Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  During the Spanish-American War, the Secret Service protected President William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president, part-time. After the war, the detail was again reduced to an on-request service, at the president’s discretion. On September 6, 1901, during a victory tour following his reelection, the president insisted on appearing at a ten-minute meet-and-greet at a music hall in Buffalo, New York. Secret Service operative George Foster, the president’s frequently called upon protector, along with operatives Samuel Ireland and Albert Gallaher, scanned the crowd. Seventy-five Buffalo police, soldiers, and Pinkertons guarded the perimeter. More people arrived than expected, and an event coordinator panicked and demanded that the soldiers, who were there purely for decoration, form a gauntlet inside the hall. The operatives lost their buffer zone and field of view as the eager line of visitors pressed right up to the president. The operatives should have whisked the president away, but Foster surely knew that the president would have been furious and blamed the operatives and the agency for overreacting. He most likely then would have disbanded his protection altogether and thus become completely vulnerable at all future events.

  In the heat, many visitors wiped their brows with handkerchiefs, and the soldiers, inexperienced with protection, did not enforce the rule to keep hands out and open. One man, Leon Czolgosz, was sweating more than the visitors around him. He stepped ahead in line, drew a pistol from a handkerchief, and fired two shots into the president’s abdomen, killing him.

  In thirty-six years, three American presidents had been assassinated. Two had not had Secret Service protection; the other had been protected only part-time. Agent Rufus Youngblood wrote of that era in his 1973 memoir: “The presidency had become a surer route to the cemetery than Russian roulette.” Something had to change.

  McKinley’s vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, who succeeded him after the assassination, became the first president to receive congressional authorization for full-time Secret Service protection. But SSD had to find the new president first. When President McKinley died, Vice President Roosevelt was on vacation, hiking in the wilderness with his family.

  At first, the fiercely independent “TR” considered SSD protection a personal tyranny and a waste. Of the five permanent Secret Service operatives protecting him night and day, he said, “they would not be the least use in preventing any assault upon my life. I do not believe there is any danger… and if there were it would be simple nonsense to try to prevent it.” Then came a near miss: A man in a tuxedo maneuvered his way through every White House security layer of officers, operatives, and the White House usher. For minutes the overly obliging president found himself cornered and alone with the dangerous “crank,” as he called the man. The president escaped, and agents searched the man’s tuxedo and found a large revolver. From then on, the president accepted the protection. As he admitted in a letter to a friend, “The secret service men are a very small but very necessary thorn in the flesh.” A person admitted to the president’s presence without proper clearance would become known as a “gate-crasher,” and though such people typically have benevolent intentions, their ability to schmooze past security measures leaves a president’s protection at the mercy of the gate-crasher’s whim.

  But with increased protection duties came increased risk to the protectors. On September 3, 1902, in Lenox, Massachusetts, a railcar collided with President Roosevelt’s carriage. The president was injured but survived. Secret Service operative William Craig, a British military veteran, died after being thrown from the carriage. The president felt humbled by the loss and sacrifice, the first death of a Secret Service employee while on the job.

  Roosevelt’s respect increased for those who risked everything to protect him. Well known and deeply meaningful to those inside the agency are photos of Roosevelt’s children reporting to the morning briefings and roll calls on the White House grounds alongside the police contingent protecting the White House, another precursor of today’s Uniformed Division. Those early images show the love and dedication crucial to the job of protecting the First Family and serving in the Secret Service in any era.

  During Roosevelt’s administration, as its role expanded, the Secret Service encountered a new rival. A new federal agency, the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), under the Department of Justice, was created in 1908 in response to the Secret Service’s complaints to Congress that DOJ too often “borrowed” its operatives. Its wish was granted but the BOI was born as a “bureaucratic bastard” and manned by SSD operatives who quit to join the new agency. That was the Secret Service’s first exodus of manpower to another government agency, but it would not be the last.

  One of the early SSD agents to jump to the BOI was William Burns, who eventually headed the agency and became a mentor to a young Bureau staffer named J. Edgar Hoover. Burns taught Hoover how to lobby Congress effectively and create a base of support among members, which Burns had learned from his work in the SSD. Hoover would turn the BOI into the FBI, pioneering his “G-man vision” for FBI agents, inspired by Secret Service operatives and techniques. The bitter rivalry between the Secret Service and FBI for national, presidential, and congressional favor continues to this day.

  In 1917, Congress made threatening the president a federal crime. As a result, the Secret Service expanded, creating “Room 98,” the precursor of the Protective Research Section, hidden in the Treasury Annex. Inside, operatives investigated, analyzed, researched, and turned over information on threatening individuals to prosecutors or mental facilities. Room 98 held a library containing every threatening letter and a dossier on every threat. Once a file was created on an individual, it was never removed. Those with a “presidential complex,” the term for a dangerous obsession with the president, were graded by their motivation and capacity to carry out any threat. Agents from field offices all over the country would put Treasury-related investigations on hold to investigate, monitor, or even follow the subjects of those dossiers, especially when the president was traveling nearby.

  Yet for all those expansions, would the SSD be able to thwart the kinds of assassins who had killed Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley and nearly killed others? The assassinations of Lincoln and McKinley had commonalities. Each assassin had made threats by letters and threatening speeches. Each had stalked his target on several occasions, and each had made use of a concealed firearm, as well as charm or false claims, to get close to the president before attempting their deadly acts. President Lincoln’s murderer had even made secret modifications to the president’s booth at the theater. For “stalkers,” SSD made a serious commitment to diligently investigate those who threatened the president; thoroughly investigate security details in advance of presidential trips; and improve upon specialized training so operatives could think like “a rogue to catch a rogue.” But what of the “approacher,” the spontaneous type who had killed President Garfield and would later pose a threat to President Franklin Roosevelt?

  In 1930, the White House Police Force, first formed in 1922, became part of the Secret Service. Congress funded the force’s first White House alarm and pass holder system, its expansion of manpower, and its members’ desire for combat marksmanship training. The White House Police Force had a simple, effective plan of protection: Balancing security and optics, in the event of attack the approachable-looking White House police officers at the perimeter, armed with .38-caliber special revolvers, would fight and fall back to the White House. As the attackers advanced on the North or South Lawn, additional officers, using gun boxes filled with shotguns, Thompson submachine guns, and other weapons hidden throughout the White House, would intercept them. The spirit of that plan remains today, and the White House Police Force eventually developed into today’s Uniformed Division.

  The election of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 brought about a major reorganization of the federal government, including the Secret Service.

  In 1933, during his first year in office, President Roosevelt appointed his longtime friend Hen
ry Morgenthau, Jr., to head the Treasury Department. Morgenthau, a young Jewish entrepreneur, had become friends with Roosevelt when each had run his own Christmas tree farm business in upstate New York. In Morgenthau, Roosevelt saw a strong and impartial ally impatient with government bureaucracy. Morgenthau was comfortable as an outsider who could enter a completely new organization and fix it. He had no prior law enforcement experience and might have seemed poorly qualified for the job, but indeed he was the most qualified because he gave no significance to politics or personal loyalties. Later described by one famous Secret Service agent as possessing freezing water in his veins, Morgenthau cared little for how hard men worked; his focus was on results. A ruthless administrator, he cut out anything and anyone who got into the way of measurable progress. Aside from being integral to Roosevelt’s New Deal economic plan, he set his own mission to overhaul the lagging Treasury Department and its worst offender, the Secret Service.

  Morgenthau recognized that presidential protection had long been increasing in difficulty and complexity, yet under Secret Service chief William Moran and White House detail chief Edmund Starling, he believed that the guard protecting the president still relied far too much on hope and chance.

  Moran and Starling made advances but fell behind the biggest threats: vehicle bombs, poison or bombs sent through the mail, “approachers,” and warnings of ground-based assaults on the White House. Chief Moran’s greatest achievement was instituting badges and standardizing operatives’ firearms, as they had previously had to purchase their own. Starling was a personal confidant of several presidents. He was very good at coordinating with White House staff and workers to find each president as he tried to sneak off—and he also left behind a detailed memoir of his life in the SSD.

  Changing times called for swift solutions, and an incident with an approacher early in the Roosevelt presidency made that clear. On February 15, 1933, an approacher, Giuseppe Zangara, managed the first critical assassination attempt on a president under full-time Secret Service protection. In Miami, President Roosevelt gave a short speech sitting on the back seat of his limo before a crowd of 8,000, all unscreened. Zangara, who had previously plotted to ambush President Herbert Hoover, pushed his way to the front of the crowd to try for Roosevelt. To Zangara’s dismay, the president’s speech ended and Miami Mayor Anton Cermak began his own speech as Roosevelt sat down in his limo, shielded from view. The SSD’s plan had been to move Roosevelt while the mayor was speaking, but against protocol, they had acquiesced to Roosevelt’s demand for the limo to wait, engine off, so he could leisurely read a telegram.

  Zangara fired six shots. Five hit flesh, but none struck the president. Cermak was grievously wounded. A woman standing next to the shooter hit his arm with her purse and spoiled his aim. Operatives from the follow-up car closed in. A twenty-three-year-old civilian, a New York City police officer, and a Secret Service operative were hit, but all survived. Cermak died three weeks later. The errant sixth bullet missed Roosevelt by inches. Had the president been standing just where the mayor was, he would have been shot at close range as Secret Service protectors watched. The assassin died in the electric chair, but presidents’ continued use of slow open convertibles would continue to plague the Secret Service. One wonders why it inexplicably went along with it.

  Even after the assassination attempt, the president’s SSD operatives described Roosevelt as “fearless.” He became close with them thanks to their help in pulling off what came to be called a “splendid deception,” as SSD operatives shielded from the press and public as much as possible views of the president that revealed his dependence on his wheelchair. Agents hoisted the president up and helped him stand, and at times they even helped him dress.

  Two full years after the Miami assassination attempt, Starling had increased the president’s detail from five to only nine agents. One new addition was Michael Francis Reilly, who recognized that in near misses, the Secret Service had contributed to the president’s survival, but the only thing separating its successes from its failures had been luck. And under Starling’s leadership of the White House detail, that was not changing.

  New Secret Service leadership came when Frank Wilson was made chief in 1936, replacing Moran. To the operatives, Chief Wilson was an outsider planted among them by Morgenthau, but Wilson prioritized the SSD’s war on counterfeiting above all else, including even presidential protection. Chief Wilson had participated in finding the kidnapper and murderer of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s baby. When the BOI and the power-hungry Herbert Hoover couldn’t crack the case, the SSD and the Treasury had solved the “crime of the century” by turning to the public for help. Eventually a gas station attendant noticed one of the ransom bills’ serial numbers and the jig was up.

  Chief Wilson’s SSD again turned the public into a major asset by forcing it to educate Americans on how to spot fake bills—and Wilson did so against the wishes of many appalled SSD veterans who coveted their believed secrecy. Despite more than seventy years of the Secret Service losing the war on counterfeiting since its creation, Chief Wilson, using innovative approaches and determined leadership, cut counterfeiting nationwide by 88 percent in two years. Newspapers gleefully reported how American “store keepers and children alike” detected and rejected fake money as amateur sleuths catching criminals alongside local police and the feds. By 1942, Frank Wilson’s Secret Service had won the second counterfeiting war.

  Chief Wilson would have sealed the fate on “secret” when he penned his memoir, Special Agent: A Quarter-Century with the Treasury Department and the Secret Service, if not for one catastrophe soon to follow. But with the war on counterfeiting won, Chief Wilson was all ears to Agent Reilly on how to turn presidential protection around.

  That same year, an approacher in a crowd threw a dagger and missed President Roosevelt by inches (the dagger was found afterward to be rubber). That was one of several near misses that cemented a truth for Reilly: the president’s detail could not protect against assassins such as the ones who had killed Presidents Garfield and McKinley and nearly killed Roosevelt in Miami. For the White House Police, the same mentality was recognized: from 1937 to 1940, twenty fence jumpers were caught around and in the White House. Though none committed any violence during those attempts, some were found with knives or guns. Still, those breaches spurred little to no change.

  Everything changed dramatically on December 7, 1941. Mike Reilly had just been promoted to assistant supervising agent within White House Protective Operations. He was the highest-ranking Secret Service employee on site, as Wilson and Starling were miles away, off duty. When Reilly heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor, he realized that it had been designed to cripple the US Navy. Therefore, he reasoned, a larger strategy to cripple the entire US command-and-control structure targeting the president and White House was likely and could be imminent. He wasted no time obtaining the permissions of his off-site superiors. He called in every agent he could find, issued more firearms, and started new patrols.

  Wilson and Morgenthau each conducted midnight inspections of the White House defenses. They found the Oval Office officer on duty snoring. Secretary Morgenthau estimated that two dozen enemy agents with guns and bombs could plow into the White House with a heavy truck and, with little resistance, slaughter every Secret Service protector, with the president meeting the same fate. The White House was nearly as vulnerable as it had been during its sacking by the British in 1814.

  Reilly was placed in charge of the White House detail and, out of respect, kept Starling on as “codirector” for another two years. But it was Reilly’s show now, and he had his work cut out for him. On his first day on duty, President Roosevelt requested to be taken on a drive around Washington in a show of national resilience. Despite years of begging for them, the Secret Service had no armored cars, Reilly, unlike Starling, was willing to work outside the specific allocations from Congress. Two hours after the president requested the ride, Reilly and Wilson procured the firs
t presidential armored car, a custom-built Cadillac limo that had been seized from the Al Capone crime network.

  As war on Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire was declared, the Treasury, Congress, and the president deluged the Secret Service with emergency war funds that allowed Reilly to make a number of critical changes.

  The permanent White House detail was expanded from eleven agents to seventy. The size of the White House Police Force doubled. Marksmanship training was increased and would soon save the life of another president. Temporary vehicle barricades were installed. An underground zigzag tunnel was built connecting the White House to the Treasury Building’s vault, which was turned into the president’s own bomb shelter and temporary underground command center.

  In addition, the Secret Service established a bomb team with the help of local police and military units. A military police unit posted .50-caliber antiaircraft machine guns on the White House roof, and a .50-caliber-armed car patrolled the area. Gas attack filters were added to the White House. Agents and officers received Geiger counters, and all White House occupants were issued gas masks. The military’s White House Signal Corps (WHSC) (the precursor of the modern, White House Communications Agency, or WHCA) was established at the White House and created the Secret Service’s first secure White House radio system.

  Thus the White House was transformed into a true “complex.” Comprising 18.5 acres, it included the North and South Lawns, the State Department Building (now known as the Old Executive Office Building) to the west, the White House at the center, and the Treasury Building to the east, all under the Secret Service’s protective jurisdiction.