In another section of the tactical village, a black van slowly drives past, packed with counterassault team (CAT) members doing in-service training. Wearing black “unis,” rifles at the ready, they watch out the van’s windows, scowling behind their sunglasses.
Down the road, a smoke bomb goes off near a motorcade. The CAT team jumps out to deal with whatever its members find—a motorcade ambush, a suicide bomber, a shooter. Perhaps the explosion is a distraction from the real threat. The team leader sees something in the woods, a sniper hiding behind a tree. Sniper subdued, the instructor says “the problem” has been dealt with. The team hustles back into the van. The motorcade reassembles and drives off to continue around campus, where more scenarios are waiting.
Near another part of the tactical village is a White House gate with a kiosk where the occasional trapped bird can be found fluttering in exhaustion at all the windows. Replicas of the Uniformed Division’s White House kiosks, those familiar white houses with pointed roofs, dot the Secret Service campus.
A scenario staged at one of these guardhouses could be dealing with a “gate caller” about to jump the fence. This part of the tactical town is two blocks long with the same lettered and numbered streets as downtown Washington near the White House. The buildings here are not back-lot façades but heavier duty, including an eight-story repelling tower for countersnipers’ practice shots.
Here, trainees work rope line scenarios where they take turns playing the protectee. When trainees interview a “subject” in the lockup room, the person is usually a contracted role player—an actor or a retired police officer. Agents learn to use pressure points to unlock the grip of an assailant or an overeager fan. Outside there are “instant action drills” where motorcades are ambushed, people fire guns from windows, and things blow up.
Many of the practical exercises begin at the “airport,” where air traffic is always grounded. Permanently stuck on the tarmac is Air Force One-Half, a mock-up of the front half of the presidential plane, including the presidential seal and gangway. Next to it in similar unflyable condition is Marine One-Half, the center’s version of the president’s Marine One helicopter.
At the protective operations driving course, the regular students get about twenty-four hours of training in driving techniques. If they are assigned to drive in a detail, they receive an additional forty hours of training.
The giant parking lot is like a driver obstacle course from TV commercials or reality shows. Here they use Chargers—high-powered, high-energy vehicles—to speed out of the kill zone. As a countermeasure, they learn to do the J-turn, making a perfect one-hundred-eighty-degree turn at high speed by going into reverse, jerking the wheel to right or left, and shifting into drive.
Trainees learn to negotiate serpentine courses, weaving around road objects and crashing through barriers, roadblocks, and other cars. If a protectee’s car is disabled, they learn to push it through turns and obstacles with their own vehicle. When backing up their vehicle, to give them more control, agents are trained not to turn around to look out the rear window but to use their side-view mirrors.
Besides physical training, agents get eight to twelve hours of swimming instruction, including escaping from a submerged helicopter. For this, the training center uses the dunker, which is meant to simulate what would happen if a helicopter went down and an agent—strapped into his seat—was on it.
In fact, that happened back in May 1973, when Agent J. Clifford Dietrich died while on assignment with Nixon. Dietrich drowned when a U.S. Army helicopter crashed into the Atlantic Ocean about two hundred yards from Grand Cay Island in the Bahamas. The helicopter flipped upside down, and Dietrich was unable to extricate himself. The pilot and the other six agents with him survived.
At several indoor and outdoor firing ranges, trainees and Secret Service agents doing periodic requalification shoot handguns, shotguns, and automatic weapons. Out of view, from behind bulletproof glass, a voice issues commands over a PA. “Hot reload all the remaining slug rounds from the stock and one from your pocket…. Shooter will continue one line of rifle slug in four seconds….”
A barrage of bullets flies from six stations. As they are riddled with bullets, the targets spin in place.
“Everything we teach out here, we hope we never have to do,” Bobbie McDonald says.
If it comes down to taking a bullet, “You did something wrong,” says an agent. “And if that happens, I don’t think it’s something you’re going to think about before you do it. It’s just basically you’re going to try to get the man out of the way, and if you take some rounds, so be it. But the whole goal is for both of you to get out of there without a scratch.”
15
“I Forgot to Duck”
COMING BACK FROM the ranch one day, President Reagan chatted with his agents about how tough it was being president, always surrounded by security.
“I would love to be able to walk into a store like any person, just go down a magazine rack and browse through the magazines like I used to. Walk here, walk there,” Reagan said.
His agents suggested he go into a store spontaneously to lessen the risk. While he was in the store, they would block the entrance.
“Valentine’s Day was coming up, and he said he wanted to go to a card store in Washington and get a card for Nancy,” says former agent Dennis Chomicki. “So we pull up in a small motorcade, the president gets out of the car and goes into the store. He was just browsing around, having a great time.”
Meanwhile, a man was looking at cards.
“Reagan picks a card up, and he looks over to this guy and shows it to him and he says, ‘Hey do you think Nancy would like this?’” Chomicki says.
At first, the customer said, “Oh, yeah, your wife would like that.”
Then he looked up.
“Oh, my God, the president!” he said.
Not long after that, Reagan would be reminded of why presidents need protection. At two thirty-five P.M. on March 30, 1981, John W. Hinckley Jr., twenty-five, fired a .22 Röhm RG-14 revolver at Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton Hotel after giving a speech.
Members of the public had been allowed to greet Reagan as he left the hotel. Magnetometers were then used at stationary locations such as the White House but not when the president traveled outside the White House. As a result, no one had been screened. By inserting himself into that crowd, which included the press, Hinckley managed to get within twenty feet of the president.
Instinctively, Agent Timothy McCarthy hurled himself in front of Reagan and took a bullet in the right chest. It passed through his right lung and lacerated his liver. While Secret Service agents and Uniformed Division officers have been wounded or killed during protection duty, McCarthy is the only agent to have actually taken a bullet for the president by stepping into the line of fire. In a second and a half, Hinckley fired six rounds. Besides McCarthy, Metropolitan Police Officer Thomas Delahanty and Press Secretary Jim Brady were wounded. Brady suffered extensive brain damage.
Agent Dennis McCarthy—no relation to Timothy—would be the first to pounce on Hinckley. At first, McCarthy thought he was hearing firecrackers go off.
“After the second shot, I knew it was a gun,” McCarthy says. “At that point, I had a feeling of panic. I knew I had to stop it.”