The Secret Service then allegedly escorted Khosa, who now works for the International Monetary Fund, through one of the perimeter gates and onto the grounds of the White House.
“No one speaks as the agents walk him behind the gate’s security station, down a stairwell, along an underground passage, and into a room—cement-walled box with a table, two chairs, a hanging light with a bare bulb, and a mounted video camera,” Suskind writes. “Even after all the astonishing turns of the past hour, Khosa can’t quite believe there’s actually an interrogation room beneath the White House, dark and dank and horrific.”
There, the frightened Khosa is asked if he is in league with “Mr. Zawahiri and his types,” referring to Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy. Meanwhile, Suskind claims, President George W. Bush is receiving an intelligence briefing one floor above.
It was, Suskind said in interviews, a “day literally in hell,” but Khosa apparently never noted the names of the officers, which were displayed on tags pinned to their shirts.
As anyone familiar with security and law enforcement knows, if a person is acting suspiciously in front of the White House, the last place the Secret Service would want to take him is inside the tightly guarded White House grounds. Such individuals may have explosive devices strapped to their bodies. Even if they were thoroughly searched, they could have deadly pathogens in their clothing. If Khosa’s tale was not implausible enough, Suskind claims that Khosa agreed to go with the Secret Service officers initially only if he could make a few calls.
“Then, I promise, I’ll go with you,” Suskind quotes him as saying.
Khosa then called the Pakistani embassy and friends and family, according to Suskind. No doubt the Secret Service trusted Khosa not to call possible co-conspirators or remotely controlled bombs to detonate them.
Rather than being “dark and dank” and illuminated with a bare lightbulb, the room under the Oval Office—W-16—is brightly lit with fluorescent lights. It’s where Secret Service agents spend their downtime. Agents use computers in the room to fill out reports. In the room, they also store formal wear they may need for an event that evening. So they can check their appearance, the room is outfitted with full-length mirrors.
Khosa declined to comment. Suskind told me that in researching the book, he spoke with a Secret Service spokeswoman, who searched records but found nothing on Khosa. Suskind quoted her as saying it is not uncommon if the individual was “in and out that we don’t find a permanent record.”
As for the question of whether the Secret Service would ever take a suspicious person into the White House, Suskind told me, “It seems like that was just a matter of convenience. It was a block from where they were questioning him for a half hour on the street.” What about explosives and pathogens? “They patted him down,” Suskind said.
When asked why he did not include in the book the fact that the Secret Service has no record of questioning and detaining Khosa, Suskind said he did not consider it “pertinent.”
Asked for comment on Suskind’s account, Edwin Donovan, assistant special agent in charge of government and public affairs at the Secret Service, told me, “We have no record of the incident or the individual referenced [Khosa].” He added, “Bringing an individual inside the White House for questioning defies standard security and protocols and safety procedures. We would not bring a ‘suspicious person,’ potential prisoner, prisoner, or any person who has not been properly vetted, onto the White House grounds.”
7
Passkey
IN CONTRAST TO Richard Nixon, Secret Service agents found Gerald Ford—code-named Passkey—to be a decent man who valued their service. But agents were amazed at how cheap Ford was. After he left the White House, “He would want his newspaper in the morning at hotels, and he’d walk to the counter,” says an agent on his detail. “Lo and behold, he would not have any money on him. If his staff wasn’t with him, he would ask agents for money.”
The agent remembers Ford checking in at the chic Pierre hotel in New York. A bellboy loaded his cart with the Fords’ bags and took them into their room.
“After the bellboy was through, he came out holding this one-dollar bill in front of him, swearing in Spanish,” the former agent says.
At Rancho Mirage, where Ford lived after leaving the White House, “You’d go to a golf course, and it’s an exclusive country club, and the normal tip for a caddy is twenty-five dollars to fifty dollars,” another agent says. “Ford tipped a dollar, if at all.”
On September 5, 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, twenty-six, drew a Colt .45 automatic pistol and squeezed the trigger as President Ford shook hands with a smiling crowd outside the Senator Hotel in Sacramento, California. Bystanders said Ford was shaking hands with everyone and smiling when suddenly he turned ashen and froze as he saw a gun being raised only a few feet away.
“I saw a hand coming up behind several others in the front row, and obviously there was a pistol in that hand,” Ford said later.
Secret Service Agent Larry Buendorf had already noticed the woman moving along with the president. As Fromme pulled the trigger, Buendorf jumped in front of Ford to shield him. He then grabbed the gun and wrestled her to the ground. It was later determined that she had cocked the hammer of the gun. Fortunately, there was no bullet in the firing chamber. There were four in the gun’s magazine. Fromme later claimed she had deliberately ejected the cartridge from the weapon’s chamber, and she showed agents the cartridge at her home.
Fromme was a disciple of Charles M. Manson, who had been convicted of the ritualistic murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others. Two months before the assassination attempt, Fromme had issued a statement saying she had received letters from Manson blaming Nixon for his imprisonment.
Just seventeen days after this incident, Ford was leaving the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco when Sara Jane Moore, a forty-five-year-old political activist, fired a .38 revolver at him from forty feet away. At the report of the shot, Ford looked stunned. Color drained from his face, and his knees appeared to buckle.
Oliver Sipple, a disabled former U.S. Marine and Vietnam veteran, was standing next to the assailant. He pushed up her arm as the gun discharged. Although Ford doubled over, the bullet flew several feet over the president’s head. It ricocheted off the side of the hotel and slightly wounded a cab driver in the crowd.
Secret Service agents Ron Pontius and Jack Merchant quickly pushed Moore to the sidewalk and arrested her. As bystanders screamed, the agents pushed the uninjured Ford into his limousine and onto the floor, covering his body with theirs.
For more than three hours, Moore had waited for Ford outside the hotel. Wearing baggy pants and a blue raincoat, she had stood with her hands in her pockets the entire time. Agents will sometimes ask people to remove their hands from their pockets, but this time, as people milled around her, agents did not notice her.
Moore is the only presidential assailant who was listed as a possible threat in the Secret Service data bank before the assassination attempt. Two days before the attempt, Moore had called the San Francisco police and said she had a gun and was considering a “test” of the presidential security system. The next morning, police interviewed her and confiscated her gun.
The police reported her to the Secret Service, and the night before Ford’s visit, Secret Service agents interviewed her. They concluded she did not pose a threat that would justify surveillance during Ford’s visit. By definition, evaluating anyone’s intentions is an inexact science. Indeed, the next morning, she purchased another weapon.