman’s Handbook, calling us “knights of the spur.”[5]

  I wasn’t a thrill seeker; the risks I took had a purpose. Not long ago someone gave me a blue cap with white lettering. It says, “God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And then God made linemen.” We brought light to dark places, often working in severe weather to keep power flowing to hospitals or military bases. I was hoping my next job
would also have meaning and would serve others.

  Now, in that snack shop at Peabody College, I knew I’d have a college degree and more choices. It seemed impossible, but I hoped to find a new vocation with an odd combination: an edge of excitement, good pay, a chance for promotion. But I needed even more than that. I had a wife I loved and a new baby on the way; I wanted to make them proud of me. And I wanted a job that served the common good. I got up to get a coffee refill, and then resumed looking at the list of upcoming interviews. As I skimmed the Hustler, my heart began to race. Right beneath the list of corporations, I saw “Central Intelligence Agency” and “US Secret Service.” Immediately I signed up to interview for both.

  In one of the Vandy Student Union rooms set aside for interviews, the CIA representative spoke to me about analyzing aerial photos of power lines. I could tell how much voltage was going to a particular site, important information in figuring out whether a nuclear bomb was being built and whether a site was developed for a military purpose. The job would involve some travel, and not to tourist destinations. Though the mission appealed to my sense of adventure and patriotism, I still wasn’t sure.

  Albert Vaughn, a retired agent from the Nashville field office, was the first person who interviewed me for the Secret Service. I knew agents protected the president and, from seeing Code of the Secret Service as a kid, I remembered they had something to do with counterfeiting. But I learned more: the Secret Service was part of the Department of Treasury (now the Secret Service is part of Homeland Security), and agents in the field were criminal investigators. They hunted down and arrested suspects for stealing and forging government checks—like Social Security checks from older people’s mail—and bonds. They investigated coins altered to look like rare ones. The counterfeiting squads worked undercover under false names—an assignment as dangerous as, or more so, than protection. And agents testified in court to get convictions.

 

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