by Jerry Parr
Palestine had no standing as a state, and our State Department considered Arafat an international terrorist. Nevertheless, the United Nations invited him to speak on November 13, 1974, and the United States had to let him come to New York City. Although our government did not officially recognize Arafat’s presence, President Ford ordered the Secret Service to protect him. Outside of Israel, Manhattan may have been the most dangerous place in the world for him. We had to keep him safe. If he were killed in the United States, the whole world would believe we colluded in his death.
Arafat would be in the States for only eighteen hours, but his second in command, Farouk Kaddoumi, came early and stayed ten days. When he arrived at JFK Airport, Bill Duncan and I went there to greet him. We didn’t have his photo, so I boarded the plane and called, “Farouk Kaddoumi, Farouk Kaddoumi.” A hand went up, and I said, “Follow me.” He was working his prayer beads. We took him to a mobile lounge, and he sat down. He was wide eyed and trembling. I asked, “Are you Farouk Kaddoumi?” and he shook his head. We had the wrong guy! The real Kaddoumi was still on the airplane!
Fortunately, the foreign passengers had not yet been allowed to disembark. Back on the plane, I again announced, “Will the real Farouk Kaddoumi please come with me?” I don’t know what he expected, but he came along. As Arafat’s deputy and designated successor, he was number two in the PLO hierarchy. He had attended American University and spoke perfect English. As it turned out, we got along well.
More than sixty agents were assigned to the detail. Don Edwards from the Foreign Dignitary Division coordinated the advances. Ham Brown from Chicago headed transportation. Drivers were agents Ernie Graves and Jack Cliff. We had a first-class detail: guys with White House experience like Chuck Zboril, Bill Duncan, George Opfer.
Arafat would fly in on November 13, address the United Nations, and fly out before dawn the next morning. I had to figure out how to get him in and out of the airport, his hotel, and the UN building without public exposure. We wanted to keep Arafat off the New York streets as much as possible. I recalled Hal Thomas’s mantra from the Humphrey days: “Don’t fight ’em, fool ’em.”
With Kaddoumi, the team leaders and I brainstormed a plan. We lined up hundreds of New York City police to run a motorcade from JFK to downtown Manhattan. We would put Kaddoumi in the motorcade and Arafat in one of eight helicopters that all looked alike. They were olive-drab, combat-style Army “Hueys.”
Arafat arrived with five bodyguards of his own. The leader was Abu Hassan (“The Red Prince”).[60] He was very, very tall and handsome. Suave. Debonair. He spoke English. I later learned Abu Hassan was not his real name. He was the PLO’s answer to James Bond.
Arafat, on the other hand, was swarthy, short, and bald under the headdress he always wore. Personal charisma, not looks, was the source of his power. As soon as he landed, Kaddoumi told him, “You’re going by helicopter. I’m going by motorcade to throw people off. We’ll mix the helicopters up in the air. There will be eight; no one will know whether you’re in a car or one of the helicopters.” Arafat nodded agreement.
As I sat in the helicopter with Arafat, his team, and Bill Duncan, the air was so thick with tension it was hard to breathe. The PLO bodyguards were restless, eyes darting everywhere, feet tapping a nervous tattoo. They were fully armed and kept touching their weapons. They seemed so uptight I wondered whether this was their first time in a chopper. Arafat and I may have been the calmest people there. He trusted his men. I trusted our plan—and God.
This was the first time a helicopter ever landed on the UN grounds. Arafat spoke English, and I told him, “When we hit the ground, you must run to the armored car,” which Ernie Graves was driving. It was about forty feet away. He said, “I understand.” He ran. We drove the last hundred yards from where the helicopter landed to where he entered the UN.
There were no magnetometers to check for weapons.
Arafat went in and gave his speech, which ended with an ominous warning: “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”[61]
Arafat was tired and wanted to go to the Waldorf, his hotel. By the time he finished speaking, darkness had fallen. Now we could not avoid the streets, where furious New Yorkers lined the road to the hotel, screaming for blood.
It was time for “Plan Two”: another motorcade.
Everyone at the United Nations watched us put the chairman in a black limousine. But about six cars back, there was another armored limo, “off the record.” That is, it was armored but looked like a regular car. We exited the UN by tunnel, and right in the middle of the tunnel I stopped the motorcade. I explained to Arafat, “We’re going to change cars.” We had a heavy armored cape for him and he removed his burnoose. His bald head showed, and the awkward cape came up to his neck. But he was very dignified and quickly changed places with Jimmy Zedee, a New York policeman of Arab extraction, who took his place in the limousine. We drove out of the UN tunnel with the decoy in place.
Another first that day was the “muscle car” in the motorcade. It carried the “CAT” (counterassault team), with Kevin Hoolihan, Ken Lynch, Joe Carlon, and Art Rivers.
Along with maybe a thousand hostile demonstrators at the Waldorf, there must have been three hundred media types waiting in the “well,” the entrance where VIPs emerged from their limos, protected from the weather. To get there, a car must pass another entrance on 50th Street. Well, the decoy ahead of us went up into the well, and while everyone was craning to see Arafat emerge from the limo, we stopped at the 50th Street entrance. Arafat without his burnoose, a couple of agents, and I just walked into the hotel, stepped into the service elevator, and rode up to his room—while the manager, all the press, and the hotel security officers were in the well. We didn’t say a word to anybody. When we entered the suite, about forty agents were on duty with guns and shotguns—because we really were prepared for any trouble!
I heard that when Jimmy Zedee got out of that car, the people waiting in the well went nuts! They knew they’d been had. The manager—and even the hotel security officer—never could believe that we got Yasser Arafat into that hotel. But Don Edwards, Bill Duncan, and Chuck Zboril can attest to it. They were there.
As I left him at his room, Arafat said, “You can expect me to call you early in the morning.”
I said, “We’ll be ready.” I liked working with him, because he knew how to be secure.
He said, “When I leave, I just want to go quietly. I want to go to the airport and get on an Algerian airliner to Havana.”
“No problem. You tell us when you want to go.”
At four o’clock in the morning we left in four cars, one of which was that unmarked armored car. We simply rode down in the service elevator. A New York police officer assigned to us appeared to be sleeping—on duty—at the elevator site. We walked right past him, got in the cars, and left. We crossed the Triboro Bridge, drove to the airport, put Arafat on his airplane, and he left with Abu Hassan and his security team.
A postscript: I later learned that Abu Hassan’s real name was Ali Hassan Salameh. He was chief of operations for Black September, the organization that had carried out the 1972 Munich Massacre. He lived an ostentatious playboy life and was rumored to be a conduit between the CIA and PLO, though the CIA denied this. Educated in Germany, he purportedly received military training in Cairo and Moscow and was fluent in at least four languages. In 1978 he married Georgina Rizk, a former Miss Lebanon who in 1971 had been named Miss Universe.
Under Golda Meir and continued by Menachem Begin, Israel pursued a secret plan to kill everyone connected to the Munich murders. And, systematically, they did it. Israeli Mossad operatives tracked Salameh to Beirut. He and four bodyguards with him—perhaps the very men I knew in New York—perished in a car bomb explosion on January 22, 1979.
And here’s the most chilling thing I later learned: when we all c
limbed into the helicopter taking Yasser Arafat from JFK Airport to the United Nations on November 13, Abu Hassan and his companions were carrying live grenades, which they planned to detonate had the helicopter veered off the route to the UN. They didn’t trust us.
I’ll always wonder whether Arafat knew his “protectors” were prepared to kill everyone on the helicopter, including him, before allowing him to be taken prisoner.
CHAPTER 8
UP AND DOWN THE LADDER
All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.
MATTHEW 23:12
1976–1981
I checked my watch again and steeled myself. In five minutes I was going to have a very tough conversation. One that would be painful for my colleague, the chief of the Executive Protective Service (EPS). And painful for me.
My mission: to persuade him to change his management style—or else. Considering what I’d heard in my new role as an inspector, it would not be easy.
For the first time in eleven years I was not assigned to protection. Since I had spent only two years in field offices (New York and Nashville), my career had become lopsided. I hadn’t followed the usual track, to alternate between the field and protection. One reason was I was good at protection, and Headquarters believed they needed me there. But by reassigning me, they were not only developing my career but also doing me a personal favor. When Carolyn was accepted to Georgetown University law school, Secret Service director Stu Knight promised to keep me in DC for three more years to allow Carolyn to complete her degree without interruption.[62] But I still needed to familiarize myself with other aspects of Secret Service work if I was going to move up. So instead of going to lead a field office, on December 7, 1975, I went from Foreign Dignitaries to the Office of Inspection. This change allowed me to leave protection and reacquaint myself with field operations while still based in Washington.
Inspectors were GS-15s, a high grade in government and a lateral move from my Deputy SAIC job. We traveled to field offices and other divisions to interview the Special Agents in Charge and other employees and to check out their systems, statistics, and paperwork. Our goal was to understand each office’s particular challenges and to solve problems. We then wrote a report to the director.
We also investigated serious disciplinary matters: an employee’s arrest, breaches of security, or complaints from the public or Congress. Sometimes our arrival was seen as good news; usually not so much.
A hernia operation almost caused me to miss the biggest assignment of my inspection career. Until the surgery I had never taken a single day of sick leave in thirteen years as an agent. If I’d known what I was stepping into, I might have taken another week off and let someone else handle the EPS assignment.
Jimmy Carter was now president. His first cousin, Hugh Carter, a White House aide, had gotten to know some of the EPS officers. They were the uniformed officers who protected the White House outer perimeter and foreign embassies in the United States. They had complained to him about their work situation. So the director called me in and said, “Take a team and go look at morale over there.” I had no idea of the Pandora’s box I was about to open.
Having learned from earlier crises about the value of listening, I took Tim McIntyre, George Hollendersky, and Dick Hankinson, good listeners all, and we simply showed up unannounced at EPS roll call in the White House basement early one morning. When I said, “We’ve come over to look at morale,” the EPS officers laughed for five minutes! I noticed a framed picture of their boss—who never visited the basement—with a big technical security sticker pasted over his face. Other stuff was happening: an anonymous caller had sent a hearse to the chief’s home.
His officers hated him.
It didn’t take a genius to know the press would blow this problem out of proportion if it wasn’t fixed. We were, after all, in the White House.
I told the officers, “We’re going to interview every one of you who wants to talk. We’ll keep what you say confidential. And we’ll give you each as much time as you need.” In field office inspections we normally interviewed employees, but this was a huge operation. I didn’t really expect more than a dozen to want to talk.
I was wrong. They lined up, three deep! We had to bring in three more inspectors to handle the number. We interviewed more than six hundred people, one at a time. It took nearly four months.
The problem was the chief’s autocratic, top-down management style. He hadn’t come up through the ranks; he came from the DC Metropolitan Police into a culture that was working well and imposed his regime without any understanding (or consultation) about the effects of his changes.
A huge source of misery was mandatory rotations. People were now being forced to change shifts every two weeks. (This was also a problem for Secret Service agents, but with all our travel and advances, set shifts were often impossible. We had never known anything else.)
Under the prior chief a routine had developed that accommodated individual differences. Some officers liked midnights because they could study when things were quiet and go to college during the day. Or if they had working spouses, the couple could manage child care without the cost of a sitter. Some officers enjoyed meeting people and liked the posts at the gates. Others were more introverted and preferred posts away from the public. People could keep their assignments on a long-term basis.
Mandatory rotations turned people’s lives upside down. The disruptions seemed unnecessarily arbitrary, even cruel. One inspector fought back tears when he told me some of the stories he was hearing.
The more we learned, the bigger the investigation grew. I told the director, “We’ve got a time bomb here.”
By the time I met with the EPS chief, I had the full picture. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the meeting. Most of the inspectors had wanted to fire him on the spot, but I still hoped he would be willing to change. After what I’d heard, I realized the chances were slim. But in a confrontation I usually felt sorry for the loser, at least momentarily. Perhaps to spare myself, I stubbornly sought a happy ending. I laid everything out in plain English, but I tried to be tactful. “You have a lot of disappointed men and women, Chief. This morale problem is interfering with the mission.”
He snapped, “Who’s saying this? I want names!”
“I’m sorry, Chief,” I said, “but we promised not to divulge that information. It’s not just one or two people. The unhappiness is very widespread.”
Red with rage, he sputtered, “I’ll find out who the s.o.b.s are. They’ll pay for this!”
That did it. The chief’s style might work in the military or in other settings, but it wasn’t working here.
Nevertheless, the chief deserved to be treated with dignity and respect. He was eligible to retire, and after a talk with Knight, he did. EPS was reorganized: it would be led by Assistant Director John Simpson, who would report directly to Director Knight. Simpson, a strong but compassionate leader, made immediate improvements. One was to open a path for EPS officers to become regular agents if they finished college.
Soon after, I received a personal letter from Director Knight:
June 6, 1977
Dear Jerry:
I want to commend you and your group for your enlightening and in-depth reports on the recently concluded study of the Executive Protective Service.
This most sensitive and challenging task was performed under difficult circumstances. The manner in which you and your associates conducted yourselves was most professional.
This was an important assignment and the results of your efforts are already evident. The improved morale and more effective operation of the Executive Protective Service will be a direct outgrowth of this team effort.
My sincere appreciation to you, Thomas Behl, Tim McIntyre, George Hollendersky, John Cook, Richard Hankinson, and Ned Hall.
Very truly yours,
H. S. Knight
I’d guarded a major contender in every presidential
election: Humphrey for vice president in ’64, Humphrey for president in ’68, Agnew for vice president in ’72, and in June 1976 I was temporarily pulled out of inspection to head another candidate detail. In my nonpartisan job, I was switching sides once again. This time the candidate would be a Democrat.
President Ford’s opponent was Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, a newcomer on the national stage. Against the sordid backdrop of Watergate, Carter’s outsider status gave him an advantage. A Naval Academy graduate who had served on America’s first nuclear submarine, a Baptist, and a successful peanut farmer from tiny Plains, Georgia, Carter seemed a fresh and compassionate antidote to the cloak-and-dagger politics of the Nixon era. Voters liked his reputation for independent thinking, attacking government waste, and ending segregation in Georgia.[63]
Carter chose Senator Walter “Fritz” Mondale from Minnesota as his running mate; I would lead Mondale’s security.[64]
Mondale was a liberal Democrat, a “boy wonder” sent to Washington in 1964 at the age of thirty-six to fill Hubert Humphrey’s Senate seat when Humphrey became vice president. He’d won election in his own right in ’66 and reelection in ’72. More liberal than Carter, he brought both political and geographical balance to the ticket. I knew him as cochair of Humphrey’s primary campaign for president in ’68. After the Democratic Convention riots he’d said, “I didn’t leave Chicago. I escaped it.”
I could resonate with that.
I was with Mondale in New York on November 2, 1976, when Carter defeated Gerald Ford. Next morning Mondale celebrated with Carter in Plains, a tiny Georgia town with a population of 653. There I met the president-elect for the first time. We didn’t spend a lot of time together then, but perhaps because we shared Southern roots, I felt comfortable in his presence. After the election, I returned to inspection for another year and a half until I had the privilege of returning as special agent in charge (SAIC) of Mondale’s detail in June 1978.