by Dan Emmett
Each Secret Service agent in a field office was given a government car to use, not only while working but also at night. It could be taken home. This benefit of the job was known as “home to work,” and the Secret Service was one of the few agencies that offered it. Home to work was a tremendous privilege, and the rules were clear: No use of the car was authorized other than for official business, which included going directly from home to work and work to home. No one was allowed to ride in the car other than on official business—no children, no wife. There was to be no stopping at the grocery store, dry cleaners, or bars—especially bars. The SAIC tied it all together by saying that, while circumstances sometimes necessitated the bending of these rules, I was never, ever to combine all three of the Bs in one event. By this he meant going out for drinks and then driving the government car with an unauthorized passenger, such as a woman. He ended the briefing by stating that any misuse of the government car, or the “G-ride,” as it was known, meant an automatic thirty-day suspension without pay. Warning received.
After my swearing in and lecture on the evils of alcohol, cars, and women, I was handed off to an agent who took me to the part of the office where suspects were fingerprinted and photographed. He took what would be my official Secret Service photo. It would appear in my coveted commission book and would be kept on file at HQ. I still have a copy of it. I had another taken at the twenty-year mark. Side by side, the photos scarcely resemble the same person, although I still had most of my hair twenty years on.
The next morning, after being introduced to the daily ritual of morning coffee in the downstairs coffee shop, run by a very nice old man named George, I was introduced to Frank, one of the firearms instructors in the office and one of the oldest agents still on the job. His protection experience went back to the Eisenhower days, when Frank walked the links of Burning Tree Country Club with Ike while carrying a Thompson submachine gun in a golf bag. On this day in 1983, Frank’s job was to qualify me with the Smith & Wesson standard issue revolver, if possible, and help get me ready for upcoming agent training.
The course of fire a new agent was required to pass in order to carry a weapon was not a combat course but rather a bull’s-eye-type course called the SQC, or Standard Qualification Course. It was fired all single-action, meaning the hammer had to be pulled to the rear and cocked in order to fire each round. It was only a thirty-round course and designed to teach the fundamentals of shooting.
Frank and I drove to the Charlotte Police Academy range in his G-ride. Upon arriving, he explained the course of fire. After allowing me to dry-fire the weapon, meaning cycle it with no ammunition to get the feel of the revolver, Frank produced live ammunition and allowed me to try my luck.
I qualified on my first attempt, with a score of 290 out of a possible 300. Frank was very pleased with me and with himself. I did not reveal the fact that I had been firing handguns since the age of thirteen and was the top shooter with the .45 pistol in my marine unit. I liked Frank and had no problem with letting him believe it was his instruction that had carried the day. All organizations need men like Frank, and all new guys should listen to them.
Satisfied I was competent to at least carry a gun, Frank handed me the weapon along with twelve rounds of .38 special +P+ ammunition, a holster, and one speedloader, which carried an additional six cartridges. I was now armed and dangerous, although probably more so to myself than anyone else. While obviously proficient in the use of a weapon, I had yet to receive any instruction on the legalities of when I could and could not use it. This was standard procedure in the old days but was changed sometime in the 1990s. Today, agents do not carry weapons until they graduate from agent training.
The following week, the entire Charlotte field office and the smaller satellite offices of Wilmington and Raleigh converged on the same police academy range. The purpose of this gathering was for the mandatory quarterly firearms requalification for all agents in the state of North Carolina.
At the end of the training day and after qualifying with the revolver, Uzi submachine gun, and Remington 870 shotgun, I met with Paul, the agent I had met on my first day, and we headed for his road district of western North Carolina for some basic criminal investigative work. It was a part of on-the-job training, where a new agent was passed around from senior agent to senior agent to learn how things worked.
We checked into our respective hotel rooms, where we would live for the next three days, and then met at the bar to plan the evening’s activities, which included my introduction to the covert world of how to bend the three Bs a bit without repercussions.
THE NOT SO GLAMOROUS WORLD OF CHECK FORGERY INVESTIGATIONS
When a government check is stolen, the thief usually forges the payee’s signature and cashes the check. This becomes a federal violation investigated by the Secret Service. Today these investigations are largely unneeded, due to direct deposit, but in 1983 they made up the majority of investigations conducted by the Secret Service.
Check investigations were truly at the dull end of the Secret Service mission spectrum. At the other end was the all-important protection of the president, which took a very special person to accomplish. Any junior detective could succeed at check investigations. Until 2002 the Secret Service fell under the Department of the Treasury, and because all government checks are drawn on the US Treasury, investigations were assigned to the Secret Service.
While the Secret Service still has jurisdiction over these cases, today there are few compared to the 1980s. Today’s Secret Service, in addition to the staple investigation of counterfeit currency, also investigates credit card and bank fraud. Even though check forgery cases are rare, these new types of investigations keep every field agent more than occupied. In a sense it is a shame that the check forgery cases have all but gone extinct: They were how every new agent was broken in, and they offered what amounted to basic training in the field of investigations. The new Secret Service agent of today will never know the down-in-the-gutter experience of working them.
The danger these cases presented to the agent far outweighed the importance of the cases themselves. Investigating federal crimes in rural America was as dangerous as working in a large city, and it was easy to imagine that an agent could be made to disappear in this setting.
In the mountains of North Carolina, for example, you frequently worked alone. Many of the people who lived in extreme rural North Carolina existed in their own world and did not recognize federal law or the legitimacy of an agent’s authority. While an agent had complete legal authority to be on a person’s property in order to ask for cooperation in an investigation, many of those who needed to be interviewed believed that agents were trespassing.
To ensure his own safety, the wise agent would befriend a local deputy to accompany him on these cases. Each deputy knew almost everyone in the county, and the chances of being shot by a check forgery suspect were far less with the deputy along. This sometimes backfired—a deputy who was related to or friends with the suspect would call ahead and warn of the agent’s visit. It seemed that almost everyone in the extreme rural areas of North Carolina was related either by blood or marriage. It was almost the norm rather than the exception to arrive at the residence of a suspect to find no one home, even though the suspect was unemployed.
On my first day of working these cases, Paul and I interviewed one or two payees and obtained some handwriting samples. Most of these individuals were living in deplorable conditions that smelled of stale urine, and each seemed to have an army of mongrel dogs that guarded the mobile home or shack he resided in. I learned the lesson of the rural dog the hard way.
Paul and I had pulled up in front of a mobile home off a dirt road with a typical narrow dirt driveway. The first advice Paul offered was always to back the car in rather than to park nose first—for an expedient getaway if things went wrong. The second was to dress appropriately for such assignments. I was dressed in a three-piece pinstriped suit I incorrectly thought appropriate for
criminal investigations, while Paul was dressed in a sports jacket with wash-and-wear pants. It was on this day that I discovered an agent needed two different sets of work attire: one for dress-up events such as protection, the other for days when getting dirty is a distinct possibility.
As we exited Paul’s car I heard distant barking and saw the fast approach of a large, mud-caked mongrel. The owner who had seen our arrival stood in the doorway of his aluminum castle and told us not to worry: “The dog don’t bite.” He did not say anything about not jumping on a rookie Secret Service agent. As the dog ran toward us, he decided that I would be the best person to soil. He happily jumped on me, his front paws leaving a bounty of mud and who knows what else on my starched white shirt and suit and tie. Having now had his fun, the owner called the dog back. Paul was having a bit of fun, too, holding back laugher over my predicament.
Paul identified us, stated our business, and said that we needed some handwriting samples. The dog’s owner agreed to provide them. Inside, at the kitchen table, as I slid a form in front of the man to complete, a large drop of tobacco juice dripped from his mouth, staining the handwriting form. Seeing my quiet but noticeable disgust, Paul could barely contain himself. When we got back into his car he burst out laughing until tears ran from his eyes. Between gasps of air he said, “Welcome to the glamorous world of the Secret Service.” In every profession there is a period of paying one’s dues, and these cases amounted to that for a new agent.
As much as I disliked these investigations, I soon realized that check cases were the main activity in a small office like Charlotte. If I was ever to get to the presidential detail, I had to do them and do them well. But agent school was coming soon, and I would be, at least for the time being, delivered from these less than glamorous investigations.
CHAPTER 5
Special Agent Training
The key to success of any law enforcement organization is the selection and hiring of the best people available, followed by intensive, exhaustive, never-ending training. Arguably, few personnel in law enforcement are trained to the level of an agent of the United States Secret Service. I don’t believe there is any organization in the law enforcement arena that places as much importance on continued training throughout an agent’s career as does the Secret Service. This is especially true in the areas of firearms and executive protection. This training begins the day a new agent is hired, when he or she is assigned a mentor, and it continues until retirement through frequent refresher training.
In addition to never-ending on-the-job training, each new hire has six months of initial formal training. This training is divided into two phases—criminal investigations followed by protective training—and it is conducted at two separate facilities.
The first school a newly hired agent trainee attends is the Criminal Investigative Training Program (CITP), located in Brunswick, Georgia, at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC). There, a new agent learns the basics common to all agents in federal law enforcement agencies. This school is not specific to the Secret Service but is a generic course designed to certify each student in the 1811 series, or criminal investigator category. The curriculum includes basic firearms training, physical fitness, defensive measures, and how to conduct a criminal investigation from the beginning through judicial adjudication. Each class is comprised of forty-eight students, with twenty-four being Secret Service agent trainees and the other twenty-four from various other agencies within the federal government.
After graduation from CITP, the Secret Service agent trainee attends the second phase of his or her training at the Secret Service Special Agent Training Course (SATC), held at the James J. Rowley Training Center (JJRTC) in Laurel, Maryland, sometimes referred to as Beltsville. This school belongs exclusively to the Secret Service, and it is here that the new agent learns how to provide executive protection for the president, as well as conduct investigations specific to the Secret Service, such as investigations of counterfeit and financial fraud. Firearms proficiency with all issued weapons specific to an agent of the Secret Service is ensured by many hours of range time with the issued Sig Sauer pistol, Remington shotgun, and Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun.
In addition to this training, each new agent is certified as a first responder in order to save lives in medical emergencies. This training, conducted by qualified EMTs and others from the medical community, gives each new agent the knowledge and tools necessary to respond to any medical emergency, from a heart attack to delivering a baby. It has saved many lives over the years.
Each new agent receives a significant amount of water survival training conducted in the state-of-the-art training tank (a large swimming pool) at Beltsville. In addition, the Secret Service trains its own water rescue swimmers, whose skills rival those of military combat swimmers. There is also an almost daily regimen of aggressive defensive tactics and challenging physical training.
Upon graduation from all required training, new Secret Service agents are prepared for any situation they might encounter over the course of their careers, everything from a gunfight, to subduing a resisting suspect, to stopping arterial bleeding, to the all-important covering the president and evacuating him in the event of an attack. Graduation, however, does not signal the end of training for an agent. Quite the contrary. Over the course of a career, each agent returns to Beltsville many times to receive refresher training in protection, firearms, and computers, and to hear the latest about investigative techniques and capabilities. Each is also briefed on the latest Supreme Court decisions relevant to the Secret Service.
Even after reporting to one of the two major protective details, PPD and the Vice Presidential Protective Division (VPPD), each agent undergoes two weeks of training every eight weeks. Known as protective detail training (PDT), it keeps each agent who is on the presidential and vice presidential detail sharp in all related skills. During this two-week period, agents requalify with their service pistol, submachine gun, and shotgun and are given the physical fitness test, consisting of push-ups, pull-ups, abdominal crunches, and 1.5-mile runs for time. A refresher in medical emergencies likely to be encountered by an agent is also given. The final day of PDT is spent engaged in attack on a principal (AOP) exercise, where agents are subjected to several mock attacks simulating assaults on their protectee. These attacks could include responding to a lone gunman on the rope line or a long-distance shooter, a medical emergency, and perhaps a water emergency such as exiting a crashed helicopter. In this scenario, several agents are seated blindfolded in a device submerged in water that simulates a helicopter fuselage. The fuselage is then rolled and inverted, and the agents must swim out of the simulated helicopter on one breath of air while fighting panic and with no visual reference. The problems are a bit different each time, so no one can really know what will come next. All agents, including supervisors, participate. It is without doubt the finest protective training in the world. It is also the major reason the Secret Service has been so successful in protecting the nation’s leaders over the decades.
Like most police agencies, the Secret Service through the years has had its share of changes in training doctrine and philosophy for new agents. The emphasis varies with each new director. Some have believed that the school should be somewhat of a gentleman’s course, while others have implemented measures that resemble those used in state police academies or military boot camp. It is for this reason that agents trained during different time frames will often offer different recollections of their training.
MY TRAINING BEGINS
In compliance with my orders to report to FLETC in June 1983, I departed Charlotte and drove first to my parents’ home, in Gainesville, Georgia, where I spent a weekend visiting the family and some old friends.
The next day found me a little sleep-deprived en route to my first training stint at FLETC. I arrived at the base, checked in, and headed for my room, where I found my roommate, Mike, and several men from my class. Mike was an outgoing, likable f
ellow who seemed to collect people of all types wherever he went. He also on this day had a cooler of cold beer, which always helps make new friends.
All of us hit if off right away and had a lot in common. Almost everyone was about the same age, twenty-eight. Almost everyone had a work history that was focused on either law enforcement or the military, and almost none of us were married. Later that day, when the beer in Mike’s cooler ran out, most of us went to nearby St. Simons Island for dinner.
The next morning we attended our first day of training, punching one another in the ribs to keep one another awake. I am surprised that none in my class over the course of the next few weeks suffered any permanent rib damage.
It was a long eight weeks, living with Mike in a small concrete block room just large enough for two people, but, as with thousands of other students over the years, we made do. Each day, we attended class, practiced our future trade, and generally had a pretty good time of it.
The saving grace of this experience was that our class was convened during the summer. As a result we could be found every Saturday and Sunday enjoying the beaches of St. Simons Island. Even on weekends, we began each day at the beach with a brisk three-mile run through the surf, then settled into our places while enjoying refreshments, the ocean, and the gracious hospitality of both tourists and locals alike.
Eventually we each grew a bit weary of the routine, the prison-style uniforms, and the food. Our elation was almost unbridled when it came time to graduate. Due to a lively graduation party the night before that was held on base so no one had to drive, almost everyone the next day was a little worse for wear, although functional. Someone gave an unmemorable speech and then we were handed our diplomas, and off we went, back to our home offices to await the next SATC class and the next round of the best training in the world with some of the best friends and comrades a man could wish for.