Politicians may run the town, but no one knows our nation’s capital better than cab drivers and cops.
Sometime in 1993 or 1994, a man arrived at Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC, from a Middle Eastern country and hailed a cab from the international arrivals terminal. He told the driver to go straight to the White House. When he arrived, he got out, told the driver to wait, and walked around the White House complex, taking notes and seemingly making surveys. When he finished, he returned to the cab asked the driver to take him back to Dulles. Upon arriving, the man entered the Dulles international departures terminal and left the country.
Suspicious of his passenger’s behavior, the cab driver drove straight back to the White House and informed the Secret Service of what he had seen.
Soon after, every Secret Service employee, or at least those working the White House, was informed by the same report that played in our ears via our radios. “Be advised,” it began, “at approximately… at Dulles, a taxi driver drove a man of Middle Eastern origin, approximately 35, to the White House, asked the cab driver to wait, where the man appeared to make a survey, and then got back into the cab and returned to Dulles and departed the country.”
I was working at the White House when the incident was reported. It was strange enough that I and several others remembered it years later, when the 9/11 Commission asked government employees to come forward with any information that might be related to the attacks. We contacted the commission to share our story, but, being unsolved, it never made it into the final version of the report. The identity of the mysterious White House visitor during the Clinton years remains unknown.
In the early 1990s, Al Qaeda killed scores of innocent people, though their prime targets were US military personnel in foreign countries. In 1993, a splinter faction infiltrated the United States, crafted a 1,200-pound bomb in New Jersey, and drove it into the parking garage of the World Trade Center. When detonated, it killed six people and injured more than a thousand. In 1996, the group targeted President Clinton on his trip to Manila, planting a bomb on a bridge. The fact that Agent Lewis Merletti exercised his override authority and changed the route at the last minute was all that saved the president. That attack was kept secret by the Secret Service until December 2009, when an interview with Merletti was published by author Ken Gormley. In 1998, the terrorist group simultaneously bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than two hundred people, including twelve Americans. Al Qaeda was steadily building its status as the world’s deadliest terror organization, but the extent of its threat was yet to be realized.
But as the Clinton administration—and with it the 1990s—came to a close, the Secret Service was less worried about a foreign terrorist empire than it was about building its own empire. In 1999, Director Merletti retired and Brian Stafford became the Secret Service’s twentieth director. Stafford was a “made man” of the Secret Service, and along with senior colleagues A. T. Smith, Julia Pierson, Joseph Clancy, and others, had been a ringleader of the agency’s inner circle as it pushed back against the Kenneth Starr investigation. With Starr behind them, they looked to the future. They were ready to take advantage, eager to put what they called the “Master Plan”—or, as the Uniformed Division called it, the “Beltsville Plan”—into effect. Officially the idea was only to expand the agency’s training center, the James J. Rowley Training Center, in Laurel, Maryland, but it turned into far more.
The Master Plan was designed to balloon the Secret Service to rival the size and mission scope of the FBI, even as that empire building sowed the Secret Service’s eventual collapse. It was an expansive overreach that bogged down the entire service and distracted the agency from its real problems both inside and out.
The plan involved expansion in six areas: additions to the training center, new missions, new branding, a takeover of the Uniformed Division, a buildup of middle management, and greater international reach. We can piece together what we know about this plan from interviews with current and former personnel as well as government reports. Taken together, one thing becomes clear: as the Secret Service expanded in the 1990s, its decades-old problems remained: there were still too few agents and officers on duty, and they were overworked with too little sleep. As a result, President Clinton experienced some very close near misses, and the agency was put into a bad position in the tumultuous days after 9/11.
The first iteration of the Master Plan was building more than a dozen buildings at the training center. They included the Bowron Administration Building, the Magaw Tactical Training Facility, and the Merletti Classroom Building.*
More money—beyond the $500 million already supplied by Congress—was a critical ingredient of the expansion plan. The Secret Service got its hands on it by never letting a crisis go to waste. For instance, in 1997–98, several credible threats came in targeting the president’s new chief of staff, Erskine Bowles. Bowles was greatly concerned and was flabbergasted to hear “Erskine, we can protect anyone in the world, but we can’t do it for free.” The agency claimed it couldn’t afford more. Within the hour, he pushed for a meeting with the president, who gave the director access to the congressional terrorism fund of some $300 million.
Bowles was the victim of obvious Secret Service manipulation. While the threat was very real, it was preposterous to think that the Secret Service could not find a way to give the president’s chief of staff the protection he needed. Last-minute protective details had been set up before, including for the mother and wife of the alleged assassin of President Kennedy. Bowles and the president were willing to play ball. With the financial infusion secured, the Secret Service created far more than the simple protection detail for the chief of staff. The new buildings at the training center were planned, but other details of where the counterterrorism fund money went remain a mystery for one simple reason: the Secret Service did not have its own accountant.
Despite its rapid expansion, there was still nobody keeping track of the agency’s funds. In fiscal year (FY) 1975, the Secret Service had a congressional budget of $82.8 million; in 1985, $192.6 million. Each decade, Congress just about doubled the service’s budget. But in five years under President Clinton, as the Secret Service became his darling for fighting Starr’s inquiries, the budget went even higher. In 1990, it was $366.1 million; in 1991, $412.7 million; and five years later, $555 million. This was done in part, starting in 1995 and ending in 2000, by the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which increased the Secret Service budget by an average of $18 million each year.
The next concerted effort in the Master Plan was changing the interpretation of “secret” in “Secret Service.” In fighting Starr, the agency contended that “secret” referred to anything directly involving the president, but that didn’t stop it afterward from sending out open invitations to cable news channels and programs to create TV spots and documentaries that highlighted the agency’s prowess.
Dan Emmett, in his book Within Arm’s Length, wrote:
“Subsequent to this [Joan Lunden Special], it became the norm for journalists… to regularly be on campus. There were times when so many of these visitors were on site that regular training had to be canceled and special agent class members used as extras in productions. It was not unusual on some days to be standing for an hour or more at the obstacle course with an agent class waiting for the signal to being the course while some cameraman filmed away. Even more irritating… was being forced to give up certain students for on-camera interviews… [the Secret Service’s Office of Public Affairs] granted just enough [media requests] to interfere—significantly, at times—with our normal training schedule.… During this time many agents began to feel that the Service had lost touch with its mission by allowing this type of unnecessary exposure.”
In the 1990s, the Secret Service lobbied the president and Congress to pass executive orders and legislation that would mandate the service to take on more missions, such as administering asset forfeiture, combating cybercrime, providing protection to individuals other than foreign dignitaries or those in the Executive Branch, crafting a national plan to protect schools against active shooters, locating missing or kidnapped children, assisting all law enforcement agencies with their investigations, and being the lead agency responsible for securing all major US events, such as the Olympics and NATO summit, for starters.
The Secret Service succeeded in getting power over forfeited criminal assets and created the Asset Forfeiture Program. It could thereby seize all property used to facilitate crimes, such as homes, cars, planes, boats, land, farm equipment, and so on. This opened up a Pandora’s box of constitutional issues when it became clear that the Secret Service and other agencies were choosing investigations to pursue based on what they could financially gain from them and thus bolster their budgets. Litigations and countersuits flooded agencies using the practice as criminals and their victims tried to get their property back.
In May 1998, the Secret Service expanded again to take the lead role in protecting National Special Security Events (NSSE). This was a clear example of the agency’s leadership taking on new missions at the expense of presidential protection, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. In his second term, President Clinton set out to travel the world nonstop, much as President Eisenhower had on his “Goodwill Tour,” but Clinton went above and beyond any president before him. To keep up with his grueling schedule, the Secret Service was stretched to its limits.
In October 1998, Senator Larry Craig of Idaho summed up the serious uptick in presidential travel in a speech on the floor of the Senate: “President Clinton broke the Presidential record for foreign travel with his 27th trip abroad,” he announced. “This year so far he has logged 41 days in 11 different foreign countries. Some say he is traveling in foreign countries to keep his mind off domestic problems… the president has now broken all-time Presidential travel records with 32 trips abroad, more than any other president ever… Bill Clinton also likes to travel around the country as well… the President has spent almost half of 1997, 149 days, as well as over half of 1998 so far, 155 days, outside of Washington, DC.”
The men and women of the Secret Service were worn ragged protecting him. There simply wasn’t enough manpower to protect the president correctly—yet the service higher-ups thought they could expand into new missions.
At the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference, which, due to violent protests, became known as the “Battle of Seattle,” the Secret Service struggled to secure the area before the president’s arrival. Coordination with local authorities, specifically Mayor Paul Schell, was so difficult that as President Clinton was about to land, PPD threatened to turn around and head back if the mayor didn’t get the situation under control. At the conference venue, rioters were getting out of hand and the Uniformed Division officers running metal detectors donned gas masks. The tear gas and pepper spray deployed by local police had seeped into the attendees’ clothes and bags, causing officers to choke. Their eyes burned, their mucus membranes overloaded, yet they had to remain vigilant.
Just a block away, maddened rioters were flipping cars, smashing storefronts, and beating innocent people. The conference venue was a secure area, and many bystanders headed there for safety. Secret Service operatives kept working to make sure everyone was screened but were frustrated that they couldn’t do anything to secure the situation beyond the venue.
Making matters worse, on their final sweep agents discovered an empty backpack big enough to fit a rifle and climbing equipment discarded and hidden in a closet. All Secret Service personnel were alerted, and they launched another sweep to find what appeared to be an unknown sniper or political stuntman in their midst. But soon afterward, with seemingly no substantiation, the agents declared the find a hoax, a way to intimidate the president and keep him from attending.
As the PPD threatened to turn Air Force One around, riot police stormed the protests with great force. The president arrived, and everyone in the Secret Service held their breath. The exit routes had been compromised. The streets were jammed. Tear gas still hung in the air. Whoever had left the backpack and climbing equipment behind was never found. Luckily, the president got through his appearance without a scratch, but it was another sign that the Secret Service was having a hard enough time guaranteeing presidential protection and wasn’t in a position to guarantee the public’s safety at large national events.
The same year, President Clinton insisted at the last minute on walking in the funeral procession of the deceased King Hassan II in Morocco. As CNN wrote, “President Clinton caused the Secret Service some anxious moments in Morocco Sunday, when he became caught up in the moment… and decided to continue walking with the funeral procession, as crowds pressed around him.”
The story was filled with gross understatement. The “crowd” was an emotionally charged mob of at least two million. They were crying, screaming, running; the atmosphere was chaotic. It was as though the president were surrounded by a surging river of people. In the National Geographic documentary Secret Service Files: Protecting the President one of the PPD agents described how his improvised plan was to use the coffin and pallbearers as cover and concealment if any one of the 2 million unscreened Moroccans realized that he or she was next to the US president and attempted an attack. The PPD was also completely separated from the Counter Assault Team. The CAT and others had to disembark from the motorcade and try to stay parallel to the president. All of the equipment, time, money, and effort put into protecting Clinton could have been made worthless by anyone with a rusty razor blade or even a stampede that could have occurred at any moment. The procession was walking into the blinding sun in the driest month of the year in the desert country. Sand was being kicked up like a storm. The desert heat was unbearable for everyone in suits. If anything did go wrong, the closest adequate medical facility was back the other way—on board Air Force One.
The Morocco trip was a strategic failure brought on by a reckless prioritization of marketing over security. By putting himself into a dangerous situation, President Clinton put both the US government and the Moroccan funeral attendees at risk. Such a situation hadn’t been dreamed of or planned for in even a theoretical sense. Some Secret Service personnel have speculated that the CAT and PPD would have attempted to shoot their way through the crowd of Moroccan civilians to get the president out—which prompts the question, why endanger the Moroccan people with such a selfish stunt? In footage of the event, the PPD agents and even the president are noticeably terrified, but they had no way out until the PPD pushed their way out, back to CAT and the motorcade. The advance team was blamed, but that was also ridiculous. The trip had been coordinated only in the few days since King Hassan had died. Within that window of time, no advance would have been adequate. Besides, it had been the president’s last-minute decision to take part in the parade, and once he was committed, there was little chance of stopping him.
Since taking office in 1993, President Clinton had made the Secret Service so user-friendly—for himself—that it had been reduced to protecting him with little more than hopes and prayers. During the 1999 trip in Morocco, that’s all that kept the American president alive.
Back stateside, President Clinton was on hand to dedicate the newly built Secret Service headquarters. He spoke of how the agency had a proud history and was “worthy of trust and confidence.” His speech sounded so hollow, it was as if he were reading the agency’s eulogy.
At the James J. Rowley Training Center in Laurel, Maryland, the “raw apples”—new recruits—were trained alongside agents and officers conducting their recertifications and continuing education. In 1999, Director Merletti invited about sixty National Football League employees and representatives to a Secret Service “dog-and-pony show,” which had become so frequent they were like circuses that regularly came to town. The demonstrations had originally been put on for protectees to impress upon them the effectiveness and seriousness of Secret Service protection. Later, congressmen were invited so the agency could demonstrate to Congress how its ballooning budget was used.
The program consisted of a tour of the complex and large-scale demonstrations, with real pyrotechnics, of the Secret Service’s defensive measures. It even included a mock “attack on the principal” with blank-firing guns and explosions. It was well known that the spectacle was put on at taxpayers’ expense. Even if it was somehow justified in the accounting books to have the training center used to entertain NFL hotshots, real training had been sidelined and morale had suffered. The damage was done. The optics were that “worthy of trust and confidence” meant loyalty primarily to the Secret Service. Director Merletti joined the ongoing exodus of service personnel, leaving his successor in as tight a spot as the one he had inherited. Merletti took a job in security in the NFL and later became senior vice president of the Cleveland Browns.
During the Clinton administration, the Secret Service found itself in a desperate last-ditch effort to save itself. Director Merletti could have taken the agency to new heights instead of new lows if not for the power couple at the center of all the scandals, President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton.
Snipers, crowds, approachers, gate-crashers, and bombers have been common categories of violent threats facing presidents, but threats from the air have also hounded the president for more than a century and continue to this day.
The average reader reads about two hundred words per minute. That’s a few paragraphs in this book. So just imagine seven seconds—that’s how quickly an airborne threat can travel from outside the normal military or commercial air traffic lanes over DC and deviate to the White House. Small arms are useless against aircraft, so as soon as officers radio that an “unannounced” mystery aircraft is inbound for the White House and our president, seven seconds is all we have to realize what’s being said over the radio, take the initiative, and “cover and evacuate”—fancy talk for getting the president from wherever he is to a secure area.
The airborne threat is far from new. During the Civil War, the Confederates launched blimps that posed threats to President Lincoln. Agent Mike Reilly had .50-caliber antiaircraft guns installed on the White House roof during World War II and wrote of them in his memoir. Then, as now, the Secret Service knew that the best protection was early detection so they could rush President Roosevelt into the bomb shelter, the only place safety was guaranteed if and when planes took aim at the White House. In Agent Reilly’s memoir he noted very specifically how the capital’s geography and monuments could easily lead any low-flying bomber directly to the White House, and the Secret Service consulted with experts and they even considered rerouting the nearby river to camouflage the White House from a bomber circling at high altitude. So the cat has been out of the bag on airborne threats for well over a century. Until the Secret Service and US government make it clear that airborne attacks are not possible on their watch, attackers will continue to see them as an opportunity, a chance to succeed.
One year, 1974, saw two significant near misses. That February, a disgruntled army pilot stole a Huey helicopter and headed for the White House. Thinking he could win his job back by impressing the president with aerial stunts, he engaged in two chases with police helicopters and twice performed low-flying acrobatics over the White House. On his second pass, Secret Service personnel opened fire with everything they had—handguns, shotguns, submachine guns—forcing the chopper to land and arresting the wounded pilot. That pilot was given just a few months in a military prison and was granted a “general discharge” from the Army, not even a “dishonorable discharge.” Just five days later, a man attempted to hijack an airliner at a local airport with the intent of flying it into the White House. Wounded when police stormed the plane, the would-be assassin committed suicide like the coward he was.
By the 1990s, the Secret Service still had learned nothing but was in a worse position due to fatigue in its highest ranks and most important positions. There was, of course, the 1994 airplane crash at the White House. But another, relatively unknown incident placed President Clinton in danger, and it was made worse by the wrongly diagnosed problem of “freezing up.” What most people call “freezing up” usually means that protectors lack rest, training, balanced psychological conditioning, mental readiness, or a mixture of all of those. But in a service where split seconds matter, “freezing up” kills.
The incident, which occurred shortly before Ken Starr’s subpoenas started flying out of Secret Service fax machines, was kept secret even from President Clinton and amazingly never made it into the headlines.
A brand-new PPD agent stood just outside the closed door of the Oval Office. I stood next to her, standing the E-6 post outside the Oval Office. If and when the president moved, so did she and all of the PPD, who for the moment were downstairs in “W-16,” the term for the PPD agents’ break room and staging area. But as the officer at E-6, I would remain standing the post. President Clinton was inside and holding a meeting in his office. This agent was on her first shift on the job. She was new, but, like everyone else, she was overworked and desensitized. More important, she hadn’t been there long enough for the shine to wear off, for the reverence of those hallowed halls and the VIPs in them to become mundane, part of just another workday. Yet, as she stood there, she and I were the last lines of defense for President Clinton.
The validity of that “last line of defense” was never more evident than when there was an airborne threat. Just as there had been nothing but air and the decisions of agents between President Kennedy and a sniper’s bullet, there was nothing but air, some building material, and our ability to react decisively that could save the president’s life should we be alerted that an aircraft had left the unrestricted airspace, broken into the “P-56 area” of restricted airspace, and aimed at the White House.
The Uniformed Division officers at the Ellipse and on the executive mansion’s rooftop radioed in fast. Per protocol, the president needed to be evacuated from the Oval Office to a more secure area in the White House immediately. The September 12, 1994, airplane crash at the White House was fresh for all the officers—several ERT officers had sprinted for their lives out of its path. This time we had a very large “unannounced” mystery helicopter coming in low and fast at the White House. It was flying up East Executive Avenue! No one knew why. Worse, unlike the small Huey helicopter shot down over the White House in 1974, this very large one was more than defensible against small-arms fire. Whatever it was up to, we were powerless—except to evacuate the president.
The radio warnings came in.
The PPD agent’s response was astounding: “I’m not doing anything without the permission of my supervisor, and I’m certainly not going to open that door.”
And just like that, seven seconds had passed. We might have missed our window to evacuate to a safe area. Still, we had to act. I opened the door and held up my finger to the president. President Clinton recognized the simple gesture that said “Be ready in a moment. We may have something that is more demanding of your attention.” The president nodded and carried on with his meeting. I turned back and closed the door. The PPD agent was furious and gave me the stink eye for having had the gall to open the door and warn the president, let alone look him in the eye.
As she dithered for a few seconds, the gray mystery helicopter with military markings went from a far off shape to take the form of a marine CH-53 heavy-lift helicopter, even bigger than the old white-and-green marine 1 SH-3 helicopters that flew the president.
But as that PPD agent had failed in a split second by choosing to ask her supervisors before acting, the Secret Service had an unwanted H-series helicopter approaching and flying overhead. If you haven’t been near such a large helicopter landing and taking off, it’s like a mini-earthquake. Everything shook. The reverberations were so loud that you had to raise your voice to be heard. But the shaking and noise diminished. The gate-crashing helicopter passed overhead and went on its way.
As soon as it did, the postgame show was on. The PPD agent and I saw the situation differently. She believed I had brazenly and disrespectfully interrupted the president, but I knew the Secret Service had completely failed to follow procedure and thereby failed to guarantee the president’s protection. As soon as that Marine helicopter broke the airspace, we had roughly seven seconds to evacuate the president and get him to a hardened safe area. If that helicopter was intent on crashing into the White House, the president, the PPD agents, the West Wing officers, the West Wing staff, and all the visitors would be dead or wounded. There had been some light talk of the West Wing officers being formally trained to conduct the evacuation procedure in case the PPD couldn’t for whatever seemingly inexplicable reason—but I had just experienced such a reason: a brand-new PPD agent who was more afraid to interrupt the president than protect him.
The PPD shift leader came up from W-16 and wanted to know what the hell had happened. Meanwhile, the officers in the Uniformed Division control center scrambled to hail nearby military and commercial airports to check flight rosters and find any explanation. Officers radioed in the tail number. I monitored the back and forth with the officers on the Ellipse, in the control center, and on the lawn to deduce details: how low, fast, etc.
“It said ‘Duke’ on his helmet,” one officer said, half laughing. “That’s how low he was.”
Everyone wanted to know: Why the hell had a Marine CH-53 military helicopter flown past us?
Only one thing was certain: we had lost control of the situation. Our imaginations had raced to fill in the blanks. Some officers and agents were irate; others snickered, “That was weird. Another crazy day at the shit magnet, am I right?”
The agent’s control center soon delivered an explanation: our mystery fly-by helicopter was discovered to be a legitimate Marine helicopter, though its route was anything but. Two marine aviators had taken a “check ride” of their CH-53 helicopter to test recent maintenance and figured that if they flew very low, no one would pick them up on radar—or at least no one would be monitoring. But their joyride and sightseeing tour around Washington, DC, had gone farther than they had planned. They had gotten lost but couldn’t gain altitude lest their joyride be discovered by radar. Then they had traveled over the monuments and seen the White House up close, and only as they had traveled up East Executive Avenue, did they realize that they had really screwed up.
Back at the White House, the special agents in charge of the PPD, future director Lewis Merletti and Edward Merinzel, were working to figure out why the hell the PPD hadn’t responded as it was supposed to. They eventually got someone from the marine unit or flight tower on the phone. I stood in W-16, offering what information I had gathered from the officers who had sounded the alarm on the helicopter. The person on the phone was explaining that the helicopter had been traveling much more slowly and higher than any of the officers were reporting, claiming that they were blowing things out of proportion and overexaggerating.
Merletti wasn’t having it. “Who the hell is ‘Duke’?” he demanded.
There was silence on the other end of the line. I knew I had done my job and passed on the right information. The PPD was about to give whatever marine unit and their aviators a licking. I didn’t need to be there for that, so I left.
The hope after this incident was that the Secret Service would learn.
It had been another quiet day turned into a near miss. Air accidents happened far more than terrorist acts, and several dozen tons of fast-moving aluminum and steel loaded with aviation fuel was never something to take lightly. It was another failure to guarantee presidential protection that would be swept under the rug, another accidental success in keeping the country safe, another day counted as a “win” solely because the airborne gate-crasher happened to be friendly. But the damage to the Secret Service’s morale and strategy was done: it proved that such an attack was possible and we were still no better off after decades.
The hope was that the Secret Service would harden up and be ready the next time. But it had been strategically distracted for so long, especially from 1998 to 2001, and eventually our time had run out and our bubble had burst. After decades of airborne incidents that had showed our weaknesses to enemies, the United States and especially the Secret Service had been distracted in all the wrong places. The airborne threat recognized in 1941, the two 1974 attacks, the CH-53 incident, and the 1994 Cessna crash into the White House had still left the Secret Service unprepared in January 2001 as President George W. Bush took the helm of the presidency.
Of course, the transition wouldn’t have been complete without a final series of run-ins between the Uniformed Division and Clinton staff. A criminal investigation was looming, threatening to drag officers into court and Congress again to testify against the Clinton administration. On their way out, numerous Clinton staffers, bitter over Vice President Al Gore’s loss, stole White House decorations and ornaments, drew graffiti in bathrooms and offices, and even removed the “W” keys on keyboards. Furniture was ruined, desks overturned, even glass tables were smashed. And then the big one: a key that only the Secret Service used was broken off in a door lock, making it inoperable. After the presidential transition was completed, the Government Affairs Office published a report entitled “The White House: Allegations of Damage During the 2001 Presidential Transition.” Officers wondered if, yet again, they were going to be subpoenaed and have to answer the questions “Who did what?” and “How did this happen with the Secret Service present?” But the political currency needed to push the issue had evaporated.
Meanwhile, in New York City, the Secret Service was enjoying its modern office space in one of the world’s most exclusive office complexes. Its old field office had been deemed so unsafe and unhealthy to employees—even the ceiling was collapsing—that the Government Services Administration (GSA) and Congress had prioritized the move to a new space over other federal agency projects. The process had taken eight years, but the agency magazine was finally able to say of the new office, “It’s big, it’s spacious, it’s beautiful.” It boasted that it had 8,000 additional square footage with backup generator, permanent emergency command center, voice mail, and bigger conference room and gym and was the first Secret Service office to be completely disability-friendly by the legal requirements. But what the service was perhaps most proud of was the new command center, which would be the hub of its latest expansion of authority: coordinating the protection of major national events, especially those in New York City, including the United Nations. The Secret Service had been very proud to move its area field office from World Trade Center Building 6 to Building 7.
The Secret Service internal publication continued with its announcement: “We all remember on Friday, February 26, 1993, at 12:18 p.m., a bomb exploded in the parking garage area near the New York City Field Office secure parking lot facility.” Everyone in the field office had felt the explosion when the Al Qaeda bomb went off. The publication continued, “But one thing that came out of this tragic incident was that the GSA seemed to expedite our plans for relocation.”
Like all federal law enforcement officials, everyone in the Secret Service was kept up to speed on the latest in enemy tradecraft. If a new kind of bomb or style of attack happened anywhere in the world—a suicide bus bombing or hostage taking in Israel or Myanmar, bombings that mimicked controlled detonations to collapse buildings on top of innocent victims—we were briefed on it. We were supposed to be thinkers and questioners of everything. Whether on a temporary assignment at a hotel or at the White House fence line, we would think to ourselves: Why is that wire in the ceiling there? When’s the last time that lady with the stroller looked at her child? Are that man and woman in the corner of the room professional colleagues, friends, or intimate because they haven’t looked at each other in minutes? We were professional people watchers, and we were on the alert. If some kind of attack had repeatedly proven successful around the globe, it was due to be tried in the United States eventually.
All agencies, including the Secret Service, were great at sharing general knowledge between directors and down to every post stander, beat cop, and ground-pounding agent or officer—because when the monster’s new form appeared, aside from civilians, it would be those frontline agents or officers who would make the first contact.
And then, sometimes, the ground radically shifts under your feet. That’s what happened on September 11, 2001.
As it always seems to go, this Tuesday started much like any other. The sky was cloudless and blue, the breeze pleasant, and most Americans had trivial complaints, such as dragging themselves through the workweek.
The War on Terror didn’t start that Tuesday, just as World War II didn’t start on December 7, 1941, with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even that attack hadn’t started on December 7; it had started long before the Japanese ships left their harbor. We were just ignorant about the war that had been declared on us. September 11, 2001, wasn’t the beginning of the War on Terror, it was just the day when Americans realized we were in it. The War on Terror had finally reached us, and as every American witnessed the four hijacked planes used as ballistic missiles flying into key components of the US economy as well as its command and control structure, they now knew what sophisticated attacks by the worst kinds of monsters would look like—and what they would cost us.
The eighteen Al Qaeda terrorists (the nineteenth had been refused entry into the United States by a suspicious immigration agent) had studied piloting in the United States and then hijacked four commercial airliners. At 8:19 a.m., the FBI was alerted of the hijackings and readied its counterterrorist teams, but the Secret Service was not notified. American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston, with Mohammad Atta at the helm after he had brutally murdered the pilots, crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) at 8:46 a.m. After the first crash, many people, including those in the Secret Service, believed it had been an accident. It wasn’t until 9:03 a.m., when United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the World Trade Center South Tower, that they realized the nation was under attack by terrorists.
Only three minutes before that had the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) realized that simultaneous hijackings were occurring. It couldn’t figure out what to do next. There had been a similar case in September 1970, when, in a three-day period, five planes, all scheduled to head for New York City, had been hijacked by terrorists. Despite that, the FAA had no protocols in place to alert aircraft to ground them. Furthermore, despite its own brushes with aerial threats to the White House, the Secret Service had no plans in place to respond to hijacked aircraft.
President Bush was in Sarasota, Florida, reading books to children in their school under PPD protection. He was notified of the first attack at 8:50 a.m. At 9:31 a.m., he spoke from Florida, announcing that the nation was under “an apparent terrorist attack.” PPD agent Eddie Merinzel notified the president he had to get back to Air Force One and evacuate. As they boarded the plane, the plan was to head back to Washington, DC. Their specific destination was uncertain, but for some odd reason, Air Force One uncharacteristically had no fighter escort, even as it left Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport. They took off at maximum climb, gaining altitude almost like a rocket. Eddie Merinzel warned the pilots of his concern that this could be the beginning of a “decapitation attack,” the likes of which the country had not faced since the 1865 plot that had killed Lincoln and nearly killed several other officials.
At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Had it been aiming for the White House, it would have hit its mark and killed scores of people, as the Secret Service had ordered an evacuation only at 9:45 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93, meanwhile, had left Newark International Airport twenty-five minutes behind schedule due to heavy traffic. As passengers learned of the attacks elsewhere, they bravely attempted to retake the cockpit, causing the plane to nose-dive into a open field in Shanksville, Somerset County, Pennsylvania. It crashed at 10:03 a.m. It is believed that the hijackers’ destination for Flight 93 was the White House. Even leaving late, it would have arrived at Washington, DC, at 10:23 a.m., as the White House was still evacuating. Had it left on time, it would have reached DC and the White House at 9:58, when the evacuations had only just begun.
Meanwhile, Secret Service master special officer Craig Miller was fighting for his life in the smoke, rubble, and mayhem of WTC 7, inside the Secret Service Field Office. Craig resided in Virginia to be closer to where he was permanently posted in the Maryland-DC area, and when his family saw what was transpiring via television, they believed he was safe. But Craig had taken a last-minute special assignment in New York City. A veteran of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm and the recipient of two Bronze Stars, Miller had assisted in the evacuation efforts but had gone missing afterward. Though his family held out hope that he might somehow inexplicably be found alive or in a coma somewhere, his remains were identified three years after the attack. He was one of 72 officers from eight local, state, and federal agencies and one of 2,800 civilians who died that day at the site of the World Trade Center attacks.
At the James J. Rowley Training Center, all the New York recruits and agents receiving requalification training joined a handful of instructors, loaded up a few SUVs with food, water, ammunition, firearms, vests, and as much medical gear as they could fit in, and headed home to be of assistance any way they could. No one knew if this was the beginning and end of the attack or just the first wave.
In the Secret Service’s possession today are several submachine guns recovered from the wreckage of the New York Field Office. The fire-rated safe had been burned through, and the barrels of the firearms had been turned into pretzel-shaped knots by the fire’s overwhelming heat. It is kept as a reminder and a memorial to history, along with the memory of Craig Miller, the thirty-fourth Secret Service employee to die in the line of duty, the thirteenth to perish on duty by violence, and, as of this writing, the last to have died by violence.
At 1 p.m., President George W. Bush announced that the nation was on high alert from an Air Force base in Louisiana.
In the year that followed, the Secret Service had to contend with additional panic over the terror threat, on top of the flaws and gaps it had been contending with for decades. With so many new responsibilities taken on already as part of the Master Plan, the bloated middle management, and no idea how it spent its money, the agency had already been stretched beyond thin. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Secret Service’s leadership tried to stretch the agency further. Defense of the White House again became a chief concern, and more officers were posted there. The security officers and trainers at the training center were even pulled from training duties. Officers were recalled from time off or ordered to take more overtime shifts to stand post at the White House. But what good was that? It just added more overtired officers to a location that was still just as unprotected from airborne threats as before Pearl Harbor.
That’s when the agency’s attrition problems went into overdrive and people started to recognize the situation for what it was: an exodus. No amount of money could justify the strategy of adding more officers to a target that was still defenseless from the air. For Secret Service personnel, what good was more money if you worked twelve-hour days seven days a week and had neither the time to spend with your family nor time to spend the money you earned?
So agents and officers flocked to the new Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) in droves. The attrition got so bad that the training center had the Internet technicians block the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) website to try to prevent officers and agents for applying to FAMS while at work—as if that were a solution.