Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [333]
One incident that Merletti kept locked in his mental file and that was unknown to the rest of the world related to a disagreement he had with President Clinton in November 1996. In this episode, Merletti had overruled Clinton and, in doing so, saved the president’s life. Merletti had been traveling with the president to Manila in the Philippines, when a snap decision confronted him as head of the presidential protective detail. Clinton was scheduled to attend a late-afternoon appointment with a senior member of the Philippine government. As was common for the gregarious Clinton, he was running late. The motorcade route from the hotel, where Clinton was wrapping up his meeting, to the government official’s office would take approximately fifteen minutes. President Clinton instructed Merletti, “You gotta get me there fast. I’m really late.”
One of the jobs of the Secret Service was to “make the president’s schedule work.” Merletti understood that. As they climbed into their long, black car, however, Merletti received a crackly message in one earpiece: Intelligence operators in the field had picked up a radio transmission in which the unknown speakers used the words “bridge” and “wedding” in close proximity. The latter word, he knew, was a code word once used by terrorists to mean a hit, or an assassination. On the motorcade route that had been mapped out, the president’s car was scheduled to cross a bridge.
Merletti urgently requested if intelligence could get “more information.” After a momentary buzz in his earpiece, the response came back: “Negative.” In the meantime, the president was still pushing Merletti, “Let’s go, let’s go. We’re late!” As head of the PPD, Merletti had to take a stand. His paramount job was to protect the chief executive, regardless of what the president wanted. Merletti climbed into the car and looked directly at Clinton: “Mr. President, I have bad news for you,” he said. “We’re going to be real late, because we’re taking a different route.”
There followed a “strong discussion” between the president and Agent Merletti. It was “professional” in every way, Merletti recalled, but the conversation involved “strong language” on each side. In the end, Merletti directed the motorcade to travel the direction he wanted, and the president sunk back in his seat, unhappy but overruled.
As the presidential entourage wound forward along its altered route, a U.S. intelligence team was dispatched to the bridge. The structure was a white concrete span in a busy downtown area of Manila and was flanked by picturesque palm trees and neat pedestrian sidewalks. Underneath the bridge, explosives specialists uncovered a bomb powerful enough to blow up the entire presidential motorcade.
This thwarted assassination attempt was never made public; it remained top secret except to select members of the U.S. intelligence community. The American government’s subsequent investigation of this plot to kill Clinton, however, revealed that it had been masterminded by a Saudi terrorist living in Afghanistan—a man named Osama bin Laden. Intelligence reports revealed that this bearded criminal’s nascent terrorist organization, known as al Qaeda, had engineered the effort to murder the American president. The Secret Service was already watching bin Laden—he had been involved in at least one earlier attempt to assassinate Clinton in the Philippines in 1994. The plot to kill Clinton in Manila had failed only because members of the PPD were trained to put the safety of the president first, regardless of conflicting instructions, even from the chief executive himself. In Merletti’s view, “If you’re not capable of making decisions like this, you don’t belong in that position.”
It was therefore infuriating and insulting to Merletti that Ken Starr and his gung-ho prosecutors would insinuate that Secret Service