At the dinner table that night in the pale green family dining room, Laura took the same positive approach. As a butler passed cheese and chicken enchiladas, daughters Jenna and Barbara Bush expressed outrage at Teresa’s comment. Typically, Jenna was the most vocal.
“You know, Mom, she put down every woman who raised their children,” Jenna said. “She was saying that’s not a real job. That was what was so bad about it. Not that she forgot you had a teaching job, but that she was putting down raising children.”
As Pamela Nelson, a high school friend of Laura’s from Midland, selected an enchilada from a platter offered by a butler, Laura talked about how easy it was for words to be twisted and taken out of context.
“You know that comment, ‘Bring them on,’” Laura said, referring to Bush’s July 2003 statement challenging those who would attack American forces in Iraq. “It had so many political repercussions. Everything can be used a million times against you.”
“This has to be the meanest campaign ever,” Nelson said, referring to the 2004 reelection campaign.
“No, the leaflets they dropped when Lincoln was running that disparaged him and his family were horrible,” Laura said. “People blame everything that happens on this office.”
24
Living on Borrowed Time
WHEN THE SECRET Service proudly shows members of Congress its James J. Rowley Training Center, it wows them with supposedly unrehearsed feats that bring down the bad guys and save the lives of protectees. But those scenarios are secretly rehearsed.
“Members of Congress were being escorted around the training complex, and we were doing building extraction scenarios with the protectee,” an agent who was there recalls. “We would be trying to move the VP out of a hotel. Say there’s a fire in the hotel, or there’s an explosion outside. We want to get him down into the motorcade and out of the area and move him to a secure location.”
On this particular morning when members of Congress were due to visit, “Everything changed,” the agent says. “Everything was rehearsed, everything was put together, and we’re like, ‘Why are we doing rehearsed scenarios? We should be doing practical scenarios and real training exercises.’”
The agents were told, “Well, there’s a congressional tour coming through.”
Normally, in a training exercise, “The bad guy can kill the agent,” the agent says. “You don’t know. You could see the agent get killed, you could see two agents stumble over each other down a stairwell, things could happen. If you’re putting on training that’s effective, it is a practical exercise in the sense that you let it run through to its end. But when the congressional tour came through, we did it as we had rehearsed to do it,” the agent says. In real training, “You never rehearse something like that.”
The practiced scenario did the trick, impressing the senators and representatives who watched. “They watched an attack on a principal and saw how agents responded, how the shift goes to the protectee, how the CAT team deploys, but they didn’t know that they spent the last couple days rehearsing that scenario.”
According to another current agent, the same thing happened when the Secret Service opened the Rowley center to a group of visiting U.S. Attorneys. Prior to their visit, the agents had rehearsed scenarios for two hours.
That is not the way it’s supposed to happen.
“You know what the setting is, that the president will give a speech,” former Secret Service deputy director Danny Spriggs says. “They are not told what will happen. They don’t know if an attack will come, where it will come from, or what it will be.”
When asked about the practice of rehearsing supposedly spontaneous scenarios, Ed Donovan, a Secret Service spokesman, did not respond.
At the Rowley center, the Secret Service also likes to impress members of Congress with agents’ marksmanship. But what the agency doesn’t tell Congress is how agents are outgunned because the Secret Service continues to use the outdated Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. In contrast, the army and other federal law enforcement agencies have switched to the newer and more powerful Colt M4 carbine.
While a counterassault team travels with the president and is armed with the SR-16—similar to the M4—other agents on a protective detail also need to be ready to repel an attack. Many of those agents are equipped with the MP5. In addition, all agents are armed with a SIG Sauer P229 pistol with the barrel modified to accommodate a .357 round instead of the standard smaller nine-millimeter round.
“The service, you would think, would be on the leading edge when it comes to weapons, and they’re just not,” says a current agent. “They’re still carrying MP5 submachine guns,” developed in the 1960s. “Guys from State Department are out there carrying M4s, which is a weapon that soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are carrying.” Developed in the 1990s, it is “much more powerful. It has better range and better armor-piercing capabilities,” the agent adds.
The army uses the M4 as its main weapon. The FBI trains agents to use both the MP5 and the M4. Even the Amtrak Police Department is equipped with the M4.
“You’re going to be getting attacked with AK-47 assault rifles, you’re going to be getting attacked with M4s,” an agent says. “We want to be able to match or better whoever’s attacking us. You want to get the same range or better. The problem is, if you’re getting a shootout in a motorcade, with the MP5, you’re shooting a pistol with a submachine gun round—you’re basically shooting a pistol round. You don’t want your rounds falling short and not even able to reach out to the bad guy. And that’s essentially what you’ve got going on with the weapons they have now.”
In fact, he says, “The nine-millimeter round fired by the MP5 does not even penetrate the most basic type of body armor available to the general public.”
“I laugh every time I go to training and we do motorcade attack scenarios,” another agent on a major protective detail says. “Our so-called attackers use the AK-47 as their weapon. When there is an attack and the bad guys open up with the AK-47s, it is deafening. You feel like you’re being ambushed in the Middle East. Then the Secret Service shift fires back with MP5s. By comparison, it sounds like little cap guns.”
In contrast to the M4, the MP5 used by the Secret Service does not have night-vision capability or mounted flashlights. Flashlights help agents identify a target at night, illuminate a dark room, and could be used to distract an enemy. By temporarily blinding assailants, they could give an agent an advantage in a confrontation.
“Without the ability to see at night, we are at a grave disadvantage,” an agent says. “It is shameful and embarrassing that we do not have such basic equipment to even put us at a level playing field against any possible assassins.”
In fact, in one night-training scenario at Beltsville, agents almost had a “blue-on-blue” incident because shift agents could not tell if the CAT team members bounding through the woods were good guys or bad guys. To identify themselves to other agents, CAT members wear a device called a firefly, which emits a blip of light. But it can only be seen through night-vision goggles or scopes mounted on weapons. Some of the agents later said they almost unloaded their blanks on the CAT team thinking they were the attacking force.
Agents constantly raise the need for improved weapons with the brass, but management dismisses their concerns.
“There are guys who are out there trying to campaign to upgrade to the M4,” an agent says, “but we have these people entrenched at headquarters who have actually come out and said the M4 is a weapon of war; it’s not a weapon of protection. It’s an excuse because they don’t want to spend the money to buy new weapons.”