Free Within Arm's Length: A Secret Service Agent's Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President by Dan Emmett Page A

formal follow-up.
    The vehicle behind the presidential limousine is called the follow-up, and each agent in the Secret Service is a virtuoso at jumping in and out of it while the vehicle is moving. In today’s super-modern Secret Service, this vehicle is an armored Chevrolet Suburban and does a fantastic job in its role of carrying the working shift and all of their equipment. In the 1980s, before the advent of giant all-wheel-drive SUVs, the Secret Service employed what were known as formal follow-ups. These were Cadillac sedans heavily modified with running boards, handrails, and convertible tops. Up until about 1990, almost all formal follow-ups were a version of this, and the shift usually rode with the top down if weather permitted. Upon slowing down and preparing for arrival, the shift would climb out onto the running boards while holding onto the handrails for a fast jump to the ground, where they could quickly surround the limo. It was the most impressive-looking thing the Presidential Protective Division did publicly, and new agents could not wait to try it.
    Prior to the state-of-the-art drivers’ training now done at Rowley, all vehicle training was conducted at a nearby abandoned airstrip used by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor to the CIA during World War II. This was the setting for our formal follow-up training. The strip was a paved runway about thirty-five hundred feet long. It had not been used in decades for the intended purpose but provided a perfect place to run cars at full speed for thirty seconds or so.
    Richard was our instructor for the day, had recently come to training from PPD, and was a bit of a wild man, a fact we were about to discover. The exercise began with Richard demonstrating to the class on a stationary follow-up how to mount the running boards, which foot went up first, and how to hold onto the handrails. He then demonstrated how to get off the boards safely while the vehicle was moving. After a few more demonstrations, it was time for us to give it a try.
    We assumed that Richard was going to simply drive up and down the old runway at a slow speed a few times just to give us an idea of what the whole experience was like and to provide a basic familiarization. This was not the case.
    With Richard behind the wheel, the car first moved out slowly, with four agents walking next to the follow-up and some inside for the ride. As the car gained speed, the agents walking alongside jumped on the boards in the prescribed manner and held on as Richard put the accelerator to the floor until he easily hit sixty miles per hour.
    Approaching the end of the landing strip, Richard began to slow down in order to make a 180-degree turn and speed to the other end. As he turned left with tires squealing, the agents on the right-hand side were holding onto the rails with all their strength as Richard accelerated and the centrifugal force pushed to the outside of the turn. Then Richard sped flat-out to the other end of the runway, where he decelerated and turned, this time to the other side, nearly flinging off the students on the left side of the car, who were holding on white-knuckled, hoping not to lose their grip. Richard gave each car full of students several runs up and down the strip until he was convinced every agent knew how to work the formal follow-up. Like most of SATC, the exercise was a tremendous amount of fun, but we were all glad to be alive at the end of the day. We felt confident that we could certainly work the formal if called upon.
    After eight weeks, graduation day finally arrived. The ceremony was held in a small room at 1310 L Street, Washington, DC, which barely accommodated the class of twenty-four and the small audience. Graduations from SATC are now gigantic productions accommodating over two hundred people and go on for an hour or so. In 1983 the proceedings lasted about fifteen minutes. I recall that the deputy director of the Secret Service made the