The First Family Detail Page 19

  As is common with all campaigns, the Secret Service and Romney campaign aides engaged in a constant negotiating process that sometimes led to friction. Campaigns want the candidate accessible to supporters, while agents want fans kept at bay.

  If fifty or more people were to attend an event, the Secret Service wanted to create a physical buffer between them and Romney. Romney aides wanted the partition to be a rope line. The Secret Service wanted to employ bike racks. Romney aides wanted the campaign plane to be fueled immediately as Romney’s plane landed and he gave a speech at the airport. The Secret Service did not want airport personnel near the plane until they could be passed through magnetometers.

  In many cases, the agents and the aides compromised: Bike racks would be set up as barriers for gatherings of a hundred people or more. Both sides understood that they were trying to do their jobs, which had competing goals. None of the issues rose to the level of importance of what had happened when the Reagan White House insisted that unscreened crowds be allowed near the president as he left the Washington Hilton.

  “Typically staff wants the crowd as close as they can get to the stage,” an agent says. “We obviously have to have enough of a buffer there to make it safe to move around. A good starting point is ten feet. But staff always wants to push it in, and unfortunately for us, we have management that folds to staff and doesn’t articulate why we need this for security reasons. They always end up giving back some and shrinking it back to eight feet.”

  Despite the friction, the Romney aides came to admire agents for their professionalism. But what the aides could not understand was the refusal of Secret Service headquarters to provide enough magnetometers at events. As a result, especially during the last three months of the campaign, Romney would give a separate speech to those who were outside events and had not been passed through magnetometers, jeopardizing his safety just as surely as Reagan’s safety was jeopardized.

  “We had hour-long waits to get in because of the number of magnetometers they would provide,” an aide says. “They had this wrong calculation, that four hundred fifty people go through a magnetometer in one hour. We did our own calculation and found the average number was two hundred to two hundred fifty. We would spend tremendous amounts of time arguing for more resources.”

  Privately, Secret Service agents confirm that the lower number is more realistic. But headquarters, always trying to save money, refused to budge to accommodate the Romney crowds. Besides prompting Romney to give speeches to unscreened crowds, the Secret Service would create what Romney chief strategist Stuart Stevens refers to as a two-tier system, allowing nonscreened crowds to sit farther away from Romney at events.

  “Especially as we got bigger, the crowds started growing,” Stevens says. “But there was always this problem of getting people into the event. The Secret Service went to having two tiers with people who were not screened with magnetometers. In addition, Mitt would come out and talk to the people outside who were not magged.”

  “Near the end, we usually had three events a day and had to do two speeches each time,” an aide says. “If we had a thousand people outside and a thousand inside, the governor would say to his detail leader he was going outside. The governor would walk to the parking lot and give an impromptu speech. Of course, he’d be ticked if he had to do two speeches instead of one. But we were not going to walk out of Des Moines with mad voters. These people outside events had not been screened with magnetometers and could have had firearms.”

  In addition to calculating how many people actually go through a magnetometer in an hour, the Romney campaign dispatched aides to observe Obama events. Being president, Obama was provided with enough magnetometers so that most people could enter events before they started, the aides found. As a result, Obama’s events came across on television as better attended.

  “Basically the president’s detail gets first whack at everything, and all the other details, there’s kind of a pecking order, and it’s hard to say it, but they get a lesser level of protection the further down the pecking order you go,” a former agent says. “There’s not enough bodies to go around, not enough budget, not enough resources.”

  Romney aides pointed out to the Secret Service that their magnetometer calculations were off. They would argue about whether the Secret Service would provide four or six magnetometers at an event. “They would say, ‘Well, this is expensive equipment that had to be flown in,’ ” an aide says.

  As a result, a country that spent $113 million in fiscal 2012 to protect the presidential candidates would not scrape together funds to provide enough magnetometers at events held by a possible future president. The same kind of corner cutting ordered by the Reagan White House led to the shooting of President Reagan.

  If Romney had been taken out by an assassin with a handgun in a parking lot or with grenades in an unscreened area of an arena, the Secret Service’s failure to provide enough magnetometers would have been exposed as a shameful dereliction of duty. Like so much else about the Secret Service, that shortsightedness has remained a secret until now.

  The misplaced priorities go back to an entrenched Secret Service management culture that boasts that the agency “makes do with less” and that dismisses criticism with the cavalier explanation that the Secret Service has “always done it this way.”

  25

  INTRUSION

  As a Washington Post reporter covering the social scene for twenty years, Roxanne Roberts thought she had seen it all—until one evening at the White House.

  Covering the state dinner for Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday, November 24, 2009, Roberts looked up from the guest list and saw a couple who looked exactly like Michaele and Tareq Salahi. With her long blond mane, Michaele—wearing a striking red-and-gold traditional Indian lehenga—was hard to miss.

  Going back to 2005, Roberts had been writing the Post’s Reliable Source gossip column with Amy Argetsinger. Over the years, they had reported on legal wrangling over the Salahis’ Oasis Winery in Hume, Virginia, and on complaints that patrons had been ripped off by a polo championship the Salahis ran. More recently, Roberts and Argetsinger had written about the couple’s effort to be selected for Bravo’s Real Housewives of D.C.

  “I immediately looked down at the guest list and saw that they weren’t on it,” Roberts recalls. “I have never in all the years covering state dinners seen a guest come through who wasn’t on the list.” The idea that they had not been invited did not occur to her. Rather, Roberts was shocked to think they were.

  “I knew that they weren’t wealthy,” Roberts notes. “I knew they were not big political donors or moved in any significant political circles. They were not what I would call part of Washington’s power establishment, by any stretch of the imagination.”

  Wanting to hear Argetsinger’s opinion, Roberts asked a Washington Post photographer to e-mail her colleague a photo he had just taken of the Salahis.

  “I recognized them, and my first reaction when I saw the photos of them was ‘Oh my God, they crashed,’ ” Argetsinger says. “Because they are not the kind of people you expect to see at the White House. If the one thing you knew about them was that Michaele Salahi was vying to be on the Housewives show, it would be inconceivable that the White House would want them there. This is a reality TV show, and one that in recent years is best known for pretty vapid material—plastic surgery, catfights, table flipping, hair pulling.”

  Argetsinger e-mailed Rox, as she calls her, urging her to include in the story she would write with Robin Givhan that the Salahis attended but were not on the guest list.

  “The most curious and unexpected sighting: Tareq and Michaele Salahi,” their story said in the sixth paragraph. “The notorious Fauquier County vineyard socialites, who are filming Real Housewives of D.C., swanned in, even though their names did not appear on the official guest list.”

  “Everyone who enters the White House grounds goes through magnetometers and several other levels of scr
eenings,” Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan was quoted in the article as saying. “That was the case with the state dinner last night. No one was under any risk or threat.”

  That is the standard Secret Service line when the agency has screwed up. What Donovan failed to say was that the Salahis had managed to enter the White House without the required background check. Normally, those attending a White House function will receive an invitation in the mail. If they are to attend, they must e-mail or call in their full name, Social Security number, and date of birth. The Secret Service’s Uniformed Division checks to see if they are listed by the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) or the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (NLETS) as having been arrested or violated laws. If no problem surfaces, invitees are told they have been cleared to attend.

  None of that took place in the case of the Salahis. For all the Secret Service knew, the couple could have been wanted terrorists or serial killers. While they passed through magnetometers at the checkpoint at Fifteenth and E Streets NW, they could have had chemical or biological weapons. Inside, they could have grabbed a knife from a table and stabbed the president in the heart.

  After Roberts kept pushing, the White House and Secret Service confirmed that the Salahis had not been invited. The story ran on all the networks.

  On Friday, the White House released a photo of the couple in the receiving line. A smiling Michaele Salahi is pictured clasping Obama’s hand, as her husband, wearing a tuxedo, looks on. Prime Minister Singh is standing next to the president.

  Secret Service director Sullivan finally stepped forward and issued a statement saying the agency was “deeply concerned and embarrassed” by the incident. He said preliminary findings indicated that “established protocols were not followed at an initial checkpoint, verifying that two individuals were on the guest list.”

  In administrations past, aides from the White House Social Office have stood outside the Secret Service guard post, performing a preliminary check to make sure that arrivals were on the guest list. Acquiescent as always, the Secret Service this time had agreed at a meeting with the Social Office that their representatives would not have to be there. Instead, social secretary Desiree Rogers took the unusual step of attending the dinner herself as a guest.

  Yet the fact that the Salahis were able to crash the White House was the fault of the Secret Service. The Secret Service is solely responsible for the security of the president and the White House. Regardless of what the Social Office did, it was up to the Secret Service uniformed officers at the first checkpoint to verify that the couple was on the guest list. If they were not, the officers should have called the Social Office to see if they had inadvertently been left off the list. If the answer was yes, the officers would then have asked the couple to step aside while they did a background check. They did none of this.

  As I later reported, it turned out that a third crasher, Carlos Allen, had also been allowed into the state dinner. Weeks after the event took place, the Secret Service pinpointed him while reviewing surveillance videos of guests arriving at the dinner.

  The publisher of a minor Washington society blog called Hush Society Magazine, Allen, thirty-nine, claimed he fell in with the India delegation congregating at the Willard Inter-Continental Hotel and rolled on in with them.

  Like the Salahis, the man turned out not to pose a threat, but because the Secret Service failed to perform a background check, the agency never would have known if he was, for example, wanted for murder or involved with terrorist groups. Ironically, in the movie In the Line of Fire, an assassin gains access to the president in similar fashion. Like the Salahis, Carlos Allen claimed he had been invited. But the “invitation” he later showed on a television show appeared to be the dinner program for the evening, according to the Washington Post’s Reliable Source.

  Until I reported the story on Allen, mortified Secret Service officials had failed to notify the House Homeland Security Committee investigating the Salahi security breach of yet another embarrassment to the agency. It would have made little difference, since the committee whitewashed the incident. At a hearing, the House members called as a witness only Sullivan, who rejected any notion that the intrusions were a symptom of deeper problems within the Secret Service.

  Why would Secret Service Uniformed Division officers let in three individuals who were not on the guest list and had not undergone a background check? The fact that Secret Service management removed Mary Cheney’s detail leader after he refused to violate the rules to allow agents to take her friends to restaurants suggests the reason.

  Agents and uniformed officers say their perception is that the Secret Service’s spineless management, which condones cutting corners, likely would not back them if they turned away glamorous crashers and it later came to light that they had been left off the guest list by mistake.

  The same management culture contributed to Secret Service agents’ engaging prostitutes while assigned to protect President Obama in Cartagena, Colombia. The saga began when agents checked into the Hotel Caribe, a beachfront resort, and decided to explore local bars and nightclubs. On the evening of Wednesday, April 11, 2012, agent Arthur Huntington, forty-one, made his way with some other agents to Tu Candela, a bar and dance club in the city’s old town.

  Huntington spotted the alluring Dania Suarez, who later told the New York Times she was not a common streetwalker. Rather, she said, she was a woman of “higher rank” whom a “man can take out to dinner. She can dress nicely, wear nice makeup, speak and act like a lady. That’s me.”

  After dancing with the twenty-four-year-old, the married Huntington took Suarez to his hotel. On the way, she says, she stopped to buy condoms and told the agent that if he were going to spend the night with her, he would have to give her a “gift” of eight hundred dollars. He didn’t object, she said.

  Under hotel policy, temporary female guests must register with the front desk for a fee and must leave by 6 A.M. At 6:30 A.M. on Thursday, April 12, the front desk called Huntington to say it was time for his guest to leave. Suarez asked for her eight hundred dollars.

  “I tell him, ‘Baby, my cash money,’ ” she later said.

  Claiming he did not know Suarez was a prostitute, Huntington, a member of the counterassault team, refused to pay her. Calling her a bitch, he gave the brunette thirty dollars in local currency and shoved her out the door.

  Suarez was crying as she banged on the door to the room of another agent, who was sleeping with a friend of hers. He and a third agent scraped together another two hundred fifty dollars to pay her. The ensuing commotion led to the Colombian National Police being called in, the State Department being notified, and twelve agents being interrogated in Cartagena by Paula Reid, the special agent in charge of the Miami field office, which oversees activities in Colombia. On the morning of Friday, April 13, eleven of those agents were relieved of their protective duties, put on administrative leave, and sent home.

  Later that afternoon, Obama arrived in Cartagena for the weekend’s Summit of the Americas, a meeting of thirty-three of the hemisphere’s thirty-five leaders, to discuss economic policy and trade. At about the same time, I received a call from a longtime Secret Service source. A critic of Director Sullivan, the agent told me what had happened in Colombia and that the agents were being sent home. He said Sullivan planned to keep the incident a secret. Indeed, since it could have been seen as an internal personnel matter, the agency could plausibly have said it was obligated to keep the entire matter confidential.

  While he declined to give the specific reason, Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan confirmed to me that agents were being sent home. I gave the story to the Washington Post, which jumped on it and ran the story the next day, touching off a media frenzy.

  During the ensuing investigation, another Secret Service employee admitted to paying for sex at a private apartment, according to a January 2013 report by the DHS Office of Inspector General. Nearly all the agents involved los
t their jobs or were forced to retire.

  The scandal represented a serious breach of the rules, which are designed to prevent agents from being compromised and then blackmailed to allow access to those who may wish to harm or eavesdrop on the president. According to those rules, Secret Service employees “shall not engage in criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral or notoriously disgraceful conduct or other conduct prejudicial to the [United States] government.”

  Contrary to some press reports, this kind of misconduct is not common, as confirmed by a December 17, 2013, report by the DHS inspector general. While agents may have drinks after the president has departed, hiring prostitutes is a rare occurrence. But given management’s lax attitude toward security, it’s easy to see how the agents figured that if their bosses cut corners, why shouldn’t they ignore basic security rules as well?

  26

  RISKING ASSASSINATION

  Today about a third of the Secret Service’s annual budget goes to investigation of financial crimes like counterfeiting and fraudulently obtaining money from ATMs or checking or credit card accounts. While the Secret Service’s work in solving these crimes is impressive, with the exception of counterfeit currency investigations, the FBI probes the same crimes. Yet the Secret Service has sought greater jurisdiction in going after financial crimes even as protection demands soar.

  Besides having to protect more White House staff, the Secret Service is now charged with planning and implementing security arrangements at “special events of national significance” under the Presidential Threat Protection Act of 2000. The first such event was the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002. Other events are the September meetings of the United Nations General Assembly, presidential inaugurals, the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions, the Super Bowl, G8 summits, and major visits, such as a pope’s trip to the United States. The state funerals of Presidents Reagan and Ford were also designated national special security events. At these events, the Secret Service is the lead law enforcement agency and coordinates all security.