Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  Despite the payout, Reverend knew and quietly disclosed to others that his injury had permanently changed his personality. He didn’t feel much like himself anymore. As for the civilians, all anyone had heard was that they had been handsomely compensated for their injuries, losses, and silence.

  Still, the Clintons’ attitude toward their protectors and their security never changed.

  The service’s run-ins with staff worsened. As strange as it seems, despite all the other scandals and the special committees of the House and Senate investigating so much about the president’s administration, it was the run-ins between the president’s staff and the Secret Service that ultimately and directly threw the service under the president’s bus.

  The Secret Service, and especially the PPD, grew more capitulating with the first couple and presidential staff. Yet from the staff’s perspective, the Secret Service would never be “user friendly” and docile enough. The Secret Service leadership went along with the staff’s demand that the Treasury Department (the service’s parent agency) hire a private-sector human resources company to instruct the Uniformed Division how to be nicer, kinder, gentler, and “less abrasive.” Secret Service higher-ups assumed that that would be of no consequence. Morale was not much of a consideration. The UD officers were insulted and distanced. Through middle management they tried to explain that they were always diplomatic with the staff. Management chalked it up to a gesture, a harmless placation. But the staff didn’t realize that their seemingly simple requests would actually jeopardize the Secret Service protection measures, even ones mandated by Congress. When management did learn of the course curriculum that encouraged making those measures flexible, they finally looked into the program and ended it.

  Issues related to White House tours caused constant conflicts with the Uniformed Division. The Clintons used the tours as political currency to pay back donors and various political pals. Lots of presidents had done the same thing in the past with standard tours, but the Clintons were constantly trying to take tours into restricted areas to convey to groups how “special” they were—that they were so valued they deserved to see what nobody else could. And the Clinton staffers’ seemingly innocent request (from their perspective) to skirt protocol was a key factor in the October 29, 1994, attack on the White House. Today we would call this an “active shooter” incident.

  The attacker was hovering by the fence line in an overcoat. Officers had cued in on him. They analyzed his suspicious behavior from a distance so as not to spook him, biding their time to confront him without endangering the public. Meanwhile, a Clinton staffer had insisted and pressured her way past an officer with a tour group in tow. Despite the warnings from the officer of protocol and security considerations, she knowingly took the tour group through to see the lawn from the perspective of the staircase of the White House. The officer did not want to embarrass the obstinate staffer by escalating the issue—by this point, the Secret Service culture had devolved to a mixed bag and some officers were unsure whether their agency would back them if they enforced the rules against a staffer’s wishes. One tall gray-haired man on the tour resembled President Clinton. A woman at the fence line shouted and pointed at the gray-haired man as he emerged with the group, believing him to be the president. That’s when the shooter initiated his attack and began firing his SKS rifle through the fence.

  The Uniformed Division Emergency Response Team (ERT) ran in the face of the gunfire as other UD officers at the fence line charged in from the sides. A handful of civilians rushed the shooter and tackled him. Since the shooter believed he was shooting at the commander in chief, he was charged with attempting to assassinate the president. But had that Clinton staffer simply heeded the warning of the officer citing protocol, the shooting might never have happened. Instead of recognizing that the common denominator with each run-in with officers was the Clinton staff’s “what-harm-could-it-do?” mentality, the Uniformed Division officers themselves were actually sent to further “sensitivity training.”

  Despite all the reasons to change, the Clinton administration never relented in the behaviors that continually put the president and Secret Service officers into jeopardy.

  Examples abound. One such incident nearly placed President Clinton at grave risk at the hands of his protectors. The president and Mrs. Clinton requested that aside from the Uniformed Division Counter Sniper posting on the White House roof by their private residence balcony, the Secret Service abdicate the rest of the Uniformed Division rooftop postings. It was openly discussed that the Clintons had made this request because of the rumors of their domestic disputes leaking out to the press. There was a sense in the Clinton White House that the leaks had come from Secret Service conspirators working on behalf of the previous administration. Vice President Al Gore even pulled the alarms out of the ceiling of his residence, fearing that the Secret Service had bugged him. The Clintons did not realize that their screaming could be heard by all executive residence staff such as electricians and ushers, as well as agents and officers posted around the residence. One such tale that infuriated First Lady Clinton was of a lamp being broken in the residence—in fact, it was a vase—but in any event there was a grand effort to dispute it in the press. In the first couple’s eyes, the problem was not that their marital problems interfered with their public service; it was that people knew about them.

  Yet no explanation justifying removing the important rooftop protection seemed reasonable. The post was not there to snoop, only protect. The Secret Service again capitulated, and when the Counter Sniper Team members retired one evening, no one replaced them. Many officers didn’t like the posting anyway as it required standing on a high, narrow catwalk. It was removed later in the Clinton administration anyway, after a small propeller plane was hijacked and flown into the White House (causing minimal damage) on September 12, 1994.

  Soon after that, Counter Assault Team (CAT) agents were posted inside the complex during a particularly tense period when there was a high threat level. The president and first lady were in the residence, their private living quarters. Unlike the rest of the complex, no agents are posted in the private living quarters, and therefore no one reported on their movements. Suddenly the balcony alarm sounded. It seemed to the agents that someone was breaking in through the balcony, and without the officer posted on the catwalk to confirm or deny, the CAT agents responded with guns drawn, ready for anything. As one agent turned the corner, he aimed the red laser of his MP5 submachine gun, putting the little red dot on the man in the room.

  “Whoa, fellas!” the president exclaimed with his typical charm, and the exasperated agent took his aim off the president’s chest.

  There was no break-in. But the Secret Service had again removed another layer from an established defensive plan without reevaluating: Does the plan still work with that layer removed? Clearly the roof was not secure enough, so the service reinstated the rooftop posting. Amazingly, one of the suggested solutions after the plane crash attack that was in the direct field of view of the rooftop posting was to give the officer posted on the roof a flare gun. The idea was that the rooftop officer would use the flare gun to signal the plane and officers would be able to discern between friendly and nonfriendly aircraft before shooting with small arms. Many jokes followed, of course. The small instructional material kept with the flare read, regarding firing flares, “If necessary, repeat.” Whereas once .50-caliber machine guns on the roof had protected the White House from low-flying aircraft, the defenses had now devolved to a “please don’t” flare gun.

  But that near miss, like all the others, never caused the president, nor his staff, to consider how their patterns of behavior and inattention to security were pushing the Secret Service into disarray and dysfunction. Much of the service was so overworked and bogged down in the day-to-day stress of the Clinton craziness that the long-term issues were never addressed with sustainable long-term solutions. The biggest reason for this was seemingly a small but constant issue:
the run-ins between the service and the arrogant Clinton staff, which increased tensions throughout the White House.

  At one point, I walked up to Lewis Merletti, then the Secret Service director, and asked, “Everything all right, Lew? Seems a bit more tense than usual.” He turned to me and said, “Oh, you know, Gary. The president has a higher threat level than Abraham Lincoln. And we all know how that went.” Good humor was a must to keep the stresses at bay. But Director Merletti had no idea how much stress was heading his way.

  In Washington, a new Starr was about to rise, as larger, darker issues were immediately ahead for the Clinton White House and for the Secret Service.

  TWO.

  KENNETH STARR TARGETS THE SECRET SERVICE

  In 1998, for the first time in the agency’s existence, the men and women of the Secret Service found themselves pitted against their protectee. In many ways, it seemed that the Secret Service could hold the key to determining whether President Bill Clinton would be impeached.

  The chain of events that led to the agency’s torturous involvement in Clinton’s impeachment investigations began in tragedy. On July 20, 1993, Vince Foster, one of the loyal members of the “Arkansas mafia,” Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer and longtime close confidant, was found dead by an apparent self-inflicted gunshot in Fort Marcy Park in McLean, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington. A passerby found his body on July 20 at 7:40 p.m.

  After finding White House credentials on the body, US Park Police immediately contacted the FBI, which joined the investigation. Simultaneously, the Park Police notified the Secret Service that “one of your guys,” a White House pass holder, had died and the service should be on alert. Whenever a pass holder was in jeopardy or the victim of a crime, there was the concern that the crime might be part of a larger threat against the executive branch.

  Foster’s office was located on the second floor of the West Wing, just down the hall from Hillary Clinton’s West Wing office. Though a first lady typically has only an office in the East Wing, the Clintons were famous for mixing personal and professional matters. The night of Foster’s suicide, the FBI requested that the Secret Service post a sentry, an officer, on his office door until their arrival.

  Uniformed Division officer Hank O’Neill was posted to make sure no one went in or out. FBI investigators needed the office to be as Foster had left it, so they could investigate the space and ascertain if there was evidence relevant to their investigation into Foster’s death. Because of attorney-client privilege, the FBI could not look at any files deemed personal. This was another example of the Clintons’ mixing personal and professional records and communications. Foster was involved in the Whitewater case, which the FBI was investigating, and now the Park Police and FBI were investigating his death. That also presented a constitutional conflict, as Foster’s files were confidential to the Clintons under attorney-client privilege.

  Maggie Williams, the first lady’s chief of staff, along with White House aide Patsy Thomasson, approached UD officer O’Neill, trying to gain access to the office. Williams, in an account she gave in July 1995, two years after the suicide, testified that she had been distraught and was merely searching for a suicide note. She said she remained in Foster’s office for several minutes, wallowing irrationally in grief.

  According to O’Neill’s testimony in the same hearings, Williams threatened his job, his career, and more. The officer succumbed to the pressure and allowed her access but kept a log of anything she removed from the office, which turned out to be several files. He logged the removal and notified the UD Control Center. Williams accused O’Neill of lying to Congress. The Uniformed Division officer tried to remain steadfast in his version of the story, while not speculating why Williams was providing a completely different account. The senators grilled O’Neill but went easy on Williams. That was the first time a Secret Service employee had been compelled by subpoena to testify against a member of a president’s administration in an open hearing.

  Though Williams testified that she had not removed the files, she admitted that they did exist and had somehow ended up in the White House’s private residence with Hillary Clinton. What has never before been revealed, garnered from exclusive interviews during research for this book, is that after Maggie Williams first took files out of the office, against every crime scene investigation protocol, Officer O’Neill’s post was not manned by another officer after he went off duty. On the morning after the suicide, Secret Service officials contacted the agency’s Uniformed Division Control Center. At the behest of the Clinton administration, those officials ordered that the alarms to Foster’s office in the West Wing be temporarily turned off and that no logs be kept of the doors opening and closing. During that window of time, the office was plundered of additional unknown documents, according to Secret Service sources stationed in the control center.

  One former Secret Service employee involved in the incident reported to me that he had informed the FBI investigators about it when they had interviewed him. Despite their stricken faces, nothing had come of it. As the source put it, “I always figured I’d get questioned about the alarms or get subpoenaed later, but nothing came. It was weird. I don’t think they knew what to do with the information I had given them. They were shocked. I supposed they didn’t have anything else to go on but what I told them. At least that’s what I hoped. I certainly wasn’t going to make my own federal case out of it.”

  Everybody had questions about the incident. In 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno named a special prosecutor, Robert Fiske, to investigate Foster’s death, a continuance of the initial alleged bribery scandal that came to be called “Whitewater.” The special prosecutor law was soon changed by Congress, resulting in the creation of the Office of Independent Counsel (OIC), headed by a circuit judge named Kenneth Starr.

  And so began a battle of wills among the presidency, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Secret Service. It was a struggle that nearly tore the Secret Service apart all at once but instead is integral to the slow collapse happening today.

  By this point in the Clinton administration, the Secret Service had jumped into normalizing the Clintons’ inappropriate—perhaps even criminal—behavior with both feet. The unofficial rationale for this was that it was the agency’s job to protect the president and his staff and secure the area but not to police the administration—even as it policed all other suspected criminals throughout the nation. But that presented two paradoxes: First, how can a security agency protect its protectees from themselves, especially when the protectees continually seek to systematically destroy the protocols that ensure protection? The agency had decided to err on the side of blind loyalty—and that was nearly its undoing. The second paradox: How can a law enforcement agency maintain its integrity, say in policing counterfeiting, while admittedly having compromised integrity in the area of protection?

  At times the Secret Service leadership seemed to believe that the Clintons were invincible. The view from the front lines, however, was that something, somehow was bound to ensnare them. It was simply a matter of the right scandal. But the Secret Service, thus far, had done a good job of keeping itself out of the various investigations into the Clintons. It had even managed to escape implication in “Chinagate,” the 1996 US campaign finance controversy in which campaign contributions to the Democratic Party from Chinese shell companies had allegedly been used to buy access for Chinese goods to be imported into the United States. The Secret Service knowingly allowed Chinese generals, disguised in civilian clothes, to meet administration personnel at the White House and logged them as “business guests” at the administration’s request so as to avoid transparency. The Secret Service also willfully ignored the contents of the generals’ paper bags brought to those meetings. The administration would later be accused by journalists of accepting bribes, though investigators never discovered a specific enough foothold to subpoena any Secret Service or White House personnel about the case
. Then, when attorneys for Paula Jones, who alleged that she had been sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas, tried to subpoena Secret Service personnel, the judge refused. As with President Richard Nixon and Watergate, it looked as though the Secret Service might pull through unimplicated.

  If the Secret Service leadership felt that the Clintons were invincible, the Clintons themselves felt that they were, too. Secret Service Director John Magaw (seventeenth director, 1992–93) and his successor, Eljay Bowron (1993–97), never anticipated that the service would become involved in those investigations, so they had no contingencies in place. Directors Magaw and Bowron’s cult mentality, which enforced the belief that the Secret Service was invincible, blinded them from anticipating the strategy of the wily OIC investigator Ken Starr.

  The US capital has always been a close-knit network, and somehow a claim reached Starr’s office that President Clinton was having an affair with a twenty-one-year-old White House intern turned employed mistress. OIC staffers set a trap for President Clinton. They strategized that if they challenged the arrogant president, got him to sign an affidavit, and then proved that he had committed perjury, they could put his entire defense in peril as his integrity would be destroyed. The fallout could endanger his presidency politically and could potentially lead to impeachment and even jail.