The First Family Detail Read online

  In view of his trips, Secret Service agents on Biden’s detail chuckled when Obama announced in 2011 that he was placing Biden in charge of a Campaign to Cut Waste that was supposed to root out unnecessary government spending. In making the announcement, Obama said Biden would “hunt down and eliminate misspent tax dollars in every agency and department across the federal government.”

  In an e-mail to supporters, Biden proclaimed himself the “new sheriff in town.” He said that “particularly at a time when we’re facing tough decisions about reducing our deficit, it’s a no-brainer to stop spending taxpayer dollars on things that benefit nobody.”

  Yet besides spending a million dollars on personal trips to Delaware and receiving an annual salary of $230,700 as vice president, Biden has free use of the vice president’s residence on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. At least five Navy stewards attend to every personal need of Biden and Jill, including cooking, shopping for food, cleaning, and doing the laundry.

  As a U.S. senator, Biden proudly publicized the fact that he commuted daily by train from his home in Delaware to Washington during the week. Amtrak named the newly renovated Wilmington station the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Railroad Station. But after taking office as vice president, a Secret Service agent says Biden began the pattern of commuting to his Delaware home on Air Force Two.

  While Secret Service agents say flying is the most secure way for Biden to make the trips, the question is why the sheriff who is supposed to cut out government waste thinks it is appropriate to take such frequent trips for personal reasons, even flying back and forth to Andrews on the same day to play golf with Obama. They note that Biden has continued the trips despite the fact that government employees have seen their salaries cut because of the sequester and its budget reductions.

  Among themselves, Secret Service agents assigned to Biden’s detail and officers of the 89th Airlift Wing, which flies the planes, express outrage at what they consider an abuse. Given the fact that Biden’s job is in Washington, where the government provides him with a luxurious mansion, they say there is no justification for charging the government for such frequent trips back home. They refer derisively to Biden’s practice of constantly flying back and forth as the “Wilmington shuttle.”

  “The Air Force Two guys pull their hair out over this,” says a Secret Service agent who deals with the crew. In contrast to Biden, Obama reserves personal trips on Air Force One for occasional vacations, Air Force officers point out.

  While agents personally like the potential 2016 presidential candidate, “that doesn’t mean we don’t see the waste, abuse, and risk-taking,” a current agent says, referring to Biden’s insistence that his aide with the nuclear football remain separated from his motorcade in Delaware.

  9

  ADVANCE

  Today the President’s Protective Detail consists of three hundred agents, including those protecting the president’s family, and assigns twenty-five to forty agents to the president per shift. The Vice President’s Protective Detail consists of one hundred fifty agents. In all, the Secret Service has thirty-five hundred special agents, compared with three hundred in John F. Kennedy’s day

  As the president moves about in public, six agents surround him. They include a shift supervisor and a detail leader.

  “The detail leader is right on him or very close,” an agent says. “He’s literally right behind him, probably with his hand on his back or maybe even holding on to his belt, so that if he had to pull him or pivot him, he could do that right away.”

  When the president is advancing, the agents form a box configuration, and if he’s moving down a narrow corridor, they form a diamond configuration. Other agents stand post at access points.

  After 9/11, President Bush roughly doubled the number of individuals given Secret Service protection to twenty-seven permanent protectees, plus ten family members. Another seven were protected when traveling abroad. President Obama has increased the number under protection to forty-five, including aides such as Valerie Jarrett.

  When Kennedy was president, the Secret Service conducted little advance work before a presidential visit. Today, ten days before a presidential visit out of town, the Secret Service dispatches eight to ten agents to conduct advance planning.

  An advance team includes a lead agent, a transportation agent, an airport agent, agents assigned to each event site, a hotel advance agent, one or two logistics agents, a technical security agent, and an intelligence agent. As part of advance preparations, a team of military communications personnel from the Defense Department’s White House Communications Agency is dispatched to handle radios and phones. They ship their equipment and additional personnel on Air Force C-130 cargo planes. Depending on how much exposure the president will encounter, members of the Uniformed Division’s countersniper team and the counterassault team from the Secret Service’s Special Operations Division may go along on an advance.

  Before the president is checked in, an entire floor of a hotel is reserved, plus the two floors below. Agents sweep the area for explosives, bugging devices, and radioactive material or other contaminants. They check carpeting for concealed objects. They examine picture frames that could be hollow and conceal explosives. They install bulletproof glass on windows, and they plan escape routes from every room that the president might enter.

  “In the hotel, if the president will stay overnight, we secure the suite and floor he will stay on and make it as safe as the White House,” an agent says. “We seal it off. No other guests can be on the floor. If the floor is huge, we will separate it [with guarded partitions]. But no outside people will be on the floor, guaranteed.”

  The Secret Service checks the backgrounds of employees who prepare food for the president and other members of the first family during a trip. If an employee has been convicted of an assault or drug violation, agents will ask the dining establishment to give the employee a day off. To ensure that no one slips poison into food served the president at a hotel or restaurant, an agent randomly selects from the prepared dishes the one to be served to the president and watches as it is brought out to him. Employees who have been cleared are given color-coded pins to wear. On overseas trips, Navy stewards might prepare dishes for the president. With food prepared at the White House, the Secret Service is not directly involved.

  “You can’t watch everything,” a Secret Service agent says. “But the majority of stuff is checked. We have lists of the suppliers. We check the employees once and go back randomly and check them again to see if anyone has been added.”

  In contrast to the cursory look the Secret Service gave to John F. Kennedy’s planned Dallas parade route, its Forensic Services Division now creates virtual three-dimensional models of buildings along a motorcade route so that agents will know what to expect and can plan what to do at spots where the motorcade may be more vulnerable to attack. The division also produces slide shows of the floor plans of buildings where the president will speak.

  “We’re doing things now that are so much more advanced than what they would have done before 9/11,” an agent says. “The work that we do now is just so much more comprehensive and detailed.”

  During the advance for a presidential trip, the Secret Service picks out safe houses, such as fire stations, to be used in case of a threat. It plots the best routes to local hospitals and alerts the hospitals of an impending presidential visit.

  As many as twenty-five vehicles could comprise the president’s motorcade. A helicopter hovers overhead, and no aircraft are allowed in the area.

  For an overseas trip, military cargo planes airlift in more than fifty support vehicles. Fighter jets fly overhead so they can intervene quickly if a plane gets too close to the president’s location on the ground. As many as six hundred people could be included on an overseas presidential trip, including military personnel and up to fifty Secret Service agents. Including the White House doctor and other administration personnel, a domestic presidential trip entails two h
undred to three hundred people.

  Back in Washington, advance work for an inauguration is even more elaborate. The Secret Service canvasses the area along the parade route and spot-welds shut manhole covers and removes trash cans and mailboxes. If an item like a utility vault cannot be removed, it is inspected and taped shut. If anyone tampers with the special tape—color-coded for each event—it disintegrates to warn agents that someone may have gained access to a secured area.

  Concrete barriers or police cars block every street in Washington leading to the motorcade route. Spectators must pass through magnetometers before entering the area of the motorcade route. Coolers, backpacks, and packages are banned.

  Bomb-sniffing dogs inspect buildings, garages, and delivery trucks. Employees in offices and hotel guests along the route are often checked for criminal records. Agents make sure they have access to every office and hotel room, with master keys from the building or hotel manager. They tape shut utility rooms and electrical circuit boards along the parade route.

  Agents or police officers are stationed on roofs of buildings. More than a dozen countersniper teams are deployed at the most vulnerable points. High-resolution surveillance cameras scan the crowds.

  “Every window must be closed when the motorcade passes,” a supervisory agent says. “We have spotters looking at them with binoculars. For the most part they comply. If they don’t, we have master keys to all those doors. We ask them why they are there and opening the windows.”

  The Secret Service scripts exactly where the president and first lady are to step out of the Beast and wave to crowds following the inauguration. Counterassault teams armed with semiautomatic Stoner SR-16 rifles and flash-bang grenades for diversionary tactics are positioned at these critical points.

  If agents encounter a problem, they call for an ID team. Named for the Intelligence Division, the ID team at an event is usually composed of a Secret Service agent and a local police officer. Upon learning of a potential threat, the team races to the scene, interviews the subject, takes control of the situation, and passes along any threat information to the detail.

  Protection of the first lady and first kids outside the White House is essentially the same as protecting the president and vice president, except that fewer agents are assigned. Depending on the type of venue, as many as thirty-five to forty agents may accompany the president when he leaves the White House, compared to four to six agents for the first lady and three to four for a first child.

  As with the president and vice president, agents allow the first lady and first kids a comfort zone: Agents do not sit in on classrooms, for example, but will station themselves around a school and down the corridor from a classroom. In the same way, agents are not stationed in the residence portion of the White House. However, as with the president and vice president, agents accompany the first lady and first kids wherever they go—to soccer practice, to friends’ houses, and to vacation spots.

  If a president’s child is going to a birthday party in a private home, agents check out the house beforehand. Given that the host vouches for the young guests by inviting them, agents will not screen them with magnetometers or conduct background checks. During the party, agents station themselves in an adjoining room or in the basement and sit outside in Suburbans. If an event is an “off-the-record movement” where no one knows that the president’s children will be attending, agents likely will not check out the premises beforehand.

  Where the children go to school is the decision of the president and first lady, and often they send the kids to private schools, where security may be tighter. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter made a political statement by sending Amy to a public school in northwest Washington called Hardy Middle School.

  Most of the time, Secret Service agents had little more to contend with than sixth-grade boys speculating on how they would tie together an agent’s shoelaces were he to fall asleep under the tree where he sat watching Amy play soccer at recess. But at one point, the Secret Service received intelligence that Middle Eastern terrorists might be planning to try to kidnap Amy.

  “We put in a counterassault team,” says former agent Dennis Chomicki, who was a member of the team. “We had five armed guys hanging around with some pretty heavy weapons. We did it for weeks until we felt it was not going to happen.”

  For agents, the path to protecting the first family begins in a field office. Agents in field offices spend most of their time investigating financial crimes—counterfeiting, check fraud, access-device fraud, identity theft, and computer-based attacks on the nation’s financial, banking, and telecommunications infrastructure. But when the president, the vice president, or a presidential candidate visits their city, agents in the field are often assigned to protective duties. If a threat requires investigation in their city, they will follow leads and conduct the necessary interviews.

  Typically after seven years in one or more field offices, agents may be assigned to the President’s Protective Detail (PPD) or to the Vice President’s Protective Detail (VPD), where they usually serve for the duration of the president’s or vice president’s four-year term. Alternatively, they may be assigned to the Technical Services Division, the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division, the Dignitary Protection Division, the Financial Crimes Division, or to the protection of former presidents and their spouses. After about six months, agents may be assigned to protect the president’s or vice president’s wife or children. These are called satellite details of the PPD or VPD.

  While the president’s detail may seem more prestigious than the vice president’s, “I’ve never seen anybody say anything bad because you’re on VPD or considered a lesser agent,” a current agent says. “I think there’s a certain arrogance that agents have, considering what they do, but I wouldn’t say that there’s a rivalry.”

  After another six months, agents may return to the PPD or the VPD or may be assigned to drive the presidential or vice presidential limousine or to return to one of the specialty divisions. Finally, after three to five years in this phase of their careers, agents return to a field office or are promoted to a job in headquarters.

  Not including overtime, an experienced agent makes $110,000 a year, including a cost-of-living adjustment for Washington. After twenty years of service, agents can retire at age fifty with a pension of 34 percent of the average of their three highest-paid years. Agents may also retire at any age with twenty-five years of service.

  While threats aimed at first family members like Michelle Obama and her kids come in routinely, the number is minimal compared with those aimed at the president. Still, agents worry just as much about threats against the family as about those against the president, recognizing that a president’s wife or children could be targets or taken hostage at any time.

  In conducting an advance before an inauguration or a trip, agents consult with local law enforcement. In one of the more bizarre events in Secret Service history, when President George H. W. Bush was to give a speech in Enid, Oklahoma, on September 17, 1992, local law enforcement officials told agents that a resident who was a psychic had had a vision that a sniper on an overpass would shoot Bush. The authorities said the psychic had been incredibly reliable in the past, even leading police to the bodies of murder victims and providing useful leads in other cases.

  Norm Jarvis, who was assigned to run intelligence investigations for the visit, remembered seeing the psychic, Patsy Jane Henigman, on television. Sporting a beehive hairdo, she would don what she called a special pair of cowboy boots and then tell police not only where bodies were buried but how the victims had been murdered.

  The evening before Bush’s visit, Jarvis and his partner drove to Henigman’s home in Enid.

  “While it may seem surprising that the Secret Service would pay attention to a self-proclaimed psychic, we talk to them, not because they may have psychic powers, but to try and determine if they have legitimately picked up information from someone about an assassination plot or have access to
sensitive insider information,” Jarvis says.

  Henigman invited them in, and Jarvis explained why they were there. The psychic confirmed that she had had a vision that the president was about to be assassinated.

  Jarvis asked Henigman to describe her vision. The woman said she saw the president arriving in Oklahoma: He gets off the plane, and he gets in a limousine and sits behind the driver. When Bush gets in his limousine, he is not wearing a suit. Instead, he is wearing a light jacket and an open-collar shirt. According to her vision, as they start to drive under an overpass, the passenger window is shattered, and he is killed.

  Jarvis knew that when the president flew in on Air Force One, he always came out in a suit and tie, and the dress code for the visit was suit and tie. And when the president is in the limousine, he is not behind the driver; he is on the right rear side, the position of honor. Still, Jarvis asked Henigman to describe the limo. She correctly said the car was already in Enid. The Secret Service always flies its vehicles to the sites of presidential visits on a cargo plane prior to the visit, storing the vehicles in fire stations or hangars at the airport where Air Force One is to land.

  Jarvis asked Henigman to pinpoint just where the limo was. She said it was at the Air Force base near Enid. He asked if she could show him, and she agreed.

  As they drove toward the five hangars, Henigman gave Jarvis directions.

  “As we got close to this one hangar, she said to slow down,” Jarvis says.

  “Something is in that building right there,” the woman said.

  “What do you mean?” Jarvis asked.

  “Something important is in that building there.”

  “Okay, but not the limo?”

  “No,” the woman said.

  As they drove past another hangar, Henigman said it contained the limo. She then identified another hangar as also containing something important.

  Jarvis’s hunch was that the limo was in the fire house bordering the runways. As it turned out, he was wrong and the psychic was right. Secret Service agents guard the president’s limo until he steps into it. Checking with them, Jarvis learned that the hangar the psychic identified as holding the vehicle did indeed contain two presidential limousines. As the woman walked back to Jarvis’s Secret Service car, he asked the special officer in charge of security for the limos what was in the other two hangars she had identified as containing something important.