Secure job, protecting presidents

If, during Apec, you should encounter anyone wearing dark glasses, listening to mysterious voices and apparently muttering to themselves, chances are that it's not a casualty of psychiatric de-institutionalisation, but a member of the US Secret Service.

While the number of Secret Service people travelling with President Clinton is, well, secret, they will be out in force, and conspicuous by their close proximity to the President.

Protecting Presidents is a relatively new task for the service, set up in 1865 to combat counterfeiters.

That mission still exists - these days it extends to crimes such as credit card and computer fraud - but it's watching over Presidents and other "protectees", as they're called, that has made the Secret Service famous.

And what a lot of protectees there are to watch over. As well as the commander in chief and his immediate family, the Secret Service looks after the Vice-President and his family, former Presidents (but only for ten years after they leave office), presidential widows (but not, curiously, once they remarry), major candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency (a category added after Robert Kennedy's 1968 assassination) and foreign dignitaries visiting the US.

There are some 5000 of them, from the Presidential Protection Division, which sticks close to the President and First Family, through to uniformed officers who patrol the White House and other government buildings in Washington DC.

Since the Secret Service first moved into the White House in 1894, to protect President Cleveland, two presidential assassins have got past them - the anarchist who killed President McKinley in 1901 and Lee Harvey Oswald, who took John Kennedy's life in Dallas in 1963.

No one knows how many potential attacks the Secret Service has averted, but they have helped Presidents and candidates survive a half dozen incidents in which shots were fired (at Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, Harry Truman in 1950, George Wallace in 1972, Gerald Ford in 1975 (twice) and Ronald Reagan in 1981).

As well as staying close to the President, watching for potential attackers and, if it comes to that, shielding him with their bodies, agents carry out advance checks of places the President plans to visit, looking for security threats.

Even if President Clinton decides to slip out of the White House to visit a restaurant or a store, the Secret Service goes there first.

The Service has also encouraged Clinton to cut back on one of his leisure activities, jogging through the streets of Washington, because of the security risks.