Within Arm's Length: A Secret Service Agent's Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President

by Dan Emmett

I expected him to provide a brief escort through the home, but instead he handed me the key and said, “Here, Dan, please lock it up when you are done.” And then he left. Although only fifty-two years old, the senator moved back toward the main house with the posture and gait of a much older man. It was clear that the passing of the years since the assassinations of his brothers, President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, had done little to relieve his pain. He was still grieving. During my time with him, he also seemed a man tormented by the other tragedies that had occurred in his life. Secret Service agents are often with their protectees in settings far from the media and crowds. They observe politicians in a light not seen by anyone outside their families. Sometimes the view is tragic.

  It took only moments after entering the house for me to realize that it had not received the news of President Kennedy’s death. Frozen in time, it seemed to be waiting for its windows to again vibrate, announcing the arrival of a helicopter delivering the president and his family for another weekend or holiday at Hyannis Port with friends and a multitude of relatives. It had now been waiting in silence for twenty-one years.

  At first glance, the president’s home seemed much like any other and was furnished as expected, with furniture and décor that ranged from antique through early 1960s, complemented by an abundant supply of Life magazines and newspapers. The subtle clue that this home was perhaps not like others began with the discovery that these reading materials were all printed in 1963 or earlier.

  The other two agents and I began to explore the old house, laced with a hint of dampness from the late New England autumn. Soon, however, my colleagues each declared he had to leave for the airport or miss his flight. As we bade farewell, I realized I should probably have gone with them, but I was not yet ready to end this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  Now alone, I moved through the house and slowly began to discover a museum’s worth of President Kennedy’s personal belongings. As I allowed this more-than-unique experience to sink in, a revelation occurred: I was walking through a time capsule, an inner sanctum that probably few outside the Kennedy family had seen since 1963.

  Some of the priceless items that now surrounded me included framed photographs of President Kennedy and his family, both on the walls and resting on various tables and shelves. Other items I stood before included business suits in President Kennedy’s closet, which upon closer examination revealed his name sewn inside by someone possessing great skill in such matters. Arranged neatly on wooden hangers, each seemed to be waiting for President Kennedy to return and wear it once again.

  As I continued to explore, apprehension began to set in, making me feel I had inadvertently surpassed the boundaries Senator Kennedy had intended when offering access to the home. The stillness and quiet became deafening and I knew it was time to leave.

  Alone in President Kennedy’s bedroom, which darkened by the minute in the fading afternoon light, I felt for the house key in my pocket and prepared to conclude my self-guided tour. As I was about to depart the bedroom and the house that time had forgotten, two items on the bureau suddenly caught my attention. Curious, I moved closer for a more detailed examination—and found a pair of gold cuff links. The cuff links seemed to be waiting, like the house itself, for their owner to return. But who was their owner? Standing in the cold bedroom of the late president, surrounded by the fading light of Election Day 1984, I read the initials engraved on the face of each accessory and realized to whom they had once belonged. The owner of these mysterious lone cuff links had been President John F. Kennedy.

  Although any number of possibilities existed as to how and why these artifacts were lying on President Kennedy’s dresser in 1984, it did not seem an unreasonable assumption, given the undisturbed state of other items in the house, that these heirlooms had perhaps been resting on the dresser since 1963. That possibility alone was a bit unnerving, as was the presence of the cuff links themselves.

  As I started to pick one up for closer examination, my hand abruptly halted, as if grasped by an unseen force. These cuff links were perhaps last touched by President Kennedy himself; I did not feel I should be the next to touch them. In addition to entrusting the Secret Service with his life, Senator Kennedy had also trusted each of us to merely tour the home, not touch items probably considered sacred to him. The handling of these treasures would have been totally unprofessional. I was not a tourist left to run amok in the president’s home but a Secret Service agent trained from the first day of my career to respect the personal lives and property of those I protected. As with all other objects I encountered in the home of President Kennedy, these two items were left undisturbed where they lay.

  As I stared at the objects, a draft of cold air moving through the quiet stillness of the house reminded me yet again that it was time to go. Leaving the cuff links in their resting place while thinking of how much trust the senator must have had in us, I exited the house using the same door through which I had entered, locking it on the way out per the senator’s instructions. After a brief search for the senator to return the key, I discovered him walking along the beach in front of the compound.

  When I handed him the key, he said, “Thank you, Dan, I appreciate your work and that of the Secret Service very much.”

  “Thank you, Senator, for allowing us the honor of viewing the president’s home,” I replied.

  We talked for a few minutes. He politely asked me where I was from and how long I had been a Secret Service agent. Feeling more comfortable with the senator and with the assignment now over, I almost asked about the cuff links. Not certain, however, if he would appreciate the range of liberty I had taken with the tour, I elected not to raise the subject. After a pause in the conversation, I sensed that he wanted to be alone. We shook hands, and I left him standing on the beach staring out at the ocean, seemingly looking for something or someone. It had been a long thirty days for him also. I then walked to the command post, formerly the home of Bobby Kennedy, gathered my gear, and called a cab, which would take me to the airport, where I would board an airplane for the trip home.

  AN UNEXPECTED CHANGE OF DIRECTION

  It was now 1986. After three years as an agent in Charlotte, with my desire to transfer to the Counter Assault Team well known, the SAIC brought me into his office one day and delivered some excellent news. “Dan,” he said, “it looks like you are going to be in the first CAT class in 1987.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said and left his office, my feet barely touching the ground. CAT was growing and needed agents—preferably military veterans, and at the time there were very few of us. It was time to now put investigations behind me and move on to the most important mission of the Secret Service, which is to protect the president of the United States. Unknown to me at the time, however, there were forces at work that would alter these plans.

  One morning in the late spring of 1986, I had just arrived at work and was sitting at my desk planning the day’s activities, which included report writing, lunch, and running a few miles, followed by an hour in the weight room. CAT school was a very physical course and I wanted to ensure that I was ready for the challenge. Something seemed different today, however. Everyone seemed distant—as if they knew something I did not. Something was up, and I sensed it had to do with me.

  As I sat at my desk looking over a check forgery case, the SAIC came in and said he wanted to see me in his office. I knew this was either very good or very bad, as SAICs do not normally seek out GS-9s and invite them into their office.

  Upon entering his office, I sat down in the same chair I had sat in three years earlier on my first day as a Secret Service agent. The SAIC sat behind his desk, appearing almost to take cover there, and wasted no time in stating his purpose. He said, “Dan, you are being transferred, but it is unfortunately not to CAT.” He looked down at his desk with his hands folded, seemingly unable or unwilling to look me in the eye.

  I asked, “Okay, where to, then?”

  Without looking up, he said, “Th
e New York field office.”

  Being transferred to New York was the ultimate nightmare come true for any agent, young or old, and it took a few seconds for the words to sink in. I was well aware, from previous trips to New York on temporary assignments, that it was a large, dirty, noisy, and above all highly expensive place to live. This did not play into my career plans, and I had absolutely no interest in being transferred there.

  My first visit to New York had been in 1984, when I had been assigned to Indian head of state Rajiv Gandhi. His mother, the former prime minister of India, had recently been assassinated and he had subsequently been targeted. In 1992 he would meet the same fate. I was on the midnight shift and we were required to wear our ballistic vests, which was very uncommon. We worked with Indian security but did not dare turn our backs on them and trusted none of them. We were working and staying in the Waldorf Astoria, a hotel that would play a part in my life many times over the next twenty-five years. After getting off one morning I ventured out into the streets of New York for the first time. I was there for no more than five minutes before beating a retreat back to the hotel. I had never witnessed such chaos, with people moving in great insectlike swarms to God knows where. The assignment ended in a couple of days and I headed back to Charlotte with the intent to never visit again.

  After regaining my internal composure in the SAIC’s office, I asked, “What has changed so dramatically that I am being pulled from CAT and sent to New York?”

  Without really answering the question, he stated that Secret Service headquarters had selected me for the assignment, and that while it was not what I wanted, it would be good for my career. As he finished delivering his news, he looked up at me, seeming to expect a response of some sort, and asked if I had any questions. I asked if being assigned to a large office had helped his career. He stated that he had never actually served in a large office but that career paths were different today and again asked if I had any questions.

  I answered no and asked if that would be all. He said it was for now, and as I stood to leave, I said, “It might be a good idea to get someone else on deck; I am not at all certain I will take the transfer.” I saw the confusion and near panic on his face. I suppose he expected me to respond to the news in any number of ways, but not to threaten resignation.

  An agent had balked at orders recently. Mike, my best friend in the Service and old FLETC roommate, had been given the same treatment a few weeks earlier. His fate was to be Los Angeles, but, to the horror of the SAIC, Mike, rather than take the transfer, resigned. For another agent to resign from Charlotte over a transfer would not be good for the SAIC. As with all SAICs, his headquarters image was all-important to him. For two young agents to walk off the job would suggest weak leadership. It would be assumed that the SAIC had in some way failed to properly motivate and indoctrinate the youth in his office to happily accept transfers to large offices.

  I walked into the hallway, which was lined with coworkers looking at me as if I had been on death row and was walking toward the gas chamber. I almost expected someone to say, “Dead man walking.” All the faces of my peer group were filled with survivor’s guilt and fear. Each was sorry I was going to New York, but all were glad it was not them, and all were now terrified it would be them next time around. For more than one colleague, it would be.

  For better or for worse, I was a career agent, and, while I never had any intention of resigning, I put off signing my paperwork as long as possible, since it would officially launch me to the New York office. I suppose the deliberate avoidance of signing my orders was a quiet rebellion on my part, although a bit immature and certainly futile. Each day, my first-level supervisor would call me into his office, where my transfer papers sat on the desk awaiting my signature. Each day, I told him I had not yet decided whether I was going or not and then left his office without signing.

  All of the other agents in the office were becoming more and more uncomfortable over the whole thing, including the SAIC. Everyone was nervous because if I did not go, someone else would have to.

  Finally, on the last day possible before being threatened with disciplinary action, I signed the papers, an act that began the countdown for my transfer to the office of investigations, New York. As I signed the piece of paper acknowledging my receipt of orders, I did not realize that while the New York experience would do absolutely nothing for my career, contrary to the assertions of the SAIC, it would become one of the many defining points in my life.

  CHAPTER 7

  The New York Field Office

  New York Field Office: a bottomless black hole of despair that knows no limits.

  —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

  Upon receiving a T-number, or transfer number, an agent who has been selected to relocate to another assignment in a different geographical area is entitled to a ten-day house-hunting trip to the new region.

  After overcoming the initial shock of receiving orders to New York rather than CAT, I began to get my affairs in order, including planning my house-hunting trip. The Charlotte assistant to the special agent in charge, who had served on PPD, was very clear about it. He said to me one day, “Dan, they screwed you, so screw them back.” What he meant was that I should do whatever I wanted to do in preparation for my move and not worry about my casework. I was not so interested in screwing the Secret Service but was in a bit of a panic about where I was going to live in the New York area on my salary.

  Therein lay the worst part of an agent’s being transferred to New York. It wasn’t so much the city and the surroundings but rather the cost of living. If the government had paid agents enough to live in New York proper, things would have been much better. As it was, most agents were forced to live in New Jersey or even Pennsylvania. This made for one of the worst commutes in America.

  One June day in 1986, I boarded an airplane bound for Newark, New Jersey, and my house-hunting trip, where I would search for an apartment to live in for the foreseeable future. Upon landing in Newark, I picked up my rental car and headed south to the town of Plainsboro, New Jersey, where I knew other agents lived.

  Upon arriving in Plainsboro I selected an apartment on the top floor of a building overlooking the first fairway of a golf course, paid my first month’s and last month’s rent as a deposit, and went on my way. I decided that the following morning I would, just for fun, drive into New York to try to find the field office. Having never driven into New York City, I was expecting an exciting adventure and was not disappointed.

  After arriving in New York I spent the day touring the field office and exploring the vast World Trade Center complex. It was like a city within a city, much of it underground. There were restaurants, banks, bars, stores, and PATH tubes—subwaylike trains that ran under the Hudson River and came out on the other side in Jersey City.

  The following day I returned to Charlotte from my New York adventure, cleaned up my remaining cases, and, on a molten hot day in August 1986, climbed into my Porsche 911 and headed north to my New Jersey apartment and my new life.

  A few days later I checked into the New York field office for my first day of work. One of the first things I saw upon entering the office that morning was a sign taped to an agent’s desk. It read: “New York Field Office: a bottomless black hole of despair that knows no limits.”

  I thought to myself, this is still a Secret Service office. Everything should be standardized, and, therefore, the adjustment to the work itself should not be very hard. I would soon find out that the culture of the Secret Service was not universal. Large offices had their own way of doing things, and New York was the largest of them all.

  CHECKS AGAIN

  Even though I had over three years of experience as an agent and had worked all types of cases assigned to the Secret Service, all the recent transferees and I began our New York careers working forged checks.

  The contrast between working these cases in North Carolina and working them in Manhattan and the Bronx was off the scale. In North Carolina we had to d
eal with a certain type of criminal and his or her rural surroundings. In New York, both the landscape and the criminals were different. Instead of mobile homes and falling-down shacks, in New York we had to enter the most horrid tenement slums in America. It was not unusual to have to step over human feces in the hallways as well as unconscious humans with needle tracks in their arms. There were no mud-caked dogs to greet one, but upon entry into these apartments we encountered another menace: the American cockroach.

  In some of these apartments the walls were alive with these insects, and the cupboards and kitchens were infested. One did not dare lean against a wall or even touch anything if it could be avoided. In addition to dropping on you, these little menaces would crawl up your leg and take refuge. After returning home in the evening, the first thing an agent who had been in this environment did was to completely undress down to his skivvies and leave all clothes and shoes on the front step or hallway of his residence. On more than one occasion after I had done this and had shaken out my clothes, a roach that had managed to steal a ride would drop to the ground and then be murdered on sight by me. I could not blame the roach for wanting to get out of the slums of New York and move to the suburbs of New Jersey.

  I learned that the answer to this problem was to get as many of these people as possible to come down to the field office for questioning. It was preferable to entering their world, which was both unpleasant and dangerous. Many people who were harboring friends and relatives from the police lived in these apartments, which made working a two hundred–dollar check case a great deal more dangerous than it should have been.

  INVESTIGATIONS VS. PROTECTION

  When I checked into the New York office I soon realized to my amazement that many agents did not want to do any type of protection but rather only liked investigations. I found this to be puzzling on many levels. Not that a person would like investigations—I just found it strange that people who wanted to be strictly criminal investigators would join an agency that spends half its time protecting politicians. For those people, there were many other options that did not include being in the Secret Service. Many sought those options and left for police departments and other federal agencies, while others stayed and bitched about having to do protection.