(I don’t know whether to put this in MPSIMS, IMHO or General Questions.)
Question I:
Tonight I happened to be re-reading about the 1981 Reagan assassination attempt. About halfway through the Wikipedia article I read something I’d never heard of before:
Military officers, including the one who carried the nuclear football, unsuccessfully tried to prevent FBI agents from confiscating the suit, Reagan’s wallet, and other possessions as evidence; the Gold Codes card was in the wallet, and the FBI did not return it until two days later.
Wow. National Security SNAFU-ville, for sure! So what happened here? Shouldn’t the need to keep the nuke codes secure and accessible by the president beat out the FBI’s desire to run its investigation all by-the-book? Shouldn’t/wouldn’t there have been some White House heavy around who would make sure the codes didn’t go bye-bye with the 5-0?
As for the military dudes–I’m sure they didn’t want to get in a pissing contest with FBI agents but wouldn’t the need to keep those codes with the president take top priority? Even if the FBI was correct about procedure wouldn’t the military be obligated to do whatever it needed to secure the codes? Including assaulting FBI agents if necessary?
Question II:
The second part is probably common knowledge but not for me. I’m curious about the handgun photographed near Jim Brady’s head as he lay injured on the pavement.
I’ve scoured Google but no love. Who does it belong to? My first thought was it must be Hinckley’s gun, but it looks bigger than a .22. But if it’s not Hickley’s it would likely have to be Secret Service or police. So maybe it belonged to the wounded D.C. cop?
If so, he must have drawn it pretty damn fast.
IIUC, the military has no authority over civilians, only over other military. If it had occurred on a military base, I suppose the MPs would confiscate the evidence first. But they were in civilian jurisdiction, the FBI took over, and the military can’t order civilians around, because if they could, it would be martial law, and we don’t have martial law.
That’s true. I hadn’t looked at it like that. Still, doesn’t the critical importance of the nuclear codes being near the president at all times mean that some civilian should have the authority to order those codes to stay with the military aides?
I suppose the president is that civilian. But what if the president is indisposed? Does the Veep need to order the FBI to stand down? Can he do that with the president still conscious and aware? Could the Attorney General order it?
Did somebody need to make sure that Reagan’s wallet (with the code cards) stayed right by him even as his clothes were cut off and confiscated?
Why? Reagan was in no condition to authorize any nuclear attacks, so why was it critically important to make sure the code card stayed right by him?
Furthermore, you know those codes are changed, and even furthermore even if you found today’s card on the floor in a restaurant you would not be able to use it to launch any ICBMs; sorry
The Gold Codes are changed frequently. They would have been changed soon after the incident. The Nuclear Football is over-rated also, it just has some papers in it. There’s some indication there’s a communication device in the bag also, but it’s not something you can open and start pressing buttons to launch nuclear devices. With both the Gold Code and the Nuclear Football you still can’t launch
missiles, the process is much more complicated than that.
Looks like a Smith & Wesson service revolver. Most likely belonged to the officer rendering aid, possibly a .357 since he was guarding the POTUS and would want stopping power without getting too big to conceal carry. Sure looks government issue.
Standard issue side arm for the U.S. Secret Service Presidential Protective Division in 1981 was the Smith & Wesson Model 19. I’m not a good enough gun spotter to say definitively that’s what’s pictured, but it sure looks like it to me. Almost certainly the sidearm of one of the agents rendering aid to Brady.
Presumably the Veep already had/has a similar set of codes to identify themselves that would be useless until / unless the NCA has been informed the Prez is offline and the Veep is now CinC, whether temporarily or permanently. So it’s not like Reagan’s codes being in FBI hands effectively disarmed the USA for those 2 days.
The biscuit itself shouldn’t have anything actionable on the outside. So some FBI agent or even lowly evidence clerk seeing the thing is an administrative procedural breach but not a practical usable breach.
There would have been an after-action review of the whole scenario and between NSA, FBI, and the military “football team” for lack of a better term, some lessons should have been learned and some procedures tweaked. Maybe somebody got fired off an elite team over this.
But I’ll argue that the practical consequences of the biscuit custody flail at the time were just spitting in a hurricane versus the rest of the flail of maintaining NCA continuity from the moment of the shooting, through Reagan’s incapacity, treatment, and recovery.
As always, when dealing with highly classified stuff, even the cites we can dig up are suspect. As much as we try to be GQ, we’re all spitballing here a bunch.
Surely there must be some national security exceptions, especially when it comes to nuclear weapons. For an extreme example, say an overland atomic weapon transport was involved in a fatal crash. There’s no way the state patrol or other investigating body is going to be allowed to seize or even hold in place the weapons as evidence.
The document below lists some of the planning for dealing with incidents involving radioactive materials. I didn’t read the whole thing, but the basic idea is that there are laws authorizing certain agencies and/or the military to deal with specific, highly dangerous situations. The difference is that the ‘football’ is just a briefcase with some codes in it, and doesn’t have any special laws relating to it the way nuclear materials and especially nuclear weapons do.
Ok, let’s take nuclear weapons out of it. It’s a crash of a top secret, undisclosed aircraft, bristling with never before seen stealth and avionics technology that collided with a pleasure craft. The FAA and NTSB want to collect the pieces.
The FAA and NTSB collect the pieces. If the pieces came down on a military reservation, the military could try to deny access to the FAA and NTSB investigators. Otherwise, the military has no authority over civilian crash investigators, and military personnel who tried to interfere would be unlawfully interfering in an official investigation.
Realistically, once the military personnel (and likely civilian defense contractors) involved in the project realize what happened, they send the information up the chain of command, and DoD staffers coordinate with the FAA and NTSB. There might be a bureaucratic squabble that eventually involves the Secretaries of Defense and Transportation and the agency heads, and the White House Chief of Staff (informally) or the President (formally) steps in to sort it out.
Most likely, the FAA and NTSB already has some investigators with security clearances; the DoD would want to restrict access as much as possible, read on cleared investigators to the Special Access Project that the classified aircraft is under, and make everyone involved sign NDAs. They can’t actually force any of that, though.
The U.S. military, both by tradition and by specific and explicit laws, really has very little authority on U.S. soil.
I would expect that there would be more than one set of facilities available at hand for the nuclear codes.
You’d have to think that the VP would have them immediately avaiable, and then whoever is next in line down to whatever level is deemed appropriate.
The secondary codes would only become active on confirmation of the primary holder being disabled, and so on. The primary set of codes would immediately become useless when the primary holder is confirmed to be disabled.
The Kern County sheriff’s office, whose jurisdiction included Bakersfield, did relay some further information from the Air Force–telling reporters that the “whole area has been restricted, including the airspace above the crash site” and that “there will be military aircraft in the area and anyone entering the area will be dealt with appropriately by the Air Force.”
The airspace restrictions called for low-flying aircraft to remain about six miles away from the crash site and other aircraft to maintain altitudes of more than 5,000 feet when within that radius. While civilian aircraft were kept away from the crash site, there were plenty of military helicopters arriving and departing. The Air Force brought in officials and other personnel from Edwards AFB, Calif., and Meadows Field in Bakersfield. As many as four helicopters at a time were in operation from Meadows Field. A helicopter gunship was observed circling the crash site the day following the crash.
At ground level, armed sentries carrying M-16 automatic rifles kept unauthorized visitors away. Not even firefighters were permitted within the guarded perimeter, which one paper described as a “ring of steel.”
At the crash site investigators collected evidence and evaluated the remains of the aircraft for clues to the cause of the tragedy. Then came the task of cleaning the site and leaving no pieces of the highly classified aircraft for scavengers, the media, or others to find. A clean-up team moved out a thousand feet from the last of the recognizable debris and then dug and sifted all the dirt in the area.
On July 23, controlled explosive charges were detonated on the hillside to free pieces of the aircraft buried as the result of the crash.
To mislead anyone who might try to search the area for pieces of the F-117A, the recovery crew had the remains of an F-101A Voodoo, one that had crashed and been stored at Area 51 for over two decades, broken up. They returned to the crash site and scattered the debris throughout the area. On Aug. 7 the Air Force announced it had withdrawn its guards from the crash site and would no longer restrict access to the area.
That does not sound like the US military lacked the authority to exclude people from the crash site. Perhaps the Air Force was bluffing, and Kern County authorities agreed. The site was within a National Forest, after all. I do not know whether or not a National Defense Area was formally declared around the crash site.
