by Crisis of Character- A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience
I was flying missions just a few days later from the field office covering Philadelphia International Airport. Tensions ran high. We were sure—we felt it in our bones—that more attacks, bombings, and hijackings were coming our way. Most laypersons think it’s been all quiet since 9/11. They’re dead wrong. That myth drives us crazy. It’s the great irony of our national security personnel, from the swords to the shields, that if we do our jobs right, no one hears about it. The best umpire in the league is one you never notice. But if we don’t do our jobs right, it’s the USS Cole, Beirut, Oklahoma City, or even Benghazi all over again. Today we’re doing a tremendous job, but we’re at a crossroads.
Since—and even before 9/11—the United States has been constantly probed for weaknesses, from both terrorist groups and full-bore state-run attacks. I initiated my FAMS duty with domestic Return over Night (RON) missions, typically two-day missions. Fly, stay, and then fly back. I had negotiated my transition to FAMS to be based out of Philly International. I wanted to raise my family where I grew up and to have my kids’ grandmother be part of their lives. When I was starting out, the usual trips were Philly–Miami (with D.C. in the middle), Philly–Charlotte, or Philly–Los Angeles, followed by an office day, then a day off. The day after that, I was back flying missions. Sometimes we’d have two office days in a row or an occasional training school for explosives detection and disarmament, in case I ever had a Jack Bauer–style moment disarming a ticking time bomb. These training schools were always amazing because our tactical renaissance development was moving so far, a development that gets the bad guy dead and the good guy home with fewer casualties. As the old military adage goes, “If you’re in a fair fight, you’re doing it wrong.”
At forty-one, as a new air marshal, I was high-strung and eager, for two reasons. Genny and I had sold our house in Maryland and were, as if college kids, living with our parents until we could acquire a house to raise our family. Further weighing on my mind, even in 2003, were our country’s three wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, and the less defined but equally crucial Global War on Terror. In Iraq we had just shifted from invasion to policing and counterinsurgency. I still hated the image in my mind of Congress, along with Hillary, standing on the Congress steps singing the national anthem, knowing they had f—ed us with petty BS that left us so vulnerable leading up to 9/11.
In Tom Quinn’s infinite wisdom, FAMS policy mandated we wear a suit and tie. We also preboarded the aircraft in our positions ahead of all passengers. For most jobs, dressing professionally is a great thing—but not for undercover work. Board before the first first-class passengers and it was extremely obvious who the undercover air marshals were: the A-holes who looked like Secret Service agent wannabes. Being undercover was supposed to thwart the same terrorist threat that fought to the cockpit on 9/11. They were clandestine operators, too, after all, and they dressed subtly. They didn’t go around wearing “I Love Radical Islam” T-shirts.
But with Quinn’s goal of appearance of strength rather than actual strength, we would be easily identifiable to terrorists. They’d take us out and then take our weapons. It endangered not just our lives, it endangered the entire mission. It made it easier for a 9/11 to happen again.
We even had passengers thank us for our service when they boarded and as they stowed their bags overhead. Normally getting thanks as a cop or military guy is great, but for us as air marshals, it made us feel as though we had a giant target on our backs, throats, and major arteries for any contraband razor blade, garrote wire, sleeper hold, or sharpened toothbrush shank hastily crafted in the bathroom. Our protection plans worked only if we could maintain our cover identities as just other passengers. It was a farce. FAMS’s micromanaging policies jeopardized everything. It was all about appearances and portraying air marshals like hotshot agents. It was moronic.
Sometimes when we were preboarding, flight attendants and pilots would give us the rundown of the plane and show us the under-areas and nuances of the specific aircraft. That was great and helped foster the bond of our being in this together to maintain international air traffic security. But on one preboarding, our pilot (a retired Air Force pilot) pulled me aside and gave me a piece of his mind about how unprofessional and stupid the air marshals were. He referred to us as “you guys.” I just bit my tongue until he ran out of breath—or I could get a word in. I appreciated the old-school military-style critique—made me a little nostalgic even. I knew he wasn’t going to stop until he got winded.
“You g-ddamn air marshals are costing us millions!” he exclaimed, berating us for checking everything and holding up flights an extra thirty minutes. “You’re not bomb-sniffing dogs! What the hell are you searching for?”
I didn’t know, either. Some planes had their nuances, but this was clearly a policy adapted by the Secret Service for prechecking hotels. The pilot continued bitching about how obvious we were to everyone, and in reality how we didn’t do a damn thing to keep anyone safe.
He took a breath.
“Are you done?” I asked, letting him wipe the sweat off his forehead and breathe.
He was, so I leveled with him. “I hear you, and I agree with you. I’m just the air marshal. I don’t like the policy, nor do I set the policy, any more than you do. I just follow it. Believe it or not, I’m actually a new guy here. Yeah, I’ve only joined just recently, and all I can say is the air marshals are trying to work through it. It’ll get fixed, but it’s going to take a while.”
I didn’t mention a reason but gestured upward so he could read between the lines. It was all so ridiculous, and it ruined my agency. Many air marshals sidestepped agency brass to air their complaints to legislators and even to anonymously leak stories to the press. If it took embarrassing FAMS management to save its mission—and lives—then guys would do that.
Behavioral detection was one policy that did get adapted eventually and I loved that. It became just like what the USSS UD did at checkpoints. “Nervous?” I’d ask someone with a smile as I watched their posture to see if it stayed the same or fluctuated, if they went into some elaborate story, if they got defensive for no reason at all, or if they were consistent within their cultural or religious norms.
The 9/11 hijackers were divided into groups of four with one trained pilot and three other terrorists armed with crude melee weapons, some hand-to-hand training, and the will to kill and succeed at the expense of their own lives. I was looking for someone like myself, someone who was mentally and physically prepared to succeed in his or her political mission by killing and even giving his or her life, if necessary. The difference between them and me is that if I succeeded, everyone who boarded the plane would walk off alive. If they succeeded, three hundred plus people would be dead.
I harbored no Snow White illusions of what the plane was going to look like if a hijacker and I tangled. It was going to be ugly, and bloody, and it would make passengers want to vomit. If I did exactly what our protocol and training dictated, it was going to be a mess. I’d conditioned my mind for it. I did that as I trained at CrossFit. I did it each morning as I reminded myself why I had my firearm in the first place. But I’d be lying if I said that the mental conditioning didn’t take a toll. Premeditating to kill someone places a ghastly burden on the mind and even on the body.
The “underwear bomber” and the “shoe bomber” failed because they sweated through their bombs. The underwear bomber was so incredibly nervous that he decided to wear the bomb three weeks before his mission, and that’s how he ruined it. He was willing, and he tried to kill a plane full of people—but what he actually did was burn his crotch off. There happened to be a Swedish documentary filmmaker several seats over. When he saw the fire and the bomber fiddling with his explosive, the Swede hopped over seats from the other side of the plane and beat the crap out of him. Other passengers joined in. Those passengers didn’t have to be embroiled with the fatigue and stress of mentally preparing for a fight, because they never planned on it. They didn’t think—they act
ed. But the underwear bomber was thinking and emotionally compromised—and failed.
I wish I could tell you that it was some FBI mosque undercover agent, cyber team, or TSA or FAMS agent who stopped him. Nope, it was his own sweat because of the emotional burden of his mission. In 1991 a Tamil Tiger (radical Sri Lankan terrorist), the “bra bomber” (actually it was a belt), didn’t sweat through her bomb, though, and she accomplished her goal, assassinating Indian prime minister Rajiv Ratna Gandhi. She was ruthless.
My partner and I once homed in on a passenger and we were so keyed on him that when he entered the bathroom I took my in-flight magazine and placed my gun underneath it. When everything panned out without incident, I figured no harm, no foul. Many air marshals at the time were similarly hyperaware; we believed a hit was coming any damn day.
Since 2003 we started to refocus and retrain. I’ve heard stories, though, of how after 9/11 higher-ups were basically handing firearms to those transferring to FAMS and saying, “Get on the plane.” Things have greatly improved since then, but I fear the pendulum is swinging both ways. I believed in the FAMS mission—and we needed to stay vigilant.
In the years that followed, many air marshals like myself, who still held the mission-first mentality, knew we had to pick and choose our battles carefully; otherwise midlevel management was going to stick its neck out to put ours on the chopping block. We couldn’t be the guys who were always saber-rattling and rocking the boat. But when we did, they knew to take us seriously. One guy—bless him—pushed management’s micromanaging back into their smug faces. Our dress code was professional coat and tie, but as in the movie My Cousin Vinny, one air marshal bought a very old red formal suit with coattails!
“But I’m still in dress code,” he retorted to management—and he was.
No one likes a stink, but sometimes stinks have to be made. Management was either going to have to fight him, citing protocol; change the protocol to let us dress undercover; or make the dress code worse so that we really would look like U.S. Secret Service or FBI G-men, with the typical Men in Black monochrome suit and tie, shades, earpiece. But if they wrote him up, they were going to have to air grievances on paper.
Eventually, after several other air marshals banded together in a series of hilariously dressed stunts, management caved. We no longer preboarded and could finally dress the way we best deemed fit the mission. Our dress code became to simply blend in. A suit from Philly to Boston may have been fine, but from Philly to Miami? It garnered attention.
It was clear at both our training schools, at our Philly field office, and from hearing from my old classmates and other field offices that FAMS pervasively discriminated against women and minorities. It created a crossfire. Management at every level pledged to wipe that shit up and out, but management’s solution was the constant political-appearance-based solution. They created “protected classes,” as we called them, while routing out diversity of thought-and performance-based competition. Instead of leadership’s digging deep, creating tough standards, and holding everyone equally accountable, they played games.
The worst game was making our qualifications pass-fail rather than score based—because management could not pass the older sky-marshal standards of marksmanship and physicality. If an air marshal can’t do a pull-up or thirty-five push-ups in a minute, will they really be able to fight to the death against someone committed to dying to succeed in taking down a plane? Hell, no.
I have to say it: For some middle management and a select few, the federal air marshal program has become a shining example of the worst government welfare I can think of. Former Secret Service special agents used FAMS as a way to pay into and collect on a second pension from the same U.S. Treasury—double dipping because they came from the old D.C. police and fire retirement program before President Reagan instituted the Federal Employee Retirement System.
What made matters worse is that so many former SAs treated their new full-time FAMS jobs like part-time gigs. Supervisors often clocked in late and left early. FAMS’s system of pay and timekeeping was designed to leech hours for employees so that more personnel had to be hired. I flew on a plane! I had a ticketed flight and set schedule that they gave me at a set hotel that I had to get approved, so why was it necessary that I logged my hours and got them approved on the back end, too? It was not only unnecessary, but it was made far too complicated purposely. If you’ve seen the NBC television series The Office or Jennifer Aniston’s movie Office Space, you’ve seen what our office days looked like. I’m dead serious. It was criminal, but I was mandated to play the game.
Here’s how ridiculous it got: I was on an overseas mission, and what did I see proudly displayed on my hotel wall? “Customer of the Month: The Federal Air Marshal Service.” What the hell? Could you imagine an undercover law enforcement officer being outed because of that? Who bought into that? Meanwhile, an air marshal who put his schedule on his family fridge got fired over it.
To politicians the problem was actually perception—not the problem itself, not what actually jeopardized the mission. For me on an airplane and in any undercover work, it was true that I didn’t want operators who looked like cookie-cutter slimmed-out Caucasian-only men. But it was just as damned dangerous to hire people based on gender and skin color. Performance standards and accountability applied to everyone.
We needed FAMs worthy of trust and confidence to complete the mission. It was the only way to fight crime and terrorism. Character for us had no appearance except for a look of general athleticism. On the flip side, there were air marshals who needed seat belt extenders because they were too obese to use the regular airplane belts. One air marshal nagged management so much that they allowed him to carry a SIG P239, a much smaller version of our pistol, which meant our cartridge magazines weren’t compatible. Management at HQ were complaining that the SIG P229 made them “look fat.” Right, blame the gun. So they instituted the SIG P239 for themselves. Then they had to accommodate all other the whiners, too. Then anyone who was overweight or inconvenienced by carrying the standard issue got to carry the smaller pistol with half the amount of standard ammunition—not that the original whiner could shoot the broad side of a barn, no matter whether he had a bandolier full of ammo.
If you can’t raise the bridge, lower the water. If you can’t meet the standards, well, just lower them.
Another air marshal couldn’t stay awake in a meeting, let alone on an airplane. (I’m no doctor, but.…) He had horrible sleep apnea, to the point where even the flight attendants found it irksome. Management refused to bench him or hold him accountable. It was like having a lifeguard who couldn’t swim. If we didn’t laugh, we’d cry. But I finally had to shut up about it, even though I was fuming.
The ugly truth is that so much of middle management had lost sight of the mission. They truly didn’t believe another attack on a plane would happen. That was their mentality. They often used “check ride” flights that are made to verify in-flight air marshal performance as transparent excuses to visit friends or for family events like weddings or vacations.
While many air marshals were hard chargers, management had a created an “everyone’s a winner/everyone gets a participation trophy” mentality. Protected classes were a lost cause. Management was so worried about HR grievances that I knew an air marshal who refused to get the quarterly physical.
FAMS actually hired an independent review board to create a minimum standard for us. They spent thousands of dollars on it. The board settled on three pull-ups, a mile and a half in fifteen minutes, and thirty-five push-ups in a minute. That was abysmally low. Does that level of fitness indicate someone’s being able to fight four 9/11-style hijackers? No. But FAMS didn’t even enforce this standard—so we really didn’t have any. And there was zero incentive for an individual air marshal to comply, other than one’s own self-respect and sense of duty. I couldn’t live with myself if I let a tragedy occur.
We had a protected-class female air marshal who weaseled
her way into a promotion to become an “airport liaison” by insinuating (really threatening) to file a discrimination lawsuit. I’m just glad I didn’t have to fly with her often, because she wasn’t on my team.
I discussed her with the air marshals I knew from other countries. Foreign air marshals could spot our flaws from a mile away and laughed at us (the Germans, for example, had an excellent program). They were impressed by her case.
“Don’t even get me started,” I’d say.
“Don’t you have fitness standards?” they’d ask in their various accents.
And I’d shake my head, and they’d laugh and shake theirs. “I can’t talk about it—she’ll file a grievance against me. So just drop it.”
Foreign air marshals could sense our own marshals’ disdain for our system’s abusers. FAMS management’s lack of professionalism stemmed from persons of weak character attaining key leadership positions. Lower level slipups occurred when higher-ups junked the principle of leading by example. It led to misconduct such as marshals’ hiring prostitutes on foreign trips, wasting tax dollars, and overlooking outright corruption. FAMS recently made the papers after a pilot kicked an air marshal off his plane; the marshal had threatened to sue over not being offered the same meals as others and groused that a drink was deliberately spilled on him.
As time passed, even expert instructors who had been active combat Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, Delta Force, and other Special Forces–type operations abandoned FAMS. They could no longer stand the pattern of constant administrative back-and-forth and broken promises. It had become routine for us, but they, as private contractors, could work anywhere—and soon did.
