The First Family Detail Page 14

  The Secret Service engages in the same kind of dishonesty when it pads arrest statistics proudly presented to Congress and the public. In fiscal 2011, the Secret Service made 9,022 arrests for financial crimes, according to its annual report. But that figure includes arrests that the agency never made. They are so-called in-custody responses, which means the Secret Service takes credit for an arrest when local police notify the agency that they have a suspect in custody for the equivalent of a counterfeiting violation or other financial crime.

  “When you are a field agent, you are strongly urged to call the local police departments in your district and have them contact you if they made an arrest, state or local,” a veteran agent says. “Then you write up the necessary reports and claim credit for the arrest and conviction of the subject.”

  “The reason they do it obviously is so they can walk over to Congress and inflate the investigative success of the agency,” says a former agent who left the Secret Service to join the inspector general’s office of another federal agency. “They make a copy of the police report and make a copy of the note, and that’s about it. The FBI does not do that. It’s a game, and it’s deceptive.”

  Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan did not respond when asked for comment on the practice of padding arrest statistics and secretly rehearsing threat scenarios.

  Each point of the Secret Service star emblazoned on special agents’ badges represents one of the agency’s five core values: justice, duty, courage, honesty, and loyalty. But too often, honesty is missing from Secret Service management’s way of doing business.

  18

  ENERGIZER

  Like his wife, Bill Clinton has an explosive temper that he directs at aides, calling them “stupid” and “morons.”

  “If he was in a hurry, Clinton would literally push staff out of his way,” an agent says. “He could turn on you instantly.”

  Secret Service agents call it “Clinton Standard Time”—a reference to Clinton’s usual practice of running one to two hours late. To Clinton, an itinerary with scheduled appointments is merely “a suggestion,” a former agent says.

  Clinton was “always late for everything,” an agent on Clinton’s detail says. “He could be in his room playing cards. We would stay waiting for him for an hour because he was playing Hearts with his staff.”

  “Bill Clinton was never on time,” former agent Jeff Crane says. “He didn’t care how late he was or whether it strained our resources. But Bush 41 [George H. W. Bush] was so apologetic if he was late, it was almost embarrassing. He hated to inconvenience us.”

  According to Jane Burka, coauthor of Procrastination, such behavior is often a tool of control. “In effect, they [tardy people] are saying, ‘I’m in control. I run on my own schedule,’ ” she says. These people are “oblivious to the needs of others—they get so self-absorbed they literally lose track of time.”

  In contrast, Clinton managed to be on time for most of his assignations with Gennifer Flowers in Arkansas.

  “I don’t recall him being real late,” Flowers tells me. “I can recall things coming up, and he would call me. He would say he would call me later. He never did not show up.”

  Air Force One tends to bring out the true character of presidents. In command of their own flying carpet and confined to a small space over many hours, presidents who are arrogant and haughty tend to exhibit those traits more. Bill Clinton’s escapades on Air Force One were prime examples.

  In May 1993, Clinton ordered the presidential plane to wait on the tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport while he got a haircut from Christophe Schatteman, a Beverly Hills hairdresser. Schatteman’s clients have included Nicole Kidman, Goldie Hawn, and Steven Spielberg.

  “We flew out of San Diego to L.A. to pick him up,” recalls James Saddler, a steward on the infamous trip. “Some guy came out and said he was supposed to cut the president’s hair. Christophe cut his hair, and we took off. We were on the ground for an hour. They closed the runways.”

  While Christophe cut Clinton’s hair, two runways at LAX were closed. That meant all incoming and outgoing flights had to be halted. Clinton’s thoughtlessness inconvenienced passengers throughout the country.

  Like a teenager, Clinton would exchange observations with male crew members about the anatomy of any attractive woman who happened to be on the plane. To female crew members, he would make off-color remarks.

  Howard Franklin, the chief Air Force One steward, told Clinton’s advance people that “the key to being effective was planning.” That novel idea brought a vigorous retort. “They said, ‘We got here by being spontaneous, and we’re not going to change,’ ” Franklin recalls. Besides an aversion to planning, Clinton and his staff brought with them the attitude that “the military were people who couldn’t get jobs,” Franklin notes.

  Despite his flaws, when away from Hillary, Clinton, when he was president, would occasionally go out of his way to be friendly to agents and uniformed officers.

  “Bill Clinton would come out on the South Lawn at ten o’clock at night, smoke a cigar, and he’d start talking to you,” says a former uniformed officer. “At the time my wife was pregnant, and like two or three months later he came out on the South Lawn and walked up, lit up a cigar, and asked me how my wife was doing. And you know, I was just a Uniformed Division guy. That was pretty impressive.”

  When Clinton was away from the White House, agents were always concerned because he would spot a pretty woman and make a beeline for her.

  “Clinton was going to a retreat in Williamsburg, Virginia,” an agent who was temporarily on his detail recalls. “The standard operating procedure was, at all costs, keep women out of the arrival point area, because he will make a beeline to them. That was my job: Make sure there’s no women in eyesight of him, because if he sees a pretty woman, he’ll walk over there out in the open and will be exposed. Other people will want to come over and see him and speak to him. So it was a security concern.”

  When Clinton was to shake hands with onlookers, bored agents amused themselves by scoping out which attractive woman he might zero in on. Standing near one of them at the rope line, an agent would radio to fellow agents, “Wouldja?”—meaning “Would you do her?” Then he would say, “Would he?” To signify they thought Clinton would, other agents would press the button on their microphones twice. The double clicking in their earpieces meant yes. When a knockout young woman was the object of this game, “you would hear a cacophony of clicks,” says a former agent on Clinton’s detail.

  When Clinton flew to Fresno, California, “we had a chain-link fence set up to keep the crowds back at the airport,” former agent Cliff Baranowski says. “I had a special section for Secret Service employees and their families. He got off Air Force One, and he walked to the crowd area. He sees this blond lady, and he kisses her on the lips. It turned out to be another agent’s wife. She was thrilled that he picked her out. But I couldn’t believe it.”

  Clinton loved greeting people and had a gift for remembering their names. After a speech in New York at an AFL-CIO convention, he was shaking hands. Agents noticed a busboy eyeing him and moving closer.

  “Clinton saw him and called him by his name,” says an agent on his detail at the time. “The president shook his hand and asked how his father was. The busboy got teary-eyed and said his father had died. Commiserating with him, Clinton turned to an aide and said the man’s father had had cancer.”

  The Secret Service tried to adapt to Clinton’s unpredictable style.

  “President Clinton would see a small crowd of spectators that may have gathered behind a rope outside our secure perimeter just to get a glimpse of the president, and he would head off to shake their hands,” says former agent Norm Jarvis. “Of course, this drove us to distraction because we didn’t want him to approach an un-magged crowd. We didn’t know if we had a Hinckley or Bremer in the crowd with a handgun,” he added, referring to Arthur Bremer, who shot Governor George Wallace of Alabama w
hen Wallace was campaigning for president. “A person like that might be loitering in the area because he couldn’t get into the event.”

  At one point, Jarvis was faced with just such a situation: Clinton plunged spontaneously into a crowd that had not been screened. Jarvis was in the lead on the rope line and noticed a woman with her hands under her coat.

  During an event, “you’ll be in the formation and walking along with the president, you spot something, and you say something over the air to the shift leader,” Jarvis says. “You’re generally very quiet. There’s not a lot of chatter, but if you say something and you’re with the president, it means something. You size up the person that causes you to bring your attention to them and you have to make a quick judgment as to what you’re going to do or what the detail needs to do.”

  In this case, “what was strange was everyone was looking at the president—clapping, yelling, smiling,” Jarvis says. “She was staring down and had a real puzzled look on her face. Mind you, the president was two arms’ lengths from us. I let the shift leader know I had a problem, and I just wrapped my arms around this woman because I didn’t have time to frisk her.”

  Jarvis held her in a bear hug as the shift and the president worked their way around him.

  “She was startled, but I wouldn’t let her arms out from under the coat,” Jarvis says. “I held her until I could get some assistance, which arrived from a protective intelligence team that was nearby.”

  The team interviewed the woman and quickly determined that she was mentally ill.

  “She didn’t have a weapon under her coat, but you can tell mentally disturbed people by the way they react,” Jarvis notes. “And when they react the opposite of everybody else, it brings your attention to them, and you know you’ve got an issue out of the ordinary.”

  At one point during his second term, agents say Clinton managed to lose the plastic authenticator card with the codes he would need to verify his identity to launch nuclear weapons.

  “He has to keep those codes with him at all times, at all costs,” says a former agent. “With the codes, the White House Communications Agency can set up communications through the nuclear football and hit the satellites.”

  Retired general Hugh Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed in his book Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior that in Clinton’s last year in office, the required codes for launching a nuclear strike were missing for months. “This is a big deal—a gargantuan deal—and we dodged a silver bullet,” Shelton wrote.

  As the Secret Service sees it, Hillary and Bill Clinton have a business relationship, not a marriage.

  “They would talk on an encrypted phone,” an agent says. “He would give her advice. It was a political alliance. My impression was they didn’t have sex. She portrayed herself as devastated by the revelations of Monica [Lewinsky]. I doubt she cared.” When Hillary was away, attractive women would show up at the White House residence late at night, former agents say.

  While Secret Service agents and uniformed officers never observed Monica Lewinsky having sex with Clinton, they sensed that something was going on between them. For someone who worked in the West Wing, Lewinsky was over her head yet acted as if she owned the place. She would hug agents and act flirtatiously with them. Uniformed officers noticed her in the Oval Office pantry or private study, sometimes looking embarrassed that they had seen her.

  On Easter Sunday, April 7, 1996, Clinton was in the Oval Office at 4:56 P.M. Lewinsky told Secret Service agents she wanted to deliver some papers to him. After some time elapsed, Lewinsky had not left, and a White House operator told the Secret Service that Clinton was not answering his phone. Worried that something might have happened to the president, a Secret Service agent knocked on the door to the Oval Office. When he got no response, he entered and called out, “Mr. President?” Still no response.

  The agent checked behind the desk and again called out, “Mr. President?” Then he noticed that the door to Clinton’s study off the Oval Office was slightly ajar. According to Lewinsky, the president typically left the door to the study open while they were engaging in sex there. The agent called Clinton’s name again. This time, the president responded and said he would pick up the phone if the call—which was from aide Dick Morris—was routed to his study.

  According to the report of independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Lewinsky was giving Clinton oral sex at the time. After Clinton took the call, he told Lewinsky to continue as he talked politics with Morris. She obliged for the nine-minute duration of the call and left at 5:28 P.M.

  The agent, who was not named in the Starr report, tells me jokingly that if he had pushed open the door to the study, “I either would have been fired or named Secret Service director.”

  On August 17, 1998, Bill Clinton stood in the Map Room of the White House and on national television confessed that he had lied about his relationship with Lewinsky. “Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong,” Clinton said.

  The next day, the president and Hillary flew to Martha’s Vineyard.

  “I was up at Martha’s Vineyard right after he had confessed on national TV to the whole Monica Lewinsky affair,” a former agent says. While the agent was operating the command post, Hillary called him and said, “Where is he?”

  “Ma’am, the president is downtown right now, I think he just arrived at a Starbucks,” the agent said.

  “Confirm that,” Hillary demanded, and the agent did. Hillary then ordered the agent to tell the president to “get home now, and I mean right now.”

  The agent passed the message along to the detail.

  “Oh, my God. Clinton loves mingling with people, and he loves to play golf, but she was having none of that,” the agent says. “Clinton was to remain at the Martha’s Vineyard estate. He was being punished. It was like he was grounded.”

  As when they were in the White House, agents say the Clintons argue a lot.

  “There seems to be some kind of tension [between them],” one agent says. “There is an uneasiness.”

  On those rare occasions when Clinton has been photographed kissing his wife, he looks uncomfortable, and she has a look of distaste. Just as Jimmy Carter would carry empty luggage when cameras were around, to try to cover up their chilly relationship, the Clintons make a point of rigidly holding hands in front of photographers.

  In contrast to Hillary, since leaving the White House, Bill Clinton is “very friendly to the agents,” says one agent. “I think he realizes once he’s out of office, we’re pretty much all he’s got, and he does treat the guys really well.”

  But as when he was in the White House, Clinton is constantly looking for women, an agent says. “He’ll see some attractive women walk by, and you can just see he isn’t paying any attention to what anyone is saying. He will actually point out the women. He hasn’t changed.”

  Several years after moving into the Clintons’ 5,200-square-foot home in Chappaqua, Bill began seeing the blonde who lives nearby.

  “She’s a soccer mom type,” says an agent, referring to the woman the Secret Service unofficially code-named Energizer. “She’s real nice. She brings little snacks for the agents. She is just the opposite of Hillary.”

  He may be perpetually late, but Bill Clinton times their comings and goings so well that the woman appears almost as soon as Hillary leaves.

  “They would miss each other by just minutes,” says an agent.

  Other agents say their supervisors’ instruction to suspend a security check for Energizer and conceal her visits undercuts their mission.

  “My problem is with the Secret Service,” an agent says. “When you conspire with him to conceal his mistress from his wife, doctor the books, and force your agents to ignore a security plan, you are helping to foster a corrupting culture.”

  19

  DALLAS

  If corner cutting has become standard practice in the Secret Se
rvice today, it is not without precedent. By definition, an assassination nullifies democracy. Yet despite four assassinations, protection of the president has always been an afterthought.

  Even though the Civil War was raging and he received constant threats, Abraham Lincoln refused to agree to the security protection recommended by his aides, friends, and the military. Finally, just before his assassination on April 14, 1865, Lincoln agreed to protection by Washington police officers. Four officers were assigned to the detail. But on the night of Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre, Patrolman John F. Parker decided to wander off to watch the play, then went with Lincoln’s footman and coachman for a drink at the nearby Star Saloon.

  Parker was an incompetent officer who had been hauled before the police board numerous times. His infractions included conduct unbecoming an officer, using intemperate language, and being drunk on duty. When brought before the board for frequenting a whorehouse, Parker claimed that the proprietress had sent for him.

  As a result of Parker’s negligence, as Lincoln watched the play Our American Cousin, the president was as unprotected as any private citizen. John Wilkes Booth, a fanatical Confederate sympathizer, made his way to Lincoln’s box, snuck in, and shot him in the back of the head. The president died the next morning.

  A fellow presidential bodyguard, William H. Crook, held Parker directly responsible for the assassination. “Had he done his duty, I believe President Lincoln would not have been murdered by Booth,” Crook wrote in his memoir. “Parker knew that he had failed in duty. He looked like a convicted criminal the next day.” Parker should have been fired immediately, but he was not terminated until 1868—for sleeping on duty.

  Despite the tragedy, protection of the president remained haphazard. For a short time after the Civil War, the War Department assigned soldiers to protect the White House and its grounds. On special occasions, Washington police officers helped maintain order and prevented crowds from assembling. But the permanent detail of four police officers assigned to guard the president during Lincoln’s term was reduced to three. These officers protected only the White House and did not receive any special training.