Capitol Suspect Had Made the ‘List’

In early 1996, the man now accused of fatally shooting two Capitol police officers earned himself a place on an exclusive list.

After Russell Eugene Weston Jr. repeatedly threatened President Clinton in conversations with friends and acquaintances, Secret Service agents appeared on his doorstep to figure out whether he had the means to make good on his boasts.

Within days, Weston’s name, his picture and an assessment of the possible danger he posed to senior federal officials was punched into a database that grows by more than 200 people a month, according to government officials.

Known sometimes as the “watch list,” the Secret Service’s database embraces student pranksters and the delusional mentally ill; gun enthusiasts and denizens of Internet chat rooms; deadly serious conspirators and, overwhelmingly, harmless loudmouths.

Its total number of names remains a secret, although it includes far too many for a force of even 2,100 officers to keep tabs on. “You can’t watch all the people all of the time,” said Chuck Vance, head of his own security firm, Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

What most Americans see of the Secret Service is a phalanx of well-tailored men and women who wear dark glasses and wires in their ears and hover close to the president, other top federal officials and foreign dignitaries.

But that “is just the tip of the iceberg,” said former agent King Davis, one of two agents with President Reagan the day he was shot in 1981. Out of public view is the tedious fieldwork that goes into compiling the watch list.

Without the list, Davis said, security workers would have no idea where the next bomb might explode or the next shot might come from. “It all starts,” said Davis, now chief of the Sierra Madre Police Department, “with the intelligence.”

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Agents must walk a fine legal line between protecting public officials and allowing free speech.

If you can get to within several feet of the president and call him a disgrace to his office and country--as one San Diego woman did recently while President Clinton was jogging--the exercise of your right to free speech might get you little more than a sidelong glance from his four-man Secret Service detail.

But if you draw cross hairs on a photograph of the president and post it inside your home--as a former Marine from Camarillo did in 1996--you could get repeated visits from Secret Service gumshoes, a possible trip to court and a special place in the agency’s database.

“It’s just such an inexact science,” said Ronald K. Noble, a New York University law professor and former Treasury undersecretary for enforcement. The agency’s mission itself, he said, is a “mixture of protecting the body of the president, bringing charges against those who have made criminal threats against the president and engaging in the kinds of deterrent activities that would discourage people from making those threats.”

In the balancing act, it is the first mission--that of protecting the president--that usually takes precedence, say those most familiar with the agency’s methods.

Although threatening someone protected by the Secret Service is a federal crime, many prosecutors are loath to pursue cases against those who have committed no act of violence and seem unlikely to do so.

As a result, Secret Service agents rarely make arrests. Rather, they try to keep track of the more serious threat-makers in their database, although they often lose track of them.

But if the president or someone else with Secret Service protection comes to town, the potential troublemakers receive more lavish attention. “We may be in his back pocket the whole time,” one former agent said, watching his every move and circulating his picture and file.

More often, agents say, they satisfy themselves quickly that an individual poses no real threat to those under their protection. In a vast number of cases, they conclude quickly that the suspect individual is delusional, posing mainly a threat to himself or to the immediate community. In others, the individual lacks the wherewithal to carry out any threats.

Former agent Jurg “Bill” Mattman said a man in Belgium had sent explicit letters threatening former President Carter’s life. When Mattman went to investigate, he found a 400-pound man who had not been able to leave his apartment for 18 months.

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In New Hampshire recently, two 10th-grade boys were suspended from school, though not arrested, after they sent e-mail messages threatening the president. Agents swooped down on parents and school officials and quickly concluded the two were misguided pranksters with no intent to harm. But they were photographed for the database anyway.

In other cases, agents are slow to discount a threat. They investigated the Camarillo man in 1996 after local police arrested him for shooting ducks with a crossbow from the back seat of his car.

A search of his house yielded a photograph of Clinton’s face with cross hairs drawn on it and an epithet against homosexuals scrawled on it. They also found 20 semiautomatic weapons and militia-style literature. In the end, no federal charges were brought against him.

Secret Service agents rely on established profiles of assassins and would-be assassins--including short, slight, lone-wolf males such as Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan--to guide their instincts.

Mattman, who now runs a security consulting firm in Riverside County after 13 years with the agency, says the most experienced agents develop a “sixth sense” that helps them identify which of the would-be threats are truly dangerous and must be tracked with vigilance.

“Over a period of time, Secret Service agents really develop an uncanny sense of a person’s intent and propensity to violence,” he said. “It’s a kind of street knowledge rather than a clinical scientific approach. But I’ve learned that people with that street sense are often much more accurate than clinicians.”

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Mattman’s own test came one afternoon as he roamed a crowd of revelers at a Cinco de Mayo event in downtown Los Angeles. With then-President Carter about to walk into the crowd, Mattman eyed a man whose gaze seemed distracted and whose clothes--an ill-fitting black suit on a warm day--did not seem right. He moved quickly toward the man and, in the casual procedure in which agents are drilled, began moving his hands over the man’s body in search of a gun.

He found one--an adrenaline-filled moment he says aged him by several years. It proved to be a cap gun, which the suspect said was to have created a diversion so several other men with shotguns could take aim at the president.

While agents found extensive evidence--including spent shell casings from what the man said were training rounds fired from a nearby rooftop--to indicate his account was accurate, the alleged co-conspirators were never found.