Zero fail, p.20
Zero Fail, page 20
The agents never figured out the source of the projectile they thought they saw. But four months later, the Secret Service learned Daughetee had been plotting to kill Bush in Hamtramck—and the discovery was entirely by accident. That August of 1989, police in Oakland, California, chased Daughetee from a Bay Area bank after he tried to hold up a teller. They found him hiding in a nearby elementary school park with a gun.
Daughetee explained to detectives that he was trying to raise enough money to finance a quest. The voices in his head had been telling him to kill the president. The man they had interviewed years earlier for threatening President Reagan’s life readily confessed that he was still trying to kill a president. He had been plotting ways to kill Bush for nearly a year.
What he shared next stunned the local detectives.
“I almost killed President Bush when he was in Detroit, but I couldn’t get through the security,” he said.
Four decades later, an agent who helped plan the Hamtramck visit said the Daughetee case still bothers him. He believes that even after this incident, and even after all the years that have passed since that near-disaster, the Secret Service still fails to focus enough of its investigative power on the delusional, mentally ill people who are most likely to kill.
These assassins in the making start with random and even silly-sounding threats. Their co-workers or family might initially brush off these threats as one-time outbursts. But over time, they refine their plots and their targets. Psychologists who have studied assassins for the Secret Service said this category of would-be killer believes they are fulfilling their destiny by pulling off a high-profile murder. Shooting a large group of people at a public gathering is one fixation. Assassinating a president is another. The fixation rarely has anything to do with politics but everything to do with fame. So it doesn’t matter if the president is named Carter or Reagan—as was the case with John Hinckley. And for Daughetee, it didn’t matter if the president was named Reagan or Bush, either—his target just needed to be the president.
Daughetee kept honing his plans to kill for four years before he was caught. And the Secret Service’s ability to spot and stop a person who had fantasies of killing a president could help prevent other mass shootings.
The Service had commissioned a massive psychological study to help pinpoint the types of people who were likely to try to assassinate a president. The Exceptional Case Study Project examined the paths of eighty-three people who had attacked or come close to attacking a prominent American public figure from 1949 to 1996. The findings were clear: Most would-be assassins were seeking notoriety and cared little about the politics of the person they tried to kill. They were often well educated but isolated. Many had made some disturbing reference to their plan to a neighbor, a relative, or a co-worker. Nearly every one had stalked their target and even switched targets if they faced obstacles.
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TONY BALL, A hulking, muscular agent with a bald head and a quick smile, resembled a cross between former NFL lineman Terry Crews and the actor Morris Chestnut. The former Houston police officer had been thrilled to join the Secret Service in his early twenties in the Houston field office. The job had lots of perks: He’d met Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Thatcher, and he’d experienced intimate concerts by Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, and Stevie Wonder as they entertained the president and his guests. But like many agents, he prided himself on not getting too worked up about all the famous celebrities and VIPs he brushed up against. “You have a job to do, and you can’t get too excited,” he said. “The first time I saw George H. W. Bush, I said, ‘Okay, now I’m cured. I just saw the president.’ ”
But Ball had one VIP assignment that overlapped with a dangerous turning point in the country’s history. Late one night in September 1990, as Ball left his job at the Houston field office, a supervisor told him he would be temporarily assigned to help protect the visiting leader of Kuwait. At the time, President George H. W. Bush was wrestling with whether to take the United States to war in the Middle East. The emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah, had recently gone into exile in neighboring Saudi Arabia. He had fled under threat of assassination when Iraqi troops had invaded his tiny, oil-rich country on the afternoon of August 2, 1990. Now, seven weeks later, the emir was flying in a private jet to the White House seeking a personal audience with President Bush to urge him to deploy U.S. troops and drive Saddam Hussein’s forces out of his country. Ball’s only job for the next seven days was simply to make sure the emir, who was marked for death, remained safe while he was on American soil. “You’re thinking all I’ve got to do is make sure he stays alive from touchdown until he’s gone,” Ball said. “That’s it.”
The man had a target on his back. U.S. intelligence sources believed the Iraqis had originally hoped to kidnap or assassinate the emir when they invaded his country a month earlier. By keeping the emir close, the matter-of-fact agent was unknowingly part of sealing a quiet deal that would rock the Middle East and cast a long shadow over the United States for decades after.
The emir didn’t have to work hard to persuade President Bush to take on Saddam Hussein. Bush already strongly agreed with Prime Minister Thatcher and his defense secretary Dick Cheney that allowing Iraq to invade Kuwait without consequences would set a dangerous precedent. More powerful states considering hostile takeovers of smaller neighbors might feel emboldened. But more than that, his administration feared that Saddam now held in his grip a country that was a loyal exporter of oil to America and that controlled 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves. Iraq could be emboldened to invade neighboring Saudi Arabia next. If that happened, Hussein would seize 45 percent of the world’s oil supply. Starting in August, Bush ordered a massive influx of U.S. troops to bases in and near Saudi Arabia. In short order, there was a buildup of up to 250,000 troops in the area.
In November 1990, at the urging of the White House, the United Nations Security Council voted to sanction Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait. The council ordered that Saddam withdraw his forces from the tiny country by January 15, 1991—or else. Bush announced that the United States would send as many as 200,000 troops to the border, amping up the pressure.
The Iraqi leader refused to back down. The day after the deadline, on January 16 at 11:30 p.m. in Baghdad, a U.S.-led coalition unleashed Operation Desert Storm. The unprecedented air bombing campaign dropped more than 88,000 tons of bombs in a hundred thousand separate sorties on Iraqi military strongholds, weapon arsenals, air bases, and communication systems. It continued for forty-three days, sapping the Iraqi military’s morale while also knocking out much of the country’s defense and power grid.
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IN DESERT STORM, U.S. television viewers for the first time got to marvel at their military’s technological might from the comfort of their living room couches and gym treadmills. Live satellite images showcased the pounding explosion of Tomahawk cruise missiles and new Nighthawk Stealth fighters dropping scores of bombs undetected by radar. CNN broadcast video of a bomb slicing into the ventilator shaft of the Baghdad headquarters of the Republican Guard. The images of the target in the neon-green crosshairs from the cameras on board the fighter jets became so frequent on the nightly news, the media gave Desert Storm a new name: the Video Game War.
Just four days after the air campaign, the war was over. The vast majority of Iraqi forces had either surrendered or retreated. The Americans had won a decisive victory and lost only 147 soldiers in battle. The government of Kuwait, a major exporter of oil to the United States, was liberated. The royal kingdom and the princes of nearby Saudi Arabia breathed a sigh of relief.
The American-led pummeling on the Arabian Peninsula produced one of the most lopsided battles in history. But the buildup of more than 450,000 U.S. troops on Saudi Arabian soil stirred a new and dangerous threat—which was coiling up to strike. The Gulf War had showcased the U.S. military at its zenith, and yet the traditional American war-fighting machine couldn’t detect this new enemy.
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OSAMA BIN LADEN was the millionaire son of a Saudi construction magnate whose family had long enjoyed close ties to the royal House of Saud. A strategic thinker and introvert, bin Laden had returned to his homeland a war hero a year before the Gulf War began. Saudi citizens cheered his triumph in helping finance and train the mujahideen fighters who successfully repelled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. From the army he had helped build in the ten-year war in Afghanistan, bin Laden and a co-founder had created a ready network of fighters and knew they could be summoned as needed for future jihad in hot spots around the globe. They called it al-Qaeda, or “the Base.”
Bin Laden opposed the pending arrival of U.S. forces on Saudi’s holy lands and criticized the Saudi princes for allowing it. He called the sight of U.S. military cargo planes inbound to Riyadh “the most shocking moment of my life.” Bin Laden embarrassed the Saudi king by accusing him in public speeches and writings of encouraging an “occupation” by American “crusader forcers” in Muslim holy lands. Bin Laden cited the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad in his campaign, warning that two religions could never exist on Saudi soil and infidels should never live and work on the same holy lands as Mecca and Medina. The six-foot-five-inch Islamic extremist also espoused the writing of an Egyptian rebel who urged good Muslims to take up arms against nonbelievers in order to preserve Islam.
For bin Laden, the Saudi welcome of American troops didn’t just affront his religious views. There was a personal aspect, too. After Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in late 1990, bin Laden had offered the royal House of Saud his services. He said he could call up his trained army of Muslim fighters to beat back the Iraqis. But the Saudis turned bin Laden down in favor of President Bush and American troops. And then, because he took his dispute public, the royal family put bin Laden under house arrest. In 1991, he was expelled from the country, whereupon he moved his headquarters to Sudan.
After the Gulf War, U.S. soldiers remained in Saudi Arabian bases, further infuriating bin Laden. “They can’t let the American army stay in the Gulf area, taking our oil, taking our money,” he told his followers at their new headquarters. “We have to do something to take them out. We have to fight them.”
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IN THE EARLY 1990s, the security protocols used to shield President Bush hadn’t kept up with the massive technological advances that were revolutionizing everything from mobile phones to electronic surveillance. His protection appeared quaint compared to the massive arsenal of high-tech playthings the U.S. military deployed in the first Gulf War. Supervisors coordinating trips still made a rush of phone calls to put together teams of agents. They used computers sparingly. The newest technological toys were the magnetometers the Service had begun requiring to screen guests at presidential events after Reagan’s shooting in 1981. As it had since Kennedy, the Service still overwhelmingly relied on the sheer will and determination of its people. Sweat and muscle were the Service’s standard solution for most security problems. “It’s always, ‘Let’s throw bodies at the problem,’ ” explained a former senior agent. “No strategy. Just reaction.”
Bush’s Secret Service detail leader, a square-jawed and crusty Midwesterner named John Magaw, embodied that traditional “sheer will and determination” approach. He was a former Ohio state trooper who became a special agent a few years after Kennedy’s assassination.
Magaw was known as a stickler for very specific standards he held dear. Bush aide Joe Hagin had great respect for Magaw. But he once blamed Magaw’s exacting personality—a sense that he was “too perfect”—for his not rising more quickly in the Secret Service. Another top Bush adviser translated this as Magaw’s being “too serious, too straight, too well-combed to be one of the guys.”
As a detail leader, Magaw didn’t get close to agents. He was known to tinker with a security plan up until the last minute, moving by a few inches or feet the location where agents were supposed to stand if he thought their placement created a hole. Once, according to agents who overheard the story, he ordered an agent to move in close between President Bush and a bomb-sniffing dog who was passing. The agent asked why. “If that dog bites anyone, I want him to bite you and not the president,” Magaw explained.
Magaw was known to wake in the middle of the night with a concern about a vulnerability in a security plan, and then phone in suggested changes. He also demanded a dress code and grooming standards that harked back to the 1950s. He wanted clean-shaven agents with close-cropped hair. He insisted that all agents wear laced shoes. No loafers, ever. If they had to run in a crisis, he said, their shoes might fall off.
He was a traditionalist in his approach to security. He focused on the threat he knew posed the highest risk to a president’s life: a lone shooter. He drilled his detail agents in how to eye a crowd and spot suspicious moves, especially from a deranged gunman trying to become famous.
President Bush and Magaw had become close friends on the road, a relationship built on mutual respect and some shared characteristics. They both had a dry, cut-to-the-chase manner, and both took pride in their public service. In February 1992, as Bush entered the final year of his term in office, the president rewarded his family’s loyal protector and public servant by naming Magaw the next director of the Secret Service.
That same month, from his exile in Sudan, Osama bin Laden made a declaration to his Islamic warriors across the globe. Few in the Secret Service knew the Saudi upstart’s name or his cause. But bin Laden, tossed out of his own country by the Saudi royal family, had declared war against his chosen enemy: U.S. forces abroad. He and fellow leaders of al-Qaeda issued a fatwa calling for jihad against Western “occupation” of Muslim lands and American troops in particular. “We have to cut the head off the snake and stop them,” bin Laden told his followers in a series of lectures. “The snake is America.”
With the close of the Gulf War, bin Laden set out to expand the network of Islamic fighters that he had helped train and unite in the hills of Afghanistan. He and his old band of brothers were united in their shared hatred of the West. In his Sudan exile, bin Laden relied on an estimated $25 million inheritance and money from other wealthy donors to finance this new quest.
Within a year of the U.S. victory in the Gulf War, bin Laden had drafted the first of several plots. He had grand plans to kill Americans, starting by bombing U.S. soldiers whom President Bush had sent to Somalia for a famine relief effort there in December 1992.
Soon he would add U.S. presidents to his kill list.
CHAPTER 11
A ROCK STAR PRESIDENT
As 1992 opened, a new presidential campaign season was moving into full swing, and a little-known governor from Arkansas had just pulled off the unthinkable. While Bill Clinton was battling a half dozen fellow Democratic candidates just to get noticed, a gossipy grocery store tabloid pelted him with accusations that he had carried on an adulterous affair with a pretty former television reporter and cabaret singer. The claim threatened to torpedo the young politician’s fledgling run amid the all-important New Hampshire primary. But just days later, Clinton somehow managed to emerge not only unscathed but also, however unlikely, as far more famous and likable. He was now the leading candidate for the nation’s highest office.
The Star’s January 23 edition splashed a picture of a pretty blonde named Gennifer Flowers across the cover under the screaming headline My 12-year Affair with Bill Clinton. In the article, Flowers recounted how she and Clinton first met and began a sexual relationship in 1977, just two years after Bill Clinton had married Hillary Rodham. She described their efforts to keep the affair a secret, especially after he became governor. At Clinton’s urging, Flowers moved into a high-rise in Little Rock where some of Clinton’s aides also lived. He said visiting her there would draw less suspicion. Flowers, who was reportedly paid $100,000 for her interview, later provided somewhat garbled tapes in which Clinton could be heard explaining that there’s no story if two people deny having an affair. “They can’t run a story like this unless somebody said, ‘Yeah, I did it with him,’ ” he said.
Bill and Hillary Clinton knew the Flowers story could spell the end of his campaign. They both wanted to punch back at this accusation. The couple agreed to give a joint interview three days later on CBS’s highly watched 60 Minutes program, broadcast immediately after the Super Bowl. Clinton told interviewer Steve Kroft that he knew Flowers as a friendly acquaintance and state employee but “she changed her story” when the tabloid offered to pay for her account. In phrases that sounded straightforward but had actually been carefully parsed, Governor Clinton and his wife said Flowers’s claims were false, suggesting without actually stating that they were denying all of them outright. The governor did signal that he had transgressed in some unspecified way, saying he and his wife had worked through some marital problems.
