The First Family Detail Read online

  “There is nothing more insulting than calling us guards,” says a former uniformed officer who became an agent.

  In protecting the White House and providing security at events, the Uniformed Division, which has twelve hundred officers, employs canine units. In all, the agency has seventy-five of the dogs. Mainly Belgian Malinois, most of the dogs are cross-trained to sniff out explosives and attack an intruder. While they resemble German shepherds, the breed is believed to be higher energy and more agile. The dogs are prey-driven, and ball play is their reward after they locate their “prey.” The Secret Service pays $4,500 for each trained dog.

  While waiting to check cleared vehicles that arrive at the White House’s southwest gate, the dogs stand on a white concrete pad that is refrigerated in summer so their paws don’t get hot. Each dog eagerly checks out about a hundred cars a day.

  For new recruits, there’s a seventeen-week canine school at the Secret Service training facility, where dogs are paired with handlers. The dogs come to the school with a lot of training behind them, but the Secret Service gives them more—in explosive detection and emergency response to threats such as a fence jumper at the White House.

  The Secret Service’s Technical Security Division (TSD) installs sensors to pinpoint intruders on the White House grounds and devices that detect radiation and explosives at entrances to the White House. TSD also samples the air and water within the White House for contaminants, radioactivity, and deadly bacteria. As a precaution, air in the White House is maintained at high pressure to expel possible contaminants.

  Populated with real-life Qs, James Bond’s fictional gadget master, TSD sweeps the White House and hotel rooms for electronic bugs. While electronic bugs have never been found in the White House, sweeps of hotel rooms have detected bugs that had been planted to pick up the conversations of previous guests. When suspicious packages are thrown onto the White House grounds, TSD deploys robots to examine them safely.

  At an off-site location, TSD each year screens more than a million pieces of mail addressed to the White House for pathogens and other biological threats before it is delivered. With Los Alamos National Laboratory or Sandia National Laboratories, TSD runs top secret risk assessments to find any holes in physical or cyber security measures.

  In case an assassin bent on hunting down the president manages to penetrate all the security, TSD installs panic buttons and alarms in the Oval Office and the residence part of the White House. The alarms can be activated in case of a physical threat or a medical emergency. Many of the alarm triggers are small presidential seals placed innocuously on tables or desks. Knocking them over activates them and brings agents running, weapons drawn.

  In addition, “There are knock-down alarms that may be lamps,” a current agent says. “The president or vice president knocks a lamp down if he needs help.”

  Besides agents and uniformed officers stationed around the Oval Office, in response to an alarm, agents deployed to W-16, the Secret Service holding room under the Oval Office, can leap up the stairway in a few seconds with their weapons drawn.

  As a last resort, the White House has emergency escape routes, including a tunnel ten feet wide and seven feet high. It extends from a subbasement under the east wing of the White House to the basement of the Treasury Department, adjacent to the White House grounds. A new multistory underground bunker can accommodate the entire White House staff so the West Wing can continue to operate in the event of an attack.

  Incidents at the White House always seem to have a bizarre quality. At 9:04 P.M. on Friday, November 11, 2011, U.S. Park Police responded to reports of gunshots along Constitution Avenue, at Seventeenth Street near the Ellipse and the Washington Monument, about a half mile south of the White House. A witness said she saw the driver of a dark-colored sedan firing a weapon through the passenger window in the direction of the White House.

  Officers searching the area spotted a black 1998 Honda Accord parked on the lawn of the United States Institute of Peace, near the ramp from Constitution Avenue to the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. A witness said he saw the driver try unsuccessfully to restart the car, then run. Inside the car was a Romanian-made Cugir SA semiautomatic rifle with a large scope.

  According to a Secret Service agent, while a Uniformed Division officer at the White House reported over his radio on Friday night that shots were being fired at the White House, “a Uniformed Division supervisor got on the radio and said to disregard that, there weren’t shots fired, it was construction in the area.” The agent notes that while there was construction in the area, “it had stopped for the night, and what that officer initially said was right on.”

  No action was taken until five days later. That was when the FBI, pursuing the shooting, found a bullet hole in a window on the south side of the White House, confirming the uniformed officer’s report on Friday night. The slug had pierced the historic exterior glass, but ballistic glass installed behind that glass stopped the round. The FBI found several other bullet impact points on the south side of the building on or above the second floor.

  At least one of the bullets recovered at the White House matched the ammunition and nine spent cartridges found in the Honda, according to an affidavit an FBI agent filed the next day with the U.S. District Court in Washington. It supported an arrest warrant for Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, the owner of the abandoned Honda.

  A month earlier, before leaving his home in Idaho Falls, Idaho, Ortega-Hernandez had told acquaintances that Obama was “the devil” and “the Antichrist” and said that he “needed to kill him.” The twenty-one-year-old made a video asking Oprah Winfrey to let him appear on television with her.

  “You see, Oprah, there is still so much more that God needs me to express to the world,” he says in the video. “It’s not just a coincidence that I look like Jesus. I am the modern-day Jesus Christ that you all have been waiting for.”

  On November 16, Pennsylvania state police arrested Ortega-Hernandez at a motel in Indiana, Pennsylvania. He was charged with attempting to assassinate the president and pleaded not guilty. As it happened, both Obamas were out of town when the shooting occurred. The Secret Service never explained to the public why it had taken the agency five days to recognize that the White House had been shot at.

  A far more embarrassing incident took place on February 17, 1974, when U.S. Army private first class Robert K. Preston stole an Army helicopter from Fort Meade, Maryland, and landed on the South Lawn at 9:30 P.M.

  Instead of firing at the helicopter, uniformed officers called a Secret Service official at home and asked what they should do. He told them to shoot at the helicopter. By then, the helicopter had flown away, but it returned fifty minutes later. This time, uniformed officers and Secret Service agents fired at it with shotguns and submachine guns.

  “They riddled it with bullets,” a Secret Service agent says. “When he landed [the second time], he opened the door and rolled under the helicopter. It probably saved his life. They put seventy rounds through that. There were twenty rounds in the seat. He would have been shot to death [if he had not rolled under the chopper]. It was not going to take off this time.”

  Preston, age twenty, had flunked out of flight school and perhaps wanted to prove that he did have some flying skills. He was treated for a superficial gunshot wound, sentenced to a year at hard labor, and fined $2,400. Neither President Nixon nor his wife, Pat, was at the White House at the time.

  One of the more dramatic attacks took place on October 29, 1994, at 2:55 P.M., when Francisco Martin Duran stood on the south sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue and began firing at the White House with a Chinese SKS semiautomatic rifle. As he ran toward Fifteenth Street, he paused to reload, and a tourist tackled him. Uniformed officers drew their weapons, but they held fire as more tourists grappled with Duran.

  “I wish you had shot me,” Duran told officers as they arrested him.

  When Duran began firing, a white-haired man who resembled President Clinton had just
come out of the White House. The Secret Service concluded that Duran likely thought he was firing at Clinton. Duran was convicted of attempting to assassinate the president and sentenced to forty years in prison. He was also ordered to pay the government $3,200 to repair damage to the White House, including replacing windows in the press room that were riddled with bullets.

  A previous incident, on September 11, 1994, demonstrated the White House’s vulnerability. That evening, after drinking heavily and smoking crack cocaine, Frank E. Corder found the keys to a Cessna P150 rental airplane at the Harford County Airport in Churchville, Maryland. Although the thirty-eight-year-old truck driver was not a licensed pilot, he had taken some lessons and several times had flown that particular aircraft.

  Corder stole the plane and flew to the White House. He then dove the plane directly toward it at a steep angle. While aircraft are not supposed to fly over the White House, airplanes periodically do so by mistake. As a result, the military must exercise judgment when deciding whether to shoot down aircraft that stray into White House airspace.

  Given that after 9/11 cockpits of commercial airliners were hardened, air marshals were assigned to flights, and many pilots are now armed, it is less likely that a commercial airliner would again be successfully commandeered. But since 9/11, any general aviation aircraft that violates restrictions on flights near the White House and does not respond to military commands is to be shot down by missiles or fighter aircraft.

  The Joint Operations Center at Secret Service headquarters now interfaces twenty-four hours a day with the Federal Aviation Administration and the control tower at Washington’s Reagan National Airport. Headquarters also views on radar any planes flying in the area.

  Corder’s plane crashed onto the White House lawn just south of the Executive Mansion at 1:49 A.M. and skidded across the ground. But Corder had not planned on the Sony JumboTron that had been set up for an event next to the White House on the South Lawn. The giant television screen measured 33 feet by 110 feet.

  “There’s no way he could have flown the plane into the White House,” says Pete Dowling, who was on the President’s Protective Detail at the time. “He couldn’t have navigated the plane without hitting the JumboTron. So he had to land a little bit early, and what he did was he just came to rest against one of the magnolias that was right in front of the south part of the White House.”

  Corder died of multiple massive blunt-force injuries from the crash. At the time, the White House was undergoing renovations, and President Clinton and his family were staying at Blair House, the guest house for presidents and dignitaries on Pennsylvania Avenue across the street from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and next to the White House.

  While Corder had expressed dissatisfaction with Clinton’s policies, and his third marriage had just crumbled, the Secret Service concluded that his purpose was to gain notoriety. He had told friends he wanted to “kill himself in a big way” by flying into the White House or the Capitol.

  Indeed, for many White House collars, causing mayhem at the Capitol is a backup plan if security at the White House proves too tight. Thus, Miriam Carey, a thirty-four-year-old dental hygienist from Stamford, Connecticut, first tried to drive her black Infiniti through a White House checkpoint at Fifteenth and E Streets NW at 2:12 P.M. on October 3, 2013.

  “Whoa! Whoa!” Secret Service uniformed officers shouted as an officer tried to stop her car with a bike rack barricade. Her car hit the officer, who was thrown up on the hood and then off the car. She made a U-turn and led uniformed officers on a chase that reached speeds of eighty miles per hour along Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol, where officers ordered occupants to “shelter in place.”

  As officers shot at Carey and tried to corner her at Garfield Circle, she rammed a Secret Service vehicle. She then backed up the car and drove to Constitution Avenue and Second Street NE, where a barricade operated by the Capitol Police popped up from the street and stopped her. She attempted to make another U-turn, but the car became stuck on a grassy divide. At 2:20 P.M., outside the Hart Senate Office Building, Carey was shot and killed. Officers rescued her one-year-old daughter, who was in the car with her.

  Like most White House collars, Carey was suffering from mental illness. She had postpartum psychosis and schizophrenia. She was convinced Obama had placed her home town of Stamford on lockdown and that he was communicating to her electronically.

  12

  BOYS WILL BE BOYS

  Unlike Jimmy Carter, Secret Service agents found that Ronald Reagan was the same decent, affable man in private that he appeared to be in public.

  “What you saw with President Reagan in private with us at Camp David, at the ranch in Santa Barbara, was exactly the same way he came across on TV,” says Patrick Sullivan, an agent on Reagan’s detail for the last four years of his presidency. “He was just a very nice guy who was concerned about us and our creature comforts.”

  So that agents and the staff would be home with their families on Christmas Day, President Reagan would stay at the White House for Christmas, Sullivan says. Then on December 26, “he would head out to the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, and we’d stay there for a couple of days.”

  When the Reagans made an exception one year and stayed at the ranch on Christmas Day, Reagan “came up to me and apologized to me for having to be away from my family on a holiday,” former agent Cliff Baranowski recalls. “A lot of times they would give us food from a party. I certainly did not expect it, but sometimes they insisted.”

  “When he [Reagan] first became president, he called down to the Los Angeles field office from his home there and he said, ‘I want every one of your agents up here because I want to get a picture with all of them,’ ” former agent Lloyd Bulman says. “And he had all the agents come up there and take their pictures with him, and he signed an autographed picture for them.”

  “The military and the police loved him,” Sullivan says. “When he returned to Air Force One, he would never fail to have all the police officers from his motorcade line up at the stairs of Air Force One so that he would get a handshake individually with each one of them, and they’d take a picture and then they would get those pictures out to them.”

  Reagan liked to walk around the West Wing and Eisenhower Executive Office Building and surprise employees.

  “On one occasion, an elderly lady was typing away at some document,” former agent Dennis Chomicki recalls. “The president walked in, and she was so busy working she didn’t even notice him. The president picked up the document and he says, ‘Can I look at this?’ She grabbed it out of his hand and she goes, ‘That’s classified!’ Then she looked up and saw it was the president, and she goes, ‘Oh my God, you can look at it!’ ”

  Whenever Reagan boarded Air Force One or Marine One, he made a point of greeting the pilot and copilot.

  “Carter came into the cockpit once in the two years I was on with him,” says James A. Buzzelli, an Air Force One flight engineer. “But [Ronald] Reagan never got on or off without sticking his head in the cockpit and saying, ‘Thanks, fellas,’ or ‘Have a nice day.’ He was just as personable in person as he came across to the public.”

  When Reagan was running for president the first time, he came out of his home in Bel Air to drive to his ranch. An agent noticed that he was wearing a pistol and asked what that was for.

  “Well, just in case you guys can’t do the job, I can help out,” Reagan—code-named Rawhide—replied, according to former agent Thomas Blecha. Reagan confided to one agent that on his first presidential trip to the Soviet Union in May 1988, he had carried a gun in his briefcase.

  Reagan had a routine at Rancho del Cielo, his seven-hundred-acre ranch north of Santa Barbara.

  “Reagan would get up, and he and Nancy would sit around for a while,” Sullivan says. “Then they’d go ride horses and come back and have lunch. And then he would wait until we’d change shifts at 2:30 P.M. before he’d go out and cut wood, because he knew th
at if he went out in the woods with the day shift guys, they’d be stuck out there for a couple of extra hours.”

  Reagan quietly wrote personal checks to people who had written him with hard luck stories.

  “Reagan was famous for firing up Air Force jets on behalf of children who needed transport for kidney operations,” says Frank J. Kelly, who drafted presidential messages. “These are things you never knew about. He never bragged about it. I hand-carried checks for four thousand or five thousand dollars to people who had written him. He would say, ‘Don’t tell people. I was poor myself.’ ”

  While Reagan liked to look for the best in people, he was not a choirboy. On one occasion, he gave a speech at Georgetown University, and as the motorcade drove down M Street to return to the White House, Reagan noticed a man in a crowd.

  “Fellows, look,” he said to his agents. “A guy over there’s giving me the finger, can you believe that?”

  Reagan started waving back, smiling.

  “We’re going by, and he’s still waving and smiling, and he goes, ‘Hi there, you son of a bitch,’ ” former agent Chomicki remembers. Like many agents, Chomicki does dead-on impressions. He imitates Reagan’s buttery smooth delivery.

  When the news broke that Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart was having an affair with Donna Rice, Reagan was returning to the White House from an evening event.

  “We were in the elevator going up to the residence on the second floor of the White House,” says former agent Ted Hresko. “The door of the elevator was about to close, and one of the staffers blocked it. The staffer told Reagan the news about Donna Rice and Gary Hart.”