Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  From the first meeting, it was clear to the Uniformed Division officers that we were being set up. Our choice was stark: we were either going to be accused of criminally withholding information from a federal investigation by the DOJ and FBI or be accused of criminally divulging sensitive information that was proprietary to the president and Secret Service. Saying the wrong thing could result in any of us losing his job or even going to federal prison for a very long time.

  The UD officers were already locked in a prison of silence. In the meetings it was made clear that we could not discuss their situations with anyone, including coworkers, superiors, and family members, and, of course, the press. Furthermore, the Secret Service lawyers were federal employees themselves and therefore no attorney-client privilege existed between the officers and the agency’s legal counsel. If we officers decided to cooperate with the Secret Service legal counsel and their legal agenda, we would have to decide for ourselves what was relevant to both the OIC and FBI and whether any bit of information could still be classified by the Secret Service. Police officers are not trained to be their own lawyers, and such decisions are beyond their training—but one false move could mean big consequences.

  On top of all that, we were required to work our posts while this was going on. Adding that stress to the natural stress of the job made the work unbearable, and morale plummeted—all because the president had not been truthful at the outset.

  After the tense atmosphere of the group meetings, Secret Service attorneys decided to interview all the officers individually to assess their legal exposure and relevance to the case. Starr was conducting interviews of his own, sitting down with disgruntled former service employees. He needed to find agents and officers who remembered that they were law enforcement officers first and foremost and would cooperate with the criminal investigation.

  The OIC lawyers studied a diagram of the West Wing. They needed to learn: Who controls access to the West Wing lobby? Who secures the West Wing? Several Uniformed Division officers’ names kept popping up. Among them were one officer I’ll call “Musket,” another I’ll call “Brett,” an officer named Sandy Verner—and me.

  Soon enough, the fax machine in Secret Service headquarters in Washington began buzzing with subpoenas.

  During President Clinton’s time in office, Sandy and I filled different shifts on the E-6 post, the last stationary post before the Oval Office. Along with our partners, we secured the area until the president arrived, while he was in the Oval Office, and after he and his staff departed. It was the responsibility of the E-6 post to know who was in the West Wing and that they were permitted to be there.

  When I stood that post, I had turned away the intern, Monica Lewinsky, on numerous occasions for having a pass that did not allow her to be there. She was clearly making a point of crossing paths with the president by befriending presidential and White House staff, as well as other officers and agents. She even went so far as to openly flirt with them, which was conduct unbecoming the grounds. She concocted seemingly innocuous errands and elaborate excuses, even so far as to say she had tried to enter the West Wing to use the restroom. She found that some Secret Service personnel were more easily swayed than others.

  When I asked Nancy Hernreich in White House Operations about that suspicious behavior, she called it a “mentorship.” But there was nothing about a mentorship that required the intern to talk with the president over a secure emergency military hotline, to flirt with him in the hallway (even once flashing her read end), or to spend an extended period of time alone with him during a government shutdown. I was witness to all of those incidents, and after one such episode I even helped dispose of a semen-stained hand towel for a frustrated Navy steward and, on another occasion, discussed throwing out equally sordid tissues. But one of those incidents had nothing to do with the one mistress in question but, in fact, with another.

  At one point, I suggested to Evelyn Lieberman, the president’s deputy chief of staff, that the intern be removed from the West Wing for good. Gone for a while, she soon returned as a permanent employee, through a suspiciously expedited process. The president was going to have it his way, no matter what. I soon transferred off of E-6 as a result of my discomfort in working so close to the president. I had realized that many people around the president seemed to care more for the president’s responsibilities than he did.

  Though Officer “Musket” spent most of his time as a Uniformed Division counter sniper, the one time he rotated in for some overtime work at E-6 was more trouble than even a counter sniper could handle. While trying to inform the president of an important phone call on hold, the officer and Harold Ickes, President Clinton’s other deputy chief of staff, walked into the president’s study to find him and his young female friend in a “compromising position.”

  Officer “Brett” held a fixed post over the West Wing lobby. On a number of instances he had to run interference to prevent Lewinsky from going to see the president on the directions of his secretary Betty Currie, because Clinton was busy with another mistress, Eleanor Mondale. Upon receiving this news, the one mistress would often become noticeably emotional at having to wait for another.

  Currie called on me to attempt to fix another similar incident. In one instance the Uniformed Division officer at the White House northwest gate had told Lewinsky something to the effect of “You’ll have to wait. He’s with his other piece of ass.” She then called the president using the pillar phone at the northwest gate, calling the president directly on the special coded dropline. The officers described her as “hostile,” and recognized that this emotionally compromised person should be kept away from the president. Worse still, the president’s secretary asked who was responsible for the mistress at the northwest gate finding out about the other and “wanted someone [an officer] fired over this.”

  That was the reality for the officers on the ground, yet the Secret Service leadership and attorneys still remained committed to their charade. They briefed the officers on the “executive function privilege.” The officers were led to believe that they had to invoke that “privilege” when answering any OIC question that directly involved the president. As a result, the frustrated OIC lawyers asked about the incidents that indirectly involved the president.

  Other Secret Service personnel floating into and out of those meetings turned out not to be lawyers at all. Officer “Brett” once sat down with the OIC investigators with someone he thought was his Secret Service lawyer, only for that person to inform “Brett” that he was just an agent assigned to the counsel’s office, whose job it was to report on everything that was said, not to give “Brett” legal advice. Another mysterious figure, who would show up for meetings and take notes, was later spotted with a pass identifying her as someone who worked in the Old Executive Office Building. None of that made the officers under scrutiny any more comfortable.

  As the officers began to be interviewed by OIC, they immediately ran into problems. Answering even the simplest questions about the layout of the West Wing based on a tourist map, and details of security procedures they used every day, proved to be impossible—doing so would have given away detailed protected information that the officers were not authorized to divulge. The tourist map was propaganda to thwart attackers.

  The officers believed in being “worthy of trust and confidence,” but they were stuck in a quagmire. They believed the motto referred to following the law and preventing disclosure of tactical information that attackers could use, known as Operational Security (OPSEC). But it also amounted to being “worthy of trust and confidence” to the American people. When the officers testified that indeed the president had lied, they wanted their word to be sufficient alone. They were willing to tell the truth, but OIC, DOJ, FBI, and Secret Service personnel were tearing them apart, wanting to know every detail of how the officers knew what they did—which couldn’t be done without violating OPSEC.

  FBI agents threatened to arrest and prosecute the officers for withh
olding evidence. But the officers faced the same threat from their own agency if they disclosed, deliberately or not, any protected tactical knowledge. The Secret Service maintained its authority as the issuing agency for whatever was considered tactical or strategic and any bit of knowledge that could be considered classified.

  Meanwhile, within the Secret Service culture, in locker rooms, around water coolers, and on what little jobs the subpoenaed officers were reduced to working, coworkers heavily insinuated that the subpoenaed officers should feign amnesia. Though plausible deniability and feigning poor or faulty memory could have worked, the FBI was threatening arrests at a moment’s notice for doing so; in any case, all each officer truly wanted to do was the right thing.

  Starr expected the pressure to get us all to open up and spill the beans. Merletti expected the pressure to create a collective stonewall. There seemed no way out.

  “Brett” was even subjected to a bizarre interaction with President Clinton immediately after giving his testimony. After searching for him, the president asked about his family, wife, and kids—one on one. That was so bizarre it could only have been a form of intimidation.

  As officers were subjected to investigations and interrogations under immense pressure, the spigot slowly opened. Many repeated what they had rehearsed under the Secret Service–backed attorneys: “On the advice of my counsel, without revealing any privileged information…,” so as to dodge the question. Asked why a particular question was privileged, the officers couldn’t say. All of the main players—Starr, Merletti, Reno, Holder, and President Clinton—believed their pressure tactics would put them on top, but they were gambling with the legal outcomes, the officers’ careers, and the risk of an officer snapping under pressure.

  Officers who received subpoenas found themselves spurned and their loyalty to their agency questioned. In one instance the FBI made a concerted effort to threaten Sandy and me with arrests. Gary Grindler, Reno’s deputy attorney general, went to bat for the two officers against the OIC’s Jackie Bennett. When the day ended early and abruptly and the frazzled officers were told to go home, Secret Service lawyers pleaded with the officers that should the FBI make good on its previous promise to arrive in the middle of the night and arrest them in front of their families, “please, whatever you do, don’t resist.” Because of the OIC’s tactics of adding pressure by leaking information to the press, the Secret Service lawyers informed the officers to expect camera crews to be there to witness the high-profile arrests. The sleepless night passed and the FBI’s threat turned out to be a bluff, if only a tactic to exhaust and break the officers. The Secret Service surely hadn’t won much favor with any of the officers it had served up.

  The rift between the Secret Service leadership and the frontline personnel grew wider, and many of us lost faith entirely. To make matters worse, the leadership sought to downplay our significance by dismissing us as “guards” in the press, which only served to drive a wedge further between the Uniformed Division and the Special Agent Division that has never fully healed.

  On July 9, 1998, the Baltimore Sun ran a piece headlined “Secret Service Secrets: Are They Worth Telling? Judges Rule: Testimony from Agents Is Required No Matter the Merit of the Case in Question.” The paper reported, “The ruling by a three-judge panel that Secret Service officers must testify before a grand jury… cries out for the quickest possible review by the Supreme Court next term.… It held that the Secret Service had not made a good enough argument that the personal safety of the president requires it not to snitch on him, especially since Congress had not passed a law to that effect.” It also noted that two officers, Brian Henderson and Gary Byrne, had “refused to answer 19 questions put to them by independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s lawyers” before the grand jury. Henderson, who had been stationed in the East Wing, had information about liaisons conducted by the president in the White House movie theater.

  The world waited. The fate of the Clinton presidency hung in the balance. The future and culmination of the agency’s past all came down to the Supreme Court finally deciding the question over a hundred years in the making: How “secret” is the Secret Service?

  On July 16, 1998, the Supreme Court made its decision and CBS News ran their story: “Rehnquist: Agents Must Testify”: “It was high noon in Washington Friday when Chief Justice William Rehnquist refused to spare President Clinton’s Secret Service protectors from testifying.… The ruling ends a bitter legal dispute and clears the way for prosecutors to question some of their last key witnesses.… President Clinton’s Secret Service protectors were at the courthouse when the ruling was handed down and have been taken into the grand jury hearing room. They arrived in a van minutes before noon, when an earlier court ruling blocking their testimony was set to expire.”

  So the two agents and about a dozen officers—myself included—filed in and testified before the grand jury, answering questions directly. When the critical piece of evidence, the infamous semen-stained blue dress kept as insurance by the president’s young female friend, arrived, the case became even stronger. The president was then forced to volunteer a blood sample before that, too, was subpoenaed. The DNA from the semen on the dress was indisputable proof that the officers were telling the truth and that the president was indeed an elaborate liar who could not be trusted.

  On September 9, 1998, the OIC delivered its “Starr Report” to Congress. The House of Representatives held a historic vote and impeached the president. President Clinton was then tried in the Senate. He survived, as a two-thirds majority was required and not one senator from Clinton’s own party voted guilty on either of the two charges, obstruction of justice and perjury. Clinton remained in office, but by that time, the damage to the Secret Service had been done.

  The Secret Service director and agency counsel had chosen to place their own officers and their testimony under enormous and unprecedented duress, just to protect the agency’s brand. The officers had testified to the grand jury under immense pressure, and the entire agency stared them down as they did so.

  Officer “Brett” went back to work and retired from the Secret Service in 2017.

  Officer Sandy Verner resigned from the Secret Service soon after the investigations ended to focus on her family.

  Before the subpoenas, I had transferred to the Secret Service Training Center to distance myself from the president and first lady and to pursue my new dream of becoming a firearms instructor for new generations of Secret Service personnel. I was informed that my promotion, in no secret fashion, was delayed indefinitely as payback for my participation in answering the DOJ’s subpoenas. But good Secret Service men backed me, and I became an instructor, serving there until soon after the September 11 attacks. Officer “Musket” and I then left for the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), as part of the ensuing “exodus” of Uniformed Division personnel away from the overburdening Secret Service. I retired in May 2016. Officer Musket retired from FAMS in 2017.

  The working relationship between the Uniformed Division and Special Agent Division deteriorated, and the agency’s performance has also deteriorated so much as to become defunct. Director Merletti, the right director at the wrong time, fought for the “protective function privilege.” But the Supreme Court’s ruling against it proved that his interpretation of “secret” was a fallacy, generated by the agency’s cult mentality. Many Secret Service leaders proved to be so entrenched in their beliefs that they had lost integrity as law enforcement officers, going so far as to bring the good name of the entire agency down with them.

  Furthermore, Director Merletti, in keeping with a scheme that had been hatched by his predecessors, began to implement what was known within the Uniformed Division as the “Beltsville Plan.” It was never written down, only spoken of, and used the fallout from the Starr investigation to a specific end: Merletti and his predecessor “restructured” the Special Agent Division to swallow the Uniformed Division whole, take control at the middle-management level, and secure the ser
vice’s funding, all at the expense of the Uniformed Division being able to conduct its vital mission of White House and executive-area protection.

  In the future there would never be a question of whether or not Secret Service personnel would testify. They would have to, but their integrity and conduct would forever be in question.

  The trauma of the Starr investigation brought the Secret Service nearly to the breaking point and accelerated its downward spiral. It put the agency’s entire legacy in danger. But that legacy is hardly an unblemished one. Organizational problems within the Secret Service did not begin with the Clinton era. As the agency grew and developed into what it is today, its successes were balanced by systemic failures that can be recognized even in the agency of today.

  THREE.

  FIRST SUCCESSES, FIRST FAILURES

  After Julius Caesar was betrayed and stabbed to death, the Roman government’s answer was the Praetorian Guard, but it soon became far too powerful and a threat to Roman liberty. In 1998, Ken Starr said the Secret Service risked becoming a Praetorian Guard. History never ceases to be relevant.

  Today’s Secret Service serves a constitutional, democratic, republican society. It serves—or at least is supposed to serve—the American people by protecting the person they’ve elected to the presidency. It is sworn to protect not a king who claims to hold a throne by divine right but an individual charged with leading a free society. The US Secret Service, therefore, evolved in a unique way, and its early history contains many instances of heroism but also some disturbing foreshadowing of the bureaucratic and organizational problems that hinder presidential protectors today.

  Before America had a president, General George Washington formed his own Life Guard, almost immediately after accepting Congress’s request on June 15, 1775, to lead the Continental Army against the British in the fight for independence. The Life Guard was the forebear of today’s Secret Service’s Presidential Protection Division. But there were problems even in that early protection force—a member of the Life Guard was hanged for “mutiny, sedition, and treachery” on June 28, 1776, possibly due to involvement in a plot against Washington.