Phenomena by Annie Jacobsen

Phenomena by Annie Jacobsen

Author:Annie Jacobsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / Military / General, History / Military / Other, History / Military / United States
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-03-27T16:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Killers and Kidnappers

On March 30, 1981, just seventy days after becoming president, Ronald Reagan was shot and seriously injured in an assassination attempt in Washington, D.C. As the president was leaving a speaking engagement at the Hilton, the assassin, John Hinkley Jr., was able to fire six bullets in the direction of the presidential entourage, striking President Reagan with a single shot. It was a perilously close call. The president’s left lung was punctured and he suffered heavy internal bleeding. The attempted assassination was the first time a bullet had hit a sitting U.S. president since John F. Kennedy had been killed in Dallas eighteen years before.

Two months later in Rome, in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City, an assassin opened fire on Pope John Paul II, the leader of 600 million Roman Catholics around the world. Four bullets hit the pontiff; two lodged in his abdomen, another hit his left index finger and another his right arm. The Pope underwent more than five hours of surgery and survived. That fall, on October 6, 1981, Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists in Cairo, an event that stunned the world. Sadat had been watching a military victory parade when a group of men in uniform threw grenades and fired assault rifles at him. Mortally wounded, Sadat was airlifted to a military hospital and died two hours later. In a span of roughly seven months, there had been three assassination attempts against world leaders, with three direct hits and one death. The perceived vulnerability of international figures escalated to alarming proportions.

The day after Sadat was murdered, newspapers across America and around the world hinted at future assassination plots against President Reagan. The Secret Service tightened protocols and the FBI was placed on high alert. Across the intelligence community, analysts were assigned a variety of threat assessments both foreign and domestic. At CIA and DIA, intelligence officers learned of a plot by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to send Libyan hit squads to kill President Reagan and members of his cabinet. The president began traveling in an unmarked limousine. Secret Service members were assigned to protect National Security Council staff. A pair of surface-to-air missiles was installed on the White House roof.

The CIA learned of a second presidential assassination plot, this one spearheaded by the international terrorist Carlos the Jackal, who was thought to have already entered the United States. All kinds of intelligence collection were called up to thwart assassination plots, including human intelligence, signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, open-source intelligence—and the Detachment G remote viewers at Fort Meade.

In Washington, Dale Graff had just begun his new job working for Jack Vorona, assistant vice director for scientific and technical intelligence at DIA. Graff moved to the nation’s capital and rented an apartment not far from his office, on the far side of Arlington National Cemetery. Barbara stayed behind in Dayton, where she worked as the head nurse at St. Elizabeth Hospital; she and the children would join him the following year. Graff’s



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