In the President's Secret Service Read online

  Sullivan radioed the New York field office asking for police assistance and an ambulance. He turned on his flashing red light and siren and chased the car uptown, where he finally headed him off on First Avenue, in front of the United Nations. Drawing his gun and displaying his badge, Sullivan ordered the man from the car and held him until police arrived. The victim survived.

  In other cases, agents prevent harm to protectees in unusual circumstances. When young Amy Carter attended Ethel Kennedy’s annual Hickory Hill Pet Show at Ethel’s estate in McLean, Virginia, in May 1978, a three-ton elephant named Suzie charged her. As the crowd scattered in panic, an agent scooped up Amy and carried her to safety.

  Aside from agents who have lost their lives in the line of duty, many have contracted incurable tropical diseases like dengue fever and other maladies while protecting U.S. officials overseas. Agents will literally give protectees the shirts off their backs—as agent Harold Ewing did when the president’s limo hit a pothole on the way to Annapolis and Bill Clinton spilled coffee all over his own shirt.

  “The Secret Service attracts a lot of people who have been brought up with a certain code of ethics,” says former agent Norm Jarvis, who trained new agents and later was a special agent in charge. “Those ethics mean that a person who would ordinarily be interested in preserving his own life is willing to sacrifice his life. The training that the agent goes through doesn’t necessarily say, ‘When you hear this, this is what you’ve got to do. You hear a gunshot, and step one is this. Step two is you take a bullet for the president.’ It’s basically, you go to an instinct kind of mode.”

  Obviously, Jarvis says, “When you sign up for the job, you have to come to the conclusion that you would step in front of the president to protect him from an assassin. But,” he adds, “I don’t even think it’s worth contemplating. You would just do it.”

  “The greatness of the Secret Service is its people,” says former agent Pete Dowling. “Somehow we get high-quality people who are superdedicated to a mission.”

  No one knows how many assassination attempts have been prevented because a gunman decided an attempt was too risky or because the Secret Service confiscated a weapon. Beyond the well-publicized attempts, presidents and other protectees have been targets of dozens of lesser-known plots. For example, when Edward M. Kennedy was running for president in 1979, agents subdued a knife-wielding woman who entered the reception room in his U.S. Senate office.

  “The Secret Service’s mission of preventing a criminal act is far harder than investigating one after it takes place,” FBI director Robert S. Mueller III tells me.

  Yet effective as Secret Service agents have been, their capability is diminished by a management that cuts corners when the need for tight security has never been greater, and refuses to recognize that the agency cannot properly handle all the duties it unflinchingly assumes. Just as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover managed to cover up the bureau’s shortcomings through good public relations, the Secret Service has done a brilliant job of projecting an image of infallibility that is not deserved.

  Even Hoover’s obsessive emphasis on dressing sharply and wearing white shirts is mirrored by Secret Service management. In one of his first communications with agents after being named deputy director in July 2008, Keith Prewitt said that agents should dress like Secret Service agents when traveling. Yet agents point out that one way to catch a terrorist planning to take down an airplane is to dress in the most casual clothes so a terrorist does not suspect the person sitting next to him is a law enforcement officer.

  In one respect, Hoover’s management style differed from the Secret Service’s: Hoover inspired loyalty to himself and the organization. Secret Service management inspires mistrust and cynicism, leading to low morale.

  In explaining this counterproductive culture, agents say that Secret Service officials prefer to maintain the status quo rather than make waves and rock the boat. That way, they further their chances for promotion, resulting in high-paying jobs in the private sector. Meanwhile, top agents who head field offices drive BMWs, Lexuses, Corvettes, and Jaguars, cars that have been seized in arrests. The rationale is that the vehicles could be used for undercover work. In fact, they rarely are. Rather than providing senior agents with luxury cars, the Secret Service should sell such cars to generate money for the Treasury Department.

  “If anyone did that in the FBI, we would be in hot water,” says a former FBI assistant director. “In the FBI, cars used for undercover work are designated as such, and the head of a field office would never get one.” Nor, the former agent says, does the FBI claim an arrest if it is made by local police.

  Secret Service agents believe that if they press their concerns and point out shortcomings, they will suffer repercussions. “Management will label them as malcontents or implement classic Secret Service retaliation, most notably an undesirable duty station and lack of advancement, or both,” an agent says. “Everyone at headquarters sees the job as a stepping stone to something better. If you raise a big issue, you waste your energy, and they want to screw you. It creates a culture of fear.”

  In 1978, the Secret Service asked Frank M. Ochberg, a former associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health, to study agents and their jobs to see if they were under excessive stress.

  “I found the danger they face is not a source of significant stress,” says Ochberg, who is now clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University. “Rather, it was an excessively authoritarian management style that does not respect agents enough and does not try to make arrangements so they don’t miss their daughter’s christening or graduation. The attitude was, ‘Yours is not to wonder why; yours is just to do or die.’”

  Based on Ochberg’s recommendation, the Secret Service stopped its practice of forcing agents to double up in hotel rooms. Until then, agents on different shifts sleeping in the same room would wake each other up getting ready for work. But beyond that change, the problems have become worse. The Secret Service’s management has become even more rigid, insular, and even punitive. An agent who left to work for another federal law enforcement agency says with relief, “I am now being treated as an adult.”

  To get ahead, agents say that, much more than in most other organizations, they need connections—juice—meaning higher-ups who take a liking to them and socialize with them. The perception of favoritism has been furthered by management’s overreaction to a lawsuit by black agents claiming discrimination. During discovery, the lawsuit uncovered two dozen or so emails with racist comments or jokes out of twenty million emails sent by Secret Service employees over a period of sixteen years. In April 2008, a black agent was confronted by a noose strung up by a white instructor at the Rowley training center. The instructor was placed on leave.

  Despite these disgusting but isolated problems, the proportion of black agents in the service is 17 percent, much higher than the 12 percent of blacks in the rest of the population. An independent analyst found that for each year from 1991 to 2005, African American agents were promoted to senior pay grades more quickly than white agents. In fact, 25 percent of supervisors belong to ethnic minorities. Since 2001, three black agents—Keith Prewitt, Danny Spriggs, and Larry Cockell—have served as deputy director, the number-two spot.

  “The service is very sensitive to the diversity issue, and the statistics and appointments to top posts demonstrate that,” Spriggs says.

  Growing up in Detroit, “I never could have imagined that I would one day be with the president in his limousine, in the White House every day, and riding on Air Force One,” says Reginald Ball, a black agent who became a supervisor.

  Ironically, several racist emails uncovered by the lawsuit had been sent by Reginald Moore, the plaintiff who is alleging discrimination by the agency. One email sent by Moore contained a joke about a black woman hitting her daughter.

  Despite these facts, the Secret Service has overreacted by promoting a few black agents to high-ranking positions
even though they are not generally thought to be up to the job. While other black agents are among the agency’s best, reverse discrimination does a disservice to everyone in the organization and to the people agents protect.

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  Dereliction of Duty

  WHEN ONE CONSIDERS how important to our democracy preventing an assassination is, the amount spent on the Secret Service—$1.4 billion a year, nearly two thirds of it for protection—seems like a misprint. Indeed, while the agency’s budget increased substantially after 9/11, since then it has actually decreased, when inflation is taken into account. That does not include supplemental appropriations to cover incremental costs for coverage of campaign and national security events.

  This at a time when well-funded terrorists have replaced the lone deranged gunman as the greatest threat to American elected officials and when threats against the president are up 400 percent. Yet rather than ask for substantially more funds from Congress, the Secret Service assures members that the agency is fulfilling its job with the modest increases it requests, even as it takes on more duties and sleep-deprived agents work almost around the clock.

  Inevitably, when asked if the Secret Service needs more money, Director Sullivan makes a comparison with challenges faced by soldiers in Iraq.

  “Let’s face it,” he says. “Everybody would like to have more money in their budget. I was looking at my budget, and I was saying, ‘Boy I would love to have this or have that.’ Then in thinking of all the sacrifice that all of us have to do—I mean we’re in the middle of two wars now—and I looked at the front page of The Washington Post one day, and I saw several marines going to bed that night. They were going to bed on a concrete floor with like a foam cushion maybe an inch thick for a mattress.”

  These men, he says, are fighting for our country, not knowing “when they wake up tomorrow morning and go through their day if they’re going to be alive to go to bed again.”

  In contrast to soldiers in Iraq, “We don’t have it bad at all,” Sullivan says. “And everybody has to do their part. And I think I owe it to them. I think this whole organization owes it to the people that pay our salary, to be just as efficient and effective and be as good a steward of the government resources as we can. And I think we are.”

  Sullivan’s effort to compare Secret Service agents with twenty-two-year-old soldiers in Iraq shows how out of touch with reality Secret Service management is. In contrast to soldiers serving in Iraq, veteran Secret Service agents are being offered up to four times their salary by the private sector to leave the agency.

  One director who understood this was Brian Stafford, who headed the agency from 1999 to 2003. Because Stafford perceived the problems, the Secret Service’s budget, even before the 9/11 attack, rose by as much as 25 percent a year after adjustment for inflation.

  “When I became director, one of the first things I did was pick the brains of the special agents in charge of each field office,” Stafford tells me. “What I learned was we had quality-of-life issues and an attrition rate that was going up. It wasn’t because agents weren’t passionate about their jobs. It was because they didn’t have a life.”

  With the budget increases, Stafford hired another thousand agents.

  “The overtime was way too high,” he says. “We were working people too hard.”

  Today while the Secret Service fosters conditions that lead experienced agents to resign, it compromises the security of the president, vice president, and presidential candidates by not assigning enough agents to screen everyone with magnetometers. Under pressure from politicians’ staffs, it allows people to enter events without having been screened.

  Yet ironically, when Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren defended the agency’s performance when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at President Bush at a Baghdad news conference in December 2008, he pointed out that everyone had been screened with magnetometers. Thus, he said, while shoes were thrown, no weapons were brought into the room, so the president’s life was not in jeopardy.

  To be sure, as that embarrassing spectacle illustrates, so long as presidents insist on seeing the public, the Secret Service will not be able to prevent every incident. The tension between letting the president interact with people and protecting him goes back to the earliest days of the presidency. Secret Service agents constantly have to balance the need to protect and the need not to look like the gestapo. But failing to take the most basic precautions is as inexcusable as the decision of the Washington policeman guarding President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre to wander off for a drink at a nearby saloon.

  In the movie In the Line of Fire starring Clint Eastwood as a Secret Service agent, the Secret Service believes an assassin will attempt to kill the president during a planned trip to California. Because it cannot locate the assassin, the agency advises the president’s chief of staff to cancel the trip. Saying the president’s reelection campaign is too important, the chief of staff rejects the advice.

  As tension mounts, just before the assassin—played by John Malkovich—is about to shoot the president at a fund-raising dinner on the West Coast, Eastwood lunges for him and is wounded. In effect, he takes a bullet for the president. Yet allowing crowds into an event without screening—as the Secret Service actually does with presidents and presidential candidates—is even more foolhardy and egregious than what the 1993 movie portrays.

  Even when the Secret Service could ask for help from other agencies, as when it assigns only three agents to protect a visiting head of state at the U.N. General Assembly, it refuses to do so, rolling the dice on an assassination attempt.

  “This is another example of our stubborn leadership saying, ‘We can do this; we don’t need help; we’re the mighty Secret Service,’” an agent who was assigned to the U.N. General Assembly says. “They have this attitude to the detriment of their agents and the well-being and security of the protectees.”

  While it scrimps on agents and magnetometers, to impress Congress, the Secret Service wastes taxpayer funds by assigning agents to write reports on thousands of arrests made by local police. Similarly, the agency’s practice of directing agents to ignore violations of law by clearing illegal immigrants to work at the home of the secretary of homeland security, inflating its own arrest statistics by claiming credit for arrests by local police, telling agents to fill in their own physical training test forms, and rigging training exercises to impress members of Congress and U.S. Attorneys fosters a dishonest, corrupting culture that has no place in law enforcement. That culture of deceit conflicts with the inherent honesty of Secret Service agents.

  The fact that the Secret Service cuts counterassault teams to two agents and bows to staff demands that the teams remain at a great distance from protectees points to the fact that the agency is geared to deal with a lone gunman rather than a full-scale terrorist attack. The agency’s reliance on the MP5 rather than the far more powerful M4 that a terrorist may use is further evidence of that. That the Secret Service, in contrast to the FBI and the military, ignores the need for regular training and firearms requalification highlights a complete disregard for the sanctity of the Secret Service’s mission. In some cases, members of counter assault teams have not shot the SR-16 in more than a year.

  “Why must demonstrations at the Rowley center for VIPs, politicians, and others be rehearsed?” asks an agent on one of the major protective details. “It comes down to the instructors and supervisors knowing that if it is not rehearsed, we will look like a bunch of fools running around not knowing what to do.”

  How can something as shocking as waiving magnetometer screening go on for so long without being exposed? The same way the FBI and CIA allowed the so-called wall to prevent them from sharing information with each other for so long, impairing the bureau’s ability to detect and stop a terrorist attack. The same way investment banks knowingly acquired substandard mortgage securities, impairing the American economy and requiring the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars by the U.S
. Treasury to shore it up. The same way the Securities and Exchange Commission brushed aside specific allegations that Bernard Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme.

  “If this were a private company, they couldn’t survive,” an agent says. “But it’s the government, and nobody’s accountable.”

  The effect of an assassination of a president or presidential candidate is unimaginable. If Abraham Lincoln had not been assassinated, Andrew Johnson, his successor, would not have been able to undermine Lincoln’s efforts to reunite the nation and give more rights to blacks during the Reconstruction period. If John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated, Lyndon Johnson likely never would have become president. If Robert F. Kennedy had not been killed and had won the presidency, Richard Nixon might never have been elected.

  By definition, an assassination threatens democracy. To be sure, Secret Service management understands the importance of that mission. On the fifty-eighth anniversary of the death of Officer Leslie Coffelt, Nick Trotta, the head of the Office of Protective Operations, wrote a memo to all agents. It was Coffelt who defended President Truman at Blair House. Dying from a wound, Coffelt leaped to his feet, propped himself against a booth, and fired at Griselio Torresola’s head, taking out a would-be assassin.

  In his memo, Trotta wrote that we “must not fail in our protective mission. We are protecting the lives of those that our country expects we protect at all costs.” Trotta went on, “We are here to make sure that you have the tools that are needed to do what you are expected to do.”

  Written just before the 2008 election, the memo closed by saying, “In these last few days before the presidential election, as those on the campaign trail, your travel remains nonstop, you must remain ever so vigilant, ever so attentive to detail. We do this as the nameless agent, the nameless officer. We continue to do this without any fanfare or pats on the back.”