Standing Next To History: An Agent's Life Inside The Secret Service - Hardcover

Joseph Petro With Jeffrey Robinson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786276134 ISBN 13: 9780786276134

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2005

Synopsis

Joseph Petro served for twenty-three years as a special agent in the United States Secret Service. He spent eleven of those years guarding presidents and vice presidents; for four of them he stood by the side of Ronald Reagan. Here he provides an original and fascinating perspective on the Secret Service and the inner workings of the White House, as well as a little-seen view of world leaders.

About this title

About the Author:

After his time in the Secret Service, Joseph Petro went on to become head of global security and investigations for Citigroup. He lives in New York and Pennsylvania.

A college roommate of Joe Petro's, Jeffrey Robinson is the author of eighteen books, including the bestselling The Laundrymen. An expert on international crime, he has been a keynote speaker on the subject for the United Nations, Interpol, U. S. Customs, the FBI, and many other organizations. He appeared on Fox News, Bloomberg News, and MSNBC. He lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Standing Next to History
CHAPTER ONETAKING A BULLETIf you fail in this business, you could lose the president.At no point did anyone ever say to me, your job is to take a bullet for the president of the United States.Legend has it there's a blood oath that Secret Service agents take in which we swear to lay down our own life to save the president's. There is no such pledge, no such promise, and, maybe even more important, no such requirement. It's a myth, nothing more than part of the mystique that surrounds the Secret Service. Instead, the reality of the job--and this, perhaps, best defines the fundamental principle of the Secret Service--is to do absolutely everything possible to prevent such a decision from ever having to be made.It goes without saying that protecting the president can be dangerous, and, yes, there may be a moment when, because of where we are, getting killed is a real possibility. But police officers face that same possibility every day. So, too, firemen, soldiers, sailors, and pilots. Danger is hardly unique to the Secret Service. Because no one ever knows for sure how he or she will react in a life-threatening situation, we try to leave nothing to chance. We practice assassinations at speeches and at rallies and in motorcades, getting in and out of the car. We don't use professional drivers; we train our own agents todrive the presidential limousine because that driver is the most important person in the motorcade. Armored to our specifications, the limousine is much heavier than a regular car and a lot harder to drive. It doesn't respond the way a standard Cadillac limousine would respond. In an emergency, the driver may have to do something--break through a barricade or execute a J-turn--and even though there is always a supervisor sitting next to him, there might be a few seconds when the life of the president hangs on the driver's instinctive reaction. So we work a lot of assassination scenarios around cars, all of them authentically played out with presidential limousines and crowds and explosives, and with mock assassins firing guns.However, the classic scenario for an "attack on the principal" (AOP) is the rope line, where the president shakes hands over the simple barrier that separates him from the crowd. It's a very dangerous time, because you don't always know who's in the crowd. Even if you've controlled access by putting everyone through a metal detector--known as a magnetometer--you cannot trust the machine to pick up everything. In theory, the metal detector should spot a gun. But there's always the possibility that someone can get through with an explosive device or something simple, like a pen, with which he plans to stab the president. So you look for anomalies, for something that doesn't fit, for the man who's not smiling, for the woman who's wearing a heavy coat on a warm day, for someone who appears unusually nervous.The level of crowd emotion is always high when the president is near enough to touch, and agents need to see that emotion reflected in everyone's eyes. I would stand within a hand's reach of him, ready to grab him around the waist and yank him away, all the time looking into eyes for a stare that told me the person wasn't happy to see the president up close. And I would also be looking at hands, for the person who wasn't trying to shake hands with the president. Anyone whose hands were in his pockets was someone I needed toworry about. That's why there were agents in front of the president, and behind him, too, looking into eyes and saying to people in the crowd, "Let me see your hands, please ... . Hands, please. Let me see your hands."It's not a perfect science, but rather a technique that can be learned and perfected with practice, which is why the Secret Service teaches it and why we practice it over and over and over again. Agents on the president's detail, and on the vice president's detail, too, spend two weeks out of every two months at the Secret Service training center at Beltsville, Maryland, going through realistic situations that have been specifically designed to create instinctive reactions to a single second's madness.Although the Beltsville facility was pretty basic when I first went through there in 1971, today it is a small town--much like a movie set--with city blocks featuring façades of office buildings and hotels. They have a series of roads for motorcades and a Boeing 707 to work scenarios involving airplanes. As a supervisor I'd go out there every couple of months to train with the details. On one occasion, with an agent named Frank Larkin playing the president, I was working a rope line, exactly the way I did many times with Ronald Reagan as he shook hands with people in the crowd. Suddenly, someone started firing at us, and the crowd panicked. Instinctively, I grabbed Frank, threw him into the back of the limousine, and we took off. It's the most basic technique in the manual--called "cover and evacuate"--because it's the best thing to do. You cover the president, get him into the car, and evacuate him from the scene, leaving the shift agents to take care of the scene itself.Once we were safely out of the way, I turned around to say something to Frank, but he was sprawled across the rear seat with blood pouring out of his mouth and down the front of his suit. I froze. Having served in combat, having seen the results of shootings, having seen blood, I know about the effect of shock. In some cases it lasts for a few seconds, in some cases it lasts longer. For the most partit depends on how dramatic the shooting is and how often you've seen such things. In this case, the shock of seeing blood, which I hadn't expected, lasted only a split second. It turned out that Hollywood blood packs were the latest addition to the training. I blurted out, "You scared the hell out of me. I thought you were really hurt." That was the idea.Prior to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, the Secret Service didn't run a lot of complex assassination scenarios. But by the 1970s, we had Beltsville and were going through them regularly, training agents to act instinctively, which is not necessarily the same as doing what comes naturally. For example, most people duck when they hear gunshots. It's the predictable response of policemen and soldiers. They get down low to protect themselves before returning fire. But Secret Service agents need to do just the opposite, which is an unnatural reaction. When shots are fired, we're trained to pull our weapon, stand up straight, and return fire. Instead of protecting ourselves, we turn ourselves into a larger target. That's one reason why all of our weapons training is done standing up. We don't do any prone shooting.If you study the film footage of the Reagan assassination attempt in 1981, what you see is agents standing up while the president's military aide is diving to the ground. This is not a criticism of the army, because that's what the aide had been trained to do. He responded to his training by hitting the ground; the agents responded to theirs by standing tall. If I heard shots today, I'm sure that I would stand up, at least until I realized that's not a good thing for me to be doing at this point in my life, at which time, I hope, it wouldn't take me long to get back down.Our training put a lot of emphasis on shooting. I wasn't a particularly good shot in the navy, where I found that with automatic weapons I could just spray an area and let the weapon do the work. But I became a marksman in the Secret Service because there was so much weapons training. Agents are required to qualify with theirhandgun once a month--mine was a .357 Magnum, but the service now uses 9mm semiautomatics--and with the Uzi submachine gun and the shotgun once a quarter. Handgun qualification was done at a small range in the basement of the U.S. Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue, while the quarterly qualification was an eight-hour ordeal at Beltsville, when an agent was put through all the various judgmental courses. The best of those was called Hogan's Alley, which is a city street where pop-up targets suddenly appear and you have to shoot the bad guys and not shoot the good guys and have only have a fraction of a second to decide who's who. It's terrific training. So the Secret Service made us all good shots, which was a necessity for agents. If we ever found ourselves shooting into a crowd, we had to hit our target.Our sidearm wasn't the only thing we always carried. There was a speed loader for the revolver, giving us more bullets, the radio and the famous earpiece, an armored vest--all agents were required to wear the vest whenever we were with a protectee--and handcuffs. All agents were required to have them, too, although I admit that when I was with the president, I never bothered. I figured that if he and I found ourselves in a position where I needed to handcuff someone, we were in the wrong place and needed to get out of there fast.Another important aspect of Secret Service training is medical emergencies, which pose the highest risk to the president. We become experts in "ten-minute medicine." We learn to stabilize someone for ten minutes because, by design, wherever we travel with the president, we are never more than ten minutes away from professional medical attention. Whether the emergency is a heart attack or a stroke, a shooting, a broken leg, or an automobile accident, we train to keep someone alive for ten minutes. We can't perform a tracheotomy, but we can clear an airspace to keep that person breathing until someone arrives on the scene who can perform a tracheotomy. We are trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation and on defibrillators, which weren't aseasy to use then as they are now. In my day we spent as much time cursing the dummies as we did defibrillating them. Today defibrillators are very compact and so easy to operate that we call them "agentproof." 
Legislation creating the Secret Service was on Abraham Lincoln's desk waiting to be signed on the night he was assassinated. In those days, a reported one-third of the currency then in circulation in the United States was counterfeit, and Lincoln's idea was to create the nation's first federal law-enforcement agency, housed in the Treasury Department, to protect all the financial instruments of the United States. Today, in addition to preventing counterfeiting and the theft or forging of government checks, our investigative mission includes protecting against fraud involving credit cards, computers, ATMs, and electronic transfers. Over the years, the Secret Service investigated the Teapot Dome scandal, numerous government land frauds, the machinations of the Ku Klux Klan, and espionage activities during the Spanish-American War. In 1908, the government moved nine Secret Service "operatives" out of Treasury and put them in the Justice Department. This new corps of federal agents worked directly for the attorney general and would eventually become the nucleus of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.The most significant change in the mission of the Secret Service came in 1901. In the aftermath of the assassination of President William McKinley--the third president to be killed in thirty-six years--Congress directed the Secret Service to protect the president. Today, protection is the Secret Service's primary responsibility. In addition to the president and vice president, the service protects their spouses and their immediate families, former officeholders, and visiting heads of state. Following the Robert Kennedy assassination, which took place during the 1968 primary election campaign, the mission was expanded to protect presidential candidates as well.Because the president can order the Secret Service to protectanyone under threat, there have been times when we've protected cabinet officers, the national security advisor, and the White House chief of staff. On a couple of occasions, after threats were made against Senator Ted Kennedy, President Reagan ordered us to protect him. We have also protected the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Gutenberg Bible, and the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, when it was exhibited in the United States in 1962-1963.It's important to note that the protection afforded the president and the vice president is statutory. They have no choice in the matter. They cannot simply decide one day that they don't want to be protected. I suppose a president could say, I don't like this particular agent, and transfer him out, but that doesn't really happen--although I've heard stories about Lyndon Johnson getting angry with agents and shouting at them, "You're fired." Many of those same agents were fired by Johnson five and six times.In the end, the Secret Service can only provide as much protection as the protectee is willing to accept. How close in we get, or how far away we stand, depends entirely on circumstance. I joined President Reagan's detail two years after he'd been shot, at a time when everyone was extremely concerned about him. We raised the bar to protect him, and he went along with that, sometimes to the point of actually overriding the advice of his staff.For instance, when it was announced that he would address the United Nations in September 1986, the staff decided that after the president's speech, he should walk from the podium into the General Assembly and sit with the U.S. delegation during the next speech. From a public relations viewpoint, it was a fine idea. But from a security viewpoint, it was quite the opposite. We had no control over who would be in the room, nor could we put magnetometers at the doors, which meant that anybody could come in carrying anything they wanted, including a weapon. And we had reason for concern: Only five months before, President Reagan had ordered thebombing of Libya, and the U.S. delegation sat almost directly in front of the Libyan delegation. There was simply no way we were going to place him in that kind of danger. But the staff was insistent that this could be done safely and refused to accept our evaluation that it could not. We went round and round over this, until, finally, it became necessary to see the president.We didn't have a scheduled appointment that day, so Bill Henkel and I stood outside the Oval Office and waited for a break between meetings. Vice President George Bush and chief of staff Don Regan were there when we walked in. The president wasn't expecting to see me. He turned to Regan with a worried look on his face. "What's this meeting about?"Regan told him. "A security issue."Immediately, the president said, "You already know how I'm going to come out on this one."Bill explained the situation, and I told him why we were very much against his sitting with the U.S. delegation. "With diplomatic immunity, anybody can bring weapons into the General Assembly. What's more, the Libyan delegation would be right behind you."The president shrugged. "Maybe this is something George should do."Everybody laughed, and Vice President Bush said, "Sure, I'll even paint a big bull's-eye on my back."And that was the end of that. The president came down on the side of the Secret Service. He did not sit with the delegation.No, the job is not about a blood oath to stop a bullet. It's about doing everything humanly possible to avoid finding yourself in a situation where you have to make that decision. It's about always controlling the environment and wrapping the president in a cocoon of safety. That begins with our "three perimeter" philosophy....

About this edition

• Publisher: Thorndike Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0786276134
• ISBN 13: 9780786276134
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 503