The American Deception: True Fiction Series, #2

By Ben Goetz

President Reagan has been shot and is recovering in hospital. The nation holds its breath. John Hinckley Jr. is arrested and subsequently charged and found guilty. The basic facts have been released to the public, but there are still many details that need to be investigated behind the scenes. A small, independent Secret Service unit have been formed and given the task of tying up all the loose ends and checking that a threat no longer exists. 

Was the whole thing planned by the KGB or the Russian Mafia? Did Hinckley act alone or was it an inside job? 

The painstaking and revealing procedures used by a Secret Service unit to uncover the truth about the assassination attempt. No perfect heroes. No supermen. Real agents with human flaws who do not always get it right and sometimes rely on luck and intuition to get the job done. You may not like the people who do these jobs or the way they do them, but you just need to know that they do them right and for the good of the country. 

The follow-up to his #1 bestseller, The German Connection, Ben Goetz publishes his first full-length novel in the True Fiction series set in the 1980s. A must for anyone into Reagan-era nostalgia and a world still in the grip of the cold war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Bob Note Publishing
• Release date: Aug 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516353835

Ben Goetz

Ben Goetz is an Author from Southern California who writes high quality Thriller Novels. His new novel: "The American Deception" is the second book in the True Fiction Series set in the 1980s. The book centers around the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. Set in Washington DC, the book is a political thriller and Secret Service procedural roller-coaster ride from start to finish.

Book preview

Prologue

On March 30, 1981 I was on presidential guard detail at the Hilton Hotel in Washington DC. The President was giving a speech to a group of trade union members, something not ultra high risk, but the President is the President, and you never know. My assignment that day was patrolling inside the hotel reception area, looking for anything suspicious and generally mingling with the crowd and watching. 

Secret Service agents are trained to split up surveillance into zones; one man cannot cover everything, so all agents have their area to scan, this theoretically gives 360 degree coverage. We always watch and scan a zone, watching and scanning, always. If you ever speak to an agent and he or she is at work, you may be mistaken for thinking that they are being rude. For a start they are usually wearing mirrored sunglasses. Try asking them a question, and I can promise you that they are listening to what you say, 100%, but underneath the glasses they are scanning, whilst also determining whether you are a threat of course.

For the President we always go the extra mile on preventative measures. You may see a bum sitting in a cardboard box, an old Hippie in the crowd, or maybe someone standing shouting with the hardcore protesters. Many of these people are agents, and you would never know it. We empty surrounding buildings and identify the places a sniper could be and we put our own snipers there. We basically do whatever we see fit to protect the President, and if we upset some people or sail very close to doing something illegal, we still do it. There really are not many people out there who want to sue us and open up that can of worms, just for some minor transgression of their civil liberties for an hour or two.

Everything inside the Hotel was going well, about 10 minutes before the end of the speech I was moved from my original position and posted up outside on the perimeter. I had to check the possible vantage points that we had identified for would-be assassins: bushes, trees, trash cans, cars, windows; anything and everything. Those and everything else were identified and checked days and sometimes even weeks before the President got there. They were also patrolled while he was inside, and re-checked again before he left.

What you might not realize is that we also sweep the location and check everything after the President has gone, because someone may have been trying a dry run to hit the President next time he goes to that particular location, or maybe they were trying to hit him and we disturbed them, or they could not get a good shot off. It is surprising what we learn and pick up after everything is done at a location.

Everything checked out on my end, and I felt as though it was going to be a good day.

At around 2:20 we got the word that Rawhide (codename for President Reagan) was on his way. I could see the side door he was going to exit from where I was positioned and there was a group of journalists and some supporters gathered close by, and unbeknownst to us, John Hinckley Jr.

The President emerged at around 2:25, for the short walk of roughly 30 yards to his limo. I carried out my duties, which were not to stand and stare at the President like a tourist would, but to cover my zone. The next thing I remember was hearing gunshots. The echo of the buildings where I was posted made it hard to determine exactly where the shots came from, but it did not take a genius to guess where they were headed. I drew my weapon (standard issue Smith & Wesson Model 19-2) and started checking my immediate area to see if there was anyone with a firearm, but I did not see anyone. I finished checking my assigned area and immediately turned and ran towards the President to see if my fellow agents needed assistance. By then we had also received a shots fired announcement on the radio.

When I got to the scene it was chaos. There were bodies on the ground, and the President had been bundled into his limo and had been driven away. There was a group of agents surrounding (who I now know to be) Hinckley. He was taken away a short time later in a police car. I did not know it at the time, but the President had been hit by a bullet that ricocheted off his limousine, I thought he was OK because we got the message: Rawhide is OK...we're going to Crown, which meant the President was OK, and they were taking him back to the White House.

The President was not OK.

Chapter 1. Damaged

The aftermath of the shooting was not a good time for any of us, and morale was understandably low. The President survived, but heads had to roll. I kept on asking myself, how could this happen on my watch? Even though I was way down the pecking order, and only there as cover for a sick agent, I still felt a sense of responsibility for what had happened. My take on it was that the focus that day was shifted; it was not on Hinckley as it should have been, but on another person in the crowd that had been identified as a person of interest. He seemed to be very agitated, and was drawing a lot of attention from the agents close to him according to the radio chatter. Maybe that gave Hinckley the time he needed to do what he did?

Although I was not mentioned as being in any way responsible in the reports that followed, I think everyone who was part of the operation felt as though a black mark had been placed next to their name somewhere. Maybe it was only in the subconscious of our superiors, but it felt like it was a real thing none the less. No one wants present when President shot on their record.

The Office of Inspection, U.S. Secret Service, started the investigation the next day and it ran until May 1st 1980. Every agent who was present or involved in the planning went through painstaking reconstruction of the events and the precautions made before and after the President's speech. They had to find out where the mistakes were made, and how they could be prevented in the future.

The investigation was gradually wound down, but our department head, William Paine, wanted a separate investigation; something that went deeper into whether Hinckley acted alone, or if there was a possibility of any accomplices still at large. The investigation codenamed Devastator (after the bullets Hinckley used) was to be carried out by a small four man team, and only reported directly to Paine. The team was assembled and acted as a totally self-contained unit. All evidence and investigative materials were not to be shared with any other department, and if anyone queried what we were investigating, we were to tell them money laundering.

I was glad to be doing something interesting, something that may be of actual use to the safeguard of future Presidents. After becoming an agent at the ripe old age of twenty five, I had spent my initial six years at various field offices, and then when Carter was President I was assigned to his protective detail. But when Reagan took over, there was a changing of the guard and I was back in the field. I could have taken the easy route and worked at a training office or something with more regular hours, but after my divorce was finalized I did not care about doing a nine to five or being in a permanent location, so I went back into the field by choice. For the past couple of months I had mainly been involved in investigating a counterfeiting and fraud case involving some Cuban nationals. I had been brought on to President Reagan's protective detail on the day of the assassination attempt at the last minute because of a sick agent, and also because I had previous experience with Carter and I knew the drill.  

I volunteered for the investigation detail as soon as I heard about it because I wanted to help find out what really happened, and to make sure that any mistakes we made on that day were never repeated again. Our M.O. was clear, everything had to be done by the book, and there was to be no stone left unturned. Apart from our boss, the team members were Chris Robbins, the lead agent, Kevin Wilber, his second in command, Sean Abrams, a friend of mine in and outside of the secret service, and myself, Mark Dempsey.

Sean and I basically did the grunt work out in the field, while the other two were desk jockeys more concerned with writing reports and making sure the details were correct. I had become friends with Sean around five years ago while working on a case together. When I first met him I did not really like him, but we were thrown together and had no choice but to get on with the job. Over time I gradually got what he was about. Sean did not care what other people thought about him; he was honest about everything. If he thought something was not right to his mind he was not shy of telling you about it, no matter who it upset. At six feet four, blond, of German descent, and built like a brick outhouse, he was someone you wanted on your side. I trusted him and we had formed a great working relationship over the past few years. When I was assigned to the investigation, I insisted that he was my partner.

Being one of the guys out in the field was an OK work relationship for me; I hated having a senior agent breathing down my neck. We were given orders, and as long as we did what we were asked, there were no problems. From the very start of us tying up the loose ends of the main investigation, it felt like no one expected us to find out much more than we already knew, but we had to dot the I's and cross the T's before the case could be finally closed. We were given a tiny office that consisted of two rooms either side of a small hallway that doubled as a waiting area. The investigation seemed to be severely lacking in resources for how serious of a matter it was; more like an afterthought than a real investigation.

We cast a wide net and had to re-tread some of the steps of the original investigation. There were people present in the crowd at the hotel on the day of the shooting from all over the world, so initially we were trying to track the ones that seemed to be of interest down. The foreign nationals we checked out came back basically clean, or just did not fit the profile. They were mainly regular tourists with barely a parking ticket between them.

I had watched one of the FBI interviews with Hinckley's parents during the original investigation. They seemed nice enough; his family was rich from oil. They were also involved in an evangelical relief organization, and while that is never a guarantee that a person has a good heart, it was hard to see how Hinckley could have gone so wrong. These were law abiding citizens who even had alleged ties to Vice President Bush's family.

Hinckley himself was obviously insane. The deeper we went and the more we learned about him, the plainer that fact became. The usual conspiracy theories about his motives were still doing the rounds in many of the newspapers. By the time our tie-up investigation started, the stories had gradually moved off of the front pages and had been buried deeper with other less interesting or sensational news.

We knew he had made threats before he tried to kill the President. One such threat came to light after March 30, when he had supposedly been witnessed in Lubbock, Texas, saying that all Presidents should be eliminated, but the USSS had no record of anyone reporting it before the assassination attempt. It had been established that he had also followed President Carter around and got physically close to him at one stage. He also had an unrelated firearms charge for taking a gun into the airport in Nashville, Tennessee.

As crazy he was, you would think that he would have been on our radar by that time. Not at all.

There was a public outcry a short while later when Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. It certainly was tough to swallow, but reading the official report and personally observing him made it very hard for me to disagree that he was insane, but even so, the punishment certainly did not fit the crime as far as I was concerned.

Chapter 2. The Right Profile

Despite the mountain of data we had collected, there were still some holes in the investigation. Things like the fact that none of us wore bullet proof vests that day. Why didn't we? We usually did. More importantly was why was the President not wearing a bullet proof vest?  

The person in the crowd who had caused concern with some of the agents before the shooting had disappeared off the face of the earth, and that was a pertinent fact as far as we were concerned, but he had been left without too much investigation. I pulled the file to see what I could find out. He was identified as a 25-year-old male named Daniel Clarke and he was interviewed after the assassination attempt at a local police station. He had raised suspicion with his behavior outside the hotel while the President was giving his speech. Two agents reported that they thought he may somehow be involved as a decoy, so that Hinckley had enough time to pull his gun without being seen and shoot the President. 

I watched his interview tapes to see what I could learn about him. I carefully watched his body language, his demeanor, and anything that might have been missed at the time. Clarke was a bit strange. He came across as very effeminate, although it seemed like he was amping that up to piss off some of the older agents in the room. He struck me as being more of a theatrical or an artistic type rather than gay. He had a constant annoying smile and kept on making double entendres of a sexual nature the whole time, but despite his behavior there was nothing in the file or on the tapes that could link him to Hinckley or the shooting. He had never even been arrested. It seemed like the guy was just an oddball and nothing more. The final part of the report said that Clarke was released that evening and informed that he may be required to come in again as the investigation progressed. That was the last time he was seen by any agent, despite several attempts to contact him by phone and at his apartment.

June was almost over and this loose end was obviously something that needed to be cleared up. It had become known as the Clarke situation. Most of the other things left to do were just the checking of minor details. One thing for sure was that we needed to talk to Clarke again. I spoke to the building manager of his apartment on the phone and he told me that Clarke had not been seen for a few weeks, so I decided to begin my investigation elsewhere. Clarke had stated in his interview that he worked at a place called the 9:30 club on F Street, so that's where Sean and I headed first.

The 9:30 was a small club frequented by the more avant-garde crowd, a lot of the local New-Wave and Punk acts performed there; kids with multicolored hair, ripped clothes and Mohawks. We got there at 11am just as the beer deliveries were taking place and asked to speak to the manager. The only person available was the bar manager, a girl named Joyce, so we asked her about Clarke and what she knew about him. She told us that he in fact did not work there, but was a regular at the club. All the staff knew who he was, but the person he spoke to the most was a guy who she thought he had a crush on, an ex-Marine who worked there as a barman. His name was Joe Cleary. She called Clarke a permanent pest, someone who was always on the guest list because he knew many of the people who worked there. She also added that she could not remember seeing him for at least a month. Joyce gave us Joe Cleary's address and we left and headed over there.

We gathered some details about Cleary on the way. He had an arrest for being drunk in public when he was seventeen, he had stolen a bike to ride home on, and one for Marijuana possession two months ago, but nothing significant. He lived in a run-down apartment above a Vietnamese convenience store, the sort of place where all the items for sale are behind the counter, protected by a Perspex screen. If you wanted to buy something, you had to ask the store owner for the goods and then pay for them before he gave them to you through a small sliding hatch. Classy.

I rang the bell to Cleary's apartment on the side of the building and got no answer, so we went into the store and spoke to the owner. He told us that Cleary usually slept through the day because he worked at night. While we were talking inside the store we heard some noise from the apartment upstairs, Sean ran outside, heading toward the back of the building. I followed a few seconds later and noticed that the door to the stairs that lead to Cleary's apartment was ajar. I drew my weapon and slowly made my way up there, when I got to the top there was another inner door that was also open. I announced myself and that I was coming in, no one answered, I entered cautiously and looked around the three rooms I found and then ran back downstairs to find Sean; he radioed that he had apprehended someone.

When I caught up to him at the back of the building, he had a tall, skinny young white male with very short, spiked, and bleached hair pinned up against a flexing wooden fence, he was using his left forearm on the guy's neck to prevent him from running. The guy was dressed in shorts and a torn t-shirt with Sex Pistols written down the right hand side of it. This guy was rough looking, not even close to the Marine Joyce at the 9:30 club had described.

He shouted at Sean as I approached him,

Let me go! I haven't done anything!

I walked up and said, Who said you had?

Who are you guys, What do you want? he asked.

Are you Joe Cleary? Sean asked in return.

No, I'm just looking after the place for him.

Sean said, Look, we can go upstairs and tear your place to pieces and take you in for questioning for two days, or we can do it here and now, and you won't even be late for work tonight.

I haven't done anything, who are you guys? he repeated.

We're the Secret Service. Why are you running away if you haven't done anything? Only guilty people run, I said.

He replied, Secret Service? Bullshit! I owe some people money. I thought you were coming to collect it for them. You look like gangsters with those suits on.

"You must owe them a lot if you think they would send real gangsters after you?

Five hundred bucks, but I've owed it for two months for some car parts I bought from them. 

Two months? That's about the same time you were arrested for drug possession. Are you sure it's not money you owe them for drugs you didn't get a chance to sell because you were busted with them? 

No, car parts. I don't deal drugs.

Sean said, Your arrest record says different. Last chance, the truth or we are taking you in. 

OK, but can we go upstairs? If anyone sees me talking to you my rep will be shot.

What rep? Sean laughed as he said it.

Boy, you ain't got no rep.

Sean released his forearm and I could see a tattoo on his neck of a logo with the words Iron Cross. I gestured toward it and asked,

Are you some kind of German war medal fan?

No, it's a band, he said.

Looks like a great career move. I replied.

He did not answer.

Sean marched the guy through the front door to his apartment and up the stairs. He kept him in an arm bar