Behind the Shades: A Female Secret Service Agent's True Story

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Part I:

Executive Protective Service: Washington, DC

Chapter 1:

July 1971 The Princess is Lost – Am I to Blame?

As I drove into Camp Oneka, a picturesque retreat in Pennsylvania’s Poconos Mountains, the smell of freshly mown grass and morning air did little to calm my nerves. My excitement had turned to apprehension about five miles out. Now, as I parked beneath an ancient maple tree near the camp office, fear of failure loomed in my mind. What if my limited training wasn’t enough? What if I wasn’t enough?

Summoning what self-confidence I could, I took a deep breath and stepped out of my little yellow Volkswagen bug and into my first assignment. I can do this, I thought. I can do this.

For the past hundred summers, Camp Oneka had welcomed girls from well-heeled Philadelphia families. On July 23, 1971, fourteen-year-old Princess Caroline Grimaldi of Monaco became one of those girls. Her mother, American movie star Grace Kelly, had spent summers at Camp Oneka in her youth and now wanted her daughter to carry on a tradition. Committed to giving their daughter a normal camping experience, Princess Grace and Prince Rainier had declined federal protection for her. And so, unbeknownst to Princess Caroline or her parents, I’d been charged with Caroline’s protection, working undercover for the Secret Service.

My cover? Camp counselor.

My first order of business was to meet with Henrietta Deubler and her sister, Emily, the co-owners of Camp Oneka. Swallowing my nerves, I knocked on the door of their large log home. The door edged opened and one of the sisters appeared. Yes, may I help you?

Hi, are you Miss Deubler?

I am, replied Henrietta, the taller of the two sisters. They looked alike and both wore outdated hairstyles of relatively short, tightly curled brown hair that still showed bobby pin marks.

Hello, I’m Sue Ann Baker. I’ve been assigned to protect Princess Caroline.

Yes, we’ve been expecting you. Come on in. As I entered the room, a sickly sweet odor of cheap lavender perfume and moldiness hit me in the face. My eyes quickly swept the room. The faded floral couch and easy chair kept company with a rustic coffee table supported by two massive tree stumps.

Inviting me to sit at a small rough-hewn oak dining table, Emily offered me a glass of her homemade lemonade. My thirst gauge was on zero after my five-hour drive from DC.

Yes, please, that would be great. I smiled.

We talked about what I could expect during the next three weeks. Henrietta, the sterner-looking of the two, took the lead.

Despite what you may have been told, Ms. Baker, Caroline’s counselor has already been assigned. But don’t worry: your tent won’t be too far from her.

Too far? Too far for what? Too far to hear Caroline scream? Too far to stop an abduction?

Though the Deubler sisters seemed somewhat relieved that I was there to help take some of the responsibility of safeguarding royalty off their shoulders, they seemed less than sure as to how I would fit in. They also let me know, right off the bat, that no matter what instructions I’d been given by my supervisors, the camp was their domain, and they operated it as they saw fit. Fine! I guess I could hear her scream if a kidnapper tried to abduct her. But what if he covered her face with a chloroform-drenched rag? Given my previous Washington, DC, police training, I couldn’t help but think like a criminal. Slamming that frightening door shut in my mind, I tried to focus on the woman in front of me. Henrietta was waiting for my reaction. I conscientiously put on the poker face I’d been cultivating—every agent had one.

And by the way, Henrietta continued, you’ll need to leave your gun with Mrs. McGlinn, the camp nurse. Her cabin is only about fifty yards from the tent you will be living in. We can’t take the chance of one of the girls finding it.

A worst-case scenario flashed through my mind: A kidnapper grabbing Caroline and pulling her from her bed, Caroline trying to fight him off, the other girls screaming, and me flying out of my tent … gunless. Could this get any worse?

So, Sue Ann, what can you do? she asked. I was puzzled. I didn’t think she meant shooting guns or jumping on and off the running boards of moving cars.

What do you mean, ‘What can I do’?

"This is camp, Sue Ann, not reform school. The girls play sports, they go sailing, they like swimming and water skiing, they do crafts and put on plays. You have to teach something."

I can swim, I offered hesitantly.

Henrietta sighed.

That’s it?

I’ve water skied.

Great, Henrietta said swiftly, making a note on her planner, you’ll teach swimming to the younger girls and water skiing to the teenagers.

My startled silence must have alarmed her, because, snapping her planner closed, she said, You have taken at least a water safety course, have you not?

I had not.

Emily, the quieter of the Deubler sisters, gently pushed a copy of the Red Cross Book on Swimming and Water Safety across the table to me. This might be helpful, she said with a sly grin. I thanked her and stuffed it in my purse.

Before showing me to the cabin I’d be sharing for the first night with Caroline, the Deublers reviewed my cover story with me. As we walked down a soft, pine-needled path past fading pink rhododendrons toward the lake, they introduced me to other counselors as a graduate student. Although I was older than the other counselors, I looked younger than my twenty-five years.

When Caroline Grimaldi and her cousin arrived later that day, I tried not to stare at her. For one thing, she was darkly beautiful with long, silky brown hair and high cheekbones. At fourteen, she favored her mother. Even if I hadn’t known she was a princess, I would have known she came from wealth.

Henrietta introduced me to Caroline’s aunt and Prince Rainier III. He and Grace Kelly had met in Monaco in April 1955. After corresponding privately for several months, the prince came to America that December and reportedly proposed to her after only three days. Dubbed the wedding of the century, their nuptials were aired on TV and watched by millions. That year, I’d spent hours playing with my Princess Grace and Prince Rainier paper dolls, carefully cutting out Grace Kelly’s gorgeous wedding dress.

Now, in Prince Rainier’s presence, I felt ten years old again. I was meeting a real prince. My heart pounded in my chest. He was shorter than I imagined with thunder-cloud-gray hair. He seemed shy, perhaps because he was out of his element. The lush, tree-studded countryside of rural Pennsylvania must have been quite a change from his palace in Monaco.

Tamping down butterflies, I managed to say, How do you do, Your Highness? It’s a pleasure to meet you.

With a slight bow of his head, he answered with a rich French accent, My pleasure. I hope you have a wonderful time here at camp with Caroline. After giving his daughter a quick hug, he climbed back into his chauffeured black Caddy and sped away.

The next day, we moved into our separate tents. Set on wooden platforms, they were sparsely furnished with single metal beds. The mattresses were so thin you could practically see through them. Our metal trunks fit snugly under the beds, and my campers and I each had a small wooden nightstand. That night, after I got the girls quieted down and asleep, I pulled the covers over my head, turned on my flashlight, and read the Red Cross Manual. Undercover agent indeed.

Lakeside tent section at Camp Oneka.

I spent the next few days settling in. I’d forgotten so much from my Girl Scout camping days: the lingo, the songs, the bells, the gongs, and the bugles. At first, I felt inadequate. I had experience in many things, but I didn’t think I did any of them well. My curiosity and wide variety of interests had given me a broad view of the world, but I never had any interest in spending all my time becoming proficient in just one thing—that would have been boring. I did my best to assimilate into a culture and setting with which I was totally unfamiliar.

Fortunately, two counselors recognized my bewilderment and showed me the ropes. After the first week, they invited me to join them and some other counselors on a late-night excursion. The plan was to sneak across the road into the woods after the kids were asleep. First, we needed provisions. Cheese and crackers filched from the camp kitchen appeared, and someone had procured a couple of bottles of wine. Smoking and chatting, we bonded over boys, hair, makeup, boys, campers, the stingy Deubler sisters, and boys. On this and other counselor forays, I always drank Coke, in case something happened to Caroline and I needed my wits about me. Sometimes, instead of wandering into the woods, we only went to the far end of the tennis court. I felt much more at ease sticking close to camp, and as the days went by, I had to invent a reason why I didn’t want to go roaming around the Poconos at midnight.

My invention was a boyfriend, Bob.

Bob was staying in a cabin on the other side of the lake for the summer. He also was in graduate school, and we’d been dating for a year and a half. Bob satisfied not only the counselors’ questions, but also my fourteen-year-old campers’ questions. How old were you when you first kissed a boy? Do you have a lot of boyfriends? How did you meet him? How old is he? How old are you? Are you going to marry him? Is he handsome? OK, Sue Ann, get the lying side of your brain in gear.

Bob also gave me an excuse to get out of camp once a week. In fact, Bob was my detail leader Geoffrey, a senior agent who had the cushy (and boring) job of sitting in a hotel room approximately twelve miles from the camp. Believe it or not, Geoffrey was my backup.

Because there were no cell phones in those days, if I wanted to reach him, I had to sneak into the nurse’s cabin and use her phone. We’d arrange a time to meet in town. I’m not sure who saved whose sanity. He was stuck watching TV, reading, eating, and sleeping. I was stuck with few adults to talk to, and no stimulating conversation. Over a quiet drink, I’d bring him up to date on Caroline’s activities, and he’d bring me up to date on what was going on in the world outside of Camp Oneka. Two weeks into my assignment, I learned we’d be taking an overnight canoe trip with the older girls. I wanted to make sure I was covered. After discussing the logistics of how he would support me on the lake, I reluctantly left the air-conditioned motel room, stepped into the hot, humid, buggy summer afternoon, and drove slowly back to my cloistered reality.

On the day of the overnight trip, we hoisted our canoes over our heads and marched to the lake. On the first day, we paddled our canoes for two hours to get to the campsite. When we arrived, I was exhausted. My shoulders ached, and I realized how out of shape I was. Smoking didn’t help. Worse yet, in the distance, my backup was lounging in a motorboat. No paddling for him, and with his .357 Magnum, he probably felt less naked than I did. As for my gun, it was still safely hiding back in Nurse McGlinn’s office.

Unloading canoes for overnight trip at Camp Oneka. Princess Caroline at far left.

That afternoon, we goofed off with the canoes— sinking them and then climbing on them. When we finally reached the Oneka cabin, the girls cooked hotdogs over a wood fire until the sun went down and storm clouds rolled in. A soft rain started falling at ten, and everyone moved into the cabin for the night. There was one rickety table in the corner near a fireplace, but not much else.

Except bats.

All night long, bats swooped down from the ceiling and flew around the room, terrifying the girls. The discomfort of sleeping on the hard wooden floor was compounded by their shrieks and petrified giggles. Nobody slept much. As I lay there looking up at the cabin’s beams and listening to the sound of tiny wings flapping overhead, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. This was a far cry from the environment I’d expected to be working in—the White House.

I hadn’t trained for this. Hell, I hadn’t even been sworn in. Instead, along with six other female officers, I was being tested as a US Secret Service Agent. We were all being tested. The Secret Service had never hired women agents before. This was completely new territory—for them and for us. The stakes of success suddenly seemed immensely heavy. If Princess Caroline were bitten by a rabid bat, if she fell out of her canoe and hit her head, if a backwoods bad guy abducted her in the middle of the night, my failure to protect her would scuttle my chance to be a Secret Service Agent. But would my failure scuttle this chance for other women, too?

By the next morning, the rain had stopped. The sun warmed us as we scrambled eggs over a wood fire. We rolled up our sleeping bags, climbed into