In the President's Secret Service (7 page)

When John Hinckley tried to assassinate President Reagan, the FBI’s Washington field office called on the FBI profilers for help. While the Secret Service is in charge of protecting the president, the FBI is in charge of investigating assassinations and assassination attempts.

Douglas and Ressler had identified typical characteristics of the assassin. Based on that research, Ressler told the FBI that Hinckley would have had a fantasy about being an important assassin and would have photographs of himself for the history books, records of his activities kept in a journal or a scrapbook, materials about assassinations, and audio tapes of his exploits. The agents were able to use the tips in drawing up search warrants for Hinckley’s home. They found all of the items Ressler had described.

Sometimes if would-be assassins decide security at the White House looks too tight, they try the Capitol instead. That was the path taken by Russell E. Weston, who shot up the Capitol on July 24, 1998. Weston walked into the Capitol through a doorway on the east side and shot and killed Capitol Police Officer Jacob J. Chestnut, who manned a security post there. Then Weston burst through a side door leading into the offices of Republican Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the majority whip. Weston then shot Capitol Police Detective John M. Gibson, who returned fire and wounded the assailant.

The two Capitol Police officers died. Republican Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, a medical doctor, raced across the Capitol and helped save Weston’s life.

Weeks earlier, Weston had called the Secret Service in Montana, where he lived. He spoke with agent Norm Jarvis, claiming he was John F. Kennedy’s illegitimate son and was entitled to share in the Kennedy family trusts. Jarvis let him ramble on.

“I asked if he was being threatened by anybody in the government,” Jarvis recalls. “Did he have any feelings towards the president? What was getting him upset at this time? Because psychotics have these episodes. Suddenly something sparks them, and they get wound up.”

Weston did not express any anger toward the president, who at the time was Bill Clinton. But years earlier, he had penned a non-threatening but disturbing letter to the president, and as a result, Jarvis’s predecessor in Montana interviewed him. While that agent, Leroy Scott, concluded then that Weston did not represent a threat to the president, he established a relationship with the man, as good agents do.

“Weston would call and speak to Leroy now and then whenever he was upset about something,” Jarvis says. “He was an on-call counselor, if you will. We acquire pet psychos along the way during a career. You’d get a call from another agent from somewhere in the country once in a while looking for background information. It was not uncommon for repeat psych cases to carry an agent’s business card with them. They would usually produce those cards at some point during an interview if they had a repeat episode.”

After the shooting at the Capitol, Secret Service agents discovered a tape Weston had made of his conversation with Jarvis, and the agent eerily got to review his own performance. In retrospect, he wouldn’t have done anything differently. After the shooting, Weston was committed to a federal mental health facility near Raleigh, North Carolina.

If an individual causes a disruption at the White House, Secret Service agents detain the person and interview him at the field office at Thirteenth and L Streets NW in Washington or at a Metropolitan Police station. Agents would never bring them anywhere near the White House. Yet in his book,
The Way of the World: A Story of Truth
and Hope in an Age of Extremism
, Ron Suskind relates a story about Usman Khosa, a Pakistani national who graduated from Connecticut College.

As Suskind tells it, on July 27, 2006, Khosa was leisurely strolling by the White House as he was “fiddling” with his iPod, which was playing tunes in Arabic. Suddenly, Khosa found himself confronted by a “large uniformed officer” who lunged at him.

“The backpack!” the officer yelled as he pushed Khosa against the gates in front of the nearby treasury building and ripped off the man’s backpack. Other Secret Service uniformed officers swarmed him. “Another officer on a bicycle arrives from somewhere and tears the backpack open, dumping its contents on the sidewalk,” Suskind writes breathlessly in his first chapter.

The Secret Service then allegedly escorted Khosa, who now works for the International Monetary Fund, through one of the perimeter gates and onto the grounds of the White House.

“No one speaks as the agents walk him behind the gate’s security station, down a stairwell, along an underground passage, and into a room—cement-walled box with a table, two chairs, a hanging light with a bare bulb, and a mounted video camera,” Suskind writes. “Even after all the astonishing turns of the past hour, Khosa can’t quite believe there’s actually an interrogation room beneath the White House, dark and dank and horrific.”

There, the frightened Khosa is asked if he is in league with “Mr. Zawahiri and his types,” referring to Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy. Meanwhile, Suskind claims, President George W. Bush is receiving an intelligence briefing one floor above.

It was, Suskind said in interviews, a “day literally in hell,” but Khosa apparently never noted the names of the officers, which were displayed on tags pinned to their shirts.

As anyone familiar with security and law enforcement knows, if a person is acting suspiciously in front of the White House, the last place the Secret Service would want to take him is inside the tightly guarded White House grounds. Such individuals may have explosive devices strapped to their bodies. Even if they were thoroughly searched, they could have deadly pathogens in their clothing. If Khosa’s tale was not implausible enough, Suskind claims that Khosa agreed to go with the Secret Service officers initially only if he could make a few calls.

“Then, I promise, I’ll go with you,” Suskind quotes him as saying.

Khosa then called the Pakistani embassy and friends and family, according to Suskind. No doubt the Secret Service trusted Khosa not to call possible co-conspirators or remotely controlled bombs to detonate them.

Rather than being “dark and dank” and illuminated with a bare lightbulb, the room under the Oval Office—W-16—is brightly lit with fluorescent lights. It’s where Secret Service agents spend their downtime. Agents use computers in the room to fill out reports. In the room, they also store formal wear they may need for an event that evening. So they can check their appearance, the room is outfitted with full-length mirrors.

Khosa declined to comment. Suskind told me that in researching the book, he spoke with a Secret Service spokeswoman, who searched records but found nothing on Khosa. Suskind quoted her as saying it is not uncommon if the individual was “in and out that we don’t find a permanent record.”

As for the question of whether the Secret Service would ever take a suspicious person into the White House, Suskind told me, “It seems like that was just a matter of convenience. It was a block from where they were questioning him for a half hour on the street.” What about explosives and pathogens? “They patted him down,” Suskind said.

When asked why he did not include in the book the fact that the Secret Service has no record of questioning and detaining Khosa, Suskind said he did not consider it “pertinent.”

Asked for comment on Suskind’s account, Edwin Donovan, assistant special agent in charge of government and public affairs at the Secret Service, told me, “We have no record of the incident or the individual referenced [Khosa].” He added, “Bringing an individual inside the White House for questioning defies standard security and protocols and safety procedures. We would not bring a ‘suspicious person,’ potential prisoner, prisoner, or any person who has not been properly vetted, onto the White House grounds.”

I
N CONTRAST TO Richard Nixon, Secret Service agents found Gerald Ford—code-named Passkey—to be a decent man who valued their service. But agents were amazed at how cheap Ford was. After he left the White House, “He would want his newspaper in the morning at hotels, and he’d walk to the counter,” says an agent on his detail. “Lo and behold, he would not have any money on him. If his staff wasn’t with him, he would ask agents for money.”

The agent remembers Ford checking in at the chic Pierre hotel in New York. A bellboy loaded his cart with the Fords’ bags and took them into their room.

“After the bellboy was through, he came out holding this one-dollar bill in front of him, swearing in Spanish,” the former agent says.

At Rancho Mirage, where Ford lived after leaving the White House, “You’d go to a golf course, and it’s an exclusive country club, and the normal tip for a caddy is twenty-five dollars to fifty dollars,” another agent says. “Ford tipped a dollar, if at all.”

On September 5, 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, twenty-six, drew a Colt .45 automatic pistol and squeezed the trigger as President
Ford shook hands with a smiling crowd outside the Senator Hotel in Sacramento, California. Bystanders said Ford was shaking hands with everyone and smiling when suddenly he turned ashen and froze as he saw a gun being raised only a few feet away.

“I saw a hand coming up behind several others in the front row, and obviously there was a pistol in that hand,” Ford said later.

Secret Service Agent Larry Buendorf had already noticed the woman moving along with the president. As Fromme pulled the trigger, Buendorf jumped in front of Ford to shield him. He then grabbed the gun and wrestled her to the ground. It was later determined that she had cocked the hammer of the gun. Fortunately, there was no bullet in the firing chamber. There were four in the gun’s magazine. Fromme later claimed she had deliberately ejected the cartridge from the weapon’s chamber, and she showed agents the cartridge at her home.

Fromme was a disciple of Charles M. Manson, who had been convicted of the ritualistic murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others. Two months before the assassination attempt, Fromme had issued a statement saying she had received letters from Manson blaming Nixon for his imprisonment.

Just seventeen days after this incident, Ford was leaving the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco when Sara Jane Moore, a forty-five-year-old political activist, fired a .38 revolver at him from forty feet away. At the report of the shot, Ford looked stunned. Color drained from his face, and his knees appeared to buckle.

Oliver Sipple, a disabled former U.S. Marine and Vietnam veteran, was standing next to the assailant. He pushed up her arm as the gun discharged. Although Ford doubled over, the bullet flew several feet over the president’s head. It ricocheted off the side of the hotel and slightly wounded a cab driver in the crowd.

Secret Service agents Ron Pontius and Jack Merchant quickly pushed Moore to the sidewalk and arrested her. As bystanders
screamed, the agents pushed the uninjured Ford into his limousine and onto the floor, covering his body with theirs.

For more than three hours, Moore had waited for Ford outside the hotel. Wearing baggy pants and a blue raincoat, she had stood with her hands in her pockets the entire time. Agents will sometimes ask people to remove their hands from their pockets, but this time, as people milled around her, agents did not notice her.

Moore is the only presidential assailant who was listed as a possible threat in the Secret Service data bank before the assassination attempt. Two days before the attempt, Moore had called the San Francisco police and said she had a gun and was considering a “test” of the presidential security system. The next morning, police interviewed her and confiscated her gun.

The police reported her to the Secret Service, and the night before Ford’s visit, Secret Service agents interviewed her. They concluded she did not pose a threat that would justify surveillance during Ford’s visit. By definition, evaluating anyone’s intentions is an inexact science. Indeed, the next morning, she purchased another weapon.

Agents ask themselves, “Did that interview trigger it?” a Secret Service agent says. “By giving them a feeling of importance, we may prompt them to think, ‘I better follow through.’ The rational person would say, ‘Holy s—. I almost got arrested.’”

The following month, another incident convinced Ford he was jinxed. His motorcade was returning to the airport on October 14, 1975, after he gave a speech at a GOP fund-raiser in Hartford, Connecticut. Motorcycle policemen were supposed to block side streets, the teams leapfrogging each other from block to block. By the time the motorcade passed a narrow street, the police officers had left. James Salamites, nineteen, barreled through the intersection on a green light in a Buick sedan and crashed into the president’s limousine.

Andrew Hutch, the Secret Service driver, swerved sharply left. The maneuver blunted the impact of the collision, but Ford was still knocked to the floor. When Ford’s car halted with a dented right front fender, Secret Service agents with guns drawn surrounded the Buick and hauled out its shaken driver.

“I looked at the other car, and looking at me is President Ford. I recognized him right away. I just couldn’t believe it,” Salamites recalls.