50 Fun Facts About Secret Service

The Secret Service is famous for guarding presidents, but what was it founded in 1865 to stop?

Counterfeit money. By the end of the Civil War about a third of the cash in circulation was fake, so the new agency was set up inside the Treasury to hunt the forgers.

Which federal department has the Secret Service belonged to since 2003?

Homeland Security. The department was created after the September 11 attacks and absorbed the Secret Service on March 1, 2003, ending its 138 years inside the Treasury.

Whose assassination prompted Congress to ask the Secret Service to protect the President?

William McKinley. Three Secret Service men were already guarding him informally when he was shot in Buffalo in 1901; only afterwards did Congress ask the agency to protect presidents.

What happened on the same day Abraham Lincoln approved the creation of the Secret Service?

He was shot that evening. Lincoln gave his Treasury secretary the nod on April 14, 1865, hours before going to Ford's Theatre, and the agency he approved did not guard presidents for decades.

Which candidate was given Secret Service protection in May 2007, earlier in a campaign than anyone before?

Barack Obama. His detail began about eighteen months before the 2008 election; Hillary Clinton already had agents as a former first lady, so hers did not count as candidate protection.

What is the nickname of the armored Cadillac presidential limousine introduced in 2018?

The Beast. It only looks like a Cadillac sedan: it is widely reported to sit on a heavy truck chassis, and in Secret Service radio traffic it goes by the code name Stagecoach.

Which agent leapt onto President Kennedy's limousine in Dallas to shield the First Lady?

Clint Hill. He was assigned to Jacqueline Kennedy, not the President, and told 60 Minutes in tears in 1975 that had he reached the car a second sooner he could have taken the last bullet himself.

Which agent threw his body over Vice President Lyndon Johnson when the shots rang out in Dallas?

Rufus Youngblood. He vaulted over the front seat to cover Johnson, who phoned the agency's chief that evening to praise him and later called it as brave an act as he had ever seen.

Which agent spread his stance to shield President Reagan in 1981 and took a bullet meant for him?

Tim McCarthy. Instead of ducking he turned to face the gunman and made himself as big a target as he could; he recovered and later spent 26 years as a police chief in Illinois.

Where did agent Jerry Parr divert Reagan's motorcade after the 1981 shooting?

George Washington University Hospital. Parr first headed for the White House, believing Reagan unhurt; when the President began coughing up blood he ordered the car to the hospital instead.

With the White House gutted for rebuilding in 1950, gunmen attacked President Truman at which temporary home?

Blair House. Truman was napping in an upstairs bedroom when two Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire at the front door, and neither of them got inside.

Mortally wounded guarding President Truman, officer Leslie Coffelt did what?

Shot a gunman dead. Hit in the abdomen at his sentry booth, Coffelt still drew his revolver and killed Griselio Torresola with a single shot to the head; he died in hospital about four hours later.

How did William Craig, the first agent to die guarding a president, lose his life in 1902?

A carriage crash. The carriage taking Theodore Roosevelt through western Massachusetts was wrecked when a trolley car bore down on it, killing Craig months after the agency began guarding presidents full time.

Whose 1968 assassination led Congress to authorize protection for major presidential candidates?

Robert F. Kennedy. Candidates had no federal protection then: his bodyguards in Los Angeles were a former federal agent and two athletes, Olympic champion Rafer Johnson and footballer Rosey Grier.

Which former president gave up his Secret Service protection, saying it would save the government money?

Richard Nixon. He gave it up in 1985: former presidents are free to turn the protection down, but a sitting president and vice president have no such choice, because the law does not let them decline it.

Which president had the Secret Service code name Deacon?

Jimmy Carter. The name suited a devout Baptist who taught Sunday school in Plains, Georgia, and kept a class going in Washington while he was president.

Which 2016 presidential candidate was given the Secret Service code name Mogul?

Donald Trump. Handed a list of about ten words beginning with M when his detail started in November 2015, he sent back the ones he liked; Melania Trump, a former model, became Muse.

Which two Secret Service code names have been used for Air Force One?

Angel or Cowpuncher. The public call sign has a story too: 'Air Force One' was coined after controllers confused Eisenhower's plane with an airliner using the same flight number.

Which presidential retreat was code-named Cactus?

Camp David. The camp sits in wooded Maryland mountains with no cactus in sight, while Lyndon Johnson's Texas ranch, where the name might seem to belong, was Volcano.

Which building carries the Secret Service code name "Punch bowl"?

The Capitol. Code words like this date from the days of open radio channels, when agents had to say where a president was going without telling anyone listening in.

Which organization actually keeps the list of code names that Secret Service protectees choose from?

White House Communications Agency. The Secret Service only uses the names: the list comes from the military unit that runs the president's phones and radios, and each family's names share a first letter.

What was Vice President Dick Cheney's Secret Service code name?

Angler. Cheney was an avid fisherman, and the rest of the family kept to the letter A: his wife Lynne, a writer, was Author.

Which vice president had the code name "Hoosier"?

Mike Pence. Hoosier is the nickname for a native of Indiana, the state he governed before becoming vice president, and his wife Karen kept to the letter H as Hummingbird.

What was Kamala Harris's Secret Service code name?

Pioneer. Harris picked it from an approved list in August 2020, days after becoming the first Black woman and first Indian American on a major party's presidential ticket.

Which entertainer was given the code name "Napoleon" by the Secret Service?

Antonio Banderas got "Zorro" and Pope John Paul II was "Halo".

Which visiting monarch was code-named Kittyhawk?

Queen Elizabeth II. Since the early 1970s the Secret Service has guarded visiting heads of state on American soil, so foreign royals get radio names like everyone else it protects.

A gunman firing at President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in Miami in 1933 fatally wounded which city's mayor instead?

Chicago. Mayor Anton Cermak was standing beside Roosevelt's open car when Giuseppe Zangara fired from the crowd, and he died of the wound nineteen days later.

The Secret Service's Uniformed Division was established in 1922 under what name?

White House Police. The force answered to the president's military aide until 1930, when a stranger strolled into the dining room while Hoover was eating and he handed it to the Secret Service.

Besides the White House, what does the Secret Service's Uniformed Division protect across Washington, D.C.?

Foreign diplomatic missions. The duty arrived with a 1970 law that also renamed the force the Executive Protective Service, turning the president's house guard into a city-wide police force.

Both attempts to shoot President Gerald Ford in September 1975 came in which state?

California. Charles Manson follower Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme aimed a pistol at him in Sacramento, and seventeen days later Sara Jane Moore fired a shot at him in San Francisco.

In which 1993 thriller does Clint Eastwood play an ageing Secret Service agent haunted by Dallas?

In the Line of Fire. Eastwood's Frank Horrigan is the last agent still serving who was with John Kennedy in 1963, which is why a would-be assassin picks him to taunt.

Which rare coin has the Secret Service been seizing from collectors since 1944?

1933 double eagle. None was officially issued and nearly all were melted down, so those that slipped out of the Mint count as stolen government property; just one may be legally owned.

Which agency grew from the detective force the Justice Department formed in 1908, once Congress stopped it borrowing Secret Service men?

The FBI. Congress imposed the ban after Secret Service men on loan helped convict a senator and a congressman of land fraud, and former Secret Service agents formed the new force's core.

Which nationwide Secret Service crackdown on computer hackers in May 1990 produced only a handful of arrests?

Operation Sundevil. Some 42 computers were carried off in raids across the country, and the outcry helped prompt the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation that summer.

Which small game company in Austin, Texas, did the Secret Service raid in March 1990?

Steve Jackson Games. Agents carried off the master copy of a role-playing rulebook, GURPS Cyberpunk, which one of them called a manual for computer crime; the company sued and won damages.

In which building was the Secret Service's New York field office located on September 11, 2001?

7 World Trade Center. No plane hit the 47-storey tower: fires set by debris from the North Tower burned all afternoon and it collapsed that evening, taking the field office with it.

Which hacker, arrested in 2008, was charged with stealing 40 million-plus card numbers from retailers like TJX?

Albert Gonzalez. He had been a Secret Service informant, helping agents break up the Shadowcrew card-fraud forum while he ran a far bigger theft ring of his own.

In 2012, agents were sent home from which Colombian city over a prostitution scandal before a presidential visit?

Cartagena. The affair surfaced over an unpaid bill: a woman complained that an agent had refused to pay her the $800 he had agreed, and the dispute at the hotel drew in the police.

Which director resigned in July 2024, a day after testifying about the Butler rally shooting?

Kimberly Cheatle. A gunman had reached a rooftop within rifle range of a former president's campaign stage, and she conceded to Congress that it was the agency's most significant operational failure in decades.

The director appointed in 2022 came from a job as senior director of global security at which company?

She had spent 27 years in the agency and was its first female assistant director of protective operations.

In 1909 the Secret Service faced its first big summit test when Taft met the leader of which country?

Mexico. As Taft and Porfirio Díaz approached in El Paso, the scout Frederick Russell Burnham seized a man in the crowd by the wrist and found a small pistol hidden in his palm.

John Hinckley shot President Reagan in 1981 hoping to impress which actress?

Jodie Foster. Hinckley had fixated on her after watching Taxi Driver, in which a loner stalks a politician, and a jury later found him not guilty by reason of insanity.

Where was Secret Service headquarters moved for four years in 1870?

New York City. Chief Hiram Whitley took the agency's records north with him and left only an assistant and two clerks in Washington; four years later his successor moved everything back.

Which president became the first to get informal Secret Service protection, in 1894?

Grover Cleveland. Agents were sent after a plot against him came to light and went on to guard his family at their summer home, all without any law authorizing it.

Which annual Washington event is a National Special Security Event, secured by the Secret Service?

The State of the Union address. It puts the president, Congress and most of the cabinet in one room, so one cabinet member is kept away as the 'designated survivor'.

Outside which hotel in the capital was President Reagan shot in March 1981?

The Washington Hilton. Reagan had just addressed a union conference there, and John Hinckley was standing unscreened among the reporters by the side exit as he walked to his car.

What did the Secret Service become the first U.S. agency to do?

Domestic intelligence and counterintelligence. Its operatives tailed Spanish agents across the country in 1898, and in 1915 Woodrow Wilson set them on foreign spies before a newer bureau took the work over.

The Secret Service office that liaises with Interpol headquarters is located in which French city?

Lyon. Interpol moved its headquarters there from the Paris suburbs in 1989, which is why the capital is the wrong guess; a sister office in The Hague does the same job with Europol.

Which city's Secret Service field office was destroyed with the loss of six staff?

Oklahoma City. The office was inside the Murrah Federal Building, bombed in April 1995, and a month later the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House was closed to traffic.

What is the motto of the United States Secret Service?

Worthy of Trust and Confidence. The words come from the commission book every agent carries, and directors invoke them to remind agents never to talk about the private lives of the people they guard.