Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service by Petro Joseph & Robinson Jeffrey

Author:Petro, Joseph & Robinson, Jeffrey [Petro, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2007-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

As hard as we try to plan for every possible problem, each trip presents us with plenty of new ones.

In the early hours of October 25, 1983, Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. There’d been a bloody and violent Marxist coup d’état directly supported by Cuba, and Reagan believed he needed to act. Among his reasons for invading the island to liberate it from the Marxists and Cubans was that nearly a thousand American students were on Grenada. Six weeks after the rangers, navy SEALS, and marines landed, the students were safe, the American soldiers came home, and a pro-American government established itself on the island.

A few months later, the government invited the president to visit the island and planned to greet him as a conquering hero. But when we did the survey trip, we quickly concluded that this poor Caribbean island simply could not support the logistics of a presidential visit. They didn’t have enough police, couldn’t build a stage, didn’t have enough barricades, and that was only the beginning of a list that went on for several pages. So we had to bring in everything, from wood for the stage to portable toilets for the crowds. The president was going to speak in a big field, and the government was telling us they expected forty thousand people to show up. That’s pretty major, considering that there were only about sixty thousand people on the island.

We flew a C-141 full of equipment down there to set up the rally and the parade, including five miles of yellow rope for rope lines. Two days before the president arrived, I flew down to Grenada to check the security arrangements. I was driving through the countryside and spotted tethered animals everywhere. There were cows and horses and goats and sheep, all tied with brand-new, very distinctive yellow rope. It seems that, as we tried to utilize the rope for our purposes, the local farmers had their own ideas on how to utilize it.

As hard as we try to plan for every possible new problem, old problems also arise.

When we took the president back to Japan in 1986, I worried that there could be a fallout from the Motoishi incident. I’d tried to soothe Motoishi’s feelings after that first trip by sending him a little gift. I’d been walking through a West Wing hallway where the photo office hangs pictures of recent events and spotted one in which he was standing right next to the president. The deal with the photos was, if you saw one you wanted, you put your name and phone number on the back of it, and if no one senior to you asked for it, you could have it. I’d asked the president to sign it, and I’d mailed it to Mr. Motoishi. Now, seeing him again on the preadvance, he was guarded but friendlier. I decided that was progress. Bizarrely, five years later I was having lunch with an advance team from

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