Jim Kalafatis is an avid student of history who chose an unusual career in the U.S. Secret Service, where he spent a quarter of a century working under six Presidents. His memoir recalls some of his remarkable domestic and foreign experiences that ranged from humorous to frightening and even bizarre.
A year after starting his career in the New York Field Office in 1968, his fluency in the Greek language led to an unusual assignment with the children of President Kennedy. His experiences with their mother gave him a rare, revealing insight into the public and private personas of one of the most admired women of the Twentieth Century. One frightening shared experience gave him a rare glimpse of the emotional fragility of the complicated former first lady.
Three years later, he returned to the New York Field Office, where he spent ten years working all aspects of the Service's criminal and intelligence investigations. He was the New York field office advance agent on numerous presidential and foreign head-of-state visits, and his experiences recall many never-before-revealed anecdotes of those years. One was during a private audience he was granted with Queen Elizabeth aboard the royal yacht Britannia, during which a comment made by Prince Phillip shocked him and embarrassed the Queen.
His experiences during a four-year assignment in Secret Service Headquarters gave him a rare glimpse of the behind-the-scenes relationships between the Secret Service, the Department of Defense, and the CIA. He worked with outstanding professionals like General Colin Powell and a few small-minded Washington bureaucrats who couldn't see the big picture. That assignment revealed how our government works and why it sometimes doesn't. The author believes we have learned little after the 9ll investigation and that our continuing intelligence failures will most certainly lead to more shocking terrorist events.
He has known and worked with many dedicated, talented, and diverse professionals, several of whom were true heroes killed in the line of duty. Several of his friends saved a President's life, changing the arc of American history. Others will never know if they, too, may have prevented a horrific act by doing their job.
The everyday work of Secret Service agents is different from the fictionalized sensationalism portrayed in Hollywood movies. Nevertheless, the mission is extremely demanding. Whether you are engaged in an advance for our President or working on an investigation, a small overlooked detail can have dire consequences. By the end of this book, you will have gained a new perspective of the Secret Service and how the demands of an agent's job affect their personal lives and world views. A Secret Service Memoir is a fascinating and revealing account by an author who knows what he is writing about.
