In 1998, for the first time in the agency’s existence, the men and women of the Secret Service found themselves pitted against their protectee. In many ways, it seemed that the Secret Service could hold the key to determining whether President Bill Clinton would be impeached.
The chain of events that led to the agency’s torturous involvement in Clinton’s impeachment investigations began in tragedy. On July 20, 1993, Vince Foster, one of the loyal members of the “Arkansas mafia,” Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer and longtime close confidant, was found dead by an apparent self-inflicted gunshot in Fort Marcy Park in McLean, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington. A passerby found his body on July 20 at 7:40 p.m.
After finding White House credentials on the body, US Park Police immediately contacted the FBI, which joined the investigation. Simultaneously, the Park Police notified the Secret Service that “one of your guys,” a White House pass holder, had died and the service should be on alert. Whenever a pass holder was in jeopardy or the victim of a crime, there was the concern that the crime might be part of a larger threat against the executive branch.
Foster’s office was located on the second floor of the West Wing, just down the hall from Hillary Clinton’s West Wing office. Though a first lady typically has only an office in the East Wing, the Clintons were famous for mixing personal and professional matters. The night of Foster’s suicide, the FBI requested that the Secret Service post a sentry, an officer, on his office door until their arrival.
Uniformed Division officer Hank O’Neill was posted to make sure no one went in or out. FBI investigators needed the office to be as Foster had left it, so they could investigate the space and ascertain if there was evidence relevant to their investigation into Foster’s death. Because of attorney-client privilege, the FBI could not look at any files deemed personal. This was another example of the Clintons’ mixing personal and professional records and communications. Foster was involved in the Whitewater case, which the FBI was investigating, and now the Park Police and FBI were investigating his death. That also presented a constitutional conflict, as Foster’s files were confidential to the Clintons under attorney-client privilege.
Maggie Williams, the first lady’s chief of staff, along with White House aide Patsy Thomasson, approached UD officer O’Neill, trying to gain access to the office. Williams, in an account she gave in July 1995, two years after the suicide, testified that she had been distraught and was merely searching for a suicide note. She said she remained in Foster’s office for several minutes, wallowing irrationally in grief.
According to O’Neill’s testimony in the same hearings, Williams threatened his job, his career, and more. The officer succumbed to the pressure and allowed her access but kept a log of anything she removed from the office, which turned out to be several files. He logged the removal and notified the UD Control Center. Williams accused O’Neill of lying to Congress. The Uniformed Division officer tried to remain steadfast in his version of the story, while not speculating why Williams was providing a completely different account. The senators grilled O’Neill but went easy on Williams. That was the first time a Secret Service employee had been compelled by subpoena to testify against a member of a president’s administration in an open hearing.
Though Williams testified that she had not removed the files, she admitted that they did exist and had somehow ended up in the White House’s private residence with Hillary Clinton. What has never before been revealed, garnered from exclusive interviews during research for this book, is that after Maggie Williams first took files out of the office, against every crime scene investigation protocol, Officer O’Neill’s post was not manned by another officer after he went off duty. On the morning after the suicide, Secret Service officials contacted the agency’s Uniformed Division Control Center. At the behest of the Clinton administration, those officials ordered that the alarms to Foster’s office in the West Wing be temporarily turned off and that no logs be kept of the doors opening and closing. During that window of time, the office was plundered of additional unknown documents, according to Secret Service sources stationed in the control center.
One former Secret Service employee involved in the incident reported to me that he had informed the FBI investigators about it when they had interviewed him. Despite their stricken faces, nothing had come of it. As the source put it, “I always figured I’d get questioned about the alarms or get subpoenaed later, but nothing came. It was weird. I don’t think they knew what to do with the information I had given them. They were shocked. I supposed they didn’t have anything else to go on but what I told them. At least that’s what I hoped. I certainly wasn’t going to make my own federal case out of it.”
Everybody had questions about the incident. In 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno named a special prosecutor, Robert Fiske, to investigate Foster’s death, a continuance of the initial alleged bribery scandal that came to be called “Whitewater.” The special prosecutor law was soon changed by Congress, resulting in the creation of the Office of Independent Counsel (OIC), headed by a circuit judge named Kenneth Starr.
And so began a battle of wills among the presidency, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Secret Service. It was a struggle that nearly tore the Secret Service apart all at once but instead is integral to the slow collapse happening today.
By this point in the Clinton administration, the Secret Service had jumped into normalizing the Clintons’ inappropriate—perhaps even criminal—behavior with both feet. The unofficial rationale for this was that it was the agency’s job to protect the president and his staff and secure the area but not to police the administration—even as it policed all other suspected criminals throughout the nation. But that presented two paradoxes: First, how can a security agency protect its protectees from themselves, especially when the protectees continually seek to systematically destroy the protocols that ensure protection? The agency had decided to err on the side of blind loyalty—and that was nearly its undoing. The second paradox: How can a law enforcement agency maintain its integrity, say in policing counterfeiting, while admittedly having compromised integrity in the area of protection?
At times the Secret Service leadership seemed to believe that the Clintons were invincible. The view from the front lines, however, was that something, somehow was bound to ensnare them. It was simply a matter of the right scandal. But the Secret Service, thus far, had done a good job of keeping itself out of the various investigations into the Clintons. It had even managed to escape implication in “Chinagate,” the 1996 US campaign finance controversy in which campaign contributions to the Democratic Party from Chinese shell companies had allegedly been used to buy access for Chinese goods to be imported into the United States. The Secret Service knowingly allowed Chinese generals, disguised in civilian clothes, to meet administration personnel at the White House and logged them as “business guests” at the administration’s request so as to avoid transparency. The Secret Service also willfully ignored the contents of the generals’ paper bags brought to those meetings. The administration would later be accused by journalists of accepting bribes, though investigators never discovered a specific enough foothold to subpoena any Secret Service or White House personnel about the case. Then, when attorneys for Paula Jones, who alleged that she had been sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas, tried to subpoena Secret Service personnel, the judge refused. As with President Richard Nixon and Watergate, it looked as though the Secret Service might pull through unimplicated.
If the Secret Service leadership felt that the Clintons were invincible, the Clintons themselves felt that they were, too. Secret Service Director John Magaw (seventeenth director, 1992–93) and his successor, Eljay Bowron (1993–97), never anticipated that the service would become involved in those investigations, so they had no contingencies in place. Directors Magaw and Bowron’s cult mentality, which enforced the belief that the Secret Service was invincible, blinded them from anticipating the strategy of the wily OIC investigator Ken Starr.
The US capital has always been a close-knit network, and somehow a claim reached Starr’s office that President Clinton was having an affair with a twenty-one-year-old White House intern turned employed mistress. OIC staffers set a trap for President Clinton. They strategized that if they challenged the arrogant president, got him to sign an affidavit, and then proved that he had committed perjury, they could put his entire defense in peril as his integrity would be destroyed. The fallout could endanger his presidency politically and could potentially lead to impeachment and even jail.
The trap sprung when the president swore on a legal affidavit that he was not having an affair with an intern. But he could not help but double down, and he claimed he had never even been alone in the same room with her. Clinton, a lawyer himself, fell right into the trap.
On June 6, 1997, the Secret Service welcomed Lewis Merletti as its nineteenth director. Merletti had been raised old-school Catholic. He had served as a Green Beret in the Vietnam War and earned a Bronze Star. He had joined the Philadelphia field office of the Secret Service before moving to DC. He had soon become part of the service’s Counter Assault Team (CAT) and later a CAT team leader. From CAT, he had joined the PPD. He had gone on to become the special agent in charge (SAIC) of President Clinton’s PPD, the position that usually leads to the directorship of the Secret Service. As lead agent of the president’s detail while the president visited Manila, Philippines, Director Merletti saved the president’s life by exerting the override authority and rerouting the motorcade based on some sudden intelligence reports. The hunch was confirmed when a special forces group did indeed discover that a major terrorist organization intended to assassinate the president and had planted a large bomb under a bridge on the initial motorcade route. Director Merletti was an incredible agent and a hero.
Director Merletti was the kind of guy the American people and everyone in the Secret Service would want with them in a firefight. He was damn good at what he did: soldiering, fighting, leading soldiers into battle, and protecting the president’s life. President Clinton seemed intimidated by, almost standoffish with, most military personnel, especially those in uniform. Many in the administration who had been carried over from the presidential campaign more or less shared the president and first lady’s aloof attitude toward military and law enforcement uniforms. Vice President Gore once gave a pep talk to one of his children saying something to the effect that the child had better do well in school lest the child end up like “one of those guys,” referring to the agents on the vice president’s protection detail. Despite the release of the young Bill Clinton’s correspondence with his draft board outing him as a Vietnam War draft dodger, Clinton and Merletti, the Vietnam War veteran, connected well.
The reasons behind the departure of Bowron, Merletti’s predecessor, were clear only to Bowron himself. Theories emerged among Secret Service personnel that Bowron had known of the impending crisis and had not wanted to lead the agency through the fight that was bound to happen. What is known is that Bowron had withheld key information about the exposure of the Secret Service, revealing it to Merletti only after Merletti decided how to defend the agency from the investigations that later consumed it.
On January 17, 1998, less than seven months after Merletti became director, the Drudge Report website broke its now infamous story headlined in all capitals: “NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN. BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT.” It was a few days before anyone from the Secret Service would look at the revelations and realize that the agency had been deeply involved throughout. The Drudge Report’s exclusive story implicated the Secret Service directly. The choice was immediately clear: either the service could absolve the president of wrongdoing, or it could seal his fate.
The Drudge Report revealed that the president had begun his affair with the woman when she was merely twenty-one years old. The Secret Service had issued her an Old Executive Office Building pass while she was an intern, which she had used for her liaisons with the president. Her every visitation had been screened and logged by the Secret Service. The Secret Service had logged her into its system as a visitor when she came to see President Clinton late at night. The haste with which the Secret Service issued her a permanent pass was especially suspicious when she suddenly became an employee in the West Wing.
The Secret Service had cleared her to access anywhere in the complex except the private living quarters, and she could see what the president and chief of staff Leon Panetta saw in the West Wing, even operational intelligence. It didn’t take Ken Starr long to lock onto the Secret Service as a potential font of evidence.
The second wallop for Director Merletti and the Secret Service came just over a week later. At midnight on Monday, January 26, 1998, the Dallas Morning News dropped its exclusive story—using a single, uncorroborated “close” source—that said a Secret Service agent was with Starr and “ready to testify.” The story was picked up by the New York Post, whose headline read “Sexgate Stunner, Secret Service Agent to Testify: I Saw Them Do It.” But only two days later, the story was dead. As the Washington Post headlined a story by its media reporter Howard Kurtz: “Dallas Paper’s Story Traveled Far Before Being Shot Down.”
Kurtz wrote that although the Dallas paper had reported “that investigators had spoken with a Secret Service agent who was prepared to testify that he saw President Clinton and the former White House intern in a compromising situation,” which was, “to put it mildly, explosive stuff,” it hadn’t lasted long. “Hours later,” Kurtz reported, “sometime after midnight, the Morning News retracted the story. The piece, published in the paper’s first edition and posted on its World Wide Web site, was declared inoperative in a subsequent Web announcement.”
Inside the Secret Service at the time, the view was that a mystery agent had indeed volunteered information; what’s more, Merletti thought so, too. Starr was already probing at the agency.
Merletti, however, was determined that all Secret Service employees, both those still employed and those who had retired, stand fast and tow the “secret” line. Those of us on the ground felt his thinking was that patriotic Americans would see it that way, too—that protecting the presidency (and by extension the Secret Service brand) was essential. This was the mentality of the Counter Assault Teams and the PPD, where Merletti had cut his teeth.
As the Secret Service’s leaders realized that their legacy was threatened by the developing “Sexgate” scandal, Director Merletti put his plan into action without strategic pause or objective reflection on the service’s history. His advisers never entertained contrarian ideas or developed alternative methods of handling the situation. Merletti hadn’t even had time in his career or his directorship to fully learn his agency’s history. Had he done so, things might have been different. He should have known what Starr knew: that there was no basis for “secrecy” in the “Secret Service” grounded in legal statute or precedent. The Secret Service was no more secret than the FBI or DEA. Furthermore, he had never discussed the scandals with frontline officers or agents who had direct knowledge of the events. He simply forged ahead, unaware of the extent of the agency’s exposure.
On top of this, the Secret Service’s chief legal counsel gave Merletti bad advice, pointing out that Starr was a former colleague and as such would probably be friendly and amenable to keeping the service out of it. That was a grave error and led Merletti to misjudge Starr’s intentions badly.
Merletti sat down with Attorney General Janet Reno, along with others including Deputy Attorney General—and future AG—Eric Holder. He made the case that the Secret Service faced serious threats every day, and in order to protect the president from them, they needed his trust that it would remain silent. His message was clear: if Secret Service personnel are forced to testify, the president will be forced to push them away, resulting in more danger to him. Under Director Merletti’s direction, the Secret Service made the case that if the agency had an obligation to testify against the president, the president would be incentivized to push away the Secret Service, and the resulting distance could endanger the president; it even referenced President Kennedy’s assassination. Despite being historically inaccurate, that deeply emotional view was shared widely throughout the Department of Justice.
The Secret Service legal counsel, with input from senior Secret Service and Treasury officials, created a legal notion that was pure extrapolation with no basis in actual law, calling it “the executive protective function privilege.” It was based on the legal privileges given to spouses to avoid testifying against each other.
When Merletti made the case to Starr, Starr rushed him through his presentation and then came to what was apparently his true purpose for the meeting: questioning Merletti about the president’s relationship with the young intern. Merletti felt frustrated, and Deputy AG Holder suggested that he try again. Merletti made the pitch again, and Starr once again brought the discussion back to his target.
At that point, Merletti realized that he needed backup. He called all living former Secret Service directors into his office and included a special guest, former First Lady Detail Agent Clint Hill, who had jumped onto the back of President Kennedy’s limousine in Dallas all those years ago. Merletti still felt that invoking the Kennedy assassination would help his case. With that audience, it worked. Every former director backed Merletti’s play. Each corroborated the director’s view that the Secret Service had been, would be, and should be invisible to investigations into the president.
In that meeting, former director Bowron informed Merletti for the first time of a serious problem: Bowron had established a conflicting precedent during his tenure. During the Rose Law Firm investigation into the first lady and other investigations, Bowron had agreed to let agents volunteer to speak with Ken Starr if they had direct knowledge related to Starr’s query. Bowron declared before his successor and all the predecessors present that the only regret he had in his entire time as director is that he had not resigned right then. Starr had not disclosed that fact to Merletti, either.
Hill, in the meeting and then again afterward, made sure Merletti understood the terms: if Secret Service employees testified, future presidents would die.
Agent Clint Hill was a hero for his actions in trying to save President Kennedy’s life. He had not hesitated to try to save the president and first lady that day in Dallas. But he had been helpless, not because of a lack of protective privilege but because of a series of strategic failures by Secret Service leaders, the PPD, and President Kennedy. Agent Hill suffered from “survivor’s guilt.” But he also suffered from something largely unexplained and never before studied in the academic psychological community: “protector’s guilt,” a consequence of losing a protectee with whom you spent more time than your own family. Merletti took advantage of that to make an emotional and personal argument to shield the Secret Service from Starr’s investigation.
In Ken Gormley’s book The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, Merletti was quoted as saying “If there’s a crime, you’re not going to have to ask us about it. We’re going to come forward and tell you about it. But if you have an investigation, then you’re going to have to investigate it otherwise. Because it’s compromising Secret Service trust and confidence, which then compromises proximity, and it’s all over.”
But that view meant that the Secret Service was not “worthy of trust and confidence” to all Americans but to only one American: the president. When Merletti made the decision to oppose allowing Secret Service employees to testify regarding anything they witnessed that could hurt the president, I believe he sacrificed the Secret Service’s soul.
That pivotal choice of allegiance was crucial for the Secret Service. The president it sought to protect did not return the favor. When President Clinton doubled down on his perjury, the director and the entire Secret Service were forced into an untenable position.
Cracks soon appeared in the Secret Service’s stonewalling efforts. In February 1998, a retired Uniformed Division officer named Lewis C. Fox, known as the “Silver Fox” to colleagues, watched a television broadcast about the investigation at a Pennsylvania diner. He made several comments about his knowledge of the case to other patrons, and they found their way to the news media. Soon it was reported that a “Secret Service guard” knew firsthand that the Drudge story was true, that he knew that the president had indeed been alone in the Oval Office with the intern in question, and that the president had lied. Starr now had another potential source—and unfortunately for Merletti, since Fox was retired, the Secret Service counsel had no leverage to use on him.
Then things got worse. Starr subpoenaed a former PPD agent from President Clinton’s protective detail whom I will call “Bud.” Bud was already internally famous for the way he’d left the Secret Service. After he had martial problems that spilled over into his work and caused disturbances, the Secret Service cut him a deal, probably trying to make the story go away. He had resigned and ended up with a higher-paying job in the private sector, presumably while he collected a retirement settlement negotiated with the service that included a positive recommendation letter. The Secret Service had swept Bud’s story under the rug to protect its own name, but now he was in Starr’s sights and could reveal a story that was a lot more embarrassing than his own adultery and corruption.
And with the “Silver Fox” in hand, it was only a matter of time before Starr discovered the full value of the Uniformed Division. UD officers manned the personnel and vehicle entry and exit gates on the fence line. There was always something going on at the White House, and though the agents protected individuals, the security of the White House hummed because of the committed work of the Uniformed Division. Among their postings throughout the entire White House, the UD officers saw everything that was going on. Starr soon discovered that he had stumbled into a gold mine.
Secret Service counsel advised everyone to “hold tight” as the subpoenas for specific UD officers and their physical materials started flying out of Secret Service headquarters fax machines.
Starr first subpoenaed the UD post logbooks and Workers and Visitors Entry System (WAVES) records. Getting nervous, Merletti offered Starr a deal: He asked Starr not to probe Secret Service leadership or any agents on the Presidential Protective Division, convincing him that they would be too loyal to their protectee and would go to jail to avoid testifying. If Starr would leave them alone, Merletti would provide Starr with access to UD officers stationed at the White House and any others who had had “run-ins” and “incidents” with the intern in question.
Starr had been duped and missed an opportunity to gather key evidence. The PPD agents were the ones who were with the president at all times and could have given him what he needed. What’s more, Merletti had been bluffing when he had said they would fight to avoid testifying—though some might, there were many who would not have done so. As for Bud, the former PPD agent, he was brought back under the Secret Service’s legal protection as part of the deal.
Several Uniformed Division officers—including me—were aware that they were likely to be targeted because of what they knew. Those officers notified their supervisors and managers in anticipation of the firestorm to come. The middle managers at first dismissed their concerns, but within two hours, we were taken off our posts and told to report to Secret Service headquarters for a legal debriefing the following morning. Everyone’s minds and stomachs turned over as we thought about what would come next. Where would our loyalties lie? At first there was a collective sense of denial, dread, anger, and frustration. After everything we had witnessed on the job, we wondered: Is this the scandal that will either prove the Clintons invincible, as many believed, or could it be the one that will finally lead to their downfall?
When my fellow officers and I sat down with the Secret Service attorneys, the lawyers tried to gain our trust, but it soon became clear that their goal was simply to get us to sign on to the agency’s plan. To complicate things, none of the officers there could afford private lawyers, so the Secret Service legal counsel would represent us, as long as we “cooperated.” As for the alternative, if any officer decided to contact the OIC individually, it was heavily insinuated that his security clearances (necessary to keep our job) would be revoked.
Agreeing to play ball and accept Secret Service representation carried another important benefit: under the deal worked out among the Secret Service, OIC, and DOJ, Starr agreed that any subpoenas served to officers being represented by Secret Service lawyers would have to be faxed to the agency. That was important to the officers themselves, who didn’t want to be served at work or at home.
The officers in the meeting began pushing back, and the lawyers only made things worse with a critical misunderstanding. In what they apparently viewed as a favor, the attorneys told us we were being pulled from all overtime duty, effective immediately. Many of us depended on the overtime pay to support our families, so of course we objected—but the lawyers were unmoved.
It was clear that the lawyers assumed President Clinton’s professions of innocence to be true, while the officers in the room did not. When the lawyers implied that the officers might be placing the agency in legal risk if they suggested in testimony that the president was not being truthful, the room erupted in grunts and gasps. I saw many fellow officers shift their body language at the suggestion, and the lawyers were clearly on their toes. The officers also recognized something the lawyers did not: that their own security clearances were actually higher than those of the attorneys, meaning that what the officers could share with their supposed “representatives” was limited.
The lawyers clearly were not expecting the barrage of questions we threw at them. What was our personal risk if we refused to answer the OIC’s questions? How wide would the scope of the investigation go? Would Starr’s net catch other instances of fraternization, including the affairs between Secret Service personnel and Clinton staffers? The lawyers were taken aback; they’d had no idea of the Pandora’s box the UD officers would open for the president, Starr, and the agency. But we had been on the front lines and knew what had been going on in Clinton world for years.
From the first meeting, it was clear to the Uniformed Division officers that we were being set up. Our choice was stark: we were either going to be accused of criminally withholding information from a federal investigation by the DOJ and FBI or be accused of criminally divulging sensitive information that was proprietary to the president and Secret Service. Saying the wrong thing could result in any of us losing his job or even going to federal prison for a very long time.
The UD officers were already locked in a prison of silence. In the meetings it was made clear that we could not discuss their situations with anyone, including coworkers, superiors, and family members, and, of course, the press. Furthermore, the Secret Service lawyers were federal employees themselves and therefore no attorney-client privilege existed between the officers and the agency’s legal counsel. If we officers decided to cooperate with the Secret Service legal counsel and their legal agenda, we would have to decide for ourselves what was relevant to both the OIC and FBI and whether any bit of information could still be classified by the Secret Service. Police officers are not trained to be their own lawyers, and such decisions are beyond their training—but one false move could mean big consequences.
On top of all that, we were required to work our posts while this was going on. Adding that stress to the natural stress of the job made the work unbearable, and morale plummeted—all because the president had not been truthful at the outset.
After the tense atmosphere of the group meetings, Secret Service attorneys decided to interview all the officers individually to assess their legal exposure and relevance to the case. Starr was conducting interviews of his own, sitting down with disgruntled former service employees. He needed to find agents and officers who remembered that they were law enforcement officers first and foremost and would cooperate with the criminal investigation.
The OIC lawyers studied a diagram of the West Wing. They needed to learn: Who controls access to the West Wing lobby? Who secures the West Wing? Several Uniformed Division officers’ names kept popping up. Among them were one officer I’ll call “Musket,” another I’ll call “Brett,” an officer named Sandy Verner—and me.
Soon enough, the fax machine in Secret Service headquarters in Washington began buzzing with subpoenas.
During President Clinton’s time in office, Sandy and I filled different shifts on the E-6 post, the last stationary post before the Oval Office. Along with our partners, we secured the area until the president arrived, while he was in the Oval Office, and after he and his staff departed. It was the responsibility of the E-6 post to know who was in the West Wing and that they were permitted to be there.
When I stood that post, I had turned away the intern, Monica Lewinsky, on numerous occasions for having a pass that did not allow her to be there. She was clearly making a point of crossing paths with the president by befriending presidential and White House staff, as well as other officers and agents. She even went so far as to openly flirt with them, which was conduct unbecoming the grounds. She concocted seemingly innocuous errands and elaborate excuses, even so far as to say she had tried to enter the West Wing to use the restroom. She found that some Secret Service personnel were more easily swayed than others.
When I asked Nancy Hernreich in White House Operations about that suspicious behavior, she called it a “mentorship.” But there was nothing about a mentorship that required the intern to talk with the president over a secure emergency military hotline, to flirt with him in the hallway (even once flashing her read end), or to spend an extended period of time alone with him during a government shutdown. I was witness to all of those incidents, and after one such episode I even helped dispose of a semen-stained hand towel for a frustrated Navy steward and, on another occasion, discussed throwing out equally sordid tissues. But one of those incidents had nothing to do with the one mistress in question but, in fact, with another.
At one point, I suggested to Evelyn Lieberman, the president’s deputy chief of staff, that the intern be removed from the West Wing for good. Gone for a while, she soon returned as a permanent employee, through a suspiciously expedited process. The president was going to have it his way, no matter what. I soon transferred off of E-6 as a result of my discomfort in working so close to the president. I had realized that many people around the president seemed to care more for the president’s responsibilities than he did.
Though Officer “Musket” spent most of his time as a Uniformed Division counter sniper, the one time he rotated in for some overtime work at E-6 was more trouble than even a counter sniper could handle. While trying to inform the president of an important phone call on hold, the officer and Harold Ickes, President Clinton’s other deputy chief of staff, walked into the president’s study to find him and his young female friend in a “compromising position.”
Officer “Brett” held a fixed post over the West Wing lobby. On a number of instances he had to run interference to prevent Lewinsky from going to see the president on the directions of his secretary Betty Currie, because Clinton was busy with another mistress, Eleanor Mondale. Upon receiving this news, the one mistress would often become noticeably emotional at having to wait for another.
Currie called on me to attempt to fix another similar incident. In one instance the Uniformed Division officer at the White House northwest gate had told Lewinsky something to the effect of “You’ll have to wait. He’s with his other piece of ass.” She then called the president using the pillar phone at the northwest gate, calling the president directly on the special coded dropline. The officers described her as “hostile,” and recognized that this emotionally compromised person should be kept away from the president. Worse still, the president’s secretary asked who was responsible for the mistress at the northwest gate finding out about the other and “wanted someone [an officer] fired over this.”
That was the reality for the officers on the ground, yet the Secret Service leadership and attorneys still remained committed to their charade. They briefed the officers on the “executive function privilege.” The officers were led to believe that they had to invoke that “privilege” when answering any OIC question that directly involved the president. As a result, the frustrated OIC lawyers asked about the incidents that indirectly involved the president.
Other Secret Service personnel floating into and out of those meetings turned out not to be lawyers at all. Officer “Brett” once sat down with the OIC investigators with someone he thought was his Secret Service lawyer, only for that person to inform “Brett” that he was just an agent assigned to the counsel’s office, whose job it was to report on everything that was said, not to give “Brett” legal advice. Another mysterious figure, who would show up for meetings and take notes, was later spotted with a pass identifying her as someone who worked in the Old Executive Office Building. None of that made the officers under scrutiny any more comfortable.
As the officers began to be interviewed by OIC, they immediately ran into problems. Answering even the simplest questions about the layout of the West Wing based on a tourist map, and details of security procedures they used every day, proved to be impossible—doing so would have given away detailed protected information that the officers were not authorized to divulge. The tourist map was propaganda to thwart attackers.
The officers believed in being “worthy of trust and confidence,” but they were stuck in a quagmire. They believed the motto referred to following the law and preventing disclosure of tactical information that attackers could use, known as Operational Security (OPSEC). But it also amounted to being “worthy of trust and confidence” to the American people. When the officers testified that indeed the president had lied, they wanted their word to be sufficient alone. They were willing to tell the truth, but OIC, DOJ, FBI, and Secret Service personnel were tearing them apart, wanting to know every detail of how the officers knew what they did—which couldn’t be done without violating OPSEC.
FBI agents threatened to arrest and prosecute the officers for withholding evidence. But the officers faced the same threat from their own agency if they disclosed, deliberately or not, any protected tactical knowledge. The Secret Service maintained its authority as the issuing agency for whatever was considered tactical or strategic and any bit of knowledge that could be considered classified.
Meanwhile, within the Secret Service culture, in locker rooms, around water coolers, and on what little jobs the subpoenaed officers were reduced to working, coworkers heavily insinuated that the subpoenaed officers should feign amnesia. Though plausible deniability and feigning poor or faulty memory could have worked, the FBI was threatening arrests at a moment’s notice for doing so; in any case, all each officer truly wanted to do was the right thing.
Starr expected the pressure to get us all to open up and spill the beans. Merletti expected the pressure to create a collective stonewall. There seemed no way out.
“Brett” was even subjected to a bizarre interaction with President Clinton immediately after giving his testimony. After searching for him, the president asked about his family, wife, and kids—one on one. That was so bizarre it could only have been a form of intimidation.
As officers were subjected to investigations and interrogations under immense pressure, the spigot slowly opened. Many repeated what they had rehearsed under the Secret Service–backed attorneys: “On the advice of my counsel, without revealing any privileged information…,” so as to dodge the question. Asked why a particular question was privileged, the officers couldn’t say. All of the main players—Starr, Merletti, Reno, Holder, and President Clinton—believed their pressure tactics would put them on top, but they were gambling with the legal outcomes, the officers’ careers, and the risk of an officer snapping under pressure.
Officers who received subpoenas found themselves spurned and their loyalty to their agency questioned. In one instance the FBI made a concerted effort to threaten Sandy and me with arrests. Gary Grindler, Reno’s deputy attorney general, went to bat for the two officers against the OIC’s Jackie Bennett. When the day ended early and abruptly and the frazzled officers were told to go home, Secret Service lawyers pleaded with the officers that should the FBI make good on its previous promise to arrive in the middle of the night and arrest them in front of their families, “please, whatever you do, don’t resist.” Because of the OIC’s tactics of adding pressure by leaking information to the press, the Secret Service lawyers informed the officers to expect camera crews to be there to witness the high-profile arrests. The sleepless night passed and the FBI’s threat turned out to be a bluff, if only a tactic to exhaust and break the officers. The Secret Service surely hadn’t won much favor with any of the officers it had served up.
The rift between the Secret Service leadership and the frontline personnel grew wider, and many of us lost faith entirely. To make matters worse, the leadership sought to downplay our significance by dismissing us as “guards” in the press, which only served to drive a wedge further between the Uniformed Division and the Special Agent Division that has never fully healed.
On July 9, 1998, the Baltimore Sun ran a piece headlined “Secret Service Secrets: Are They Worth Telling? Judges Rule: Testimony from Agents Is Required No Matter the Merit of the Case in Question.” The paper reported, “The ruling by a three-judge panel that Secret Service officers must testify before a grand jury… cries out for the quickest possible review by the Supreme Court next term.… It held that the Secret Service had not made a good enough argument that the personal safety of the president requires it not to snitch on him, especially since Congress had not passed a law to that effect.” It also noted that two officers, Brian Henderson and Gary Byrne, had “refused to answer 19 questions put to them by independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s lawyers” before the grand jury. Henderson, who had been stationed in the East Wing, had information about liaisons conducted by the president in the White House movie theater.
The world waited. The fate of the Clinton presidency hung in the balance. The future and culmination of the agency’s past all came down to the Supreme Court finally deciding the question over a hundred years in the making: How “secret” is the Secret Service?
On July 16, 1998, the Supreme Court made its decision and CBS News ran their story: “Rehnquist: Agents Must Testify”: “It was high noon in Washington Friday when Chief Justice William Rehnquist refused to spare President Clinton’s Secret Service protectors from testifying.… The ruling ends a bitter legal dispute and clears the way for prosecutors to question some of their last key witnesses.… President Clinton’s Secret Service protectors were at the courthouse when the ruling was handed down and have been taken into the grand jury hearing room. They arrived in a van minutes before noon, when an earlier court ruling blocking their testimony was set to expire.”
So the two agents and about a dozen officers—myself included—filed in and testified before the grand jury, answering questions directly. When the critical piece of evidence, the infamous semen-stained blue dress kept as insurance by the president’s young female friend, arrived, the case became even stronger. The president was then forced to volunteer a blood sample before that, too, was subpoenaed. The DNA from the semen on the dress was indisputable proof that the officers were telling the truth and that the president was indeed an elaborate liar who could not be trusted.
On September 9, 1998, the OIC delivered its “Starr Report” to Congress. The House of Representatives held a historic vote and impeached the president. President Clinton was then tried in the Senate. He survived, as a two-thirds majority was required and not one senator from Clinton’s own party voted guilty on either of the two charges, obstruction of justice and perjury. Clinton remained in office, but by that time, the damage to the Secret Service had been done.
The Secret Service director and agency counsel had chosen to place their own officers and their testimony under enormous and unprecedented duress, just to protect the agency’s brand. The officers had testified to the grand jury under immense pressure, and the entire agency stared them down as they did so.
Officer “Brett” went back to work and retired from the Secret Service in 2017.
Officer Sandy Verner resigned from the Secret Service soon after the investigations ended to focus on her family.
Before the subpoenas, I had transferred to the Secret Service Training Center to distance myself from the president and first lady and to pursue my new dream of becoming a firearms instructor for new generations of Secret Service personnel. I was informed that my promotion, in no secret fashion, was delayed indefinitely as payback for my participation in answering the DOJ’s subpoenas. But good Secret Service men backed me, and I became an instructor, serving there until soon after the September 11 attacks. Officer “Musket” and I then left for the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), as part of the ensuing “exodus” of Uniformed Division personnel away from the overburdening Secret Service. I retired in May 2016. Officer Musket retired from FAMS in 2017.
The working relationship between the Uniformed Division and Special Agent Division deteriorated, and the agency’s performance has also deteriorated so much as to become defunct. Director Merletti, the right director at the wrong time, fought for the “protective function privilege.” But the Supreme Court’s ruling against it proved that his interpretation of “secret” was a fallacy, generated by the agency’s cult mentality. Many Secret Service leaders proved to be so entrenched in their beliefs that they had lost integrity as law enforcement officers, going so far as to bring the good name of the entire agency down with them.
Furthermore, Director Merletti, in keeping with a scheme that had been hatched by his predecessors, began to implement what was known within the Uniformed Division as the “Beltsville Plan.” It was never written down, only spoken of, and used the fallout from the Starr investigation to a specific end: Merletti and his predecessor “restructured” the Special Agent Division to swallow the Uniformed Division whole, take control at the middle-management level, and secure the service’s funding, all at the expense of the Uniformed Division being able to conduct its vital mission of White House and executive-area protection.
In the future there would never be a question of whether or not Secret Service personnel would testify. They would have to, but their integrity and conduct would forever be in question.
The trauma of the Starr investigation brought the Secret Service nearly to the breaking point and accelerated its downward spiral. It put the agency’s entire legacy in danger. But that legacy is hardly an unblemished one. Organizational problems within the Secret Service did not begin with the Clinton era. As the agency grew and developed into what it is today, its successes were balanced by systemic failures that can be recognized even in the agency of today.