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AS PART OF an advance, the Secret Service reviews reports from the intelligence community about possible threats. In 1996, former president George H. W. Bush was planning to fly to Beirut, Lebanon. The itinerary called for him to land on Cyprus, then helicopter over to Lebanon.
“The CIA informed us there was a threat on the former president’s life,” says Lou Morales, an agent who was with Bush 41, as he is called, on the trip. “The informant knew the itinerary of the helicopter flight and the time it was to take off. In fact, he was part of the plot, which had been hatched by Hezbollah. They were going to shoot missiles to take the helicopter down.”
The Secret Service informed Bush, who insisted he wanted to go to Beirut regardless of the risk. The Secret Service scrubbed the helicopter flight and instead drove him in a motorcade at ninety miles per hour from Damascus to Beirut. As with most thwarted plots against protectees, this one never appeared in the press.
Once agents have completed an advance, they recommend how many additional agents will be needed to cover the president. The normal working shift consists of a shift leader or whip and four shift agents. These are the “body men” around the protectee. Other agents include three to four transportation agents, along with counter-surveillance agents and a complete counterassault team of five to six agents.
Besides agents from the local field office, the additional agents for a presidential visit come from the rest of the Secret Service’s 139 domestic offices. They include forty-two field offices in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago; fifty-eight resident offices; sixteen resident agency offices; and twenty-three one-agent domiciles. These offices are in addition to twenty overseas offices.
Prior to a presidential visit, agents are flown to the location on air force transports, along with the president’s limo—code-named Stagecoach—and Secret Service vehicles. The countersniper and counter -assault teams and bomb techs fly in the same aircraft. These agents are in addition to shift agents who accompany the president on Air Force One. Canada prohibits agents from carrying arms, but they sneak in their weapons in presidential limousines.
In contrast to the open car President Kennedy used, the presidential limousine now is a closed vehicle. Known affectionately as “the Beast,” the 2009 Cadillac now in use was put into service for Barack Obama’s inauguration. The Beast lives up to its moniker. Built on top of a GMC truck chassis, the vehicle is armor-plated, with bulletproof glass and its own supply of oxygen. It is equipped with state-of-the-art encrypted communications gear. It has a remote starting mechanism and a self-sealing gas tank. The vehicle can keep going even when the tires are shot out. It can take a direct hit from a bazooka or grenade. The car’s doors are eighteen inches thick, and its windows are five inches thick. The latest model has larger windows and greater visibility than the Cadillac first used by President Bush for his January 2005 inauguration.
Often the first limousine in the motorcade is a decoy. The second limousine is a backup. The president could actually be in a third limousine or in any vehicle in the motorcade. The number of cars in the motorcade depends on the purpose of the trip. For an unannounced visit to a restaurant, seven or eight Secret Service cars, known as the informal package, make the trip. For an announced visit, the formal package of up to forty vehicles, including cars for White House personnel and the press, goes out. Agents refer to their Secret Service vehicles as G-rides.
Including the White House doctor and other administration personnel, a domestic trip entails two hundred to three hundred people. An overseas trip could involve as many as six hundred people, including military personnel. In 2008 alone, the Secret Service provided protection on 135 overseas trips. On such trips, the Secret Service relies on local police even more than it does in the United States. But when Richard Nixon was vice president, local police disappeared as an angry mob descended on Nixon and his wife, Pat, at the Caracas, Venezuela, airport on May 13, 1958.
“The police were supposed to provide protection at the airport,” recalls Chuck Taylor, one of the Secret Service agents on the detail. “We noticed the police started to leave the motorcade. They were afraid of the mob, and so the police deserted their security arrangements.”
As stones and bottles were being thrown at the couple, agents formed a tight ring around them and quickly escorted them into the president’s bulletproof limousine. Along the route to the American embassy, protestors had erected a roadblock. Wielding clubs and pipes, a crowd swarmed the car.
“They had firebombs, and they were bent on killing everybody in the party,” Taylor says. “In some cases they put small kids out in front of the car, so we’d run over the kids. We appraised that situation and decided to walk the car through.”
The crowd tried to pry open the doors and then began to rock the limo and try to set it on fire. But as long as the agents were facing down the insurgents, they seemed afraid to approach too closely. The agents managed to get Nixon safely to the American embassy where more angry insurgents confronted them.
“They wanted to burn down the embassy” Taylor says. “We went ahead and put these sandbags around, and we jerry-rigged a radio system so that we were able to talk to Washington. I understand they had cut the transatlantic cable, and we weren’t able to communicate normally. We were able to radio the president and tell him what the story was. The president sent the Sixth Fleet out to evacuate everybody.”
Now on domestic trips, each motorcade includes a car for the Secret Service counterassault team armed with submachine guns. Another Secret Service car, known as the intelligence car, keeps track of people who have been assessed as threats and picks up local transmissions to evaluate them. If necessary, it jams the communications of anyone who presents a threat. Normally, a helicopter supplied by the Park Police or local law enforcement hovers overhead.
For a motorcade, local police on motorcycles block access from side streets and leapfrog from intersection to intersection. Agents check out offices along the route. Before President Ford visited Conroe, Texas, Agent Dave Saleeba was told that one office in a building along the motorcade route could not be opened. Checking further, he learned that the building was owned by the heirs of a local lawyer.
Back in 1915, the lawyer had become heartbroken when his son, who’d been riding to see him, fell off his horse, hit his head on a well, and died. The lawyer never entered his office again and directed that his heirs never open it. However, at Saleeba’s request, the lawyer’s granddaughter agreed to open the office. Saleeba found the man’s desk covered with dust. A brown bag on top of the desk looked as if it had contained his lunch, now disintegrated.
Secret Service agents believe that simply being there, scanning crowds with a ferocious look, often wearing sunglasses, deters would-be assassins. Agents are looking for signs of danger—people who don’t seem to fit in, have their hands in their pockets, are sweating or look nervous, or appear as if they have mental problems. Agents lock in on movements, objects, or situations that are out of place.
“We look for a guy wearing an overcoat on a warm day,” says former agent William Albracht, who was a senior instructor at the Secret Service’s James J. Rowley Training Center. “A guy not wearing an overcoat on a cold day. A guy with hands in his pockets. A guy carrying a bag. Anybody that is overenthusiastic, or not enthusiastic. Anybody that stands out, or is constantly looking around. You’re looking at the eyes and most importantly the hands. Because where those hands go is the key.”
If an agent sees a bystander at a rope line with his hands in his pockets, he will say, “Sir, take your hands out of your pockets, take your hands out of your pockets NOW.”
“If he doesn’t, you literally reach out and grab the individual’s hands and hold them there,” Albracht says. “You have agents in the crowd who will then see you’re having problems. They’ll come up to the crowd, and they’ll grab the guy and toss him. They will take him out of there, frisk him, pat him down, and see what his problem is. You are allowed to do that in exigent circumstances in protection because it’s so immediate. You don’t have time to say, ‘Hey would you mind removing your hands?’ I mean if this guy’s got a weapon, you need to know right then.”
An agent who sees a weapon screams to fellow agents: “Gun! Gun!”
To identify themselves to other agents and to police helping during events, Secret Service agents wear color-coded pins on their left lapels. The pins, which bear the five-pointed star of the Secret Service, come in four colors. Each week, agents change to one of the four prescribed colors so they can recognize one another in crowds. On the back of the pin is a four-digit number. If the pin is stolen, the number can be entered on the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the computerized database that police use when they stop cars to see if they are stolen or if the occupants are fugitives. If the pin is found, police return it to the Secret Service.
When on protection duty, Secret Service agents wear trademark radio earpieces tuned to one of the encrypted channels the Secret Service uses. Known as a surveillance kit, the device includes a radio transmitter and receiver that agents keep in their pockets.
As for the sunglasses, “In training, they would give us clear Ray-Ban glasses,” former agent Pete Dowling says. “The reason they did that was eye protection, in case somebody threw something at the protectee. Most of the guys had them shaded. But the stereotype is the Secret Service guy always has sunglasses on, even when he is indoors.”
In practice, some agents wear sunglasses so people do not see where they are looking. Others prefer not to wear them.
Agents wearing plain clothes and no earpieces infiltrate crowds and patrol around the White House. If they spot a problem or vulnerability, they use a cell phone to notify the Joint Ops Center at Secret Service headquarters.
“They’re the guys in the crowd,” an agent says. “You wouldn’t know they were there, and they’re on the outside looking in during an event and during an advance.”
These agents try to think like assassins: How can they breach the security?
“It’s their job to take apart our plan prior to game day,” the agent says. “It’s their job to basically say, here are the holes, here are your vulnerabilities, tell us how you’re going to plug these holes.”
Technicians take photos of the crowds at presidential events. The images are compared with photos taken at other events—sometimes using facial recognition software—to see if a particular individual keeps showing up.
Since the attempts on Ford’s life, presidents have generally worn bulletproof vests at public events. They are currently Kevlar Type Three vests that will stop rounds from most handguns and rifles but not from more powerful weapons. Agents on the president’s and vice president’s details are now supposed to wear them at public events, but some agents prefer not to wear them. While the vests have been improved, they are uncomfortable and can make life unbearable on a hot day.
“You have to be hypervigilant,” says former agent Jerry Parr, who headed President Reagan’s detail when he was shot. In the twenty years before the attempt on Reagan’s life, “You had one president murdered, one shot and wounded, a governor shot and wounded and paralyzed, two attempts on Ford, and you had Martin Luther King killed. You know it’s out there. You just don’t know where.”