Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  The Clintons were not happy with the Secret Service for turning down the investigation. Agency leaders, however, were concerned about the character of the people who would replace the previous employees and wondered about the character of those who would destroy such a venerable tenured employee as Dale, who had worked at the office side by side with the Secret Service since 1961 and led it since 1982. Nonetheless, “Travelgate” backfired on the Clintons as the FBI’s investigation quickly turned against them and specifically implicated White House employees and even the first lady in the conspiracy.

  The Clintons and their staff simply never learned, and neither did the Secret Service.

  One illustrative run-in was with a staffer known as “the Rabbi,” so called by his colleagues because of his beard and demeanor. Late one evening, the president received word that he had accomplished one of his campaign promises. The Rabbi wanted to make the most of the milestone by staging a regal presidential address before the press, immediately.

  The Rabbi was exceedingly noncooperative with the Secret Service and developed a nasty habit of informing them of his plans at the last minute. As he prepared to set up this presidential address outside, in front of the media on the North Portico, he was unaware of one important fact: the Uniformed Division Counter Sniper Team had already been told to go home. The Uniformed Division rooftop patrols had taken their places, but they were mostly only visual overwatch. As a UD officer permanently posted outside the Oval Office, I was aware of this, but, not wanting to insert myself directly and have any backlash fall on my shoulders (already the on-the-job politics had taken hold), I headed to “Staircase,” the agents’ radio room, to inform the agents there. They thought I was joking, but when they realized I was serious, they sprung into action. The Rabbi did not realize that he was about to place the president on the North Portico in an area that had minimal tree cover from the surrounding neighborhood and nearby hotels. Lights from TV cameras would highlight him perfectly for any sniper.

  The agents were furious.

  “Why not put a giant billboard and flare on him, for Christ’s sake?” one demanded as he ran to find the Rabbi.

  When he was located and confronted, the conversation grew heated. At one point, the Rabbi actually stepped into the personal space of one of the PPD agents, as if to intimidate him.

  “I think you are having unrealistic expectations as to your authority here at the White House,” one PPD agent calmly pointed out.

  We Secret Service personnel were careful in picking and choosing our battles. Noncooperation and arrogance could be stomached to some degree, but we were ready to draw the line when we felt someone was willfully placing the president in danger. The line was up to each officer and agent to draw.

  The Rabbi was soon let go, but the problem of staffers with the same problem of prioritizing ego or popularity over security remained. In another incident, Dee Dee Myers once held up the departure of Marine One, which was waiting to take off with President Clinton aboard—a sitting duck in the middle of the South Lawn—while she took a phone call she thought was more important.

  We always had to be aware that this White House was just different. But there were exceptions. President Clinton’s secretary, Betty Currie—who was very nice—gave me the nickname “Mayor of the West Wing.” I didn’t like it, but I recognized in many ways that I was one of the last layers of defense before the president’s office.

  But mostly, a double standard was readily apparent between the staffers let in with minimal security checking and the officers charged with protecting them. Therefore, the officers’ morale continued to plummet. At times it seemed as if the Secret Service were just a big show, an elaborate theatrical security effort still in denial of its history and failures. The Clintons, their staff, and service higher-ups seemed fine with watching those past failures play out again.

  Of all the Clinton employees who caused the Secret Service so much frustration, Craig Livingstone was the poster child. He was at the center of it all. He was a boorish, cartoonish child of a man. He would name-drop and throw supposed protection terminology into conversations. It felt as though he were trying to pry information out of each person he talked with. He was a DC bouncer who had somehow latched onto the Clinton campaign. He later testified that Mrs. Clinton had personally hired him. She flatly denied it. FBI attachés and Secret Service personnel who had such information were never involved to verify this. But Livingstone was indeed the “Head of the White House Office of Personnel Security.” This had previously been a clerk’s position, a simple document filer. Working out of an office in the Old Executive Office Building but coordinating with the East Wing staff under the first lady, Livingstone tried to morph the position into something in senior management.

  He even bragged to me that he had gained his status within the Clinton administration and with First Lady Hillary by being the head of the off-the-record “opposition force,” green-lighted by the campaign. He boasted that he had chased the campaign bus of then-president George H. W. Bush and then put on a chicken suit to heckle Bush with shouts of “Chicken George” for not debating candidate Clinton. Livingstone even bragged to me that Hillary had hired him directly for his position and implied that they were personal friends. The Secret Service aims to be nonpartisan and nonpolitical, but that kind of conduct is not something that was good form to brag about to any Secret Service employee. It was especially maddening to hear such things from a coward whose target, President Bush, had been a torpedo bomber who had fought the Japanese, been shot down in the Pacific Ocean, and been saved only because a friendly submarine happened to spot him adrift.

  On another occasion, Livingstone offended the PPD agents when they got word of his newly made business cards. The cards read “Craig Livingstone: Head of Presidential Security.” With those business cards, he implied that he ran the president’s security and that PPD or all of the Secret Service worked for him. This was nuts. When PPD Agent “Dave,” who was nicknamed “The Look-Alike” for sometimes being mistaken for President Clinton, caught up with Livingstone and demanded that he destroy the cards, Livingstone retorted, “Well, it doesn’t say Secret Service.” He was exactly the kind of person who was not supposed to be permitted to work at the White House, and he was involved in the hiring process! It was another reminder of the Secret Service’s inability to protect the Clintons from themselves.

  After the White House complex was flooded with hangers-on and those with less-than-desirable character (to put it mildly), the Secret Service still viewed itself as being at arm’s length from the Clinton administration. But as former Secret Service PPD and Counter Assault Team (CAT) agent Dan Emmett noted in his book Within Arm’s Length, a memoir of his service, strategically the Clintons had already compromised far more than the Secret Service’s secure area. After compromising event and hotel security (as I describe in my own book Crisis of Character), it did not take long for the Clintons to compromise transportation security as well. Transporting the president is one of the more dangerous and serious tasks of the Secret Service.

  Emmett wrote of one such shocking instance in which the Clinton staff forced the Secret Service to back down so the president, for a mere photo op, could be placed in an ambush zone and a tactically untenable situation. Clinton strolled across a bridge between North and South Korea in full view of North Korean guards armed with AK-47s, small arms, and even worse. The president was yards away from his motorcade and isolated. If the America-hating North Koreans started shooting, the president would have immediately been killed and the United States would certainly have been thrust back into the Korean War. Emmett wrote:

  “As we sat in our vehicle, we stared at the North Koreans and scanned the surrounding area while the Communists stared back. Meanwhile, President Clinton leisurely strolled along the bridge as if he were at Camp David, with the satisfied, relaxed look of a man with no concerns. After walking a little farther onto the bridge than he probably should have, practically into North
Korea, President Clinton looked around the area for a few minutes and then returned to his vehicle, and we got the hell out of the zone.”

  Such instances happened regularly enough to reveal to all of the Secret Service a clear pattern of reckless behavior by the Clinton staff and a “hear no evil, see no evil” attitude on the part of the service’s leaders. It was a cavalier disconnect that could lead to disaster—again.

  Another tale that was kept from the public would have surely been called “Ringgate” had the media caught wind of it. The president was in a major metropolitan airport, en route to Air Force One, when he realized he had left his wedding ring at his hotel. He ordered the motorcade to turn around so he could retrieve it. He was especially concerned about being seen arriving or boarding without his wedding ring as he had been traveling without the first lady. But that was an unforeseen circumstance in the highly coordinated logistical ballet among the Air Force, local police, Secret Service, FAA, and other agencies, not to mention the airport itself. The compromise was that a group of agents at the hotel where the Secret Service was maintaining a skeleton safe room and control center would somehow quickly locate the ring and then rush to return it before detection.

  That was a break from the plans in place to ensure that the president remained protected at all times. Unscheduled delays were not accounted for and could have been exploited by potential adversaries. For a nail-biting thirty minutes, the president was exposed on his own orders, violating the security procedures in place for his own safety as Air Force One, PPD, CAT, Secret Service, military, and other security agents waited for the ring. They should have left without it, but once again presidential security was subservient to the wants and desires of convenience and PR.

  In another instance, which was picked up by the media and dubbed “Hairgate,” President Clinton held up air traffic at Los Angeles International Airport for thirty minutes so he could get his hair cut by a celebrity stylist named Christophe. Again, the Clintons created a double standard. Passengers on flights that were delayed and forced to use the one other set of runways available due to Air Force One’s presence were delayed further by congested air traffic.

  This mentality was also evident in President Clinton’s jogging habit. Every president has one thing that the Secret Service, and specifically the PPD, has to just “figure out.” President Reagan liked to use a chain saw at his ranch. President Eisenhower golfed on difficult-to-secure courses. President Clinton jogged around the National Mall area.

  “Taking the president running at peak rush hour down Pennsylvania Avenue, around the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial, or through Rock Creek Park, bordered on insanity,” Dan Emmett pointed out in his book, Within Arm’s Length.

  Agent Emmett detailed how a domestic wannabe assassin had actually traveled to DC from Florida and waited in various parks with a handgun, hoping to ambush the president if circumstance ever brought the president jogging past him. The man was caught only after he disclosed his premeditated attempt to a confidant who then informed the Secret Service. The man was prosecuted.

  President Clinton was even caught sneaking off the White House complex on more than one occasion. His personal lawyer, Bruce Lindsey, tried to hide the president in his car and leave the complex. They were stopped only by the good work of a Uniformed Division officer working the northwest vehicle exit gate on West Executive Avenue. On a hunch the officer inspected the vehicle and, much to his alarm, spotted the president trying to hide under a raincoat in the back seat. Despite Lindsey’s pleading, the officer stood his post and would not open the gate. He immediately took to his post phone, saying “You better get me some help up here. I just caught Bruce Lindsey trying to drive out West Exec. with the president with a raincoat over his head.”

  PPD agents, alarmed to hear that the president had willfully sneaked past them, were past fury. They were dejected, disappointed, bewildered, and shocked. They tried to remain diplomatic, but they had to be adamant with Bruce Lindsey that this must never happen again. Other officers confirmed this report, and although this was the first and only time I had heard of it, Gary Aldrich wrote of another similar instance. Word circulated that “sneaking off” was something to look out for.

  If the president could not completely duck his detail, he would at least take them “off the record,” or OTR. Sometimes this was done for highly honorable reasons, such as when President Clinton, without fanfare, along with many other top military leadership, visited the grieving widow of a fallen high-ranking military official. But the freedom of OTRs under this president was soon to be abused and, in one instance, nearly cost an officer his life.

  President Clinton used the OTRs to visit the well-known and lesser-known mistresses he frequented outside the complex, meaning the ones who did not have access to the White House. Standard motorcade procedures utilized a multitude of preplanned routes and UD and local law enforcement uniformed officers, particularly from the DC Metropolitan Police Department, to block intersections ahead of the motorcade, so that it could move through at accelerated speed without stopping. For events and long drives, sewer and drain ports were welded shut. Even sections of highways were shut down just in case the president might use them on a route. All the vehicles in the motorcade kept close to one another, speed limits were obviously ignored, and lights and sirens were always used. All of that was designed to keep the president safe from ambush, what some called the “kill zone.”

  President Clinton wanted all that changed at the last minute. The Secret Service again capitulated. Convoys of big black SUVs moving far above the speed limit with flashing red and blue lights with sirens are not uncommon around the nation’s capital. Without indicator flags, the protectees of those convoys could be our own government officials or even foreign dignitaries. But anonymity, mystery, and being off the public record were not enough for what the president had in mind. He wanted to move even more secretly, but the Secret Service could not invent a new plan and retrain its agents and officers simply because President Clinton didn’t like the procedure. Instead it eliminated layers of protection altogether. As the remaining layers became disjointed and nonconcentric, both the service’s own personnel and the public were put at extreme risk. Half of the Secret Service’s protective measures are for the protectees, but the other half are to safeguard agents and officers as well as the public from our operations.

  Several late-night OTRs were mysteriously ordered to not use sirens, lights, or exceed the speed limit. The number of cars was reduced to bare bones, but it was still about twelve, more than could push through an intersection without running a red light. Many of those diminished OTRs did not notify DC Metro PD of their movements—which created a snake pit of problems. Without the sirens, the motorcades could not alert other vehicles that they were on-duty police vehicles and to steer clear. Without the red and blue lights, the vehicles looked just like any other civilian car on the road. Without the consistent accelerated speed, the vehicles could not keep consistent distances between one another as they constantly stopped, slowed, and accelerated again. Civilian cars kept trying to cut into the convoy. As intersections were not blocked off ahead of the motorcade, red lights and regular traffic prevented the motorcades from pushing through intersections unimpeded. Agents and officers held their breath as the motorcades got caught in the middle of civilian traffic, engines humming idle in potential kill zones, exactly what their Secret Service training had engrained in them not to do. On one occasion, the motorcade became entirely split and had to wait for lights to change to try and reconnect. That left the president’s vehicle vulnerable, as each vehicle had a separate and important function. In case of an ambush, the agents would have nowhere to go and would have to ram or shoot their way out through the clogged and unaware DC traffic. No one had trained for such a compromised scenario; everyone was improvising. And what was all the danger and sacrifice for—an uncontrollable president’s late-night dalliance?

  On one occasion, a Metro PD car s
potted the convoy and called over to the Secret Service Foreign Missions Branch, asking something to the effect of “Hey, do you Secret Service guys have a convoy operating tonight? This looks like you guys.” The Foreign Missions Branch responded, “No, that’s not us.” As far as they knew, that was true—they had not been notified of the clandestine OTR. It appeared to Metro PD that there was a mystery twelve-car convoy breaking numerous laws while traversing DC. They naturally considered trying to pull one of the vehicles over but figured there must have been some kind of interagency miscommunication. However, they had to figure it out on the fly because they recognized the motorcade’s movements as illegal, suspicious, and extremely dangerous to everyone else—which it absolutely was.

  “Reverend,” a Uniformed Division officer, was driving the tail car, a marked police car. Another officer sat next to him in the front seat. Due to the haphazard, improvised, and extremely dangerous way the motorcade was operating, the tail car was T-boned by a civilian car correctly crossing the intersection at a green light. It wasn’t that Reverend’s car just missed the red light. But many of the cars in front of him had missed the light as well, and he had simply followed through. The car that hit him had not been stopped and waiting at the intersection; the civilian driving it had accelerated to full speed from a significant distance away. For the civilians, the light had long been green.

  Reverend was severely injured, as were another officer and two civilians. The convoy continued on. Metro PD was alerted, and that’s when it learned that the Secret Service had been operating throughout DC in such a dangerous fashion. Still, things could have been much worse.

  Reverend was hospitalized with a severe traumatic brain injury. It was significant enough that he was pulled from duty pending his recovery and even then would return only on “light duty” status. In an unfortunate mix-up and evidence of the Secret Service’s horrible management, as Reverend recovered, the service tried to deny him benefits, saying that he had “operated outside the operational envelope” by running a red light against protocol without lights and sirens! The service made him burn up all of his sick leave even before he could physically advocate on his own behalf. Once Reverend’s lawyer rattled the cage of going to trial and hashing out the issues—and the evidence—in court, the service immediately backed off and settled handsomely, including fast-tracking a transfer for Reverend to another government agency in Colorado. Word of what had happened to Reverend spread like wildfire through the Uniformed Division because any UD officer could have been in Reverend’s place. And although many would take a bullet for the president, what was the risk for? Were Clinton’s sordid personal affairs worth an officer’s life? Was that the duty we had signed up for, the reason we spent so much time away from our families?