“She was on the phone,” Chomicki says. “That’s why she didn’t come up to the barn. Nancy never really liked the ranch. She would go up there because the president liked it. Other than the ride, she used to stay in the house almost all the time, and a good portion of the time she’d be talking to her friends down in L.A. For the president, the highlight of his day was to go riding with Nancy. And when she didn’t come out because she was talking on the phone, he threw the phone on the floor.”
Besides riding at the ranch, Reagan rode at the Marine Corps Base Quantico southwest of Washington, at Camp David, and in Washington’s Rock Creek Park. Agents assigned to his detail were trained in horseback riding by the U.S. Park Police. One of the agents, Barbara Riggs, was a skilled equestrian and required no training. Sworn in in 1975, Riggs was the tenth female to become a Secret Service agent. The first female agents—five in all—joined the agency in 1971.
Riggs was on a first-name basis with Reagan. When she fell off one of her own horses and suffered a concussion, he called her upstairs to the living room of the White House after she returned to work. Reagan handed her a book called The Principles of Horsemanship and Training Horses. With a wink, he suggested she reread it.
“Yes, I encountered sexual harassment, barriers, and attitudes that women should not be law enforcement agents,” Riggs says. “There were some who did not believe women were capable, either physically or mentally, of doing the job. But I also encountered many individuals who acted as my mentors and gave me great opportunities.”
In 2004, Riggs became the first female deputy director of the Secret Service. The Secret Service now has three hundred eighty female agents.
“You are always going to find a dinosaur in the bunch,” says Patricia Beckford, the eighth female agent hired. “You did have to prove yourself. But at a certain point, they realized that our .357 Magnum shot just as well as theirs.”
14
Hogan’s Alley
IT GOES WITH the territory that an agent may have to take a bullet for the president. But the actual instruction to trainees is a little more complicated.
“What we are trained to do as shift agents is to cover and evacuate if there is an attack,” an agent says. “We form a human shield around the protectee and get him out of the danger area to a safer location. If an agent is shot during the evacuation, then that is something that is expected. We rely on our layers of security to handle the attacker, while the inside shift’s main function is to get the heck out of Dodge.”
“People always say to me, ‘Hey would you really take a bullet for the president?’” says former agent Dowling. “I say, ‘What do you think, I’m stupid?’ But what we’ll do is we’ll do everything in our power to keep the bullet out of the event. And that’s what the Secret Service is all about. It’s about being prepared, it’s about meticulous advance preparation, and it’s about training properly so that when you do your job, you don’t have to bumble around for the steps that you take.”
The key to that is the James J. Rowley Training Center in Laurel, Maryland. The training facility is nestled between a wildlife refuge and a soil conservation area. The forest muffles the gunfire, the squealing wheels, and the explosions that are the sounds of training Secret Service agents and Uniformed Division officers. Like many of the buildings on this 440-acre spread, the center itself is named for a former director. Rowley headed the Secret Service when Kennedy was assassinated, and he spearheaded many changes after the tragedy.
The main classroom building, made of stone with a green roof, looks like it was lifted from a community college and dropped there. The building was named for Lewis C. Merletti, another former Secret Service director, who now heads security for the Cleveland Browns.
While most of the photos on the walls at headquarters downtown tell of sunny days, triumphant moments, and protectees well protected, the photos here in the Merletti building tell of the underside, the hard work of processing evidence; and the dark side, the failures and poignant reminders. There are photos from the JFK assassination and an overhead of President McKinley’s funeral procession in 1901. That’s the year Congress informally asked the Secret Service to protect presidents, a little late.
Along one wall, every graduating class has its class photo, going back to the start of formalized special agent training in the fifties. Back then, they wore fedoras. The photos proceed to the sixties, when agents had preppie hair, through the big-hair days of the seventies, to the “normal”-looking agents of today.
Here, new agents receive a total of sixteen weeks of training, combined with another twelve and a half weeks of training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) at Glynco, Georgia. To apply to be a Secret Service agent, an individual must be a U.S. citizen. At the time of appointment, he or she must be at least twenty-one years of age but younger than thirty-seven.
Agents need a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university or three years of work experience in the criminal investigative or law enforcement fields that require knowledge and application of laws relating to criminal violations. Agents’ uncorrected vision can be no worse than 20/60, correctable to 20/20 in each eye. Besides passing a background examination, potential agents must take drug tests and pass a polygraph before they are hired and given a top secret security clearance.
Each year, the training center graduates seven to eleven classes of twenty-four Secret Service and Uniformed Division recruits. Even though the training center is in Laurel, agents refer to it as Beltsville, which is actually the town next door. Most of the training center’s roads have names appropriate to the task at hand—Firearms Road, Range Road, Action Road, and Perimeter Road. Nothing called Ambush Road, but there is always an ambush in the works.
At what the Secret Service calls Hogan’s Alley—not to be confused with the FBI’s Hogan’s Alley at its Quantico, Virginia, training academy—a body is lying in the middle of the road. Members of the Uniformed Division (UD) sit in a small grandstand watching down the street as four UD officers in BDUs—battle-dress uniforms—clear the buildings and sort out how to take the bad guys down. Except for a real two-story house and soft drink machine, the block-long village is like a Hollywood set, with the façades of a hardware store, hotel, restaurant, bar, and bank, and real cars parked in front. Suddenly the body comes to life, gets up, and walks away, signaling the end of the scenario.
Instructors play the roles of hostage, baddies, and bodies. The retired head of the Prince George’s County SWAT team runs the training here along with other special ops experts. They talk about the big picture, what agents have encountered in assassination attempts, as well as the details, such as how to get small behind a trash can. Most important, when agents hear gunshots, they are trained to respond rather than flinch—to cover a protectee and relocate him. However, at the training center, a sign says this is a simulated attack area and warns, “No live weapons beyond this point.”
Narrating one of the scenarios, Bobbie McDonald, assistant to the special agent in charge of training, explains to me, “What we’re viewing is how they come upon the problem, how they alert about the problem, how they alert their partner, how they react to the situation. Did they take cover? Did they draw their weapon in an appropriate fashion and at an appropriate time? Did they shoot when they should have? Was it what we would call a good shoot, versus a bad shoot?”