Ronald Kessler - The First Family Detail

Back in Washington, advance work for an inauguration is even more elaborate. The Secret Service canvasses the area along the parade route and spot-welds shut manhole covers and removes trash cans and mailboxes. If an item like a utility vault cannot be removed, it is inspected and taped shut. If anyone tampers with the special tape—color-coded for each event—it disintegrates to warn agents that someone may have gained access to a secured area.

Concrete barriers or police cars block every street in Washington leading to the motorcade route. Spectators must pass through magnetometers before entering the area of the motorcade route. Coolers, backpacks, and packages are banned.

Bomb-sniffing dogs inspect buildings, garages, and delivery trucks. Employees in offices and hotel guests along the route are often checked for criminal records. Agents make sure they have access to every office and hotel room, with master keys from the building or hotel manager. They tape shut utility rooms and electrical circuit boards along the parade route.

Agents or police officers are stationed on roofs of buildings. More than a dozen countersniper teams are deployed at the most vulnerable points. High-resolution surveillance cameras scan the crowds.

“Every window must be closed when the motorcade passes,” a supervisory agent says. “We have spotters looking at them with binoculars. For the most part they comply. If they don’t, we have master keys to all those doors. We ask them why they are there and opening the windows.”

The Secret Service scripts exactly where the president and first lady are to step out of the Beast and wave to crowds following the inauguration. Counterassault teams armed with semiautomatic Stoner SR-16 rifles and flash-bang grenades for diversionary tactics are positioned at these critical points.

If agents encounter a problem, they call for an ID team. Named for the Intelligence Division, the ID team at an event is usually composed of a Secret Service agent and a local police officer. Upon learning of a potential threat, the team races to the scene, interviews the subject, takes control of the situation, and passes along any threat information to the detail.

Protection of the first lady and first kids outside the White House is essentially the same as protecting the president and vice president, except that fewer agents are assigned. Depending on the type of venue, as many as thirty-five to forty agents may accompany the president when he leaves the White House, compared to four to six agents for the first lady and three to four for a first child.

As with the president and vice president, agents allow the first lady and first kids a comfort zone: Agents do not sit in on classrooms, for example, but will station themselves around a school and down the corridor from a classroom. In the same way, agents are not stationed in the residence portion of the White House. However, as with the president and vice president, agents accompany the first lady and first kids wherever they go—to soccer practice, to friends’ houses, and to vacation spots.

If a president’s child is going to a birthday party in a private home, agents check out the house beforehand. Given that the host vouches for the young guests by inviting them, agents will not screen them with magnetometers or conduct background checks. During the party, agents station themselves in an adjoining room or in the basement and sit outside in Suburbans. If an event is an “off-the-record movement” where no one knows that the president’s children will be attending, agents likely will not check out the premises beforehand.

Where the children go to school is the decision of the president and first lady, and often they send the kids to private schools, where security may be tighter. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter made a political statement by sending Amy to a public school in northwest Washington called Hardy Middle School.

Most of the time, Secret Service agents had little more to contend with than sixth-grade boys speculating on how they would tie together an agent’s shoelaces were he to fall asleep under the tree where he sat watching Amy play soccer at recess. But at one point, the Secret Service received intelligence that Middle Eastern terrorists might be planning to try to kidnap Amy.

“We put in a counterassault team,” says former agent Dennis Chomicki, who was a member of the team. “We had five armed guys hanging around with some pretty heavy weapons. We did it for weeks until we felt it was not going to happen.”

For agents, the path to protecting the first family begins in a field office. Agents in field offices spend most of their time investigating financial crimes—counterfeiting, check fraud, access-device fraud, identity theft, and computer-based attacks on the nation’s financial, banking, and telecommunications infrastructure. But when the president, the vice president, or a presidential candidate visits their city, agents in the field are often assigned to protective duties. If a threat requires investigation in their city, they will follow leads and conduct the necessary interviews.

Typically after seven years in one or more field offices, agents may be assigned to the President’s Protective Detail (PPD) or to the Vice President’s Protective Detail (VPD), where they usually serve for the duration of the president’s or vice president’s four-year term. Alternatively, they may be assigned to the Technical Services Division, the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division, the Dignitary Protection Division, the Financial Crimes Division, or to the protection of former presidents and their spouses. After about six months, agents may be assigned to protect the president’s or vice president’s wife or children. These are called satellite details of the PPD or VPD.

While the president’s detail may seem more prestigious than the vice president’s, “I’ve never seen anybody say anything bad because you’re on VPD or considered a lesser agent,” a current agent says. “I think there’s a certain arrogance that agents have, considering what they do, but I wouldn’t say that there’s a rivalry.”

After another six months, agents may return to the PPD or the VPD or may be assigned to drive the presidential or vice presidential limousine or to return to one of the specialty divisions. Finally, after three to five years in this phase of their careers, agents return to a field office or are promoted to a job in headquarters.

Not including overtime, an experienced agent makes $110,000 a year, including a cost-of-living adjustment for Washington. After twenty years of service, agents can retire at age fifty with a pension of 34 percent of the average of their three highest-paid years. Agents may also retire at any age with twenty-five years of service.

While threats aimed at first family members like Michelle Obama and her kids come in routinely, the number is minimal compared with those aimed at the president. Still, agents worry just as much about threats against the family as about those against the president, recognizing that a president’s wife or children could be targets or taken hostage at any time.

In conducting an advance before an inauguration or a trip, agents consult with local law enforcement. In one of the more bizarre events in Secret Service history, when President George H. W. Bush was to give a speech in Enid, Oklahoma, on September 17, 1992, local law enforcement officials told agents that a resident who was a psychic had had a vision that a sniper on an overpass would shoot Bush. The authorities said the psychic had been incredibly reliable in the past, even leading police to the bodies of murder victims and providing useful leads in other cases.

Norm Jarvis, who was assigned to run intelligence investigations for the visit, remembered seeing the psychic, Patsy Jane Henigman, on television. Sporting a beehive hairdo, she would don what she called a special pair of cowboy boots and then tell police not only where bodies were buried but how the victims had been murdered.