Thursday, March 17, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
| Be Careful What You Wish For, Libs |
| March 10, 2011 |
Listen To It!  Audio clips available for Rush 24/7 members only -- Join Now!BEGIN TRANSCRIPT |
 |
| RUSH: Now, I had a lot of people -- and I made mention of this earlier -- worried here that we're losing the headline battle out of Wisconsin, we're losing the headline war on Twitter and Facebook and, "Gee, wouldn't it be great if they were telling the truth about our victory (crying)." This is coming from people on our side. So we aim to please here at the EIB Network. We have scoured the so-called mainstream media and we have found somebody who believes that the Democrats might be in trouble in the way they are behaving themselves. And that would be the Huffing and Puffington Post senior writer Howard Fineman, who appeared on PMSNBC last night with Lawrence O'Donnell, who's already talking about quitting the network. He is. (imitating Fineman) "I can't see myself doing this more than three years. Are you kidding? It's much easier writing fiction for The West Wing." Lawrence O'Donnell said to Howard Fineman, "Howard, the Governor has already paid a price in Wisconsin polling. Polling turned against him. But did he just become a possible leading contender for the Republican Presidential inauguration since this Republican achievement in Wisconsin is something that was being cheered strongly by national Republicans?" FINEMAN: This story is no longer, if it ever was, really about Wisconsin. It's about the power of unions and the Republicans' effort to destroy them. What they want to do here is to try, number one, to goad the people in Wisconsin into overreacting. The strategy for the Republicans is to portray Barack Obama and his allies as a sort of sixties style bunch of radicals out to upset American values. And they're going to try to force the president to come out and defend the workers in Wisconsin. He's been very quiet. They want 'em out there on the front lines. RUSH: Yeah, and so does the left. The left would be happy for a visit from Obama. The left is wondering, where is Obama, by the way? Where is he on Gitmo? Where is he on all these promises? Why are we still in Afghanistan? Now, here's something also interesting, too. Mr. Fineman, "What they want to do here is portray Obama and his allies as a sort of sixties-style bunch of radicals out to upset American values." No, Obama is portraying himself that way and his buddies are portraying themselves that way. What we are doing is reporting that that's what's happening, Howard. We are not trying to caricature Obama as that. We are the ones who have the honesty and integrity to tell people who Obama and his cohorts are. He is. The sixties, if you've read up on Obama, Obama wishes he had been front and center in the sixties. I mean that was community organizing as nirvana, that was agitation like it's never been done before. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Here's more Howard Fineman, by the way, because when he says that Republicans are trying to goad people in Wisconsin to overreacting -- explain to me how can anybody overreact to what they're seeing here? Somebody want to explain this? Goad? We goading anybody? We're sitting back and watching. Mr. Fineman, you know, I love you, Howard. We're sitting here watching you try your best -- not you personally -- cover this up, or to somehow write about these riots as though they're justified. And we know full well if it's the Tea Party doing this you'd be demanding the German shepherds and the dogs and the mace. But since it's your precious union guys out doing this, why, there's solidarity within the ranks. Goading people here? Overreacting? You can't overreact. Howard, have you read the death threat emails? "Rush, come on, you know that's just part of politics, death threats." Oh, yeah, right. Just part of politics to blame people that had nothing to do with it, Gabrielle Giffords gets shot. Okay, so now you've got Jesse Jackson, who is really in need of help. If the Democrats really cared about Jesse Jackson they would stop this 'til they found out what's wrong. And you have Michael Moore out there, and guys are calling for full-throated revolution, which is fine and dandy. I have no problem with revolution, but combined with death threats, if something happens here, who's going to get blamed? Certainly, Howard, all pretense of civility has kinda gone up in smoke here. And our wonderful president gave that wonderful speech, one of the best ever, we are told from Arizona, we gotta get past these things, gotta make that little nine-year-old girl proud of us. We must live and our politics must be what she dreamed it would be. I don't know how many people dream of politics dream of death threats. We got it happening here right in front of our very eyes and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of concern about this. Republicans are being threatened. Peter King is being threatened for having hearings on domestic terrorism in the House of Representatives. We got a mob at the Wisconsin assembly trying to shut down the democratic government. Nobody gives a damn. No, we're having a discussion here about how the Republicans are trying to goad people into an overreaction? Here's how Mr. Fineman concluded his remarks. |
|
| FINEMAN: They're in a college town of Madison, Wisconsin, where they want the students and the unions and the Democrats to take the bait of this provocation and overreact in a way that will sell poorly in swing states in 2012. Now, the Democrats are the ones who have to be the grownups because the Republicans have been the ones to issue the provocation. This is very serious stakes having everything to do with the 2012 election. RUSH: Wow. So what Howard Fineman is saying is that the Republicans are targeting Obama's unions in Wisconsin and trying to cause these riots, the Republicans are trying to inspire these riots so it will help them win the election in 2012. The Democrats have gotta be very, very careful not to be manipulated into rioting here. This is what he seems to be saying. The Democrats are gonna have to be the grownups here and stop with the Molotov cocktails and the defacing of the Capitol and the threats and all this, they're gonna have to be the grownups here because the Republicans have been the ones to issue the provocation? It's a parallel universe. Who's doing the provoking here? Unless the democratic process is a provocation. There was nothing illegal or unconstitutional about the way they passed this legislation last night. So you got a mob shutting down a State Capitol for three weeks is not overreacting? That's the adults? What were these Democrats hiding out in Illinois, what would they be?  I've got one Michael Moore sound bite. He's calling for riots here on MSNBC. Let's play this because some people who heard this say he's out there saying this is a real war, Michael Moore saying it's a real war. And some people think that what Moore says is really chilling. I have trouble taking the guy seriously. I know Fahrenheit 9/11 and, well, none of his other movies did that well. But maybe I'm wrong. Is he that big a figure in the Democrat Party? Is he godlike to these people? Is he really? He is? Okay. Well, there's no explaining taste. Here's what he said. He was on last night with Rachel Maddow and they were talking here about -- I guess Michael Moore didn't get the Fineman memo because he's calling here for Wisconsin riots.MOORE: Anybody who lives within driving distance of Madison, Wisconsin, right now should make their way to the Capitol. Thousands of people are there right now in that Capitol building, in that rotunda, out on the lawn. Whatever it takes. This is war. This is a class war. Students in Madison, Wisconsin, are calling for, not only in Wisconsin but a nationwide student walkout of high-schoolers. There's gonna be a massive student walkout Friday afternoon. This has to continue day after day after day, and these governors have -- are gonna have to step down, they're gonna be recalled, they're gonna be impeached. RUSH: He goes on to talk about how the rich have all the money and they're not giving it back and it's the typical insane stuff, insane rants. But, anyway, that's that. A lot of people are taking that seriously. A lot of people think that's chilling. I have a tough time associating chilling with Michael Moore, but I go different directions when talking about reacting. |
|
| BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I want to make a little comparison here, folks, for those of you who continue to feel frustration over the fact that we're "losing the headline," which I reject anyway, but there are people on our side who are boohooing the fact that we're losing the Twitter headline war for this Wisconsin business. Look, if you want some things to fire back with, how about this: Why don't high-schoolers go protest against their teachers and principals? How about we taxpayers take over the schools and universities? Would they like that? We pay 'em. Why don't we try some of their tactics? They're talking about how rotten we are. If we were like the left, you know what we would do? Right now we'd be organizing 50,000 people to go to Richard Trumka's house and march and chant and yell. Does anybody doubt our ability to get 50,000 people? If I wanted to get 50,000 people to meet me at Trumka's house, do you think I could pull it off? Well, that's what they do. They have all these people showing up at the homes of AIG execs and wherever in Washington, DC. If we were really like them, that's what we would be doing. How about this: How about we treat MSNBC and Howard Fineman like the unions and our government treat Fox News and have thousands of people surround their reporters, block their cameras, manhandle their reporters? How about if we do that? How about if we show up and we start physically assaulting MSNBC reporters like they're doing to Fox reporters? That's not who we are. It is who they are.  We don't want to be like them, but if we wanted to we could do it. It's just that's not who we are. If we did all of those things we'd be just like these thugs, wouldn't we? And there is no doubt we have the people power to do 'em. There are more taxpayers than union members and liberal reporters, after all. But we don't do this, do we in Reverend Jackson calling for revolution. Moore calling for revolution. Fineman accuses the people of fomenting revolution. I don't think it would be very pretty if there were one because they would lose it. They're already outnumbered. The people are fed up with all these losers. The people are fed up with the cheaters. The people are fed up with the people who are not telling the truth about these things.They better be careful what they wish for -- and you don't hear me talking like this, folks; but if they're gonna start talking about "revolution," they better be very, very careful what they wish for, 'cause they are outnumbered. No question about it. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: You know these guys that keep calling for civil war and revolution, Jesse Jackson and Michael Moore? They better remember: All they've got are fire hoses. They can't compete with us. Their fire hoses not gonna intimidate us. By the way, according to reports, the Wisconsin Assembly has met. They are now voting, the roll call is underway, on making this official. God bless and protect these courageous people that are engaged here. This is, folks -- we live it, but it is -- a great and historic day, and let's hope that it is the first of many similar days yet to come. |
|
| END TRANSCRIPT |
|
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
CASE CLOSED: JFK MURDERED BY LBJ AND THE U.S. SECRET SERVICE
Amateur snapshot, made with Kodak Brownie camera, of Kennedys and Connallys in the motorcade about two minutes before the shooting in Dealey Plaza.
An ocean of ink has been wasted "proving" that John F. Kennedy was killed by any person or organization other than the U.S. Secret Service, the law enforcement agency charged with his protection. In the 2002 book by the late Philip H. Melanson entitled, "The Secret Service: The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency" lays the blame for the murder of JFK exactly where it belongs: On the shoulders of the officers and their supervisors in the U.S. Secret Service charged with his protection, who not only failed to protect the president from assassination, but took part in a dastardly conspiracy to murder the young president and gave perjury to the Warren Commission in order to cover up their guilt.
This untold story is revealed in Chapter three, "Losing Lancer -The JFK Assassination" (pp.58- 89) - where we learn that SS agents Roy Kellerman and William Greer lied in their official reports and gave perjury to the Warren Commission about their actions the day of the assassination. One can understand the reason why the lies and perjury: Kellerman and Greer could have saved President Kennedy that fateful day in Dallas.
The two Secret Service agents -Kellerman and Greer - were in the "death car" with President Kennedy in Dealey Plaza. The agent in charge of the detail was Kellerman in the front seat and Greer was the driver when Oswald's first shot rang out that wounded JFK and the Texas governor. In the six or seven seconds before the fatal head shot, Kellerman froze and Greer slowed the car, instead of speeding up and/or swerving the vehicle to throw off the sniper's shots.
====================
On Friday November 22, 1963 I was a student at Fairland High School in Rome, Ohio in the first of my afternoon classes, British Literature, or "Brit Lit" as we students called it. We were engaged in the study of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" and doing a class discussion of the "Ides of March" scene in Act III where Caesar is murdered by the Roman Republicans under the leadership of Marcus Brutus in the Senate House. About thirty minutes into our class, well conducted by Mrs. Daniels, a former subject of Queen Elizabeth and student actor at her British college, the PA announced that all students were to assemble in the cafeteria. This seemed odd and fightening, the last time this had happened at our high school was in October, 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis when the USA and USSR stood toe to toe in possible nuclear combat.
When we were seated in the cafeteria, the reason for the assembly was passed quickly from table to table: "PRESIDENT KENNEDY WAS DEAD!" Many of us shook our heads in disbelief. JFK dead? Impossible! He was too young...and too full of life. He was the husband of a beautiful woman everyone called "Jackie" who set the latest women's fashions. Kennedy was a war hero, the skipper of PT 109 who survived along with his crew a sinking by a Jap destroyer in the South Pacific during WW II. The world famous author of "Profiles in Courage." The patriot who stood down the Communists in Berlin in 1961 and during the October Missile Crisis 0f 1962. The Statesmen who told us, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. The new King Arthur of the New World who with his latter day "Knights of the Round Table" - the Armed Forces of the United States - would liberate mankind from all forms of tyranny over the mind of man!
Then a delegation of teachers led by our dour principal, Schultz, entered the cafeteria. We noticed that the normally unemotional German-American Schultz had red eyes and tears running down his face. We knew then the rumor was true: President Kennedy was dead. This raw display of sadness from a "Man's Man" like Schultz set off a wave of crying in the cafeteria, especially from the girls. My high school girlfriend, the daughter of a Baptist minister, moved her lips in the Lord's Prayer. When it became clear that Schultz couldn't force himself to make the official announcement, the assistant principal, Mr. York, told us that President Kennedy had be murdered in Dallas, Texas. This set off another wave of crying, prayers, remarks and questions. "Who killed JFK? Why didn't the Secret Service stop this from happening, Mr. York?
But York had no answers, although he did have one last announcement to make: Fairland High School was closed until further notice, and we were sent home to be with our families on what turned out to a weekend of national mourning.
======================
Indeed, who killed President Kennedy? An ocean of ink has been spilled and several motion pictures produced that "prove" JFK was murdered by any person or organization other than the dirty little rogue Communist - Lee Harvey Oswald - using a piece of junk Italian army WW II carbine purchased for $19.95 by mail order. Conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory fail to prove anything other than the facts discovered by the Warren Commission, which were that President Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin who fired three rounds that day in Dealey Plaza from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository.
The Wikipedia gives this account of the Kennedy assassination:
According to the Warren Commission[12] and the House Select Committee on Assassinations,[13] as President Kennedy waved to the crowds on his right with his right arm upraised on the side of the limo, a shot entered his upper back, penetrated his neck, slightly damaged a spinal vertebra and the top of his right lung, exited his throat nearly centerline just beneath his Adam's apple, then nicked the left side of his suit tie knot. He then raised his elbows and clenched his fists in front of his face and neck, then leaned forward and towards his left. Mrs. Kennedy (already facing him) then put her arms around him in concern. Governor Connally also reacted after the same bullet penetrated his back creating an oval entry wound, impacted and destroyed four inches of his right, fifth rib bone, exited his chest just below his right nipple creating a two-and-a-half inch oval sucking-air chest wound, then entered just above his right wrist, impacted and cleanly fractured his right wrist bone, exited just below the wrist at the inner side of his right palm, and entered his left inner thigh.[14][15] The Warren Commission theorized that the "single bullet" struck between Zapruder frames 210 and 225, while the House Select Committee theorized it occurred exactly at Zapruder frame 190.
According to the Warren Commission, a second shot struck at Zapruder film frame 313 (the Commission made no conclusion as to whether this was the second or third bullet fired) when the Presidential limousine was passing in front of the John Neely Bryan north pergola concrete structure (the House Select Committee concluded that the final shot was the fourth shot). They each concluded that this shot entered the rear of President Kennedy's head (the House Select Committee determined the entry wound to be four inches higher than the Warren Commission), then exploded out a roughly oval-shaped hole from his head's rear and right side. Head matter, brain, blood, and skull fragments, originating from Kennedy, covered the interior of the car, the inner and outer surfaces of the front glass windshield and raised sun visors, the front engine hood, the rear trunk lid, the followup Secret Service car and its driver's left arm, and motorcycle officers riding on both sides of the president behind him.[16] Mrs. Kennedy then reached out onto the rear trunk lid. After she crawled back into her limousine seat, both Governor Connally and Mrs. Connally heard her say more than once, "They have killed my husband," and "I have his brains in my hand."[17][18]
United States Secret Service agent Clint Hill was riding on the left front running board of the followup car, immediately behind the Presidential limousine. Hill testified he heard one shot, then, as documented in other films and concurrent with Zapruder frame 308, he jumped off into Elm Street and ran forward to try and get on the limousine and protect the president. (Hill testified to the Warren Commission that after he jumped into Elm Street, he heard two more shots)[19][20][21] Hill believed she was reaching for something, perhaps a piece of the president's skull.[22] He jumped onto the back of the limousine while at the same time Mrs. Kennedy returned to her seat, and he clung to the car as it exited Dealey Plaza and accelerated, speeding to Parkland Memorial Hospital. After the president had been shot in the head, Mrs. Kennedy began to climb out onto the back of the limousine, though she later had no recollection of doing so.
====================
In any event, whether there were one, two , or three snipers in action at Dealey Plaza that day the agency with the responsibility for protecting President Kennedy was the U.S. Secret Service. Clearly this branch of federal law enforcement failed to carry out their assigned task, and recently released documents point to gross incompetiency, delection of duty, cowardice, stupidity, perjury, conspiracy and a cover up designed to indict President Kennedy as being responsible for his own death.
THE FIRST: Secret Service Agent William Greer, a high school dropout with a tenth grade education, was the driver of the open car with containing President Kennedy and Texas Governor Connally along with their respective wives. Until that fateful day, Greer had led the life of a lackey, first in his native Ireland, and later as a driver for the Secret Service. Furthermore, it seems certain that Greer was ever given specialized training by the Secret Service on how to conduct his driving should he come under fire. The picture we get of Greer is a low I.Q. servant promoted way beyond his level competiency.
THE SECOND: Secret Service Special Agent Roy Kellerman, Greer's supervisor, who sat next to him in the front of the Kennedy's limo in Dealey Plaza. As the Secret Service Agent-In-Charge of President Kennedy's security, Kellerman made many mistakes. First of all, standard operating procedures for the Secret Service were to place agents at rear of the presidential limo and along the sides. at Love Field where President Kennedy and company started their tour of Dallas, two Secret Service agents took station at the back of the car, but were ordered off by Secret Service Agent Roberts, with no objection from Kellerman.
=====================
Melanson had this to say of the assassination of President Kennedy:
"He (Kellerman) did not relate how he had frozen for those six or seven seconds after the first shot - a time span that allowed the "kill shot" to the president's head.
Agent William Greer, the driver of Kennedy's car, neglected to admit how he had failed to hit the gas after the first shot or swerve the vehicle to throw off the unseen sniper's aim. The limo continued rolling at a snail's pace down Dealey Plaza. Worse, he actually slowed down almost to a complete stop.
As Greer followed the established procedures and waited for a command from Kellerman, the president was a proverbial sitting duck. The agents had those six or seven seconds to do something, anything, before the president's head was nearly blown off. They did nothing and covered up their actions - or lack of them - to the Warren Commission and others."
====================
Perhaps Greer and Kellerman's lack of judgement and slow responses were the result of another little reported activity by the the Secret Service agents charged with protecting President Kennedy that fateful day in Dallas, Texas: At least nine of the agents were seen drinking on the night of November 21 - 22. A bad hangover experienced by Greer, Kellerman and other SS agents would go along way in explaining the death of a young president. The Warren Commission called this a “breach of discipline” and according to Sercret Service regulations, agents “On Call” are forbidden intake of alcohol.
Said Melanson of the testimony of Greer and Kellerman before the Warren Commission:
"At least two agents lied to the Warren Commission . Even worse, as they created the fiction about how thorough they had been, they implicitly pinned the blame on the fallen president himself, hinting that Kennedy's recklessness or fatalism - not anything the agents had done in Dallas - ignited a tragic sequence of events. Kennedy's critics still chant the mantra that the president brought it on himself. These outright lies and half-truths cannot absolve the Secret Service for losing the life of a president for the first time in its history."
Additional mistakes made by the Secret Service that made the assassination of President Kennedy almost inevitable: The dog leg turn at Dealey Plaza that made the Kennedy limo a sitting duck; the Secret Service allowed the Dallas newspapers to publish the Kennedy's exact route from Love Field to Dallas on November 19, 1963; the follow up car was too far behind the Kennedy limo and the eight agents in it, four or whom had been out late drinking, were not effective.
Said Chief Justice Earl Warren speaking of the performance of the Secret Service agents in the follow up car Texas Book in Dealey Plaza on that fateful day:
“Now other people, as they went along there, even some people in the crowds, saw a man with a rifle up in this building (Texas Book Depository) from which the president was shot. Now don't you think that if a man went to bed reasonably early, and hadn't been drinking the night before, he would be more alert to see those things as a Secret Service agent, than if they stayed up until three or four o'clock in the morning, going to beatnik joints and doing some drinking along the way.
After all is said and done concerning the death of President Kennedy, the two Secret Service agents present in the limo bear most of the responsibility: Agent Greer, the driver and his boss, Agent Kellerman. In fact, Greer was later to confess to author William Manchester that he told Mrs. Kennedy,
“Oh, Mrs. Kennedy , oh my God, oh my God. I didn't mean to do it. I didn't hear the shots. I should have swerved the car, or at least not hit the brakes and let it come to a near stop. I couldn't help it. Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, if only I'd seen it in time.”
Jacqueline Kennedy would later tell author Mary Gallagher,“Agent Greer had not acted during the crucial moment...He might just as well been Mrs. Shaw (the nanny of John and Caroline). You should get yourself a good driver so that nothing happens to you.”
It is said that when anyone makes one mistake it's an accident, but if they make two mistakes in a row, it's enemy action.
The U.S. Secret made numerous “mistakes” - far too many and can only part of a conspiracy by a high ranking “Mr. Big” who pulled the strings of the Secret Service like a Puppet master.
Consider the roster of Secret Service personnel and their actions that led inevitably to the death of President Kennedy.
Agent Winston G. Lawson of the Secret Service Presidential Detail in the company of Agent Sorrells of the Dallas field office drove the proposed Kennedy motorcade route on November 14, 1963, and thus were well aware of the dog leg at Dealey Plaza that had to be taken at slow speed that exposed President Kennedy and his party to gun fire coming from the high rise structures in the area.
Secret Service agents assigned to the Kennedy motorcade were allowed to drink the night before into the early hours of November 22, 1963 with the knowledge of their superior officers. Secret Service regulations state clearly that “On Call” agents be alcohol free at least 24 hours in advance of a protective mission. This did not happen, nor were the hung over agents replaced with sober agents for the fateful day.
On November 19, 1963, the Dallas “Times Herald” and other local newspapers printed the exact route the Kennedy motorcade would take on November 22, 1963. It is certain that the Secret Service was aware of this breach of security, yet they did nothing to modify or change the Kennedy motorcade route. This was another major error on the part of Agents Lawson and Sorrells.
Agents Greer and Kellerman – the driver of the Kennedy limousine and his supervisor – froze when the three shots were fired by Oswald in Dealey Plaza. Agent Greer stopped the car briefly and looked back to the passenger compartment where President Kennedy was being killed and Governor Connally seriously wounded. This was in complete disregard of Secret Service regulations that required the car to speed up and make evasive moves to throw off the aim of an sniper in case of an assassination attempt. Agent Kellerman is recorded as freezing when the shots rang out. It was only when Agent Hill jumped aboard to keep Mrs. Kennedy in the car did Agent Greer put on the gas and exited the kill zone.
The actions of Agent Emory P. Roberts are highly suspect. At Love Field where the Kennedy motorcade begin that fateful day, This was highly irregular and another violation of Secret Service regulations. So unusual was this move one of the bodyguards is filmed holding out his hands as if to ask, “why?” Later when the shots were fired in Dealey Plaza, Agent Roberts ordered his men not to leave the back up car. This order was disobeyed by Agent Hill who managed to keep Mrs. Kennedy from climbing out of the presidential limousine. This was the only heroic action displayed by the Secret Service that fateful day.
Agent Kellerman and “The Battle of Kennedy's Body.” The actions of Agent Kellerman went from passive to aggressive when he and a Secret Service detail with drawn guns stole the body of President Kennedy and the blooded limousine from Texas authorities, who had jusdiction over the evidence of the homicide. This made detailed analysis of the crime scene very difficult.
OTHER SECURITY LAPSES BY THE SECRET SERVICE:
Removal of the bubble-top
Another controversy with direct bearing on the criminal investigation of the assassination relates to the origin of the order to remove the bubble-top from the presidential limousine. Kinney adamantly told me that he, and not the president, was solely responsible for the removal of the presidential limousine's clear roof on November 22, 1963. However, in testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, agents Kellerman and Win Lawson spoke of their involvement in that critical decision.
Kinney passed away on July 21, 1997. This correspondent cannot be definitive regarding the number of individuals involved in the decision to remove the bubble-top. However, based upon thorough investigation of the issue, the strong possibility exists that Lawson, acting through Kellerman and/or Boring, either gave the order or was represented as having given it.
Reduction of motorcycle outriders
The frequently repeated story that JFK ordered a reduction in the presence of motorcycle outriders in the Dallas motorcade is in need of correction. Although presidential motorcades on all prior stops on the November, 1963 Texas trip normally included anywhere from three to six cyclists on each side of the JFK limousine (a fact confirmed by numerous press and official White House films and photographs), the plans for Dallas were altered by Secret Service officials to give JFK just four non-flanking outriders.
Thus the presidential limousine was opened to crossfire, and the perceptions of professionally trained eye- and ear-witnesses were eliminated from the scene of the crime. Former agents Kinney and Godfrey confirmed that JFK never gave direct or implicit instructions to remove motorcycles from security positions adjacent to his car. Further, films and photographs of prior Texas trip stops clearly show a heavy motorcycle outrider presence during motorcades, up to and including the Fort Worth motorcade of November 21, 1963.
The origin of the order to strip presidential security by reducing motorcycle-based security remains mysterious, and carries sinister implications.
Security Stripping
Could Dallas have been deemed a sufficiently non-threatening environment so as to justify a stripping of presidential security? Not according to on-the-record comments from former agents Kellerman and Abraham Bolden (to the Warren Commission and this correspondent, respectively). They stated that they were at a loss to explain or otherwise find justification for the at least three separate checks for threats and harmful subjects in Dallas conducted by the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service that produced negative results.
Given the city's history, including the 1963 attacks there against Adlai Stevenson, the acknowledged presence in Dallas of radical, violence-prone Right Wing groups and anti-Castro operatives, and the knowledge, commonly and officially held within the Secret Service and the Kennedy administration, of ongoing, non-location-specific threats against the president, those results were, in the opinion of interviewees, highly unusual.
Disclose.tv - How the Secret Service set up & killed JFK Video
The shooting sequence
The scene at Love Field. Agent Roberts orders President Kennedy's rear guard agents off his limo.
One half second before the fatal shot. Agent Greer has stopped the limo and is looking at President Kennedy. Agent Kellerman appears frozen. At the point both JFK and Governor Connelly are wounded.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON: THE "MISTER BIG" OF THE SECRET SERVICE CONSPIRACY TO MURDER PRESIDENT KENNEDY
Robert F. Kennedy has been quoted as saying that LBJ was "mean, bitter, vicious -- [an] animal in many ways...I think his reactions on a lot of things are correct... but I think he’s got this other side of him and his relationship with human beings which makes it difficult unless you want to ‘kiss his behind’ all the time. That is what Bob McNamara suggested to me...if I wanted to get along.
WIKIPEDIA: "LYNDON B. JOHNSON"
=========
Central to Johnson's control was "The Treatment",[24] described by two journalists:[25]
Robert F. Kennedy has been quoted as saying that LBJ was "mean, bitter, vicious -- [an] animal in many ways...I think his reactions on a lot of things are correct... but I think he’s got this other side of him and his relationship with human beings which makes it difficult unless you want to ‘kiss his behind’ all the time. That is what Bob McNamara suggested to me...if I wanted to get along.
WIKIPEDIA: "LYNDON B. JOHNSON"
=========
Central to Johnson's control was "The Treatment",[24] described by two journalists:[25]
- The Treatment could last ten minutes or four hours. It came, enveloping its target, at the Johnson Ranch swimming pool, in one of Johnson's offices, in the Senate cloakroom, on the floor of the Senate itself — wherever Johnson might find a fellow Senator within his reach.
- Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint and the hint of threat. It was all of these together. It ran the gamut of human emotions. Its velocity was breathtaking, and it was all in one direction. Interjections from the target were rare. Johnson anticipated them before they could be spoken. He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, statistics. Mimicry, humor, and the genius of analogy made The Treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.
WIKIPEDIA: "LYNDON B. JOHNSON"
============
In the 1948 elections, Johnson again ran for the Senate and won. This election was highly controversial: in a three-way Democratic Party primary Johnson faced a well-known former governor, Coke Stevenson, and a third candidate. Johnson drew crowds to fairgrounds with his rented helicopter dubbed "The Johnson City Windmill". He raised money to flood the state with campaign circulars and won over conservatives by voting for the Taft-Hartley act (curbing union power) as well as by criticizing unions.
Stevenson came in first but lacked a majority, so a runoff was held. Johnson campaigned even harder this time around, while Stevenson's efforts were surprisingly poor. The runoff count took a week. The Democratic State Central Committee (not the state, because the matter was a party primary) handled the count, and it finally announced that Johnson had won by 87 votes. By a majority of one member (29-28) the committee voted to certify Johnson's nomination, with the last vote cast on Johnson's behalf by Temple, Texas, publisher Frank W. Mayborn, who rushed back to Texas from a business trip in Nashville, Tennessee.
There were many allegations of fraud on both sides. Thus, one writer alleges that Johnson's campaign manager, future Texas governor John B. Connally, was connected with 202 ballots in Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County that had curiously been cast in alphabetical order and all just at the close of polling. (All of the people whose names appeared on the ballots were found to have been dead on election day.) Robert Caro argued in his 1989 book that Johnson had stolen the election in Jim Wells County and other counties in South Texas, as well as rigging 10,000 ballots in Bexar County alone.[19] A judge, Luis Salas, said in 1977 that he had certified 202 fraudulent ballots for Johnson.[20]
The state Democratic convention upheld Johnson. Stevenson went to court, but—with timely help from his friend Abe Fortas—Johnson prevailed. Johnson was elected senator in November and went to Washington, D.C., tagged with the ironic label "Landslide Lyndon," which he often used deprecatingly to refer to himself.
WIKIPEDIA: "LYNDON B. JOHNSON"
==========
CONCLUSION: The facts of the Kennedy assassination case point in only one direction: Towards the U.S. Secret Service. I do not think they acted alone. I believe they were ordered to enable the assassination by Lyndon B. Johnson who had been a rival for the presidential nomination in 1960, and hated JFK for coming between him and the Oval Office. The facts of the case indicate that LBJ was a decades long political criminal and psychopath who stole elections and destroyed rivals.
Who else in the government had daily access to the all levels of authority in the Secret Service as did LBJ? Add to the fact that the assassination happened in Johnson's home state of Texas which he knew like every inch of his ugly naked body. The facts are that LBJ had the motive, opportunity and the pull necessary to cause the murder. It is interesting the parallel in what happened in Dallas that fateful day and the movie hit of time, "The Manchurian Candidate" in which a Communist trained assassin is dispatched to murder a presidential candidate with a high powered sniper rifle in order that his Vice President can put on, "The Bloody Shirt" and be elected President.
I know many Americans would find it unbelievable that a president's own body guards would join a conspiracy to assassinate him, so I encourage everyone to review the facts of the case. I am well aware that many Americans would not believe that the U.S. Secret Service is anything other than a band of selfless patriots who would throw themselves in front of an assassin's bullet. I can only say in defense of my thesis that I have had over 17 years experience in dealing with the Secret Service, and my observation is that these people are traitors who often give perjury in court, harass innocent suspects and invent false crimes to sent ordinary Americans to prison.
Did the U.S. Secret Service enable the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas?
In the words of Sarah Palin: "You Betcha!"
==========
CONCLUSION: The facts of the Kennedy assassination case point in only one direction: Towards the U.S. Secret Service. I do not think they acted alone. I believe they were ordered to enable the assassination by Lyndon B. Johnson who had been a rival for the presidential nomination in 1960, and hated JFK for coming between him and the Oval Office. The facts of the case indicate that LBJ was a decades long political criminal and psychopath who stole elections and destroyed rivals.
Who else in the government had daily access to the all levels of authority in the Secret Service as did LBJ? Add to the fact that the assassination happened in Johnson's home state of Texas which he knew like every inch of his ugly naked body. The facts are that LBJ had the motive, opportunity and the pull necessary to cause the murder. It is interesting the parallel in what happened in Dallas that fateful day and the movie hit of time, "The Manchurian Candidate" in which a Communist trained assassin is dispatched to murder a presidential candidate with a high powered sniper rifle in order that his Vice President can put on, "The Bloody Shirt" and be elected President.
I know many Americans would find it unbelievable that a president's own body guards would join a conspiracy to assassinate him, so I encourage everyone to review the facts of the case. I am well aware that many Americans would not believe that the U.S. Secret Service is anything other than a band of selfless patriots who would throw themselves in front of an assassin's bullet. I can only say in defense of my thesis that I have had over 17 years experience in dealing with the Secret Service, and my observation is that these people are traitors who often give perjury in court, harass innocent suspects and invent false crimes to sent ordinary Americans to prison.
Did the U.S. Secret Service enable the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas?
In the words of Sarah Palin: "You Betcha!"
Sunday, February 27, 2011
PUBLIC WORKERS PARADISE
Editor's Note: Occasionally I send you free samples of TIA Daily just to remind you of the kind of news and commentary available to our subscribers. I don't usually try the hard sell—I offer you a few samples, and you can subscribe if they intrigue you. But today and tomorrow I am going to send you two samples, from the last week of commentary in TIA Daily, that I think demonstrate just how much you need our coverage of the news right now. In the past few months, Democrats and Republicans have drawn real, substantial battle lines over big government, for the first time in decades. To my astonishment, congressional Republicans have officially added "entitlement reform" to their agenda for the 2012 budget, ending the "third rail" protection that used to make Social Security untouchable. On the state level, courageous Republican governors have set out to break the power of the public employees' unions to loot the taxpayer.
The article below—which has also been posted at RealClearPolitics—explains on the deepest ideological level exactly what is at stake.
And it's not just domestic politics that is reaching a crucial breaking point. It is as if someone decided at the beginning of this year that it was time to change every government in the Middle East—and to do it in a couple of months! Tomorrow, I will send you a sample of my coverage of that story, particularly the uprising in Libya.
This is no ordinary time, and you cannot afford to be without a rational guide to help you understand what is going on and to arm you intellectually for the battles ahead. I hope you will consider subscribing at www.TIADaily.com/subscribe.—RWT
TIA Daily • February 23, 2011
FEATURE ARTICLE
Unionized Public Employment Is the Socialist Utopia
by Robert Tracinski
It is a matter of survival for Democrats in an immediate, practical sense. As Michael Barone explains, the government employees' unions are a mechanism for siphoning taxpayer dollars into the campaigns of Democratic politicians.
But there is something deeper here than just favor-selling and vote-buying. There is something that almost amounts to a twisted idealism in the Democrats' crusade. They are fighting, not just to preserve their special privileges, but to preserve a social ideal. Or rather, they are fighting to maintain the illusion that their ideal system is benevolent and sustainable.
Unionized public-sector employment is the distilled essence of the left's moral ideal. No one has to worry about making a profit. Generous health-care and retirement benefits are provided to everyone by the government. Comfortable pay is mandated by legislative fiat. The work rules are militantly egalitarian: pay, promotion, and job security are almost totally independent of actual job performance. And because everyone works for the government, they never have to worry that their employer will go out of business.
In short, public employment is an idealized socialist economy in miniature, including its political aspect: the grateful recipients of government largesse provide money and organizational support to re-elect the politicians who shower them with all of these benefits.
Put it all together, and you have the Democrats' version of utopia. In the larger American culture of Tea Parties, bond vigilantes, and rugged individualists, Democrats feel they are constantly on the defensive. But within the little subculture of unionized government employees, all is right with the world, and everything seems to work the way it is supposed to.
This cozy little world has been described as a system that grants special privileges to a few, which is particularly rankling in the current stagnant economy, when private sector workers acutely feel the difference. But I think this misses the point. The point is that this is how the left thinks everyone should live and work. It is their version of a model society.
Every political movement needs models. It needs a real-world example to demonstrate how its ideal works and that it works.
And there's the rub. The left is running low on utopias.
The failure of Communism—and the spectacular success of capitalism, particularly in bringing wealth to what used to be called the "Third World"—deprived the left of one utopia. So they fell back on the European welfare state, smugly assuring Americans that we would be so much better off if we were more like our cousins across the Atlantic. But the Great Recession has triggered a sovereign debt crisis across Europe. It turned out that the continent's welfare states were borrowing money to paper over the fact that they have committed themselves to benefits more generous than they can ever hope to pay for.
In America, the ideological crisis of the left is taking a slightly different form. Here, the left has set up its utopias by carving out, within a wider capitalist culture, little islands where its ideals hold sway. Old age is one of those islands, where everyone has been promised the socialist dreams of a guaranteed income and unlimited free health care. Public employment is another.
Now the left is panicking as these experiments in American socialism implode.
On the national level, it has become clear that the old-age welfare state of Social Security and Medicare is driving the federal government into permanent trillion-dollar deficits and a ruinous debt load. Even President Obama acknowledged, in his State of the Union address, that these programs are the real drivers of runaway debt—just before he refused to consider any changes to them. You see how hard it is for the Democrats to give up on their utopias.
On the state level, public employment promises the full socialist ideal to a small minority—paid for with tax money looted from a larger, productive private economy. But the socialist utopia of public employment has crossed the Thatcher Line: the point at which, as the Iron Lady used to warn, you run out of other people's money.
The current crisis exposes more than just the financial unsustainability of these programs. It exposes their moral unsustainability. It exposes the fact that the generosity of these welfare-state enclaves can only be sustained by forcing everyone else to perform forced labor to pay for the benefits of a privileged few.
This is why the left is treating any attempt to fundamentally reform the public workers' paradise as an existential crisis. This is why they are reacting with the most extreme measures short of outright insurrection. When Democratic lawmakers flee the state in order to deprive their legislatures of the quorum necessary to vote, they are declaring that they would rather have no legislature than allow voting on any bill that would break the power of the unions.
National Review's Jim Geraghty describes these legislative walk-outs as "small-scale, temporary secessions." The analogy is exact. One hundred and fifty years ago, Southern slaveholders realized that the political balance of the nation had tipped against them, that they could no longer hope to win the political argument for their system. Faced with a federal government in which they were out-voted, they decided that they would rather have no federal government at all. The Democrats' current cause may not be as repugnant—holding human beings as chattel is a unique evil—but it has something of the same character of irrational, belligerent denial. More than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left is still trying to pretend that socialism is plausible as an economic system.
The Democrats are fleeing from a lot more than their jobs as state legislators. They are fleeing from the cold, hard reality of the financial and moral unsustainability of their ideal.
One-Year Subscription — $74
Six-Month Subscription — $38
Copyright © 2011 by Tracinski Publishing Company
PO Box 8086, Charlottesville, VA 22906
Forward email 
This email was sent to ronaldgenebarbour@yahoo.com by editor@tiadaily.com | Update Profile/Email Address | Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribe™ | Privacy Policy.
TIA Daily | PO Box 8086 | Charlottesville | VA | 22906
Saturday, February 12, 2011
INSIDE THE SECRET SERVICE
The prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was not so understanding. His motorcade was arriving at the Sheraton Hotel while a “POTUS Freeze” was in place. The Secret Service agent in charge of Erdogan’s detail asked him to wait until Obama’s motorcade had departed, but the Turkish prime minister did not heed the advice. He opened the door to his car, and armed Turkish agents began exiting the other vehicles in the motorcade. “Don’t do that!” the American detail leader shouted. But Erdogan’s entourage nonetheless approached Obama’s departure tent. An agent in the Presidential Protective Detail, having no idea who these foreign guys with guns were, yelled into his handheld mike, “Crash it! Crash the tent!” Within moments, a dozen agents were out of their cars in full sprint, guns drawn, and the Turks were forcibly detained.
The incident was over within 20 seconds, but the Turkish delegation was mightily offended. It canceled several events in New York, while the Secret Service and the State Department apologized and tried to smooth hurt egos. Although agents had done exactly what they were supposed to do, the service initiated a full review, and procedures were altered to ensure that presidential motorcades didn’t intersect with waiting dignitaries in the future.
The incident was over within 20 seconds, but the Turkish delegation was mightily offended. It canceled several events in New York, while the Secret Service and the State Department apologized and tried to smooth hurt egos. Although agents had done exactly what they were supposed to do, the service initiated a full review, and procedures were altered to ensure that presidential motorcades didn’t intersect with waiting dignitaries in the future.
The Atlantic Home
March 2011
Inside the Secret Service
When President Obama and two-thirds of the world’s leaders gather in New York City, it is up to the U.S. Secret Service to keep them all safe. Granted unprecedented access, our author tells the story of how the agency pulls off the most complicated security event of the year, from counter-surveillance to counter-assault, hotel booking to event scheduling.
By Marc Ambinder
Image credit: Brooks Kraft
On a warm September evening in New York City, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad slowly walked down the staircase of his official plane, idling in a remote corner of John F. Kennedy International Airport. Waiting to greet him were a gaggle of invited (and carefully screened) journalists, U.S. consular officials, and the like. But there was at least one face in the small crowd that Ahmadinejad recognized immediately, that of a U.S. Secret Service agent whom I’ll call Jack. (For security reasons, the service prefers not to publicize the names of its agents working on protective details.) A lean, compact man in his late 40s, Jack wore what passes for a uniform in the Secret Service: dark suit with a slight, artificial paunch around the middle (the result of gun, radio, handcuffs, and badge), light-blue shirt, and red tie. This was Jack’s third stint as a senior agent on the Iran detail, but his first as detail leader. He was the man charged by the U.S. government with ensuring the safety of arguably the nation’s most public enemy.
Also see:
Graphic: The Presidential Motorcade
A detailed look at security detail that moves the president on the ground.
Jack does not consider Ahmadinejad a friend, and he is somewhat uncomfortable being one of the few Americans the Iranian leader has gotten to know firsthand. (Ahmadinejad had grown so fond of Jack’s predecessor as detail leader— an agent since promoted to a more senior position—that he’d called him by his first name, asked after his children, and even, upon arriving and departing the country, given him formal kisses on each cheek.) But Jack was nonetheless proud of the job with which he had been entrusted: protecting the life of a man with a bull’s-eye on his back, and getting him door-to-door for six days, from limo to hotel to high-level meeting, as safely and expeditiously as possible.
Ahmadinejad was in New York for the 65th United Nations General Assembly—or UNGA, typically pronounced just the way it looks. While the Iranian leader’s visit was particularly high-profile and politically fraught, it was by no means unique. In 2010, the annual event required more than 200 Secret Service details for foreign leaders, American officials, and spouses, along with another 60 or so State Department security details for lower-level protectees. (This is in addition to the thousands of New York City police officers called upon to help secure buildings and traffic routes, and lead motorcades.) Over the course of the event, 900 aircraft would fly in and out of JFK bearing dignitaries; hundreds of events across the city would need to be scouted and secured.
Yet, remarkably, the General Assembly has become an almost unremarkable event, at least by Secret Service standards. There have been 38 “National Special Security Events” since President Clinton first coined the term in a classified 1998 national-security directive. Most of these NSSEs have occurred since September 11, 2001, and 14 of them since 2007, including the two presidential conventions, President-elect Obama’s pre-inauguration whistle-stop train tour, the inauguration itself, and the 2008 and 2009 G-20 summits. The General Assembly poses greater security and logistical challenges than many, if not most, of these events. This is due in part to its size, and in part to the fact that habit is the worst enemy of protective security, and the assembly offers an extremely attractive, recurring target: many foreign leaders stay in the same hotels and attend the same events at the same times each year. But despite all this, the General Assembly has not been categorized as an NSSE since 2001. The Secret Service has it down to a science.
This is the story of a dog that didn’t bark, and of the men and women who kept it muzzled. The Secret Service receives dozens of requests each year from reporters who want a peek inside the agency; most are quickly turned down. Typically, the service provides context for media coverage of its major security events by opening its training facility in Beltsville, Maryland. There, it can put on a show—complete with motorcades and simulated attacks—in a tightly controlled environment. It took me more than 18 months to persuade the service to let me be the first reporter to see the process from the inside in a real-world, real-time situation. I was allowed access to command posts, operation centers, and other secure areas. I agreed only to withhold some details about protective methodology that would imperil the service’s ability to do its job.
In exchange, I was able to witness how a smallish, secretive federal agency under some bureaucratic duress assures security at the General Assembly, an event for which two-thirds of the world’s leaders, many of whom have been subject to past assassination attempts, gather in one of the most crowded, open cities in the world. It is the job of the Secret Service, in concert with a host of local, state, and federal agencies, to make sure nothing goes wrong.
For Jack and the rest of the Iranian detail, that meant “keeping things simple,” as he explained to me. For the week, Ahmadinejad was just another “high”—that is, someone who receives the highest level of Secret Service protection. During his stay, the Iranian president was ensconced in the smallish, 20-floor Hilton Manhattan East. The hotel remained open to regular guests, and tourists wandered freely through the lobby. No demonstrators were outside when I visited (a somewhat surprising absence, given that the day’s newspapers had disclosed the location of the hotel), but a couple dozen plainclothes police officers were stationed around the building just in case.
Ahmadinejad was in his private suite, preparing for a series of interviews with American television hosts. In the corridors outside, the Secret Service agents and Ahmadinejad’s own Iranian security detail—immediately recognizable by their open-necked collars—generally kept apart, though they were mutually respectful. The Secret Service “command post” was a hotel room with the bed removed and replaced with the tools of the trade: semiautomatic weapons, first-aid equipment, one desk with a computer and another with a radio tuned to the detail’s coded frequency, nicknamed “Mike.”
But arguably the clearest signal that Ahmadinejad was no ordinary VIP was the fact that his media appearances throughout the day all took place within the hotel itself. When the time came, he rode a dedicated elevator down to a small, makeshift studio in the basement to be interviewed—under the watchful eye of his security detail—by the likes of Larry King and Charlie Rose. The mountain, in other words, came to Mahmoud.
Paint is peeling off the clapboard sides of what looks like an abandoned warehouse on the edge of the East River in Brooklyn. During the General Assembly, the Secret Service used the building as a secure location to house at least 100 armored limousines and SUVs, as well as numbered crates containing hundreds of MP5 assault weapons and thousands of secure radios. Over the course of the event, advance agents would arrive as needed to pick up their keys, their guns, and their radios.
The warehouse is a short drive from the Secret Service’s New York field office, which occupies the (again, highly secure) top floors of an otherwise anonymous Brooklyn office building. The field office had been located in Tower 7 of the World Trade Center—along with an important CIA station and the New York emergency command center authorized by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani—until its destruction in the September 11 attacks. For months afterward, until the money came through for a new permanent office, the Secret Service worked out of three temporary locations, leasing space from, among others, John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Midtown.
The New York field office is the service’s largest, averaging six protective assignments a week under normal circumstances as well as dozens of counterfeiting cases—responsibility for which the service, until recently a part of the Treasury Department, has fought zealously to retain. Among the James Bondian features of the facility are a state-of-the-art wire room, where the service conducts phone tracking; a locked vault full of disguises and fake-grass tarps for agents to hide beneath when on undercover assignments; and a warren of interview rooms where the service regularly conducts polygraphs, both for criminal investigations and for security-clearance applications. (The agency’s polygraphs are considered the gold standard in U.S. government.)
When I visited in June, Brian Parr, the special agent in charge of the field office, pointed out that terrorists had twice attempted to attack New York City within the past year, failing only because they’d made mistakes, not because they had been detected by law enforcement. He cited the case of Najibullah Zazi, a bus driver who was intercepted by the NYPD and the FBI as he prepared to bomb the New York City subway system in September 2009. “A year ago,” Parr told me, “I was standing in a room with 14 backpacks that had tested positive for TATP, an explosive. And that next week”—that is, when the UN would convene its 2009 General Assembly—“I had two-thirds of the world’s leaders coming to my district.”
During the 2010 assembly, a command center, code-named “Broadside,” was set up at the heart of the field office. Here, agents followed the movements of the many dignitaries and their security details in real time, in part by monitoring 16 distinct radio channels set aside for the summit. (This was considered a luxury: radio bandwidth is a precious commodity, and only 12 channels had been available the prior year.) Encryption keys for each channel are supplied by the National Security Agency, and the agents protect their radios as scrupulously as they protect their guns. “If only one radio is lost, we have to rekey every radio,” the agent in charge of this process told me.
In addition to establishing Broadside, the Secret Service also set up a tactical command post, code-named “North Star,” at a secret location in the city. North Star coordinated the counter-assault teams, the counter-sniper teams, and the hazardous-material teams—or “Hammer” squads—assigned to high-threat protectees. Run by the service’s Special Operations Division, North Star was responsible for arguably the most sensitive part of the assembly preparations. “One of the things we know,” Parr told me, “is that when things go wrong, we’ve got to get 150 world leaders and their spouses off the island”—that is, Manhattan—“in a hurry.” For weeks, the Special Operations Division scouted evacuation routes, hardened safe houses throughout the city, and secured Coast Guard assets. If a situation arose in which protectees needed to be moved to safety, counter-assault (or CAT) teams would “crash” the event and secure an evacuation pathway.
Also see:
Listening In: Secret Service radio chatter
Marc Ambinder is the first journalist allowed to listen in on a secret service radio encrypted transmission.
As a last resort in the event a leader is shot or otherwise injured, the service has what Parr calls its “secret weapon” on 24/7 standby. Dr. Maurizio Miglietta, a former chief of trauma at Bellevue who has been working these summits for years, provides the agency with a team of doctors and nurses, and sets up a mobile trauma unit at major venues. He can perform surgery on the spot, if necessary.
The primary goal, of course, is preventing any such incident. The mission begins with an extensive intelligence assessment. Agents and analysts at the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division in Washington, D.C., prepare a detailed profile of each protectee—including information on who might wish him or her harm and why—for delivery to the New York field office. The Secret Service has access to virtually every bit of data produced by the American intelligence community; as Charlie Allen, a former top CIA officer who served as the Department of Homeland Security’s first intelligence chief, explains, “They are voracious consumers of intelligence.”
That intelligence often includes sensitive information developed by counterparts in other countries: for obvious reasons, the service has some of the closest liaison relationships with foreign intelligence agencies of any U.S. entity. Chinese and Russian protective-security teams regularly spend time with Secret Service agents to help them prepare for large events. China even invited the service to Beijing to observe its agencies’ security arrangements for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Indeed, it is an irony of the service that some of its dealings with foreign security agencies are less fraught than those with the rest of the American intelligence community.
Mark Sullivan, the director of the Secret Service, is tall and trim, with deep-set eyes. He is ready with a smile even though he occupies a job that one predecessor, Stuart Knight, called a “living nightmare in a democracy.” When I met him last April, during a nuclear-security summit convened by President Obama, he was giving senior administration officials a tour of the Multi-Agency Command Center in downtown Washington. Before I was even able to ask the question directly, he stressed to me that the service was only a consumer, not a collector, of foreign intelligence.
What Sullivan did not tell me, but I knew from other sources, was that over the past 10 years, the CIA had asked the service on at least two occasions to help develop intelligence on a visiting foreign leader—that is, essentially, to spy on the very person it was assigned to protect. Both times, the service refused.
While not confirming these details, W. Ralph Basham, who was the director of the service from 2003 to 2006, told me, “It can’t work any other way. Once you lose the confidence of those individuals you protect, once they don’t want you near them—and many of them already think we’re spying on them anyway—it would never be a workable situation.”
Recently, Sullivan had fought, and won, yet another internal battle to avoid having his agents designated as intelligence collectors, which would have led to a kind of agency schizophrenia. “Mark is absolutely right to be fighting those battles,” Basham said. Though the service and the FBI cooperate closely on terrorism threats, they’ve created an informal firewall between the FBI’s intelligence-gathering operations and the service’s protective operations.
Although no one working for the Secret Service would discuss the subject with me, other sources told me that these sometimes contradictory priorities within the intelligence community can create Spy vs. Spy–style scenarios—but with American agents on both sides. When Ahmadinejad visits the United States, for instance, the FBI’s National Security Division dispatches teams of undercover agents to keep tabs on everyone with whom he travels or meets. As a result, the Secret Service’s security detail and counter-surveillance teams not only have to look out for suspicious figures who might pose a threat to Ahmadinejad’s life; they also have to determine which of those figures might in fact be “friendly” agents conducting surveillance on behalf of the U.S. government. (Comparable situations arise during visits by the leaders of any of a number of nations with whom the United States has a fraught or hostile relationship.)
Such conflicts help explain the wariness with which some protectees view their security details. For instance, after the Secret Service’s Technical Security Division carefully swept Ahmadinejad’s limousine and hotel room for listening devices— standard practice for all protectees—Ahmadinejad’s own bodyguards swept them as well. Trust extends only so far.
Active bodyguard duty makes up just a fraction of the work performed by Secret Service agents on protective missions; they are also, as the situation demands, hotel bookers, personal schedulers, and protocol experts. And these latter roles are often as demanding as the ones that make for good Hollywood screenplays. Being assigned to “housing,” for instance, might not seem glamorous compared with serving on one of the counter-assault teams. But the truth is that CAT team members spend much of their time standing around in stairwells, watching and waiting for extreme scenarios that are very unlikely to occur. Agents working on housing, by contrast, must constantly solve problems, though some might seem mundane.
Indeed, the Secret Service is an elite travel agency of sorts, maintaining relationships with hotels across the country and negotiating rates throughout the year. Large events such as the General Assembly pose particular hurdles, as many of the better hotels sell out years in advance.
Every venue to be used must be cleared by the Technical Security Division. First, 130 dog teams, many borrowed from other agencies, sniff for explosives. Then agents conduct fire-safety surveys; coordinate the placement of chemical, biological, and radiological sensors; and, for some rooms, add bulletproof glass and blast webbing to the windows. This year, housing agents faced an additional threat to national security: bedbugs. It would have been an obvious embarrassment if any of the General Assembly protectees had been bitten by the pests that have of late plagued New York City. None were, but one agent wasn’t so lucky. As a gag, fellow agents posted his injured-in-the-line-of-duty portrait on a wall in one of the temporary offices leased by the service.
Scheduling is a still-more-complex duty at an event such as the assembly—especially, as is often the case, when foreign dignitaries prove impulsive or uncooperative. One African nation, for instance, was particularly reticent about sharing its president’s U.S. itinerary with the service. One of the agents charged with scheduling his protective detail actually resorted to sleuthing his planned movements on Google. There, he found a reference to a speech the president intended to give in Utah. The agent then called the chief of police in Salt Lake City, who was vaguely aware of the dignitary’s impending visit and managed to supply the name of the hotel where he would be staying. A call to the hotel management provided the president’s arrival and departure dates. Only then could the agent alert his colleagues in Salt Lake City to supply protective personnel—and, just as important, determine how many agents in New York could be reassigned to other duties during those dates.
Even when protectees are more forthcoming with their schedules, those schedules are prone to change at the last minute. The service has “jump teams” available to handle sudden itinerary changes—as, for example, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy opted for an unplanned jog through the lovely (but entirely unsecured) grounds of Central Park. Last year, the Afghanistan delegation belatedly canceled its General Assembly appearance altogether. One might think that the service would appreciate the manpower this would free up. But consider the number of countries whose leaders had already scheduled events with President Hamid Karzai. Those events had to be canceled, and new events planned—and it was up to the agents in the scheduling office to make sure all the new pieces fit together. One scheduling change can create a cascade of others.
On Monday morning, September 20—the day world leaders began to arrive in force for the General Assembly—all 24 copies of the New York Post sold by the gift shop of the Embassy Suites hotel in Lower Manhattan were snatched up by 8 a.m. The Secret Service had set up a special coordinating center on the 15th floor, and agents there were passing around copies of page seven, which featured a heroic photo of one of their own in action.
The day before, in the late afternoon, the motorcade belonging to Israeli President Shimon Peres had arrived near the Carlyle hotel on the Upper East Side. French President Sarkozy and his glamorous wife, Carla Bruni, were staying at the hotel and, as a result, French and American paparazzi were staked out across the street. As Peres’s limo arrived, a photographer bearing a black backpack hopped over a barricade fence and began walking quickly toward it. Agents described the subsequent events as if they happened in slow motion.
Perimeter agents and officers immediately called on the photographer to halt: Stop stop stop! But he continued crossing the street, readying his camera for a picture and, in the process, swinging his backpack forward. Under the circumstances, both items had to be viewed as potential weapons.
Two things happened at almost the same instant: an NYPD intelligence officer leapt from the lead car of the motorcade and drew his Glock, and a bulky man in a polo shirt and shorts pulled his own weapon, a SIG-Sauer P229, shouting, “Get to the ground! Get to the ground!” The latter agent was a member of a Secret Service counter-surveillance team, breaking cover to intercept the potential threat.
Facing the business ends of two pistols, the photographer had a moment of sudden insight and dropped to the ground. He was cuffed by NYPD officers, interviewed by the Secret Service, and ordered to stay the hell away from motorcades in the future. The bad news, from the service’s point of view, was that any potential assassin would now know that the service had undercover counter-surveillance teams in place. The good news: the perceived threat was shut down quickly and smoothly. And a lucky New York Post photographer had taken a stunning photograph of the incident: agent and policeman, weapons drawn, standing over the prone photographer.
The situation also served as a reminder of the importance of the service’s cooperation with local law enforcement. For the General Assembly, the Secret Service coordinates with at least 17 different federal, state, and local agencies. In particular, the service cannot do its job unless the New York police and other local agencies have done theirs. Every year brings disagreements—often the same ones, year after year. Sometimes, the Port Authority balks at providing foreign leaders with enough vehicle escorts; the service usually wins that one. The service often requests more “setback”—that is, space between motorcades and other traffic—on certain streets; the NYPD will give it just one lane. The service prefers intersection control for all high-level protectees; last year, the NYPD decided to reserve that perk for President Obama alone. The give-and-take is perennial, and frustrating, and absolutely unavoidable.
In an advance briefing, Brian Parr had reminded his agents that maintaining mutual respect with the police was crucial. “Be humble,” he said. “The NYPD is going to be valuable to you.” The photographer incident, however inconsequential, had fulfilled his prediction.
The Secret Service likes to say that its high-level protectees are given every asset that is used to protect the president of the United States. This isn’t true, of course. The Presidential Protective Detail is the holiest of holies. Everything stops for the presidential motorcade—including, during the 2009 General Assembly, the motorcade carrying a prominent world leader accustomed to near-royal treatment in his own country. He was returning to the Waldorf from the UN, but found his route unexpectedly blocked.
He tapped the agent who was driving his car. “Why are we stopped?”
“It’s President Obama,” the agent replied. “He’s departing the hotel.” The leader was silent for a moment, before shrugging and leaning back in his seat. In his country, after all, everything stopped for him.
The prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was not so understanding. His motorcade was arriving at the Sheraton Hotel while a “POTUS Freeze” was in place. The Secret Service agent in charge of Erdogan’s detail asked him to wait until Obama’s motorcade had departed, but the Turkish prime minister did not heed the advice. He opened the door to his car, and armed Turkish agents began exiting the other vehicles in the motorcade. “Don’t do that!” the American detail leader shouted. But Erdogan’s entourage nonetheless approached Obama’s departure tent. An agent in the Presidential Protective Detail, having no idea who these foreign guys with guns were, yelled into his handheld mike, “Crash it! Crash the tent!” Within moments, a dozen agents were out of their cars in full sprint, guns drawn, and the Turks were forcibly detained.
The incident was over within 20 seconds, but the Turkish delegation was mightily offended. It canceled several events in New York, while the Secret Service and the State Department apologized and tried to smooth hurt egos. Although agents had done exactly what they were supposed to do, the service initiated a full review, and procedures were altered to ensure that presidential motorcades didn’t intersect with waiting dignitaries in the future.
The Presidential Protective Detail always walks a fine line. On the one hand, the safety of the president is sacrosanct; on the other, the detail is extremely wary of being perceived as a kind of Praetorian Guard. Still, its security footprint is, inevitably, enormous. In his 2010 book, The Kennedy Detail, former agent Gerald Blaine said he was aghast at the scope of the protective detail at a 2008 event for a presidential candidate he declined to identify: close to 60 agents and law-enforcement officers—for someone who was only campaigning to be president.
Since the Kennedy assassination in 1963, and following each subsequent attempt on a president’s life, the “package,” as the protective detail is called, has grown larger and more menacing. In 2005, as President Bush and Vice President Cheney celebrated their inauguration with a slow motorcade back to the White House, the conservative commentator George Will told the ABC News anchor Peter Jennings that the package, with its rings of hulking vehicles and heavily armed agents, brought to mind less Washington, D.C., than wartime Sarajevo. Sensitive to such perceptions, Obama’s inaugural procession in 2009 changed the security configuration somewhat—so that, for example, photographs of the president would feature the Capitol dome in the background, rather than a black, ambulance-style hazmat truck.
It is a sorely underappreciated fact that both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were the subjects of relatively close-call assassination attempts. During a speech Bush gave at Tbilisi’s Freedom Square in Georgia on May 10, 2005, an assailant threw a live grenade at the president. The would-be assassin, who was later caught, had been among the throng of Georgians who had burst through the perimeter fencing when it was compromised an hour before the event. (Luckily, the grenade fell more than 30 yards away from Bush, outside of its effective range, and it did not explode.) The Secret Service had warned the president and his staff that it was not able to screen everyone within the standard range, and that as a result, he was potentially in danger. According to former administration officials, Bush insisted on giving the speech anyway.
Clinton’s brush with death was closer still, and his life may have been saved by a gut decision made by his detail leader. The incident was disclosed only recently by the historian Ken Gormley in his book The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr. The context was Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s effort to force members of the Presidential Protective Detail to disclose particulars of Clinton’s movements and any conversation they might have heard that was germane to his case. Then–Secret Service Director Lewis C. Merletti argued to Starr that a president needed to have complete trust in his protective detail, offering the following example: in 1996, President Clinton was in Manila for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, and had on his agenda a visit with a local official. He was running late, in a surly mood, and eager to get going. According to Gormley, just moments before the motorcade was about to move, agents using a special intelligence-gathering capacity—one that remains classified—picked up radio chatter mentioning the words wedding and bridge. Knowing well that wedding was often a code word for a terrorist hit, Merletti changed the route, which happened to include a bridge. Clinton was angry at the decision, which would cause further delay, but he did not override it. When agents arrived at the bridge, they indeed found explosives: had Clinton taken the prescribed route, he very likely would have been killed. (Within the past decade, the service has added an electronic-countermeasures vehicle— theoretically capable of jamming remotely controlled explosives—to the presidential protection package.)
After the September 11 attacks, the Secret Service found itself in the middle of a bureaucratic turf war. Under pressure from congressional Democrats, the Bush administration had reluctantly agreed to consolidate domestic security functions into a huge new department with the faintly Teutonic appellation of Homeland Security. The Secret Service was to be moved from its comfortable—if seemingly outdated—perch in the Treasury Department to the new entity. (The service’s placement within Treasury was a consequence of its having been initially formed, under President Abraham Lincoln, as an anti-counterfeiting unit; it officially assumed its better-known protective function only after the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley.)
Negotiations regarding the integration of the service into Homeland Security were fraught from the start. Joseph W. Hagin, President Bush’s deputy chief of staff, told me that the White House debated folding the service’s protective duties into Homeland Security, but handing over its responsibility to investigate counterfeiting and other financial crimes to the Justice Department. Though the debate was settled in the service’s favor, the threat of having its investigative functions taken away still lingers: in late 2009, rumors flared within the service that a secret White House working group was making plans to limit the service to its protective functions and divvy up its financial-fraud mission between Treasury and Justice. Though the rumors were subsequently debunked, their persistence speaks to the service’s institutional fears.
“We can’t have agents standing post all year,” says Robert Sica, the deputy special agent in charge of the New York field office. “The investigations are what keep the agents’ minds sharp, which reinforces their effectiveness on protective details. The best protective agents are often the smartest ones, because they know how to read people. That comes from investigations.” It may be true that if you designed the entire national-security apparatus from scratch, investigating financial crimes would fall outside the purview of the Secret Service. But from the agency’s point of view, its hybrid nature is a feature, not a bug.
Tension between the Secret Service and its new DHS overseers is still evident on both sides. When I approached a top DHS official with a question about a “good story” I was working on about the service, his curt response was, “There are no good stories about the service.” Yet for all the bureaucratic wrangles and miscommunications, integration into DHS has helped the service in innumerable ways. The service now has a much easier time borrowing personnel to staff major national-security events: on the 2008 presidential campaign trail, hundreds of federal agents from other DHS agencies assisted the service with protective duties. The service can also borrow surveillance assets very easily, and its Technical Security Division works closely with DHS scientists on explosive-detection technology. As DHS claims more of a role in securing cyberspace, it has also helped protect the service’s ability to initiate financial cyber-crime investigations— an area where, again, the Justice Department would prefer to take the lead.
On September 23, as the General Assembly drew to a close, three senior Secret Service agents sat down to a breakfast of eggs and pancakes at the Embassy Suites. All were veterans of numerous large security events.
“The Pittsburgh summit was harder than this,” one of them said, referring to the 2009 G-20 gathering. Protecting 20 world leaders in an unfamiliar location, in other words, had been a greater challenge than taking care of 150 in a city where the infrastructure was in place, the local relationships were built, and the public was conditioned to accept the hassles. It had been particularly difficult in Pittsburgh, for example, to find agents hotel rooms near those of their protectees.
Talk then turned to an upcoming National Special Security Event: the APEC summit in Hawaii in November 2011. Two agents had been dispatched from Washington more than a year in advance of the event to scout out locations for command centers; establish contact with hotels, police departments, and businesses; and prepare a pre-advance packet, listing everything from hospital locations to potential motorcade choke points. “The government of Hawaii is very anxious,” one of the agents noted. “We still haven’t figured out the hotel rooms.”
Overall, though, the agents didn’t have a lot of sympathy for their colleagues’ travails. A year in Hawaii is, after all, a year in Hawaii—about as far a cry from Pittsburgh as could be imagined. “Not a bad gig,” one of the agents commented, to nods all around. There was no need to add: as long as nothing goes wrong.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/inside-the-secret-service/8390/
By Marc Ambinder
Image credit: Brooks Kraft
On a warm September evening in New York City, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad slowly walked down the staircase of his official plane, idling in a remote corner of John F. Kennedy International Airport. Waiting to greet him were a gaggle of invited (and carefully screened) journalists, U.S. consular officials, and the like. But there was at least one face in the small crowd that Ahmadinejad recognized immediately, that of a U.S. Secret Service agent whom I’ll call Jack. (For security reasons, the service prefers not to publicize the names of its agents working on protective details.) A lean, compact man in his late 40s, Jack wore what passes for a uniform in the Secret Service: dark suit with a slight, artificial paunch around the middle (the result of gun, radio, handcuffs, and badge), light-blue shirt, and red tie. This was Jack’s third stint as a senior agent on the Iran detail, but his first as detail leader. He was the man charged by the U.S. government with ensuring the safety of arguably the nation’s most public enemy.
Also see:
Graphic: The Presidential Motorcade
A detailed look at security detail that moves the president on the ground.
Jack does not consider Ahmadinejad a friend, and he is somewhat uncomfortable being one of the few Americans the Iranian leader has gotten to know firsthand. (Ahmadinejad had grown so fond of Jack’s predecessor as detail leader— an agent since promoted to a more senior position—that he’d called him by his first name, asked after his children, and even, upon arriving and departing the country, given him formal kisses on each cheek.) But Jack was nonetheless proud of the job with which he had been entrusted: protecting the life of a man with a bull’s-eye on his back, and getting him door-to-door for six days, from limo to hotel to high-level meeting, as safely and expeditiously as possible.
Ahmadinejad was in New York for the 65th United Nations General Assembly—or UNGA, typically pronounced just the way it looks. While the Iranian leader’s visit was particularly high-profile and politically fraught, it was by no means unique. In 2010, the annual event required more than 200 Secret Service details for foreign leaders, American officials, and spouses, along with another 60 or so State Department security details for lower-level protectees. (This is in addition to the thousands of New York City police officers called upon to help secure buildings and traffic routes, and lead motorcades.) Over the course of the event, 900 aircraft would fly in and out of JFK bearing dignitaries; hundreds of events across the city would need to be scouted and secured.
Yet, remarkably, the General Assembly has become an almost unremarkable event, at least by Secret Service standards. There have been 38 “National Special Security Events” since President Clinton first coined the term in a classified 1998 national-security directive. Most of these NSSEs have occurred since September 11, 2001, and 14 of them since 2007, including the two presidential conventions, President-elect Obama’s pre-inauguration whistle-stop train tour, the inauguration itself, and the 2008 and 2009 G-20 summits. The General Assembly poses greater security and logistical challenges than many, if not most, of these events. This is due in part to its size, and in part to the fact that habit is the worst enemy of protective security, and the assembly offers an extremely attractive, recurring target: many foreign leaders stay in the same hotels and attend the same events at the same times each year. But despite all this, the General Assembly has not been categorized as an NSSE since 2001. The Secret Service has it down to a science.
This is the story of a dog that didn’t bark, and of the men and women who kept it muzzled. The Secret Service receives dozens of requests each year from reporters who want a peek inside the agency; most are quickly turned down. Typically, the service provides context for media coverage of its major security events by opening its training facility in Beltsville, Maryland. There, it can put on a show—complete with motorcades and simulated attacks—in a tightly controlled environment. It took me more than 18 months to persuade the service to let me be the first reporter to see the process from the inside in a real-world, real-time situation. I was allowed access to command posts, operation centers, and other secure areas. I agreed only to withhold some details about protective methodology that would imperil the service’s ability to do its job.
In exchange, I was able to witness how a smallish, secretive federal agency under some bureaucratic duress assures security at the General Assembly, an event for which two-thirds of the world’s leaders, many of whom have been subject to past assassination attempts, gather in one of the most crowded, open cities in the world. It is the job of the Secret Service, in concert with a host of local, state, and federal agencies, to make sure nothing goes wrong.
For Jack and the rest of the Iranian detail, that meant “keeping things simple,” as he explained to me. For the week, Ahmadinejad was just another “high”—that is, someone who receives the highest level of Secret Service protection. During his stay, the Iranian president was ensconced in the smallish, 20-floor Hilton Manhattan East. The hotel remained open to regular guests, and tourists wandered freely through the lobby. No demonstrators were outside when I visited (a somewhat surprising absence, given that the day’s newspapers had disclosed the location of the hotel), but a couple dozen plainclothes police officers were stationed around the building just in case.
Ahmadinejad was in his private suite, preparing for a series of interviews with American television hosts. In the corridors outside, the Secret Service agents and Ahmadinejad’s own Iranian security detail—immediately recognizable by their open-necked collars—generally kept apart, though they were mutually respectful. The Secret Service “command post” was a hotel room with the bed removed and replaced with the tools of the trade: semiautomatic weapons, first-aid equipment, one desk with a computer and another with a radio tuned to the detail’s coded frequency, nicknamed “Mike.”
But arguably the clearest signal that Ahmadinejad was no ordinary VIP was the fact that his media appearances throughout the day all took place within the hotel itself. When the time came, he rode a dedicated elevator down to a small, makeshift studio in the basement to be interviewed—under the watchful eye of his security detail—by the likes of Larry King and Charlie Rose. The mountain, in other words, came to Mahmoud.
Paint is peeling off the clapboard sides of what looks like an abandoned warehouse on the edge of the East River in Brooklyn. During the General Assembly, the Secret Service used the building as a secure location to house at least 100 armored limousines and SUVs, as well as numbered crates containing hundreds of MP5 assault weapons and thousands of secure radios. Over the course of the event, advance agents would arrive as needed to pick up their keys, their guns, and their radios.
The warehouse is a short drive from the Secret Service’s New York field office, which occupies the (again, highly secure) top floors of an otherwise anonymous Brooklyn office building. The field office had been located in Tower 7 of the World Trade Center—along with an important CIA station and the New York emergency command center authorized by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani—until its destruction in the September 11 attacks. For months afterward, until the money came through for a new permanent office, the Secret Service worked out of three temporary locations, leasing space from, among others, John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Midtown.
The New York field office is the service’s largest, averaging six protective assignments a week under normal circumstances as well as dozens of counterfeiting cases—responsibility for which the service, until recently a part of the Treasury Department, has fought zealously to retain. Among the James Bondian features of the facility are a state-of-the-art wire room, where the service conducts phone tracking; a locked vault full of disguises and fake-grass tarps for agents to hide beneath when on undercover assignments; and a warren of interview rooms where the service regularly conducts polygraphs, both for criminal investigations and for security-clearance applications. (The agency’s polygraphs are considered the gold standard in U.S. government.)
When I visited in June, Brian Parr, the special agent in charge of the field office, pointed out that terrorists had twice attempted to attack New York City within the past year, failing only because they’d made mistakes, not because they had been detected by law enforcement. He cited the case of Najibullah Zazi, a bus driver who was intercepted by the NYPD and the FBI as he prepared to bomb the New York City subway system in September 2009. “A year ago,” Parr told me, “I was standing in a room with 14 backpacks that had tested positive for TATP, an explosive. And that next week”—that is, when the UN would convene its 2009 General Assembly—“I had two-thirds of the world’s leaders coming to my district.”
During the 2010 assembly, a command center, code-named “Broadside,” was set up at the heart of the field office. Here, agents followed the movements of the many dignitaries and their security details in real time, in part by monitoring 16 distinct radio channels set aside for the summit. (This was considered a luxury: radio bandwidth is a precious commodity, and only 12 channels had been available the prior year.) Encryption keys for each channel are supplied by the National Security Agency, and the agents protect their radios as scrupulously as they protect their guns. “If only one radio is lost, we have to rekey every radio,” the agent in charge of this process told me.
In addition to establishing Broadside, the Secret Service also set up a tactical command post, code-named “North Star,” at a secret location in the city. North Star coordinated the counter-assault teams, the counter-sniper teams, and the hazardous-material teams—or “Hammer” squads—assigned to high-threat protectees. Run by the service’s Special Operations Division, North Star was responsible for arguably the most sensitive part of the assembly preparations. “One of the things we know,” Parr told me, “is that when things go wrong, we’ve got to get 150 world leaders and their spouses off the island”—that is, Manhattan—“in a hurry.” For weeks, the Special Operations Division scouted evacuation routes, hardened safe houses throughout the city, and secured Coast Guard assets. If a situation arose in which protectees needed to be moved to safety, counter-assault (or CAT) teams would “crash” the event and secure an evacuation pathway.
Also see:
Listening In: Secret Service radio chatter
Marc Ambinder is the first journalist allowed to listen in on a secret service radio encrypted transmission.
As a last resort in the event a leader is shot or otherwise injured, the service has what Parr calls its “secret weapon” on 24/7 standby. Dr. Maurizio Miglietta, a former chief of trauma at Bellevue who has been working these summits for years, provides the agency with a team of doctors and nurses, and sets up a mobile trauma unit at major venues. He can perform surgery on the spot, if necessary.
The primary goal, of course, is preventing any such incident. The mission begins with an extensive intelligence assessment. Agents and analysts at the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division in Washington, D.C., prepare a detailed profile of each protectee—including information on who might wish him or her harm and why—for delivery to the New York field office. The Secret Service has access to virtually every bit of data produced by the American intelligence community; as Charlie Allen, a former top CIA officer who served as the Department of Homeland Security’s first intelligence chief, explains, “They are voracious consumers of intelligence.”
That intelligence often includes sensitive information developed by counterparts in other countries: for obvious reasons, the service has some of the closest liaison relationships with foreign intelligence agencies of any U.S. entity. Chinese and Russian protective-security teams regularly spend time with Secret Service agents to help them prepare for large events. China even invited the service to Beijing to observe its agencies’ security arrangements for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Indeed, it is an irony of the service that some of its dealings with foreign security agencies are less fraught than those with the rest of the American intelligence community.
Mark Sullivan, the director of the Secret Service, is tall and trim, with deep-set eyes. He is ready with a smile even though he occupies a job that one predecessor, Stuart Knight, called a “living nightmare in a democracy.” When I met him last April, during a nuclear-security summit convened by President Obama, he was giving senior administration officials a tour of the Multi-Agency Command Center in downtown Washington. Before I was even able to ask the question directly, he stressed to me that the service was only a consumer, not a collector, of foreign intelligence.
What Sullivan did not tell me, but I knew from other sources, was that over the past 10 years, the CIA had asked the service on at least two occasions to help develop intelligence on a visiting foreign leader—that is, essentially, to spy on the very person it was assigned to protect. Both times, the service refused.
While not confirming these details, W. Ralph Basham, who was the director of the service from 2003 to 2006, told me, “It can’t work any other way. Once you lose the confidence of those individuals you protect, once they don’t want you near them—and many of them already think we’re spying on them anyway—it would never be a workable situation.”
Recently, Sullivan had fought, and won, yet another internal battle to avoid having his agents designated as intelligence collectors, which would have led to a kind of agency schizophrenia. “Mark is absolutely right to be fighting those battles,” Basham said. Though the service and the FBI cooperate closely on terrorism threats, they’ve created an informal firewall between the FBI’s intelligence-gathering operations and the service’s protective operations.
Although no one working for the Secret Service would discuss the subject with me, other sources told me that these sometimes contradictory priorities within the intelligence community can create Spy vs. Spy–style scenarios—but with American agents on both sides. When Ahmadinejad visits the United States, for instance, the FBI’s National Security Division dispatches teams of undercover agents to keep tabs on everyone with whom he travels or meets. As a result, the Secret Service’s security detail and counter-surveillance teams not only have to look out for suspicious figures who might pose a threat to Ahmadinejad’s life; they also have to determine which of those figures might in fact be “friendly” agents conducting surveillance on behalf of the U.S. government. (Comparable situations arise during visits by the leaders of any of a number of nations with whom the United States has a fraught or hostile relationship.)
Such conflicts help explain the wariness with which some protectees view their security details. For instance, after the Secret Service’s Technical Security Division carefully swept Ahmadinejad’s limousine and hotel room for listening devices— standard practice for all protectees—Ahmadinejad’s own bodyguards swept them as well. Trust extends only so far.
Active bodyguard duty makes up just a fraction of the work performed by Secret Service agents on protective missions; they are also, as the situation demands, hotel bookers, personal schedulers, and protocol experts. And these latter roles are often as demanding as the ones that make for good Hollywood screenplays. Being assigned to “housing,” for instance, might not seem glamorous compared with serving on one of the counter-assault teams. But the truth is that CAT team members spend much of their time standing around in stairwells, watching and waiting for extreme scenarios that are very unlikely to occur. Agents working on housing, by contrast, must constantly solve problems, though some might seem mundane.
Indeed, the Secret Service is an elite travel agency of sorts, maintaining relationships with hotels across the country and negotiating rates throughout the year. Large events such as the General Assembly pose particular hurdles, as many of the better hotels sell out years in advance.
Every venue to be used must be cleared by the Technical Security Division. First, 130 dog teams, many borrowed from other agencies, sniff for explosives. Then agents conduct fire-safety surveys; coordinate the placement of chemical, biological, and radiological sensors; and, for some rooms, add bulletproof glass and blast webbing to the windows. This year, housing agents faced an additional threat to national security: bedbugs. It would have been an obvious embarrassment if any of the General Assembly protectees had been bitten by the pests that have of late plagued New York City. None were, but one agent wasn’t so lucky. As a gag, fellow agents posted his injured-in-the-line-of-duty portrait on a wall in one of the temporary offices leased by the service.
Scheduling is a still-more-complex duty at an event such as the assembly—especially, as is often the case, when foreign dignitaries prove impulsive or uncooperative. One African nation, for instance, was particularly reticent about sharing its president’s U.S. itinerary with the service. One of the agents charged with scheduling his protective detail actually resorted to sleuthing his planned movements on Google. There, he found a reference to a speech the president intended to give in Utah. The agent then called the chief of police in Salt Lake City, who was vaguely aware of the dignitary’s impending visit and managed to supply the name of the hotel where he would be staying. A call to the hotel management provided the president’s arrival and departure dates. Only then could the agent alert his colleagues in Salt Lake City to supply protective personnel—and, just as important, determine how many agents in New York could be reassigned to other duties during those dates.
Even when protectees are more forthcoming with their schedules, those schedules are prone to change at the last minute. The service has “jump teams” available to handle sudden itinerary changes—as, for example, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy opted for an unplanned jog through the lovely (but entirely unsecured) grounds of Central Park. Last year, the Afghanistan delegation belatedly canceled its General Assembly appearance altogether. One might think that the service would appreciate the manpower this would free up. But consider the number of countries whose leaders had already scheduled events with President Hamid Karzai. Those events had to be canceled, and new events planned—and it was up to the agents in the scheduling office to make sure all the new pieces fit together. One scheduling change can create a cascade of others.
On Monday morning, September 20—the day world leaders began to arrive in force for the General Assembly—all 24 copies of the New York Post sold by the gift shop of the Embassy Suites hotel in Lower Manhattan were snatched up by 8 a.m. The Secret Service had set up a special coordinating center on the 15th floor, and agents there were passing around copies of page seven, which featured a heroic photo of one of their own in action.
The day before, in the late afternoon, the motorcade belonging to Israeli President Shimon Peres had arrived near the Carlyle hotel on the Upper East Side. French President Sarkozy and his glamorous wife, Carla Bruni, were staying at the hotel and, as a result, French and American paparazzi were staked out across the street. As Peres’s limo arrived, a photographer bearing a black backpack hopped over a barricade fence and began walking quickly toward it. Agents described the subsequent events as if they happened in slow motion.
Perimeter agents and officers immediately called on the photographer to halt: Stop stop stop! But he continued crossing the street, readying his camera for a picture and, in the process, swinging his backpack forward. Under the circumstances, both items had to be viewed as potential weapons.
Two things happened at almost the same instant: an NYPD intelligence officer leapt from the lead car of the motorcade and drew his Glock, and a bulky man in a polo shirt and shorts pulled his own weapon, a SIG-Sauer P229, shouting, “Get to the ground! Get to the ground!” The latter agent was a member of a Secret Service counter-surveillance team, breaking cover to intercept the potential threat.
Facing the business ends of two pistols, the photographer had a moment of sudden insight and dropped to the ground. He was cuffed by NYPD officers, interviewed by the Secret Service, and ordered to stay the hell away from motorcades in the future. The bad news, from the service’s point of view, was that any potential assassin would now know that the service had undercover counter-surveillance teams in place. The good news: the perceived threat was shut down quickly and smoothly. And a lucky New York Post photographer had taken a stunning photograph of the incident: agent and policeman, weapons drawn, standing over the prone photographer.
The situation also served as a reminder of the importance of the service’s cooperation with local law enforcement. For the General Assembly, the Secret Service coordinates with at least 17 different federal, state, and local agencies. In particular, the service cannot do its job unless the New York police and other local agencies have done theirs. Every year brings disagreements—often the same ones, year after year. Sometimes, the Port Authority balks at providing foreign leaders with enough vehicle escorts; the service usually wins that one. The service often requests more “setback”—that is, space between motorcades and other traffic—on certain streets; the NYPD will give it just one lane. The service prefers intersection control for all high-level protectees; last year, the NYPD decided to reserve that perk for President Obama alone. The give-and-take is perennial, and frustrating, and absolutely unavoidable.
In an advance briefing, Brian Parr had reminded his agents that maintaining mutual respect with the police was crucial. “Be humble,” he said. “The NYPD is going to be valuable to you.” The photographer incident, however inconsequential, had fulfilled his prediction.
The Secret Service likes to say that its high-level protectees are given every asset that is used to protect the president of the United States. This isn’t true, of course. The Presidential Protective Detail is the holiest of holies. Everything stops for the presidential motorcade—including, during the 2009 General Assembly, the motorcade carrying a prominent world leader accustomed to near-royal treatment in his own country. He was returning to the Waldorf from the UN, but found his route unexpectedly blocked.
He tapped the agent who was driving his car. “Why are we stopped?”
“It’s President Obama,” the agent replied. “He’s departing the hotel.” The leader was silent for a moment, before shrugging and leaning back in his seat. In his country, after all, everything stopped for him.
The prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was not so understanding. His motorcade was arriving at the Sheraton Hotel while a “POTUS Freeze” was in place. The Secret Service agent in charge of Erdogan’s detail asked him to wait until Obama’s motorcade had departed, but the Turkish prime minister did not heed the advice. He opened the door to his car, and armed Turkish agents began exiting the other vehicles in the motorcade. “Don’t do that!” the American detail leader shouted. But Erdogan’s entourage nonetheless approached Obama’s departure tent. An agent in the Presidential Protective Detail, having no idea who these foreign guys with guns were, yelled into his handheld mike, “Crash it! Crash the tent!” Within moments, a dozen agents were out of their cars in full sprint, guns drawn, and the Turks were forcibly detained.
The incident was over within 20 seconds, but the Turkish delegation was mightily offended. It canceled several events in New York, while the Secret Service and the State Department apologized and tried to smooth hurt egos. Although agents had done exactly what they were supposed to do, the service initiated a full review, and procedures were altered to ensure that presidential motorcades didn’t intersect with waiting dignitaries in the future.
The Presidential Protective Detail always walks a fine line. On the one hand, the safety of the president is sacrosanct; on the other, the detail is extremely wary of being perceived as a kind of Praetorian Guard. Still, its security footprint is, inevitably, enormous. In his 2010 book, The Kennedy Detail, former agent Gerald Blaine said he was aghast at the scope of the protective detail at a 2008 event for a presidential candidate he declined to identify: close to 60 agents and law-enforcement officers—for someone who was only campaigning to be president.
Since the Kennedy assassination in 1963, and following each subsequent attempt on a president’s life, the “package,” as the protective detail is called, has grown larger and more menacing. In 2005, as President Bush and Vice President Cheney celebrated their inauguration with a slow motorcade back to the White House, the conservative commentator George Will told the ABC News anchor Peter Jennings that the package, with its rings of hulking vehicles and heavily armed agents, brought to mind less Washington, D.C., than wartime Sarajevo. Sensitive to such perceptions, Obama’s inaugural procession in 2009 changed the security configuration somewhat—so that, for example, photographs of the president would feature the Capitol dome in the background, rather than a black, ambulance-style hazmat truck.
It is a sorely underappreciated fact that both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were the subjects of relatively close-call assassination attempts. During a speech Bush gave at Tbilisi’s Freedom Square in Georgia on May 10, 2005, an assailant threw a live grenade at the president. The would-be assassin, who was later caught, had been among the throng of Georgians who had burst through the perimeter fencing when it was compromised an hour before the event. (Luckily, the grenade fell more than 30 yards away from Bush, outside of its effective range, and it did not explode.) The Secret Service had warned the president and his staff that it was not able to screen everyone within the standard range, and that as a result, he was potentially in danger. According to former administration officials, Bush insisted on giving the speech anyway.
Clinton’s brush with death was closer still, and his life may have been saved by a gut decision made by his detail leader. The incident was disclosed only recently by the historian Ken Gormley in his book The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr. The context was Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s effort to force members of the Presidential Protective Detail to disclose particulars of Clinton’s movements and any conversation they might have heard that was germane to his case. Then–Secret Service Director Lewis C. Merletti argued to Starr that a president needed to have complete trust in his protective detail, offering the following example: in 1996, President Clinton was in Manila for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, and had on his agenda a visit with a local official. He was running late, in a surly mood, and eager to get going. According to Gormley, just moments before the motorcade was about to move, agents using a special intelligence-gathering capacity—one that remains classified—picked up radio chatter mentioning the words wedding and bridge. Knowing well that wedding was often a code word for a terrorist hit, Merletti changed the route, which happened to include a bridge. Clinton was angry at the decision, which would cause further delay, but he did not override it. When agents arrived at the bridge, they indeed found explosives: had Clinton taken the prescribed route, he very likely would have been killed. (Within the past decade, the service has added an electronic-countermeasures vehicle— theoretically capable of jamming remotely controlled explosives—to the presidential protection package.)
After the September 11 attacks, the Secret Service found itself in the middle of a bureaucratic turf war. Under pressure from congressional Democrats, the Bush administration had reluctantly agreed to consolidate domestic security functions into a huge new department with the faintly Teutonic appellation of Homeland Security. The Secret Service was to be moved from its comfortable—if seemingly outdated—perch in the Treasury Department to the new entity. (The service’s placement within Treasury was a consequence of its having been initially formed, under President Abraham Lincoln, as an anti-counterfeiting unit; it officially assumed its better-known protective function only after the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley.)
Negotiations regarding the integration of the service into Homeland Security were fraught from the start. Joseph W. Hagin, President Bush’s deputy chief of staff, told me that the White House debated folding the service’s protective duties into Homeland Security, but handing over its responsibility to investigate counterfeiting and other financial crimes to the Justice Department. Though the debate was settled in the service’s favor, the threat of having its investigative functions taken away still lingers: in late 2009, rumors flared within the service that a secret White House working group was making plans to limit the service to its protective functions and divvy up its financial-fraud mission between Treasury and Justice. Though the rumors were subsequently debunked, their persistence speaks to the service’s institutional fears.
“We can’t have agents standing post all year,” says Robert Sica, the deputy special agent in charge of the New York field office. “The investigations are what keep the agents’ minds sharp, which reinforces their effectiveness on protective details. The best protective agents are often the smartest ones, because they know how to read people. That comes from investigations.” It may be true that if you designed the entire national-security apparatus from scratch, investigating financial crimes would fall outside the purview of the Secret Service. But from the agency’s point of view, its hybrid nature is a feature, not a bug.
Tension between the Secret Service and its new DHS overseers is still evident on both sides. When I approached a top DHS official with a question about a “good story” I was working on about the service, his curt response was, “There are no good stories about the service.” Yet for all the bureaucratic wrangles and miscommunications, integration into DHS has helped the service in innumerable ways. The service now has a much easier time borrowing personnel to staff major national-security events: on the 2008 presidential campaign trail, hundreds of federal agents from other DHS agencies assisted the service with protective duties. The service can also borrow surveillance assets very easily, and its Technical Security Division works closely with DHS scientists on explosive-detection technology. As DHS claims more of a role in securing cyberspace, it has also helped protect the service’s ability to initiate financial cyber-crime investigations— an area where, again, the Justice Department would prefer to take the lead.
On September 23, as the General Assembly drew to a close, three senior Secret Service agents sat down to a breakfast of eggs and pancakes at the Embassy Suites. All were veterans of numerous large security events.
“The Pittsburgh summit was harder than this,” one of them said, referring to the 2009 G-20 gathering. Protecting 20 world leaders in an unfamiliar location, in other words, had been a greater challenge than taking care of 150 in a city where the infrastructure was in place, the local relationships were built, and the public was conditioned to accept the hassles. It had been particularly difficult in Pittsburgh, for example, to find agents hotel rooms near those of their protectees.
Talk then turned to an upcoming National Special Security Event: the APEC summit in Hawaii in November 2011. Two agents had been dispatched from Washington more than a year in advance of the event to scout out locations for command centers; establish contact with hotels, police departments, and businesses; and prepare a pre-advance packet, listing everything from hospital locations to potential motorcade choke points. “The government of Hawaii is very anxious,” one of the agents noted. “We still haven’t figured out the hotel rooms.”
Overall, though, the agents didn’t have a lot of sympathy for their colleagues’ travails. A year in Hawaii is, after all, a year in Hawaii—about as far a cry from Pittsburgh as could be imagined. “Not a bad gig,” one of the agents commented, to nods all around. There was no need to add: as long as nothing goes wrong.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/inside-the-secret-service/8390/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
