Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  In 1783, at the end of the Revolutionary War, the Life Guard was disbanded. It was not even revived in 1789 when President Washington and his troops marched on Pennsylvania to quell the Whiskey Rebellion, thus setting an early precedent that presidents did not need special protection.

  The United States’ first election and Washington’s presidency were both unprecedented achievements in human history. No longer led by a ruler claiming divine right, the constitutional framework of the United States might have made violent coups obsolete. No kings, no coups. And what need did the country have for cowardly assassinations, when many of its leaders could settle their differences legally with duels? But the new nation would soon learn the importance of security even for democratically elected chief executives.

  In 1814, America was again at war with the British, and it was not going our way. British troops marched on the capital of the new nation, seeking to burn it to the ground. The local militia was mustered to protect First Lady Dolley Madison and the presidential mansion. The militia placed a cannon at the mansion’s north gate and camped out on the lawns. After the British defeated US troops at Bladensburg, Maryland, they continued on to Washington. Chaos gripped the capital city. First Lady Madison stood atop the White House roof looking through a spyglass and received instructions from her husband, President James Madison, to abandon the mansion.

  She hurriedly collected the most important items to take with her. Her servants, both free and enslaved, bravely fulfilled her orders as the British closed in. The first lady escaped with silver and other important items, hidden among the horde of citizens fleeing the British. A courageous doorkeeper and gardener saved a famed portrait of George Washington. We know many of these details thanks to Paul Jennings, a former slave who wrote the first book about working in the White House, A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, published in 1865. White House staff, servants, and laborers, including slaves, have proven their loyalty to every first family over the years. The force designated to protect the first lady fled; those men and women were the last to leave.

  On August 24 and 25, 1814, British troops ransacked and burned the mansion and all other government buildings. They added fuel to the fires for more than twenty-four hours. After two days, the capital city was returned to American rule by a hurricane and tornado known as “the storm that saved Washington.”

  Over the next few decades, the country passed out of the “founding” era and came into its own. In 1835, Andrew Jackson’s administration saw the first recorded assassination attempt on a sitting president. A man broke from the crowd as Jackson was giving a speech, drew two pistols, and pulled the triggers. But the weapons misfired, and President Jackson, appalled at what he considered an assault on his honor as well as his body, beat the would-be assassin with his cane before the crowd joined in.

  Around the same time, in nineteenth-century France, there was a man named Eugène François Vidocq, an enthusiastic and prolific criminal informant and spy for the French police. His methodology was summed up in his motto, “Set a rogue to catch a rogue.” He enjoyed his work so much that he even concocted grand criminal conspiracies just to solve them. Still, his methods inspired police worldwide. It was Vidocq who first coined the term “secret service,” which literally means to be in service to someone, but in secret.

  Though that term was not yet in use in the United States, the beginnings of the Secret Service’s executive protection strategy of concentric protective layers emerged in the 1800s. Far exceeding a single layer of bodyguards, the strategy employed multiple protective layers. Like a Russian nesting doll, for an assassin to get to the centermost doll, he or she would first have to pull apart each outer layer. But each protective layer works in tandem so that if and when an assailant or assailants manage to slip past or fight through one layer of protection, they will be funneled to and caught in the next.

  In 1842, Congress authorized the DC police to post a captain and three others as a permanent White House contingent to patrol and control access. Previously, local police had scheduled beat cops to patrol the area around the White House. Congressman John J. Crittenden warned that those three men “might eventually become a formidable army.” History, in some ways, has proven him correct. The police contingent at the White House grew steadily along with the DC metropolitan area. In 1853, an officer was assigned to be president Franklin Pierce’s permanent bodyguard.

  The game changed significantly on April 12, 1861, when the first shots of what would become the Civil War were fired upon Fort Sumter, South Carolina. When Virginia seceded from the Union, Washington found itself across a river from enemy territory overnight.

  The security of President Abraham Lincoln immediately became a priority for the country but not so much for the president. The White House was protected by the “Bucktail Brigade,” Company K of the 150th Pennsylvania regiment of volunteers, famous for their hats made from their native state’s white-tailed deer. At Lincoln’s request, however, they switched uniforms for civilian clothes because Lincoln did not want to cause a panic if the people thought that the White House had become an armed camp. Yet the presence of the regiment in itself was intended to discourage a direct assault.

  The volunteers concealed their rifles at various posts for easy access (much as the Uniformed Division does today). The Bucktails were accompanied by an increase in Metropolitan Washington Police Force officers around the White House. Those forces were the precursors of the modern Uniformed Division of the Secret Service.

  Another unit, the Union Light Guard, formally known as the Seventh Independent Company of Ohio Volunteer Cavalry, protected President Lincoln on his travels. The guards were the earliest precursor of Secret Service agents and the PPD. In Lincoln’s Body Guard: The Union Light Guard, one of its members, Robert W. McBride, wrote of the company members’ feeling an enormous guilt for protecting the president while other units fought and died in combat. This was especially apparent as they accompanied President Lincoln on tours of battlefields. There they felt the adrenaline rush that comes from being ready for imminent attack after long stretches of boredom while standing post at the White House—an experience no different from that of Secret Service agents, officers, and technicians today. There is a psychological burden associated with living one’s daily life in comfortable surroundings—a relative heaven—while standing ready to enter hell at a moment’s notice.

  Even so, President Lincoln was largely defenseless from lone assassins or independent assassination teams. In at least two incidents snipers nearly killed him. In August 1864, while he was on a pleasure horseback ride, his hat was knocked off as a bullet passed clean through it; the president believed it was an unexplainable accident. Then, while observing the Battle of Fort Stevens, the surgeon accompanying Lincoln was shot by a sniper as the president approved shelling houses used by Confederate troops.

  Plainclothes units formed during the Civil War became some of the first government outfits to refer to themselves as “secret services.” Brigadier General Lafayette C. Baker, a Union spymaster, ran the Domestic Secret Service out of the State Department under Secretary of State William Seward. After President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, a constitutional right requiring that an arrested person be taken before a judge or magistrate to be notified of the reason for arrest, Baker’s Secret Service imprisoned 38,000 people in internment camps with no right for them to see a judge or have a trial for years, on the premise that they had participated in “anti-war activities.”

  Other forerunners of today’s Secret Service were found in the private sector but still served the government. Allan Pinkerton operated the Union Intelligence Service and National Detective Agency. Pinkerton was an expert detective and very successful spymaster. If he is considered the first unofficial chief of the Secret Service, the first unofficial black special agent would be John Scobell, hired in 1861; the first female Secret Service agent would be Kate Warne, hired in 1856; and the most famous unofficial female Secret Ser
vice operative would be Hattie Lawton, known by her aliases HLL or Hattie Lewis—all successful Pinkerton agents. Warne and Lewis pioneered Pinkerton’s Female Detective Bureau, formed in 1860, and were extremely successful assets in the Union’s Civil War victory. As part of the “Pinkerton Black Agents” and a “black dispatch,” Scobell carried out undercover missions in the deep South—under the guise of being a slave, even at times owned by Warne and Lewis—returning to Pinkerton with vital intelligence.

  On one undercover mission to Baltimore, Kate Warne uncovered the “Baltimore Plot,” a plan to assassinate President-elect Lincoln while he was traveling to Washington for his first inauguration. Pinkerton headed the first president-elect detail, and President-elect Lincoln kept his travel schedule. Under Pinkerton’s command, the soon-to-be president traveled in disguise, then changed into normal clothes on arrival; the papers later accused him of cowardice for doing so. The agents carried multiple concealed pistols. Preceding modern Secret Service strategy by more than a century, Warne went ahead of the detail to sniff out “sleepers,” as Pinkerton called them. Through their concentric and comprehensive protection, far more than a due-diligence bodyguard, President Lincoln lived to be inaugurated.

  But even at that early stage, bureaucratic squabbles emerged. General Baker and Allan Pinkerton each claimed to be the real head of Lincoln’s Secret Service and refused to work together. On various occasions they even arrested each other’s operatives. Following the war’s end on April 9, 1865, Baker was put on trial for domestic war crimes and found guilty. He was fined one dollar. Meanwhile, Pinkerton continued the Pinkerton National Detective Agency after the Union Intelligence Service dissolved. Congress and President Lincoln left a void by not specifically delegating new responsibilities, such as fugitive hunting, investigation of land and bank fraud, and investigation of interstate white-collar crimes to existing law enforcement agencies. The existing agencies were unsure of how to operate beyond state lines. Banks, railroads, and other interstate businesses hired their own forces, often Pinkerton’s, to shut down criminals (and strikers).

  President Lincoln and Congress were responsible for the creation of a new division within the Treasury Department under a one-year congressional appropriation. It was called the Secret Service Division (SSD). Its sole mission was to rein in the out-of-control currency issues that threatened the nation’s economy during the period following the Civil War. Presidential protection was not yet part of its mission, but it would soon be made tragically clear how important that mission was.

  On April 14, 1865, five days after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, President Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln attended a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. On his travels, President Lincoln was without Union Light Guard, Pinkerton’s, or General Baker’s men. The concentric-circles strategy was gone, and the president thought that some local detectives would be sufficient bodyguards. His White House protection detail had been reduced to just three detectives.

  During the officers’ search of the theater’s balcony, they failed to notice the measures the assassin had set up; he had drilled a peephole, disabled a lock, and fabricated a hidden lock to barricade the door. One of Lincoln’s protectors left the theater to drink at a nearby bar. The assassin, a well-known actor and outspoken anti-Lincoln zealot named John Wilkes Booth, eyed the president through the peephole. He schmoozed his way past an usher into the darkened balcony box. Once inside, he barricaded the door. He then turned and fired a .44-caliber ball into the president’s skull, then slashed an army major accompanying the Lincolns with a long knife. Booth then leaped from the box down onto the stage and escaped. Simultaneously, another member of the actor’s cabal attacked Secretary of State Seward, stabbing him multiple times as he rested in bed in his home across the street from the White House. The attacker inflicted horrific knife wounds but fled following a struggle as Seward’s two sons and a soldier stationed at the house saved the cabinet member’s life.

  Baker dispatched agents to hunt down the cabal. Booth was eventually shot to death at a farm in Maryland; four other conspirators were tried and hanged. Baker personally accompanied agents to protect the new president, Andrew Johnson.

  Baker and his men soon found themselves at odds with the sleazy pardon brokers who visited President Johnson night and day. After Baker removed Lucy Cobb, a favor seeker and alleged mistress to the new president, from the White House and restricted her access to the president, Johnson fired Baker, just as Cobb had wanted. Through the decades, numerous presidents have put their protectors at odds through their personal dalliances, and, as many chose poorly, have put themselves and the country at great risk. President Johnson was the first on record to jeopardize his security, not out of principle but for personal pleasure.

  Lucy Cobb returned to the White House in 1866. That same year, the State Department’s domestic Secret Service ended. President Lincoln’s legacy lived on in the newly formed Secret Service Division (SSD) under the Treasury Department. Many of Baker’s agents found employment there and brought their expertise with them.

  The unit was devoted to stopping the rampant counterfeiting that had cropped up in the wake of the Civil War. At that point, nearly two-thirds of the nation’s currency was estimated to be counterfeit. If SSD couldn’t bring integrity back to the economy by eliminating counterfeiting, the nation would surely fall to anarchy. The agency’s chief, William P. Wood, led the first “war” on white-collar crime. Wood was a Mexican-American War veteran and had arrested the violent abolitionist John Brown for horse thievery. Wood set his sights on the biggest bank owner and counterfeiter, William E. Brockway, called by newspapers “the counterfeit king.” Following his arrest, Brockway struck a deal with the prosecutors: he revealed the hidden locations of the plates he had used to make hundreds of counterfeit bills, up to $1,000 notes, and provided information on many other operations. In the division’s first year, the Secret Service shut down two hundred domestic counterfeiting operations.

  In 1881, tragedy struck the presidency again. For weeks, a mentally ill stalker, Charles J. Guiteau, had been following the undefended president, James Garfield. He had twice aimed and cocked his single-action revolver at the president but had not pulled the trigger. Stalking the president and writing him increasingly threatening letters was the stalker’s sole obsession. On July 2, 1881, he tracked Garfield by using the president’s schedule, which was routinely published in the newspapers. He stood in the crowd, which included the president’s two sons and secretary, at the Washington, DC, train station, waiting for the doors of the president’s train to open. As they opened, the crazed man drew a pistol from concealment, fired a shot that grazed Garfield’s shoulder, recocked, and fired again. The crowd wrestled the assassin to the ground. The president died two and a half months later after fighting an agonizing infection. A mere sixteen years after President Lincoln’s murder, history was repeated. Even after the second assassination, Garfield’s successor, President Chester Arthur, refused protection in any form. The lessons of history were ignored again as debates over solutions fell to the wayside.

  In 1884, SSD became involved in executive protection by happenstance as Congress broadened the division’s authority to fight illegal gambling, mail and land fraud, and other forms of white-collar crimes. SSD chief James Brooks designated two agents to search for suspicious activity at the White House after agents discovered an assassination plot. Ten years later, at the request of SSD chief William Hazen, the agents were still there. First Lady Frances Cleveland learned of another plot: to kidnap her children. In both plots, the conspirators’ aim was to harm the president as punishment for the Secret Service’s efforts to quash gambling.

  Fearing that the first family’s protective detail would become a political liability, President Grover Cleveland removed it as soon as he learned about it—the agents, at the first lady’s request, had kept their protection a secret from even the preside
nt. But President Cleveland did request an SSD agent to accompany him when traveling to his summer retreat, and so SSD became directly involved in presidential protection.

  In its founding and formative years, “Secret” in the agency’s name meant undercover, and its agents called themselves “operatives” but were referred to as Treasury agents, “T-men,” or detectives by the Treasury. In 1875, Chief Hiram Whitley issued permission for operatives to fabricate their badges at their own expense. Operatives worked alone without partners, undercover, and in plain clothes. The agency reimbursed little more than travel and the cost of telegrams to report back to field offices and headquarters. As a result, many operatives were labeled “fake cops” and were regularly accused of trespassing and overreaching their authority because they were from a “made-up” government division. Simply put, many Americans had never heard of the SSD. The “secret” was causing problems for operatives on remote missions. They pushed for standardization and further reimbursements, but to them “secret” simply meant deep undercover.

  “Secret” was and still is little more than a carryover of a colloquialism used by Seward, Baker, Pinkerton, and others during the Civil War. However, throughout the history of the Secret Service, that colloquialism has been falsely interpreted to justify the withholding of information from Congress, the president, its own employees, and the people of the United States. But no legal backing for keeping information “secret” exists. Over time, that theory has been used by chiefs and directors to suggest that the Secret Service is essentially different from other law enforcement agencies. It is not. Yet Secret Service directors continually attempt to justify their actions of thwarting transparency and accountability based on the hollow vestige of “secret,” doing so out of their ignorance of history.