Zero fail, p.24
Zero Fail, page 24
After officers noticed the plane, reporters asked, was there enough time for agents to “get off a shot”? Noble said he didn’t know.
“Was the plane fired upon by your agents?” a reporter then asked Meyer.
“A little too early to get into that,” Meyer said.
“You would know,” the reporter replied. “It’s a yes or no answer, sir—yes or no answer.”
Another reporter called out: “And how would that hurt the security of the president by letting us know whether or not…”
“The answer is no,” Meyer said finally.
To help coordinate the fact-finding mission, Noble enlisted a team of lawyers, while the White House named an impressive panel of senior leaders, including former CIA and FBI director William Webster, to oversee the probe. But just as they began their work, a new scare shook the White House.
* * *
—
ON A PLEASANT Saturday afternoon in October, Francisco Duran stood on Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House. He pulled a Chinese-made semiautomatic assault rifle from under his tan trench coat, pointed the barrel through the bars of the iron perimeter fence, and opened fire on the White House. Duran, a convicted felon who despised the government and Clinton, shot twenty-nine rounds at the North Facade of the White House, striking it eleven times and shattering a window in the press briefing room before three civilians on the street tackled him.
Duran’s shots never endangered President Clinton, who was in a south-facing room in the Executive Mansion at the time. But the incident shook the White House staff. Leon Panetta, Clinton’s chief of staff, asked Noble’s team to include Duran’s shooting in their review.
The eight-month investigation that followed was one of the most comprehensive in Secret Service history, second only to the Warren Commission’s examination of the Kennedy assassination. They reviewed every element of White House security, interviewing former presidents Bush, Carter, and Ford to get their perspective. The investigative staff sought advice from a series of technical experts in radar and X-ray detection, aviation, explosives, counterterrorism, and more.
In one of the investigation’s more secretive steps, the Secret Service dispatched a pair of trusted senior supervisors to visit the Delta Force commander at Fort Bragg to discuss a novel way to test the White House’s vulnerability. The Secret Service wanted Delta to try some exercises to see if they could succeed in getting past the Secret Service officers, and perhaps inside the mansion.
At the meeting to discuss the operation, the burly commanding officer of the U.S. Army’s Delta Force greeted his Secret Service guests in a conference room, then ushered in about a half dozen of his operators, introducing them to the special agents from the president’s protection squad in Washington. “They want to task you guys with attacking the White House,” the commander said, pausing to let the idea sink in. “Under different circumstances, we would be arresting you right now,” he deadpanned.
The special operators didn’t succeed in breaching the White House. But in mock exercises, they warned that if a helicopter or light aircraft were to land on the White House grounds with six to eight attackers aboard, there was a strong likelihood that in the confusion, at least one assassin would make it inside the White House.
Noble’s investigative team was close to finalizing their draft report in April 1995—and was leaning toward a highly controversial step. They wanted to close Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House to create a wider barrier around Crown, but the street was a critical artery through downtown Washington. Before the final draft was made public, a moment of terror gave urgency to their recommendation. On April 19, two Army veterans used a truck loaded with explosives to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including six Secret Service agents and staff. A few weeks later, President Clinton reluctantly agreed to the Secret Service’s proposal and announced the closure of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Perhaps the most significant new protection adopted after the 1994 review was a new classified program called Tigerwall. It allowed the Secret Service to monitor the FAA’s real-time radar when planes got suspiciously close to downtown Washington’s restricted airspace. It would provide the Service with critical early warning if an errant plane ever headed over the White House again. Agents hoped they would never need it.
CHAPTER 12
THE INTERN
“Have you seen a young congressional staffer?”
President Clinton poked his head outside the cracked-open door of the Oval Office to speak to his protectors stationed outside the door. In the small vestibule office, Lewis Fox, a silver-haired Secret Service officer, had been sitting in a chair near an agent on the president’s detail. Unusually heavy snow had been falling all weekend, but inside the West Wing it was an unremarkable Sunday afternoon. A football game, which they’d been glancing at from time to time, played at a low volume on a television in the corner. To Fox, it had been a fairly humdrum weekend shift at E-6, the Secret Service’s code name for this position outside the Oval Office.
“No, sir,” Fox said.
“I’m expecting one,” Clinton said. He asked if the officer would let him know when the staffer showed up.
“Yes, sir,” Fox said, nodding.
After Clinton shut the door, Fox told the agent he had a good idea who the president was expecting a visit from alone on a weekend afternoon.
“I’ll bet it’s Monica,” Fox said.
Less than ten minutes later, just as Fox had predicted, up the hall came Monica Lewinsky, with a mane of shiny nearly-black hair and a big lip-glossy smile. The bubbly twenty-one-year-old had joined the White House as a new intern just that summer but got an unusually quick promotion after working in Chief of Staff Leon Panetta’s office that fall and had been hired several weeks earlier as a permanent staffer in the East Wing’s congressional affairs office. She greeted Fox with a warm “Hi” and then explained the reason for her visit: She had some letters for the president.
It had gotten to the point that winter that Secret Service guards were starting to set their watches to this subtle weekend dance. The president would come down from his private residence on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and stride into the Oval Office without any aides in tow. In roughly ten to thirty minutes, Lewinsky would show up in the hallway saying she had something to deliver to the president.
This Sunday afternoon, Fox knocked on the Oval Office door. He heard Clinton say “Yes,” and the curved white door opened. The president nodded to Lewinsky and ushered her into the Oval. He turned back to Fox, signaling to him to close the door. “She’ll be here a while,” Clinton said.
Fox, an officer with twenty-five years on the job, more than half of it watching the comings and goings of presidents in the White House, sensed something more than official business was going on with Eagle and the intern. Fox had developed an informal friendship with Lewinsky from her first days in the White House. The previous fall, Fox met Lewinsky while he’d been posted at a security checkpoint in the West Wing basement. He let her linger there, long enough so she could run into Clinton when he was going to pass through to the Executive Office Building and get her picture taken with him. Fox didn’t know it then, but Lewinsky had been aggressively flirting with the president since getting her intern position in the chief of staff’s office in July. She routinely tried to position herself in places she knew the president was going to pass. A week after the basement meeting, Lewinsky found Fox on duty and gave him a box of Godiva chocolates to thank him for helping her get the picture. Fellow officers had started teasing Fox by calling Lewinsky “your girl,” though there was nothing between them.
However, after the picture and the chocolates that fall, fellow officers kept updating Fox on Lewinsky’s frequent visits to the West Wing—especially on quiet weekends. “Your girl was here again yesterday,” one said. Fox saw Lewinsky in the Oval two times while he was working the weekend shift: once in January with the papers and another time when Fox saw Lewinsky quickly leave the president’s office through a side exit. In April 1996, another Secret Service officer, Gary Byrne, took Fox aside to warn him: “There’s something you may want to know.” Byrne said he’d complained to a junior White House staffer that Lewinsky was making an unusual number of trips to the hall outside the Oval Office, as if she were loitering to stay close to the action. He got an urgent call soon afterward at home from Evelyn Lieberman, the White House’s chief enforcer, the deputy chief of staff for operations. She wanted to talk to Byrne in person immediately, and he agreed to come see her before his shift the next day. Byrne relayed what he had seen.
Lieberman had already scolded Lewinsky once before, finding her lingering outside the Oval in late November and reminding her interns weren’t supposed to “hang about” near the president’s office. Lewinsky surprised Lieberman, telling her she was now a permanent staffer, prompting Lieberman to apologize for her mistake. But now this young staffer’s behavior was causing hallway gossip among the Secret Service officers. I have to get rid of her, she thought.
She told Chief of Staff Leon Panetta that she wanted to transfer Lewinsky to another agency. She dubbed Lewinsky a “clutch” who spent too much energy trying to get face time with the president. “The appearance it was creating” wasn’t good for Clinton, she said. Panetta, a longtime government hand, trusted his aide’s instincts for heading off trouble and approved the plan.
A few days later, Fox was working his morning shift in the West Wing. He saw Lewinsky in the hallway crying and asked what was wrong.
“I don’t work here anymore,” she said in a high voice, wiping her eyes. “I’m going to the Pentagon.”
* * *
—
LEWINSKY HAD BEEN promoted from intern to permanent staffer and then ejected from the White House as a threat to the president’s reputation, all in just ten months’ time. Indeed, it wasn’t long after Lewinsky started working in the West Wing that Jennifer Palmieri, one of Panetta’s top aides, and others were already “worried that an affair between the president and Lewinsky had begun.” They’d noticed how “clutchy” Lewinsky was with the president and that she seemed “giddy” in his presence. Likewise, Clinton loitered by her tiny cubicle outside Chief of Staff Panetta’s office on so many afternoons that fall of 1995 that senior aides began to take notice, dryly joking that the president had never visited his chief of staff’s office this much before.
“You sure are getting a lot of face time with the president,” one Panetta aide told Lewinsky.
Lewinsky batted her eyelashes at Clinton, giggled at his jokes, and finally, when they were alone late one evening in the West Wing, they both confessed their attraction. On November 15, the White House was working with a small portion of its normal staff due to a government shutdown that began the day before. Unpaid interns were a critical part of keeping the White House running during this period. Clinton ushered Lewinsky into a windowless hallway between his dining room and study around 8 p.m. The intern playfully lifted the back of her jacket to flash him the strap of her thong bikini above her pants. They kissed, then parted. A few hours later, Clinton brought her again to the study, where he unhooked her bra to fondle and kiss her breasts. She began performing oral sex on the president. Midway through, Clinton had to take a phone call from a member of Congress.
Secret Service agents and officers, who monitored the president’s comings and goings, didn’t see the racy stuff happening behind closed doors—the heavy petting in the president’s private bathroom, Lewinsky performing oral sex under the desk. But several of them, including Officer Fox, had a gut instinct that something was up.
Indeed he was right: Those “papers for the president” Lewinsky told Officer Fox she had that day in January 1996 were just a pretext Clinton and Lewinsky devised so they could make their weekend rendezvous look like official business. She would pass by the office with some papers. Clinton would keep the office door open when she was supposed to arrive, and then he would invite her in.
He had called her at her Watergate apartment earlier that January day to alert her he was going to his office soon.
“Oh, do you want some company?” Lewinsky asked him playfully.
“That would be great,” the president replied.
When Fox closed the door behind them, they talked on the sofas in the Oval for a few minutes and eventually Clinton led her into the bathroom, where no one could see them. They began kissing, and things got hot quickly. The president suggested he’d like to go down on Lewinsky, but she stopped him. She was having her period, she explained. Lewinsky instead performed oral sex on Clinton.
After about twenty minutes in the bathroom, they returned to the Oval Office, where Clinton picked up a cigar and started chewing on the end. He took the cigar into his hand and stared at it with a lascivious look.
“We can do that, too, some time,” Lewinsky said. Then Lewinsky let herself out, thinking no one was the wiser.
All that winter, as he appeared well positioned to win a second term, the president felt safe and even a little cocky. Nobody would be able to say with any certainty what he and Monica had been doing in their weekend interludes. He had told no one, and she seemed to like the secret they were keeping. They had fooled around only in a windowless hallway or closed rooms that not even the Secret Service could see into. They, along with some staff working in the White House, might suspect, but that was all.
* * *
—
BY DECEMBER 1997, however, President Clinton had new reasons to fear that his private sexual romps with other women might not remain private. He had won reelection handily and was serving the first year of his second term. But he now had ample reason to fear that chatty agents could sink his presidency. He was currently under severe scrutiny by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, whose evolving investigation was deep into its third year and now sniffing around into his interactions with women.
At the same time, two eras of Secret Service agents collided in a high-stress standoff. An older generation of agents who had protected President Kennedy came forward with memories of their service, unburdening themselves of a secret they’d kept for more than three decades. But they made their contribution to history at the same time the current president was struggling with his very own “Kennedy problem.”
Clinton was also being forced to answer uncomfortable questions about his sex life as part of a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by Jones, the Arkansas state employee that Clinton met in a hotel room. The president’s lawyers had argued all the way to the Supreme Court that the suit should be delayed until after Clinton left office—but lost their final appeal in May 1997. The White House had also just been stung by an August 1997 Newsweek article, which reported on allegations that Clinton had groped the breast of a White House volunteer, Kathleen Willey. She told friends the president forcibly kissed her and pushed her hand onto his genitals when they were alone in his private study next to the Oval Office.
As the president’s team battled on several fronts, on December 4, 1997, ABC News aired a two-hour history special about President Kennedy’s “Camelot.” The prime time broadcast featured a handful of well-respected agents describing the reckless philandering they had witnessed while protecting JFK. They told anchor Peter Jennings of their conflicted feelings about shielding the leader of the free world so he could swim naked in the White House swimming pool with his young secretaries and sneak around to one-night stands with women whose names they rarely knew. The agents, four somber men in their retirement years, spoke with the authority of having served their country twice—in the military and in the president’s guard.
Larry Newman, a former Kennedy detail agent, told Jennings he admired many qualities of the president, and he choked up when he described watching Kennedy stop in a Boston hospital unit to take time to write encouraging notes to burned children during what was easily the worst hour of Kennedy’s own life. The president’s newborn son was near death in an adjoining ward, and he passed away later that day. But Newman was nevertheless unsettled by Kennedy’s recklessness in pursuing an endless string of sexual conquests. “You were on the most elite assignment in the Secret Service, and you were there watching an elevator or a door because the president was inside with two hookers,” Newman said. Tony Sherman, a fellow agent, said the president’s disregard for his office and the stream of random women ushered into his bedroom eventually angered him.
At the time, reporters did not catch on to the panic this sex-tinged history program caused in the Clinton White House. If agents who had shadowed the late President Kennedy were now coming clean about his voracious philandering, Clinton and his aides wondered, what stories might the Secret Service staff shadowing President Clinton tell? The president later confided in Lewinsky that he feared the Secret Service officers who manned the White House complex were gossiping outside the White House family.
Lew Merletti, whom Clinton had recently named the director of the Secret Service, was charged with protecting the president’s physical safety. But his reaction that December to the ABC program on Kennedy was regarded as a move to shield Clinton from political peril. In one of his first high-profile acts as director, Merletti urged all agents to keep their mouths shut about what they had seen and heard at the president’s shoulder. Without their silence, he warned, they would be endangering the life of the current president and all future ones.
Merletti, a tightly wound, wiry agent with dark hair and an intense gaze, had been mentored by some of the best, including Bob DeProspero, and earned high marks when he served in lower-level positions on President Reagan’s and President Bush’s security details. In the summer of 1995, he realized the dream of any agent, becoming the special agent in charge of the president’s detail. He could not have known, but his timing was ill-fated. He took over the detail a few weeks before Clinton began his sexual relationship with Lewinsky.
