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Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service - Softcover

PETRO, JOSEPH

 
9780312332228: Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service
Softcover
ISBN 10: 031233222X ISBN 13: 9780312332228
Verlag: Griffin, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Standing Next to History presents the extraordinary account of Ronald Reagan's Secret Service bodyguard with stories that will make even a diehard "West Wing" fan go speechless.

Joseph Petro served for 23 years as a special agent in the United States Secret Service; eleven of them with presidents and vice presidents. For four of those years he stood by the side of Ronald Reagan.

Following his career as a Navy Lieutenant, during which he patrolled the rivers and canals along the Vietnamese-Cambodian border, he worked his way up through the Secret Service to become one of the key men in charge of protecting the President. That journey through the Secret Service provides an individual look inside the most discreet law enforcement agency in the world, and a uniquely intimate account of the Reagan presidency.

Engagingly, Joseph Petro tells "first hand" stories of: riding horses with the Reagans; eluding the press and sneaking the President and Mrs. Reagan out of the White House; rehearsing assassination attempts and working, then re-working every detail of the president's trips around the world; negotiating the president's protection with the KGB; diverting a 26 car presidential motorcade in downtown Tokyo; protecting Vice-President Dan Quayle at Rajiv Gandhi's funeral where he was surrounded by Yassir Arafat's heavily armed bodyguards; taking charge of the single largest protective effort in the history of the Secret Service-Pope John Paul II's 1987 visit to the United States; and being only one of three witnesses at the private meeting between President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that ushered in the end of the Cold War.

Joseph Petro provides an original and fascinating perspective of the Secret Service, the inner workings of the White House and a little seen view of world leaders, as a man who stood next to history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

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

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Standing Next to History

An Agent's Life Inside the Secret ServiceBy Joseph Petro

St. Martin's Griffin

Copyright © 2006 Joseph Petro
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312332228
Standing Next to History
CHAPTER ONE
TAKING A BULLET
If you fail in this business, you could lose the president.
At no point did anyone ever say to me, your job is to take a bullet for the president of the United States.
Legend has it there's a blood oath that Secret Service agents take in which we swear to lay down our own life to save the president's. There is no such pledge, no such promise, and, maybe even more important, no such requirement. It's a myth, nothing more than part of the mystique that surrounds the Secret Service. Instead, the reality of the job--and this, perhaps, best defines the fundamental principle of the Secret Service--is to do absolutely everything possible to prevent such a decision from ever having to be made.
It goes without saying that protecting the president can be dangerous, and, yes, there may be a moment when, because of where we are, getting killed is a real possibility. But police officers face that same possibility every day. So, too, firemen, soldiers, sailors, and pilots. Danger is hardly unique to the Secret Service. Because no one ever knows for sure how he or she will react in a life-threatening situation, we try to leave nothing to chance. We practice assassinations at speeches and at rallies and in motorcades, getting in and out of the car. We don't use professional drivers; we train our own agents todrive the presidential limousine because that driver is the most important person in the motorcade. Armored to our specifications, the limousine is much heavier than a regular car and a lot harder to drive. It doesn't respond the way a standard Cadillac limousine would respond. In an emergency, the driver may have to do something--break through a barricade or execute a J-turn--and even though there is always a supervisor sitting next to him, there might be a few seconds when the life of the president hangs on the driver's instinctive reaction. So we work a lot of assassination scenarios around cars, all of them authentically played out with presidential limousines and crowds and explosives, and with mock assassins firing guns.
However, the classic scenario for an "attack on the principal" (AOP) is the rope line, where the president shakes hands over the simple barrier that separates him from the crowd. It's a very dangerous time, because you don't always know who's in the crowd. Even if you've controlled access by putting everyone through a metal detector--known as a magnetometer--you cannot trust the machine to pick up everything. In theory, the metal detector should spot a gun. But there's always the possibility that someone can get through with an explosive device or something simple, like a pen, with which he plans to stab the president. So you look for anomalies, for something that doesn't fit, for the man who's not smiling, for the woman who's wearing a heavy coat on a warm day, for someone who appears unusually nervous.
The level of crowd emotion is always high when the president is near enough to touch, and agents need to see that emotion reflected in everyone's eyes. I would stand within a hand's reach of him, ready to grab him around the waist and yank him away, all the time looking into eyes for a stare that told me the person wasn't happy to see the president up close. And I would also be looking at hands, for the person who wasn't trying to shake hands with the president. Anyone whose hands were in his pockets was someone I needed toworry about. That's why there were agents in front of the president, and behind him, too, looking into eyes and saying to people in the crowd, "Let me see your hands, please ... . Hands, please. Let me see your hands."
It's not a perfect science, but rather a technique that can be learned and perfected with practice, which is why the Secret Service teaches it and why we practice it over and over and over again. Agents on the president's detail, and on the vice president's detail, too, spend two weeks out of every two months at the Secret Service training center at Beltsville, Maryland, going through realistic situations that have been specifically designed to create instinctive reactions to a single second's madness.
Although the Beltsville facility was pretty basic when I first went through there in 1971, today it is a small town--much like a movie set--with city blocks featuring façades of office buildings and hotels. They have a series of roads for motorcades and a Boeing 707 to work scenarios involving airplanes. As a supervisor I'd go out there every couple of months to train with the details. On one occasion, with an agent named Frank Larkin playing the president, I was working a rope line, exactly the way I did many times with Ronald Reagan as he shook hands with people in the crowd. Suddenly, someone started firing at us, and the crowd panicked. Instinctively, I grabbed Frank, threw him into the back of the limousine, and we took off. It's the most basic technique in the manual--called "cover and evacuate"--because it's the best thing to do. You cover the president, get him into the car, and evacuate him from the scene, leaving the shift agents to take care of the scene itself.
Once we were safely out of the way, I turned around to say something to Frank, but he was sprawled across the rear seat with blood pouring out of his mouth and down the front of his suit. I froze. Having served in combat, having seen the results of shootings, having seen blood, I know about the effect of shock. In some cases it lasts for a few seconds, in some cases it lasts longer. For the most partit depends on how dramatic the shooting is and how often you've seen such things. In this case, the shock of seeing blood, which I hadn't expected, lasted only a split second. It turned out that Hollywood blood packs were the latest addition to the training. I blurted out, "You scared the hell out of me. I thought you were really hurt." That was the idea.
Prior to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, the Secret Service didn't run a lot of complex assassination scenarios. But by the 1970s, we had Beltsville and were going through them regularly, training agents to act instinctively, which is not necessarily the same as doing what comes naturally. For example, most people duck when they hear gunshots. It's the predictable response of policemen and soldiers. They get down low to protect themselves before returning fire. But Secret Service agents need to do just the opposite, which is an unnatural reaction. When shots are fired, we're trained to pull our weapon, stand up straight, and return fire. Instead of protecting ourselves, we turn ourselves into a larger target. That's one reason why all of our weapons training is done standing up. We don't do any prone shooting.
If you study the film footage of the Reagan assassination attempt in 1981, what you see is agents standing up while the president's military aide is diving to the ground. This is not a criticism of the army, because that's what the aide had been trained to do. He responded to his training by hitting the ground; the agents responded to theirs by standing tall. If I heard shots today, I'm sure that I would stand up, at least until I realized that's not a good thing for me to be doing at this point in my life, at which time, I hope, it wouldn't take me long to get back...

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Verlag
Griffin
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
031233222X
ISBN 13 
9780312332228
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
318
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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