On October 9, 1980, about six months before his assault on Reagan, Hinckley had been arrested as he attempted to board a plane at the Nashville, Tennessee, airport while carrying three pistols. President Carter was in Nashville at the time. Reagan, then running for the presidency, had just canceled a trip to Nashville.
As a result of the Reagan incident, the Secret Service began using magnetometers to screen crowds at events. “We started to look at acceptable standoff distances to keep crowds away,” says Danny Spriggs, who took Hinckley into custody at the shooting and became a deputy director of the Secret Service. “The distances would vary with the environment.”
The Secret Service also learned to segregate the press from onlookers and keep better tabs on them to make sure no one infiltrates the press contingent, pretending to be a reporter. An agent is assigned to watch the press, and members of the press themselves report those who try to infiltrate.
Similarly, the Secret Service learned lessons from the John F. Kennedy assassination. It doubled its complement of agents, computerized and increased its intelligence data, increased the number of agents assigned to advance and intelligence work, created counter-sniper teams, expanded its training functions, and improved liaison with other law enforcement and federal agencies.
“Before the Kennedy assassination, training often consisted of agents telling war stories,” says Taylor Rudd, an agent assigned to revamp training. “Many agents on duty had never had any training.”
Now the Secret Service shares intelligence and techniques with a range of foreign security services. After the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, the Secret Service and Israel’s Shin Bet spent a week together comparing notes.
“The Rabin assassination was much like the Hinckley attempt on Reagan,” says former agent Dowling, who was in charge of foreign liaison when the meetings with Shin Bet took place. “It happened at a motorcade departure site.”
Shin Bet officials laid bare their own shortcomings.
“It was a very emotional, sad thing for them to do,” Dowling says. “This particular guy loitered for some time around the motorcade, and he should have been noticed. And we kind of experienced something similar with Hinckley. We had somebody who was clearly stalking the president, somebody who had stalked presidents before. It’s not because this guy thinks Reagan’s a bad guy, or he thinks Jimmy Carter’s a bad guy. It’s the office that interests them. It’s the authority.”
About a year after the Reagan assassination attempt, the Secret Service’s Washington field office began receiving calls from a man threatening to kill Reagan. The man would say, “I’m going to shoot him.” Then he would hang up.
Agent Dennis Chomicki was assigned to protective intelligence and was aware that the calls were coming in because he’d been reading what the Secret Service calls “squeal sheets,” which recount incidents over the previous twenty-four hours. One morning, Chomicki was reading about the caller when someone called the main line of the field office, which at the time was at Nineteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Since Chomicki was one of the first agents in that morning, he picked up the call.
“Hi, it’s me again,” the caller said. “You know me.”
“No, I don’t know you,” Chomicki responded.
“Well, I’m the guy that’s going to kill the president,” the man said.
“Look, do me a favor,” Chomicki said. “I’m standing here on a wall phone because I just opened up the door. Why don’t you call back on my desk so I can sit and talk with you?”
The man agreed, and Chomicki gave him his direct dial number.
Back then, the Secret Service had an arrangement with what is now Verizon that the phone company would immediately trace calls even from unlisted numbers when an agent called a telephone company supervisor. Chomicki called a supervisor and gave him the number at his desk so that all incoming calls would be traced. He was sure the man would not be stupid enough to call the number.
“I walked over to my desk, and sure enough, he called back,” Chomicki says. “So we started talking, and I was able to record that conversation.”
The man said he had a rifle with a scope.
“I’m going to aim in, squeeze the trigger off, and blow his head apart like a pumpkin,” the man said.
“Hey, this is pretty serious stuff. Why don’t we meet?” Chomicki said.
“What do you think, I’m crazy?” the caller said, and hung up.
The phone company called and said the man had called from a pay phone on New York Avenue. With the location of the pay phone in his pocket, Chomicki dashed out the door. Just then, another agent was walking in.
“Bob, come on, we got to go,” Chomicki said. “I’ll tell you all about it on the way down.”
They ran to the Secret Service garage and jumped into their respective Secret Service cars. They drove to New York Avenue and Eleventh Street, where the Greyhound bus terminal was located at the time.
“We were looking around, and we didn’t see anybody,” Chomicki says. “There was a coffee-to-go truck sitting nearby. We went up and asked the guy, ‘Did you see anybody on the phone a short while ago?’”
“Yeah, about quarter to eight there was a guy,” the man said.
He gave the man’s estimated height and weight and described him as wearing blue pants and a blue shirt. The time cited by the coffee man coincided with the call Chomicki had received at the field office. Chomicki asked the coffee man why he had noticed the individual using the public pay phone.
“Usually I show up on the corner at eight,” the man explained. “I just happened to get here early today, and my customers don’t expect me here until eight, so business was slow. I was just sitting here staring at the phone booth and saw this guy on the phone, and I just happened to remember what he looked like.”
The agents jumped into their cars. Chomicki drove east on New York Avenue; the other agent drove west. Just then, Chomicki spotted a man who matched the description given to him by the coffee man. He was using a pay phone on the outer wall of the bus terminal building.
Chomicki made a U-turn and parked his car across the street. He walked up behind the man and heard him talking in a Midwestern accent. It was the voice of the man who had called him at the field office.
“I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, and I pushed him between the phone and the side panel, and I grabbed the phone,” Chomicki says.
“This is agent Chomicki of the Secret Service,” he said into the receiver. “To whom am I speaking?”
“Wow! How’d you get him?” a voice on the other end of the line said. It was another agent back at the field office. He said the man had just called, threatening to kill Reagan.
The suspect claimed he was just trying to call a taxi. As he tried to get away, Chomicki dragged him to his car, placed him against the trunk, and handcuffed him. After he was given a psychiatric examination, a judge committed him to a mental institution.
Secret Service agents often deal with what is called White House–itis, a malady of arrogance that grips some White House aides. Near the end of Reagan’s term, that affliction almost got one of his aides shot. Agent Glenn Smith was guarding Reagan at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. Smith heard a man shout, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” Smith took out his .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum and placed his finger on the trigger. Just then, a man came bolting through a door with a New York City police officer in hot pursuit.
The man turned out to be a White House staffer who was so full of himself that when a Secret Service agent asked him to identify himself at an inner checkpoint, he refused. When the agent tried to block his way, he pushed the agent away. The police officer then chased after him.