Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  The incident, which occurred shortly before Ken Starr’s subpoenas started flying out of Secret Service fax machines, was kept secret even from President Clinton and amazingly never made it into the headlines.

  A brand-new PPD agent stood just outside the closed door of the Oval Office. I stood next to her, standing the E-6 post outside the Oval Office. If and when the president moved, so did she and all of the PPD, who for the moment were downstairs in “W-16,” the term for the PPD agents’ break room and staging area. But as the officer at E-6, I would remain standing the post. President Clinton was inside and holding a meeting in his office. This agent was on her first shift on the job. She was new, but, like everyone else, she was overworked and desensitized. More important, she hadn’t been there long enough for the shine to wear off, for the reverence of those hallowed halls and the VIPs in them to become mundane, part of just another workday. Yet, as she stood there, she and I were the last lines of defense for President Clinton.

  The validity of that “last line of defense” was never more evident than when there was an airborne threat. Just as there had been nothing but air and the decisions of agents between President Kennedy and a sniper’s bullet, there was nothing but air, some building material, and our ability to react decisively that could save the president’s life should we be alerted that an aircraft had left the unrestricted airspace, broken into the “P-56 area” of restricted airspace, and aimed at the White House.

  The Uniformed Division officers at the Ellipse and on the executive mansion’s rooftop radioed in fast. Per protocol, the president needed to be evacuated from the Oval Office to a more secure area in the White House immediately. The September 12, 1994, airplane crash at the White House was fresh for all the officers—several ERT officers had sprinted for their lives out of its path. This time we had a very large “unannounced” mystery helicopter coming in low and fast at the White House. It was flying up East Executive Avenue! No one knew why. Worse, unlike the small Huey helicopter shot down over the White House in 1974, this very large one was more than defensible against small-arms fire. Whatever it was up to, we were powerless—except to evacuate the president.

  The radio warnings came in.

  The PPD agent’s response was astounding: “I’m not doing anything without the permission of my supervisor, and I’m certainly not going to open that door.”

  And just like that, seven seconds had passed. We might have missed our window to evacuate to a safe area. Still, we had to act. I opened the door and held up my finger to the president. President Clinton recognized the simple gesture that said “Be ready in a moment. We may have something that is more demanding of your attention.” The president nodded and carried on with his meeting. I turned back and closed the door. The PPD agent was furious and gave me the stink eye for having had the gall to open the door and warn the president, let alone look him in the eye.

  As she dithered for a few seconds, the gray mystery helicopter with military markings went from a far off shape to take the form of a marine CH-53 heavy-lift helicopter, even bigger than the old white-and-green marine 1 SH-3 helicopters that flew the president.

  But as that PPD agent had failed in a split second by choosing to ask her supervisors before acting, the Secret Service had an unwanted H-series helicopter approaching and flying overhead. If you haven’t been near such a large helicopter landing and taking off, it’s like a mini-earthquake. Everything shook. The reverberations were so loud that you had to raise your voice to be heard. But the shaking and noise diminished. The gate-crashing helicopter passed overhead and went on its way.

  As soon as it did, the postgame show was on. The PPD agent and I saw the situation differently. She believed I had brazenly and disrespectfully interrupted the president, but I knew the Secret Service had completely failed to follow procedure and thereby failed to guarantee the president’s protection. As soon as that Marine helicopter broke the airspace, we had roughly seven seconds to evacuate the president and get him to a hardened safe area. If that helicopter was intent on crashing into the White House, the president, the PPD agents, the West Wing officers, the West Wing staff, and all the visitors would be dead or wounded. There had been some light talk of the West Wing officers being formally trained to conduct the evacuation procedure in case the PPD couldn’t for whatever seemingly inexplicable reason—but I had just experienced such a reason: a brand-new PPD agent who was more afraid to interrupt the president than protect him.

  The PPD shift leader came up from W-16 and wanted to know what the hell had happened. Meanwhile, the officers in the Uniformed Division control center scrambled to hail nearby military and commercial airports to check flight rosters and find any explanation. Officers radioed in the tail number. I monitored the back and forth with the officers on the Ellipse, in the control center, and on the lawn to deduce details: how low, fast, etc.

  “It said ‘Duke’ on his helmet,” one officer said, half laughing. “That’s how low he was.”

  Everyone wanted to know: Why the hell had a Marine CH-53 military helicopter flown past us?

  Only one thing was certain: we had lost control of the situation. Our imaginations had raced to fill in the blanks. Some officers and agents were irate; others snickered, “That was weird. Another crazy day at the shit magnet, am I right?”

  The agent’s control center soon delivered an explanation: our mystery fly-by helicopter was discovered to be a legitimate Marine helicopter, though its route was anything but. Two marine aviators had taken a “check ride” of their CH-53 helicopter to test recent maintenance and figured that if they flew very low, no one would pick them up on radar—or at least no one would be monitoring. But their joyride and sightseeing tour around Washington, DC, had gone farther than they had planned. They had gotten lost but couldn’t gain altitude lest their joyride be discovered by radar. Then they had traveled over the monuments and seen the White House up close, and only as they had traveled up East Executive Avenue, did they realize that they had really screwed up.

  Back at the White House, the special agents in charge of the PPD, future director Lewis Merletti and Edward Merinzel, were working to figure out why the hell the PPD hadn’t responded as it was supposed to. They eventually got someone from the marine unit or flight tower on the phone. I stood in W-16, offering what information I had gathered from the officers who had sounded the alarm on the helicopter. The person on the phone was explaining that the helicopter had been traveling much more slowly and higher than any of the officers were reporting, claiming that they were blowing things out of proportion and overexaggerating.

  Merletti wasn’t having it. “Who the hell is ‘Duke’?” he demanded.

  There was silence on the other end of the line. I knew I had done my job and passed on the right information. The PPD was about to give whatever marine unit and their aviators a licking. I didn’t need to be there for that, so I left.

  The hope after this incident was that the Secret Service would learn.

  It had been another quiet day turned into a near miss. Air accidents happened far more than terrorist acts, and several dozen tons of fast-moving aluminum and steel loaded with aviation fuel was never something to take lightly. It was another failure to guarantee presidential protection that would be swept under the rug, another accidental success in keeping the country safe, another day counted as a “win” solely because the airborne gate-crasher happened to be friendly. But the damage to the Secret Service’s morale and strategy was done: it proved that such an attack was possible and we were still no better off after decades.

  The hope was that the Secret Service would harden up and be ready the next time. But it had been strategically distracted for so long, especially from 1998 to 2001, and eventually our time had run out and our bubble had burst. After decades of airborne incidents that had showed our weaknesses to enemies, the United States and especially the Secret Service had been distracted in all the wrong places. The airborne threat recognized in 1941, the two 1974 a
ttacks, the CH-53 incident, and the 1994 Cessna crash into the White House had still left the Secret Service unprepared in January 2001 as President George W. Bush took the helm of the presidency.

  Of course, the transition wouldn’t have been complete without a final series of run-ins between the Uniformed Division and Clinton staff. A criminal investigation was looming, threatening to drag officers into court and Congress again to testify against the Clinton administration. On their way out, numerous Clinton staffers, bitter over Vice President Al Gore’s loss, stole White House decorations and ornaments, drew graffiti in bathrooms and offices, and even removed the “W” keys on keyboards. Furniture was ruined, desks overturned, even glass tables were smashed. And then the big one: a key that only the Secret Service used was broken off in a door lock, making it inoperable. After the presidential transition was completed, the Government Affairs Office published a report entitled “The White House: Allegations of Damage During the 2001 Presidential Transition.” Officers wondered if, yet again, they were going to be subpoenaed and have to answer the questions “Who did what?” and “How did this happen with the Secret Service present?” But the political currency needed to push the issue had evaporated.

  Meanwhile, in New York City, the Secret Service was enjoying its modern office space in one of the world’s most exclusive office complexes. Its old field office had been deemed so unsafe and unhealthy to employees—even the ceiling was collapsing—that the Government Services Administration (GSA) and Congress had prioritized the move to a new space over other federal agency projects. The process had taken eight years, but the agency magazine was finally able to say of the new office, “It’s big, it’s spacious, it’s beautiful.” It boasted that it had 8,000 additional square footage with backup generator, permanent emergency command center, voice mail, and bigger conference room and gym and was the first Secret Service office to be completely disability-friendly by the legal requirements. But what the service was perhaps most proud of was the new command center, which would be the hub of its latest expansion of authority: coordinating the protection of major national events, especially those in New York City, including the United Nations. The Secret Service had been very proud to move its area field office from World Trade Center Building 6 to Building 7.

  The Secret Service internal publication continued with its announcement: “We all remember on Friday, February 26, 1993, at 12:18 p.m., a bomb exploded in the parking garage area near the New York City Field Office secure parking lot facility.” Everyone in the field office had felt the explosion when the Al Qaeda bomb went off. The publication continued, “But one thing that came out of this tragic incident was that the GSA seemed to expedite our plans for relocation.”

  Like all federal law enforcement officials, everyone in the Secret Service was kept up to speed on the latest in enemy tradecraft. If a new kind of bomb or style of attack happened anywhere in the world—a suicide bus bombing or hostage taking in Israel or Myanmar, bombings that mimicked controlled detonations to collapse buildings on top of innocent victims—we were briefed on it. We were supposed to be thinkers and questioners of everything. Whether on a temporary assignment at a hotel or at the White House fence line, we would think to ourselves: Why is that wire in the ceiling there? When’s the last time that lady with the stroller looked at her child? Are that man and woman in the corner of the room professional colleagues, friends, or intimate because they haven’t looked at each other in minutes? We were professional people watchers, and we were on the alert. If some kind of attack had repeatedly proven successful around the globe, it was due to be tried in the United States eventually.

  All agencies, including the Secret Service, were great at sharing general knowledge between directors and down to every post stander, beat cop, and ground-pounding agent or officer—because when the monster’s new form appeared, aside from civilians, it would be those frontline agents or officers who would make the first contact.

  And then, sometimes, the ground radically shifts under your feet. That’s what happened on September 11, 2001.

  As it always seems to go, this Tuesday started much like any other. The sky was cloudless and blue, the breeze pleasant, and most Americans had trivial complaints, such as dragging themselves through the workweek.

  The War on Terror didn’t start that Tuesday, just as World War II didn’t start on December 7, 1941, with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even that attack hadn’t started on December 7; it had started long before the Japanese ships left their harbor. We were just ignorant about the war that had been declared on us. September 11, 2001, wasn’t the beginning of the War on Terror, it was just the day when Americans realized we were in it. The War on Terror had finally reached us, and as every American witnessed the four hijacked planes used as ballistic missiles flying into key components of the US economy as well as its command and control structure, they now knew what sophisticated attacks by the worst kinds of monsters would look like—and what they would cost us.

  The eighteen Al Qaeda terrorists (the nineteenth had been refused entry into the United States by a suspicious immigration agent) had studied piloting in the United States and then hijacked four commercial airliners. At 8:19 a.m., the FBI was alerted of the hijackings and readied its counterterrorist teams, but the Secret Service was not notified. American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston, with Mohammad Atta at the helm after he had brutally murdered the pilots, crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) at 8:46 a.m. After the first crash, many people, including those in the Secret Service, believed it had been an accident. It wasn’t until 9:03 a.m., when United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the World Trade Center South Tower, that they realized the nation was under attack by terrorists.

  Only three minutes before that had the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) realized that simultaneous hijackings were occurring. It couldn’t figure out what to do next. There had been a similar case in September 1970, when, in a three-day period, five planes, all scheduled to head for New York City, had been hijacked by terrorists. Despite that, the FAA had no protocols in place to alert aircraft to ground them. Furthermore, despite its own brushes with aerial threats to the White House, the Secret Service had no plans in place to respond to hijacked aircraft.

  President Bush was in Sarasota, Florida, reading books to children in their school under PPD protection. He was notified of the first attack at 8:50 a.m. At 9:31 a.m., he spoke from Florida, announcing that the nation was under “an apparent terrorist attack.” PPD agent Eddie Merinzel notified the president he had to get back to Air Force One and evacuate. As they boarded the plane, the plan was to head back to Washington, DC. Their specific destination was uncertain, but for some odd reason, Air Force One uncharacteristically had no fighter escort, even as it left Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport. They took off at maximum climb, gaining altitude almost like a rocket. Eddie Merinzel warned the pilots of his concern that this could be the beginning of a “decapitation attack,” the likes of which the country had not faced since the 1865 plot that had killed Lincoln and nearly killed several other officials.

  At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Had it been aiming for the White House, it would have hit its mark and killed scores of people, as the Secret Service had ordered an evacuation only at 9:45 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93, meanwhile, had left Newark International Airport twenty-five minutes behind schedule due to heavy traffic. As passengers learned of the attacks elsewhere, they bravely attempted to retake the cockpit, causing the plane to nose-dive into a open field in Shanksville, Somerset County, Pennsylvania. It crashed at 10:03 a.m. It is believed that the hijackers’ destination for Flight 93 was the White House. Even leaving late, it would have arrived at Washington, DC, at 10:23 a.m., as the White House was still evacuating. Had it left on time, it would have reached DC and the White House at 9:58, when the evacuations had only just begun.

  Meanwhile, Secret Service master special officer Craig Miller was fighting for his
life in the smoke, rubble, and mayhem of WTC 7, inside the Secret Service Field Office. Craig resided in Virginia to be closer to where he was permanently posted in the Maryland-DC area, and when his family saw what was transpiring via television, they believed he was safe. But Craig had taken a last-minute special assignment in New York City. A veteran of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm and the recipient of two Bronze Stars, Miller had assisted in the evacuation efforts but had gone missing afterward. Though his family held out hope that he might somehow inexplicably be found alive or in a coma somewhere, his remains were identified three years after the attack. He was one of 72 officers from eight local, state, and federal agencies and one of 2,800 civilians who died that day at the site of the World Trade Center attacks.

  At the James J. Rowley Training Center, all the New York recruits and agents receiving requalification training joined a handful of instructors, loaded up a few SUVs with food, water, ammunition, firearms, vests, and as much medical gear as they could fit in, and headed home to be of assistance any way they could. No one knew if this was the beginning and end of the attack or just the first wave.

  In the Secret Service’s possession today are several submachine guns recovered from the wreckage of the New York Field Office. The fire-rated safe had been burned through, and the barrels of the firearms had been turned into pretzel-shaped knots by the fire’s overwhelming heat. It is kept as a reminder and a memorial to history, along with the memory of Craig Miller, the thirty-fourth Secret Service employee to die in the line of duty, the thirteenth to perish on duty by violence, and, as of this writing, the last to have died by violence.

  At 1 p.m., President George W. Bush announced that the nation was on high alert from an Air Force base in Louisiana.