You don’t even realize there is a border until you see the looming chain-link fence, covered in canvas so you can’t have a view across from one side to the other, with all these high-powered lights making it look like a night-time sporting event. We find a vacant lot next to the immigration office. I ask the U.S. border patrol officer if it is okay for us to sleep there. He says he has no problem with that and, in fact, they are getting a lot of infiltration, so they’ll be there all night long.
I say to Terry, “If you were a Mexican wanting to cross the border, why would you do it here where the authorities are so well-prepared for you? Why not go two miles up where there aren’t all these lights?” Yet, the officer tells me, people are caught crossing right here all the time.
I think back to when I went to China on a trade mission, and climbed the Great Wall in Beijing. Which had sparked my contemplating the “great wall” that the U.S. is planning to build between us and Mexico, as a supposed answer to illegal immigration. By the end of ’08, about 670 miles are supposed to be completed along our southwestern border. Why is it we don’t see that if you don’t learn from history you’re destined to repeat it? The Great Wall of China did not work. The most formidable barrier ever built by mankind—and it failed! In 1644, the Chinese were overrun and now the Great Wall is nothing but a tourist attraction. At least their Great Wall is an architectural wonder that people built by hand, all day long, many of them living and dying there. So I hope they end up making our “great wall” tourist friendly. I tell Terry that, when it gets built, I’m gonna find where it’s on public land and I’m gonna cross it into Mexico, in protest. I don’t want my country to be East Berlin.
“That’s probably another of my ideas that won’t sit too well with the powers-that-be,” I say. Terry nodded.
We sleep on that for a while. When we wake, the sunrise fills the desert sky as we cross over into Mexico.
The first thing you realize, when you reach the other side, is that your cell phones don’t work anymore. Neither does the OnStar Locator on your vehicle. That’s the button you push that tells you where the next restaurant is, or can summon the police if you break down, because a satellite pinpoints your location. Of course, at the same time that they’re available to help you, it means they can also monitor you. Who’s to say, with the computers that exist today, that someone isn’t keeping tabs on where everyone is driving? So, in a strange way, not having these things gives me a sense of breakaway freedom. I want to escape, to have anonymity.
Terry and I were no strangers to the feeling we were being observed—and I don’t mean only publicly. After I was elected governor, the state sent a big crew over to our ranch house to install a hotline phone. We kept it on the floor under our bed. It connected directly to the local police and, if anything ever went wrong, all we had to do was knock the phone off the hook and they’d be over like gangbusters.
“Remember that hotline phone, Terry?” I am musing about this, thinking about how cut off from communication we are in Baja. “They put it in one day when we were gone.”
“Do I remember! I started noticing after a while that, every time I would use the phone at our house, it sounded like someone had picked up an extension in another room. Of course, there was never anyone there. And it always happened whenever you were involved in anything controversial. Then, all of a sudden, that clicking sound was there. It got so bad even my mom could hear it. She’d say, ‘Someone’s listening again, I guess we’d better be careful.’ It became like a family joke.”
“Then there was the time you found that little electrical transmitter laying there with the two little wires hanging from it,” I remind her. “Of course, you always notice when something isn’t right.”
Terry smiles. “I was opening up the sliding door when I saw all these bits and pieces of electrical wire. And then the transmitter out on the patio.”
I’d taken Terry’s find to a friend of mine who worked for the phone company. He knew instantly what it was: a bug. My friend used to install these. Not by choice. He’d be ordered to do it. He told me, “The government would come around, and you’ve simply got to do what they tell you.”
I was shocked, but what could we do? There was nobody to make a complaint to; the media would have just said I was paranoid. Who do you go to about something like this, when you can’t trust your own government—and you’re in it! In fact, you’re at the top of it!
Terry continues: “Then, after you were out of office, all of a sudden our bedroom phone line quit working when they removed the hotline. I had two different guys come over from the local phone company to try and repair it. They said, ‘We have no idea who’s been working on the lines. We can’t figure out what they did, or why, and we can’t repair this.’ The weird clicks on the phone continued to happen, even after we moved to our new house. But only at times when you’d stuck your neck out and sounded off on something to the media. When you were away at Harvard—nothing.”
We sit in silence for a little while. Finally I say, “Well, I guess they can’t track us anymore down here, can they?”
The first inkling that certain people inside the government were out to keep an eye on me came within the first couple months of my taking office. Sometime early in 1999, a meeting was set up for me in the basement of the Capitol. The Minnesota Legislature was not in session at the time, so there were plenty of empty rooms down there in the bowels of the building.
I was a newly elected governor who, as far as I understood it, was supposed to be giving orders, not taking them. Yet it seemed I wasn’t being given any choice about whether to attend this meeting. I was more or less being ordered to go down there. No one actually said that. No, I was told, this was a training exercise for the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and they wanted to know if I would be willing to participate.
I thought to myself, doesn’t the CIA’s mission statement say that they are only supposed to be operational outside of the United States? At the same time, being a former serviceman and a patriotic citizen, when your government wants to question you, you almost feel obligated to do it. It was maybe the case, too, that it hadn’t truly set in that I was the governor. You don’t yet fully realize the power you have—or think you have. So, while I felt this pressure to cooperate, and the whole premise seemed outrageous, it also piqued my curiosity. Okay, I guess I’ll go down there and find out what this is all about.
There were twenty-three CIA agents waiting in a conference room for me. I counted.
What stunned me when I first walked in was—these people looked like “the neighborhood.” I mean, some appeared to be in their early twenties, right out of college, alongside what looked like sixty-five-year-old grandmothers. Men and women. It was very diverse. As I looked around at them, I thought, there’s the lady down the block you see sweeping her front step in the morning, and wave to—“Mrs. Jones, how are you today?” Just an average middle-class neighborhood. Except they were all with the CIA.
They sat in chairs in a big half-moon circle, and I was placed in the center. They had notebooks on their laps, waiting there intently. I believe it really was some type of learning class, or why would there be so many of them together? If the CIA simply wanted to interrogate me, they’d have sent over a couple of well-seasoned agents and gotten the job done. Well, all twenty-three didn’t ask me questions; probably only eight or ten of them did. Actually, the meeting didn’t last all that long. Because I don’t think they considered me overly cooperative.
I opened the conversation by saying: “I have some questions for you, before you question me. First of all, what are you doing here? Supposedly, this is the FBI’s jurisdiction. According to your original charter from when the CIA was created in 1947, you’re not supposed to be working directly within the United States of America.” (I knew some background on the CIA from all my reading on the Kennedy assassination.)
Well, I got the hem-haw. So, I then said, “Okay, before I answer anything, I want to go around
the room, and I want you to tell me your name and what you do.” I couldn’t get both those answers out of more than three or four. With the rest, either they’d tell you a name but not what they do, or they would briefly describe what they do without identifying themselves, or they’d do neither. I thought that was kind of brash on their part, considering that I’m a sitting governor who’s supposed to be in charge of his state. Even if you’re CIA, you’re still an American citizen. And I think most citizens, under most circumstances, would answer the governor’s question.
I scanned their faces again and said, “Well, being that you’re not being too cooperative with me, it’s going to be difficult for me to cooperate with you.”
But I got the gist of what they were after. All their questions centered around how we campaigned, how we achieved what we did, and did I think we truly could win when we went into it from the start? In short, how had the independent wrestler candidate pulled this off? I’d say it couldn’t have been terribly productive for them. Some questions I answered and some I didn’t, sometimes just out of spite: “I don’t feel like answering that.” Give back a little of the arrogance they’d shown me. But they were always very cordial and proper. It wasn’t like anyone raised their voice to me, or tried to make me feel that somehow I was being interrogated. But it was one of the strangest experiences of my life. When I left that day, I pondered the meeting all the way back to my house, about a forty-five-minute to an hour drive, depending on traffic. I felt baffled. Somehow, I had to find out more.
I sat down in my study, and called my friend Dick Marcinko. I figured if anybody whom I knew operated around the CIA, he was probably the guy. Even though Marcinko is now out of the military and in the private sector, he’s still fairly well connected in those circles. He’s the author of the Rogue Warrior books, and he created the antiterrorist SEAL Team Six unit.
When I reached Dick at his home, and told him the scenario of what had transpired, he started laughing.
“Why do you think this is funny, Dick?” I asked.
“Well, I’m not privy to exactly why they were there,” he said, “but I could give you my educated guess.”
I said, “Well, that’s better than I’ve got. Give me your thoughts.”
He said, “They didn’t see you coming. You were not on the radar screen. And, all of a sudden, you won a major election in the United States of America. The election caught them with their pants down, and their job is to gather intelligence and make predictions. Now, next to Bill Clinton, you’re probably the most famous politician in America.”
Then Dick added this: “I think they’re trying to see if there are any more of you on the horizon.”
Which I don’t blame them for. It’s like when you’re on a SEAL team and you get caught up in some type of ambush that you weren’t expecting. The first thing you do upon completion of that “op” is dissect what happened, so you’ll never get caught like that again. Because the next time, you may be dead. So I can’t begrudge them doing their jobs. But it was still very weird. I guess they needed information so that they could be fully prepared to know if it was going to happen again. Or did they need the information to eninsure it would never happen again? Was I that much of a threat?
It wasn’t long after that meeting when I found out something else. I won’t mention any names, in light of the “outing” of Valerie Plame. But I was stunned to learn that there are CIA operatives inside some state governments. They are not in executive positions—in other words, not appointed by the governor—but are permanent state employees. Governors come and go, but they keep working—in legitimate jobs, but with dual identities. In Minnesota, this person was at a deputy commissioner level, fairly high up.
Here’s how I found out about this: The CIA person contacted my chief of staff, who then set up a meeting between the three of us. My chief of staff and I were informed that only we would know of the operative’s identity, nobody else in state government. Later, when there was a change of status, I was also briefed by the new CIA person.
No one ever made me swear that I wouldn’t talk about this and, now that I’m out of office, maybe I’m taking a chance. But I want to get it on the record. I could only speculate about other states, but I’m fairly certain the same situation exists all across the country. It would seem odd that only Minnesota would have CIA operatives, especially since Minnesota is not exactly a world port and doesn’t have any really immense cities.
Are they put there to spy? To see the direction that state government is going, what’s happening, and report back—to whom? And for what purpose? Do they think there are traitors in certain states?
I don’t know. That part, I wasn’t told. I’m left to wonder why our Constitution is being violated. It wasn’t the last time that I’d run into the CIA, either.
TERRY: I didn’t find out about it until after he was out of office. Jesse did try to protect me about a lot of things.
Was I afraid that something could happen to him? Are you kidding? Every day. When he was running for office, we didn’t have a gate on the property at the time. I came out at six o’clock one morning, going to feed the horses and the chickens in the barn, and there was a guy sitting in his car in our driveway. I said, “Who are you?” He said, “Well, I want to talk to Jesse.” I said, “Well, everybody knows that he’s on the radio right now.” There I was telling him, I’m here all alone, in the middle of nowhere. How stupid is that? Thankfully, the man simply drove off.
Another time Jade had come home from junior high school and was out in the barn doing chores. I had to go to the store, and I saw a car in front of the barn. I walked in, and there was some guy following Jade around. When I demanded to know who he was and what he was doing there, he said, “Oh, I’m just somebody who’s gonna vote for Jesse, and I wanted to come see if he was home and talk to him.” He turned out to be a perfectly nice man, but . . .
Then, after he became governor, there were always death threats and constant security. At first I would go off alone to the grocery store and one of the security people would end up telling me, “First Lady, please don’t go anywhere unless you tell us.” In the beginning it was kind of annoying, but, when you have security around you all the time, you end up figuring you must need it. I was terribly afraid when Tyrel refused to accept security. At the end, when they’d come and say, “Everybody get in the car, you have to go back to the mansion, there’s been a threat,” you think, Oh my God, somebody must be trying to kill us all the time.
The state patrol had me go and take self-defense lessons, along with my assistant and my executive protection person. They made me do gun training. I bought a purse that executive protection women carry, with the little zipper on the side. I learned how to quick-draw out of my purse. I was very accurate.
If I have to fight for myself, I can. It’s not like I’m above violence. One time I was on a pay phone at a restaurant, when a drunk came up and started talking to me. Finally I said, “Hold on just a minute ”—I was checking on the kids—and told him, “If you say one more filthy thing to me, I’m going to hit you with this telephone.” I went back to talking, and he kept on. So I took that phone and I hit him as hard as I could, right in the forehead.
After Jesse left office and there was no protection around us anymore, it took a really long time for me to be comfortable going anywhere.
Toward the end of my term, on one of my days off, I was playing golf and having a bad round. It’s competitive, me against the course, and I don’t like the course to win that easily. (Which it usually does.) Anyway, I was already in a bad mood—when, all of a sudden, squad cars started pulling onto the golf course.
It turned out that some guy in a pickup truck had been in a restaurant that morning, said he’d seen me the night before and should have killed me then—but he was for sure going to get me tonight. As he left, a waitress wrote down his license plate, picked up the phone, called the local police, and said: “We just had a guy here threatening to kill
the governor.”
I had a public appearance that night. Right away my security had to cancel it. They will not put you out in public until the person making the threat gets apprehended. So an all-points bulletin goes out to all jurisdictions. My wife and daughter were about to go horseback riding. This also had to be canceled, and they were taken back to the residence. Meantime, they wanted me to leave the golf course.
I told them, “No! Damn it, we’re on the fourteenth hole and I’m playing like crap. I’m not leaving until my game gets straightened out!”
Then I told them, “Guys, how come every time one of these fruitcakes comes out of the woodwork, I have to run and hide? This time it’s changing. When we’re done here, we’re going to my house. I’m getting my Sig Sauer P-226 handgun. I have many boxes of Black Talon bullets sitting in my gun safe.”
(The minute the announcement came that the sale of these bullets was being banned, I’d gone to my gun shop and cleaned the shelves. I would tease my security, “I’ve got more firepower than you.” Law enforcement isn’t allowed to use Black Talon, but, as a civilian, you still can.)
I said, “We’re done being the hunted, boys. Starting today we’re the hunters. We’re gonna find this guy. And when we do, I’m gonna get him on the ground, and screw my nine-millimeter right into his ear. And I want the press to come and get a photograph of this. We’re gonna send a message. That way, the next nut case who wants to try this is gonna know what the consequences are.”
Oh my God, my troopers were panicked! As governor, I’m their commander in chief. They have to do what I say. I heard later from my friend Tony—who’s still doing security for the new governor—“You should have seen the state public safety headquarters that day, when you said you were going after that guy. The brass were all going crazy, saying, ‘Now what do we do?’”
Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! Page 10