“The way we protected him, we had some agents inside, but typically what we’d do was situate ourselves at dining tables near him,” Dowling says.
Dowling had been seated for a few minutes when he heard a radio transmission: Two white males in camouflage outfits and carrying long weapons were creeping around the back toward their location. They were crawling on their bellies, moving themselves along with their elbows.
Just then, Dowling looked up and saw the two bad guys. He thought of intelligence reports that Libya had sent a hit squad to the United States to kill American officials. The agent instinctively jumped out of his chair and tackled Bush to protect him. Food flew everywhere as Dowling threw the vice president on the ground and flopped on top of him.
“What’s going on here?” Bush demanded to know.
“I don’t know, but just keep your head down,” Dowling answered.
Dowling looked up. He saw dozens of law enforcement officers with their guns drawn—Secret Service agents, sheriff’s department deputies, and state troopers. They were on the scene as part of routine protection for a vice presidential visit. The two bad guys were kneeling with their hands clasped behind their heads.
“We evacuated the VP out of the restaurant to get him away from whatever danger may have still been there,” Dowling says. “You would think I had just thwarted an assassination attempt.”
As it turned out, the restaurant was near an apartment complex where the girlfriend of one of the two men lived.
“The guy had gone to see his girlfriend, and she was there with another guy,” Dowling says. “So the boyfriend got very angry. The other guy who was there with his girlfriend pulled out a knife, kind of slashed him, didn’t hurt him badly. So this fellow who had been cut decided that he and another guy were going to go back and kill the guy that night.”
Not knowing the vice president was coming, they parked in the lot at the Chart House and decided to sneak through the woods to get to the apartment complex. They were tried and convicted on illegal weapons and attempted assault charges.
Agents noted the contrast between George H. W. Bush and Al Gore, Bush’s successor as vice president. Like Hillary Clinton, Gore—who also claimed to be a champion of the little people—treated agents with disdain and told them he did not want to be bothered greeting them or seeing them.
“Gore told agents at his home in Carthage, Tennessee, that they should duck behind bushes when they rotated shifts because the Gores didn’t want to see them,” a former agent says.
“I was on the detail one Christmas when Gore was at his home in Carthage,” former agent Jeff Crane says. “Neighbors offered us food on Christmas Day, but the Gores never even bothered to say ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Thank you.’ ”
Every agent has heard the story of how Gore was bawling out his son Al Gore III over poor performance at school and warned him, “If you don’t straighten up, you won’t get into the right schools, and if you don’t get into the right schools, you could end up like these guys.”
Gore—code-named Sundance—motioned toward the agents protecting him.
“Sometimes Gore would come out of the residence, get in the car, and he wouldn’t even give the guys the coachman’s nod. Nothing,” a former agent says. “It was like we didn’t exist. We were only there to facilitate him to get from point A to point B.” As professionals, the agent says, “we do not have to like you to protect you, but it can make the long hours a bit more tolerable.”
Like Bill Clinton, Gore was perpetually late.
“The schedule would call for him to leave the vice president’s residence at 7:15 A.M.,” former agent Dave Saleeba says. “At 7:30 A.M., we would check on him, and he would be eating a muffin at the pool.”
Gore would exit the vice president’s residence late for an appointment at the White House, climb in the Secret Service limousine, and say to agents, “Could you speed it up, but don’t use the lights and sirens? Get me there as fast as you can.”
The Secret Service was not about to speed in traffic without lights and sirens. But agents quickly came up with a solution.
“The special agent in charge would come on the radio and say, ‘Yeah, let’s move as quick as we can but safely,’ ” former agent Dennis Chomicki says. “He’d do it just for the entertainment of the vice president.”
Without pressing the button to transmit, another agent would say into the microphone, “Hey, let’s go, speed it up,” Chomicki says. “That would satisfy Gore in the backseat.”
Gore had “really poor manners,” Chomicki says. “He used to pass gas in the car, and he could care less. He had no class whatsoever.”
Having the habit of never carrying money, Gore would borrow from agents when necessary. “I think he always thought, I’m the vice president, I don’t have to pay for anything,” Chomicki says.
Unlike Gore, Bush 41, as he is called, never took agents for granted or imposed on them. But like many presidents, he chafed at protection.
“Most people have difficulty adjusting to having protection,” says former Secret Service deputy director Danny Spriggs. “These folks do it because it goes with the job. However, it’s nothing they embrace initially. You infringe on their private lives. Even though I did it for twenty-eight years, I can’t imagine what it would be like to be told I can’t go to a movie or amusement park whenever I want, or to be told that friends I have known for years must submit their name, Social Security number, and date of birth before they can visit me.”
Despite warnings from his detail, Bush would insist on leaving the Oval Office through the door to the Rose Garden and greeting tourists lined up along the fence on Pennsylvania Avenue. Bush’s detail leader assigned agents to rush to the fence as soon as an alarm notified them that Bush had opened the door to the outside. Soon, the Washington Post ran a story reporting that tourists were delighted at their unexpected encounter with the president. Just after that, agents spotted what Agent Glenn Smith calls a “textbook” possible assassin as Bush was greeting onlookers at the fence.
“The man had on a coat in the summer, he looked disheveled, and his eyes were darting in all directions,” Smith recalls. “We patted him down, and it turned out he had a nine-millimeter pistol on him and probably intended to use it on the president.”
After that, the detail leader had a talk with Bush. He pointed out to the president that by greeting people spontaneously, he was endangering not only himself but his agents. From then on, “Bush would give us time to set up a secure zone at the fence,” Smith says.
At one point, Bush and his wife, Barbara, were staying at their Kennebunkport home in the winter, and they went out for a walk in the freezing cold.
“I had a hat on, and two of the other agents had a hat on, but the one agent assigned to the first lady didn’t bring a hat with him,” says former agent Patrick F. Sullivan, who was on the President’s Protective Detail from 1986 to 1990. “So the president came out with Mrs. Bush, and we started to walk.”
“Where’s your hat?” Mrs. Bush asked the hatless agent.
“Oh, Mrs. Bush, I didn’t bring one. I didn’t realize it was going to be so cold here,” he said.
“George, we need to get this agent a hat,” Barbara Bush—code-named Tranquillity—said.
“Okay, Bar,” he replied.
She walked back into the house, got one of President Bush’s furry hats, and gave it to the agent.
“No, Mrs. Bush, that’s fine,” the agent said.
“Hey, don’t argue with Mrs. Bush,” Bush said.
The agent put on the president’s hat.
“That was Mrs. Bush,” Sullivan says. “She was everyone’s mother, and she didn’t want this forty-year-old man walking around at Kennebunkport without a hat on. She was a sweetheart.”
“Barbara and George Bush were genuinely in love,” Albracht says. “They share a special bond of being married and being each other’s best friend that you don’t really see a lot of.”
T
oday Bush’s memory is fading, but agents say he and Barbara are as considerate of them as ever. When the two-year-old son of one of the agents on his protective detail lost his hair after being treated for leukemia, to show his support for the boy, Bush followed the lead of the agents by having his head shaved. He also donated to a fund to help defray the boy’s medical costs.
“When little Patrick got leukemia, a lot of the agents shaved their heads, and I said why not me?” Bush said in an NBC interview with his granddaughter Jenna Bush Hager. “It was the right thing to do.”
17
HAWKEYE
A female Secret Service agent on the president’s detail is so out of shape that she literally cannot open the heavy doors to exit the president’s limousine. Instead of removing her from protecting the president and requiring her to pass the physical fitness tests that all agents are supposed to take every three months, Secret Service management told drivers to try to park the Beast so it would be easier for the vehicle door to swing open for her.
If the president were shot, she could not help carry him to safety, an agent notes. Agents know there is no point in complaining to a supervisor: The overweight female agent is a supervisor.
Secret Service management condones the same sort of corner cutting and favoritism when it comes to evaluations for promotion. They have become so meaningless that agents are actually handed blank forms and asked to evaluate themselves on their qualifications for promotion and how they scored on physical fitness tests. According to agents, those who have “juice” or “hooks” with management because they play golf with someone get promoted regardless of their merit.
“Forget physical fitness tests,” says a recently retired agent. “We are not given the time to do them.”
“You are supposed to do your physical training test quarterly, but I haven’t done one in two, three years,” an agent says. “When you do, you enter your scores yourself on a form and hand it in.” In fact, the agent says, “I’m one of the PT instructors. And because the service takes physical training so lightly, I don’t take it seriously either. Just give me a sheet, and I trust that what the agent says he did is accurate.”
“There is a policy in place that you have to maintain a certain physical fitness standard every quarter, but it’s more like an agent fabricates his or her sheet and hands it to a fitness coordinator,” another agent says. “I’m a fitness coordinator, and I enter the phony scores.”
As a result, agents say, many of their colleagues are out of shape.
“Some of them, you just roll your eyes,” an agent says. “One agent cannot even do a sit-up. I know for a fact he can’t because his belly’s already up to his chin. Just look at some of the details, and you can really see where the standards have gone—downhill.”
“We had a post stander, a female agent, and I was in shock,” says an agent, referring to agents assigned temporarily to guard a specific area or site. “Overweight, out of shape, just disgusting. And you look at this person and say, ‘If I’m going to go through a door with you to execute a search warrant, are you going to have my back? If I get shot, are you going to be able to carry me out? Or are you going to be able to get up four flights of stairs because I’m in a fight with somebody?’ Probably not.”
While the Secret Service has been ignoring its own fitness requirements and letting spectators into events without magnetometer screening, it has also been cutting back on the size of counterassault teams. For the sake of cosmetics, the Secret Service bows to demands of staff that the teams remain at a distance from protectees.
Outside the White House, the counterassault team, or CAT, is critical to providing protection. A heavily armed tactical unit, it is assigned to the president, vice president, foreign heads of state, or any other protectee deemed to require extra coverage, like a presidential candidate. In the event of an attack, CAT’s mission is to divert the attack from a protectee, allowing the working shift of agents to shield and evacuate the individual. Once the “problem” is dealt with, CAT members regroup, and the shift leader directs them on their next move.
The Secret Service began using counterassault teams on a limited basis in 1979. They were formed after several agents involved in training were talking over lunch and began to speculate on how the Secret Service would deal with a terrorist attack, according to Taylor Rudd, one of the agents. After President Reagan was shot in 1981, the teams were expanded and centralized at headquarters in 1983.
CAT differs from a special weapons and tactics team (SWAT), which the police or Secret Service may deploy once an attack has occurred. Code-named Hawkeye, CAT takes action as the attack occurs and remains until the threat is contained or neutralized.
Clad in black battle-dress uniforms known as BDUs, CAT members travel with the president. They are trained in close-quarters battle—when small units engage the enemy with weapons at very close range. They are also trained in motorcade ambush tactics.
Each CAT team member is equipped with a semiautomatic Stoner SR-16 rifle, a SIG Sauer P229 pistol, flash-bang grenades for diversionary tactics, and smoke grenades. CAT agents also may be armed with a Remington breaching shotgun, a weapon that has been modified with a short barrel. The shotgun may be loaded with nonlethal Hatton rounds to blow the lock off a door.
In contrast to the CAT team, the countersniper team, whose members also wear black BDUs, does not travel in the motorcade. Instead, the countersnipers—code-named Hercules and long used by the Secret Service—take positions at key exit and entrance points. For instance, when the president is leaving or entering the White House, they position themselves on the roof and on balconies across the street. Countersnipers are required to qualify by shooting at ranges up to a thousand yards each month. If they don’t qualify, they don’t travel or work.
In another example of cutting corners, for presidential candidates and many protectees below the president and vice president, counterassault teams have been slashed in the past several years from the requisite five to six agents to only two agents. Given their training, that renders the teams almost useless, agents say.
“A CAT is trained to operate as a full team of five to six men,” a current agent who was formerly on CAT says. “Each member has a specific function based upon the direction of the attack. A two-man element responds to the problem, while another responds to the attack with a base of fire—providing cover fire and trying to suppress the attackers—while the other element moves on them to destroy them. The other two-man element—or solo member if there are only five operators—provides coverage in the rear and assists the element that is moving to address the attack.”
A team of only two men “cannot do all of those tasks, on top of communicating to the protective detail a status report detailing number of attackers, number of good guys or bad guys killed or captured, and then requesting direction from the detail leader about the next course of action,” the agent says.
“Using two CAT members rather than the full team provides a false sense of security and is a tremendous misuse of a very important tactical asset,” William Albracht, who trained new agents, says.
Secret Service rules require agents based in Washington to qualify with a pistol once a month and with long guns every three months. But, in contrast to years past, many agents find they are given time to take the qualifying test for long guns only once or twice a year.
“I’ve had conversations with special agents in charge who say they are not able to get the requalification training in they would like because of the operational demands they have,” says Spriggs, who retired from the Secret Service as deputy director in 2004. In previous years, “we never sacrificed training,” he says.
Dishonesty should not be tolerated in any law enforcement agency. Yet when the Secret Service wows members of Congress with supposedly unrehearsed feats that bring down the bad guys and save the lives of protectees at the Rowley Training Center, it pretends that the scenarios are spontaneous. In fact, they are secretly rehearsed be
forehand.
“Members of Congress were being escorted around the training complex, and we were doing building extraction scenarios with the protectee,” an agent recalls. “We would be trying to move the VP out of a hotel. Say there’s a fire in the hotel, or there’s an explosion outside. We want to get him down into the motorcade and out of the area and move him to a secure location.”
On this particular morning when members of Congress were due to visit, “everything changed,” the agent says. “Everything was rehearsed, everything was put together, and we’re like why are we doing rehearsed scenarios? We should be doing practical scenarios and real training exercises.”
The agents were told, “Well, there’s a congressional tour coming through.”
Normally, in a training exercise, “the bad guy can kill the agent,” the agent says. “You don’t know. You could see the agent get killed, you could see two agents stumble over each other down a stairwell, things could happen. If you’re putting on training that’s effective, it is a practical exercise in the sense you let it run through to its end. But when the congressional tour came through, we did it as we had rehearsed to do it,” the agent says. In real training, “you never rehearse something like that.”
The rehearsed scenario did the trick, impressing the senators and representatives who watched. “They watched an attack on a principal and saw how agents responded, how the shift goes to the protectee, how the CAT team deploys. But they didn’t know that they spent the last couple days rehearsing that scenario,” an agent notes.
According to another current agent, the same thing happened when the Secret Service opened the Rowley center to a group of visiting U.S. attorneys. Prior to their visit, like kids rehearsing a school play, the agents rehearsed scenarios for two hours.
That is not the way it’s supposed to happen. In real training, “you know what the setting is, that the president will give a speech,” former Secret Service deputy director Spriggs says. “They are not told what will happen. They don’t know if an attack will come, where it will come from, or what it will be.”
The First Family Detail Page 13