The First Family Detail

by Ronald Kessler

  In an apparent effort to conceal a huge increase in trips taken by President Obama and Vice President Biden compared with their predecessors, after Obama took office, the Secret Service stopped breaking out figures on their trips. But the aggregate numbers give some idea of the pressures agents face. In fiscal 2011, the Secret Service provided protection for 3,284 domestic and 376 international travel stops for Obama, Biden, and other national leaders.

  As demands on the Secret Service increase, the agency fails to request a commensurate increase in funds and instead pressures agents to work long overtime hours. That has led to exhausted agents having no home life.

  “We were trained to be alert and constantly on edge, yet we were forced to work a twelve-to-fourteen-hour shift, hop on a plane to another city, sleep four hours, and do it all over again,” a former agent says. “We had no set schedule and could work a midnight shift one day, a day shift another, and an afternoon shift the next and have a day off on Wednesday. Even airline pilots have mandatory rest periods, but here we were standing next to the president of the United States and were expected to make split-second, life-or-death decisions.”

  “How tired do you get? Just imagine sleeping three or four hours a night for a week,” a current agent says.

  As a result of management’s lack of regard for agents’ quality of life, resignations before retirement have shot up in recent years. Since 9/11, the private sector has offered lucrative compensation to anyone with a federal law enforcement background. Former Secret Service agents often sign on as vice presidents for security of major corporations or start their own security firms. For those who want to remain vested to earn full government pensions, opportunities have expanded at other federal law enforcement agencies.

  “These people who are leaving are very qualified agents who are doing a really good job and are held in high esteem,” an agent says. “That’s what really hurts us.”

  The Secret Service’s corner cutting and mismanagement extend to polygraph testing that would detect an infiltrator. Before being hired, applicants to the Secret Service must pass a polygraph exam. But after they sign up, agents are never again required to undergo regular lie detector testing. In contrast, the FBI polygraphs all employees—not just agents—every five years. FBI counterintelligence agents are polygraphed more often.

  Given the lack of polygraphing, the Secret Service leaves itself open to a terrorist organization or a foreign intelligence service recruiting an agent to provide access to the president for an assassination or to allow installation of bugging devices or access to top secret information. Regular polygraphing would likely detect such a compromise, as well as deter it.

  The FBI learned the hard way the importance of regular polygraph testing. After the arrest of CIA officer Aldrich Ames in 1994 for spying, Robert “Bear” Bryant, as head of the bureau’s National Security Division, urged FBI director Louis Freeh to approve regular polygraphs for all counterintelligence agents. But faced with opposition from many special agents in charge of field offices and from the FBI Agents Association, Freeh backed down and shelved the proposal.

  While polygraph tests are not perfect, if nothing else they are a deterrent. If Freeh had in fact approved Bryant’s proposal in 1994 to polygraph counterintelligence agents, FBI agent Robert Hanssen likely would have decided to stop spying for the Russians. Instead, for seven years after Freeh refused to allow regular polygraphing, Hanssen continued to provide the Russians with some of the most damaging information in the history of American espionage.

  In addition, the FBI’s nearly fourteen thousand agents are required to attend annual updates on law, ethics, and security. But after initial training, Secret Service agents receive no annual in-service instruction, and training in security is limited to a minimal update online. After the scandal involving agents hiring prostitutes in Colombia, the Secret Service announced it would provide ethics training—but only to a hundred agents.

  “Local police departments have in-service training every year,” says a Secret Service agent. “You are updated on basic criminal law, new court rulings, about probable cause, what you need to develop in order to detain someone. The Secret Service teaches agents once, in their basic training, and there is no training on developments after that.”

  Much like a car that never gets regular maintenance and oil changes, the seven-thousand-employee Secret Service lurches along until a tragedy like the Kennedy assassination forces it to rectify deficiencies. No one can rationally explain the “we make do with less” mind-set and lackadaisical attitude that prevent the Secret Service from adequately protecting presidents, vice presidents, and presidential candidates.

  To let people into events without magnetometer screening, to scrimp on magnetometers to the point where Mitt Romney felt forced to deliver campaign speeches to unscreened crowds in parking lots, to bow to Joe Biden’s wishes to be without the nuclear football or adequate protection in Delaware, to divert agents from protecting the president when he takes off in Marine One from the White House so they can protect the Secret Service director’s assistant, to allow Bradley Cooper’s vehicle into a secure restricted area without screening before Obama was to give a speech, and to disregard firearms requalification and physical fitness requirements, are each so egregious that few past government scandals are comparable because so much is at stake. Each lapse by the Secret Service directly risks the life of the president, vice president, and presidential candidates.

  Yet when one such scandal became public—uniformed officers allowing party crashers into the White House state dinner—President Obama took no action to prevent such debacles in the future. Even after the Colombia prostitution scandal, Obama brushed aside the signs that the Secret Service is in need of a drastic overhaul and defended Mark Sullivan, who presided over the embarrassments as director.

  When addressing the Colombia scandal, President Obama said he would be “angry” if the allegations in the press turned out to be true. But in commenting to me for the original story, the Secret Service confirmed that agents were being withdrawn for misconduct. Being angry is not the way to fix an agency. Holding management accountable is.

  When Sullivan retired, Obama appointed Julia Pierson as the agency’s twenty-third director, on March 27, 2013. A native of Orlando, Florida, Pierson graduated from the University of Central Florida and completed graduate course studies in public policy at George Washington University. She served as a police officer in Orlando and began her career in the Secret Service as a special agent assigned to the Miami and Orlando field offices.

  During her thirty-year career with the agency, Pierson was deputy assistant director in the Office of Protective Operations, where she was responsible for daily security operations. She was also assistant director of the Office of Human Resources and Training (HRT). Most recently, she had been Sullivan’s chief of staff for five years.

  While agents express approval of the appointment of a female director, they say Pierson is a clone of Sullivan. She has taken no steps to rectify problems within the agency. Despite the increased risk to the president, Pierson was slow to navigate a way around the automatic budget cuts imposed on critical functions by sequestration, as other agencies like the Defense Department did by reprogramming funds. Because of the sequester, agents say vital protective work left protectees exposed to potential danger.

  “Agents are exhausted trying to backfill the assignments, and morale is the lowest it’s ever been,” an agent says.

  Pierson’s response to misconduct by two supervisory agents on the President’s Protective Detail is instructive. In May 2013, officials at the stately Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington alerted the Secret Service that supervisory agent Ignacio Zamora Jr. was causing a disturbance, the Washington Post reported. An internal investigation found that Zamora had been visiting a woman in her hotel room across from the White House. When she realized that Zamora had a weapon, she became agitated.

  To reassure her, Zamora removed the bullets from
his gun, but she insisted that he leave. After exiting her room, he realized that he had accidentally left one round in her room. He returned and tried to persuade her to open her door so he could retrieve the bullet, but she refused. Still, he kept trying, drawing the attention of hotel security.

  In investigating the incident, the Secret Service found that both Zamora and another supervisor, Timothy Barraclough, had been sending sexually explicit e-mails on their government-issued BlackBerrys to a female subordinate. What has not come out previously is that Director Pierson signed off on reassigning Zamora to a supervisory position in the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division, and on transferring Barraclough to head the Tucson resident office. Agents see the moves as a continuation of the double standard applied to supervisors versus agents.

  “Zamora got a lateral transfer, same position, same title in another division,” an agent says. “So there’s no punishment there. He is still an assistant special agent in charge. Barraclough was assistant to the special agent in charge and was given what is considered a promotion at the same salary level to be in charge of his own resident office. The guy suffered nothing—no demotion, no punishment.”

  While subordinates are punished severely on a regular basis, “bosses are not,” the agent says. “The problem of agent misconduct is caused by managers who do the same things themselves and are not held accountable for it.”

  In a round of talks to agents, Pierson acknowledged that turnover has been increasing and said she would work on some salary issues. But she made no mention of the lax management culture that has led to corner cutting.

  Confirming that Pierson learned nothing from the agency’s past mistakes, the Secret Service under her watch failed to warn President Obama to forgo speaking at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in South Africa on December 10, 2013, because local authorities were letting in spectators without any magnetometer screening. It was a repeat of how local authorities failed to screen crowds when President George W. Bush spoke in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2005, allowing a man to throw a grenade at him.

  “I was shocked at the apparent lack of any real security measures, precautions, or deterrents,” reporter Scott Thuman of Washington television station WJLA told Politico. “We entered the stadium along with a steady but manageable crowd of people through the main gates, which were completely unattended. There were no workers performing bag checks or patdowns—there were no magnetometers to walk through, no metal detector wands being used—anywhere.”

  One of those not screened was bogus sign language interpreter Thamsanqa Jantjie, who stood three feet from Obama and other world leaders during the service at Soweto’s FNB stadium. In 2003, Jantjie was part of a group that accosted two men found with a stolen television and burned them to death by setting fire to tires placed around their necks. As a result of the murders, Jantjie was institutionalized for at least a year. Yet in commenting on that fact, Secret Service spokesman Donovan covered up the obvious security lapses by saying “agreed-upon security measures between the U.S. Secret Service and South African government security officials were in place” during the service. He thus implicitly confirmed that the Secret Service had failed to warn Obama of the security breakdown so that he could decide whether to appear at the event or address the crowds remotely by television.

  “I really don’t think the president should be going to these sorts of events unless there’s some guarantee that the domestic security force has a plan that’s operational and workable,” says former agent Dan Bongino, who was on George W. Bush’s protective detail.

  Reflecting her priorities, just after taking office, Pierson sent an e-mail to all agents reminding them to maintain a “professional appearance.” Tattoos should not be visible, and facial hair must be short and “neatly groomed,” she instructed. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover reflected the same obsession with image, helping to conceal the bureau’s many flaws.

  Pierson may have done nothing to reform the agency, but she loves taking trips with Obama on Air Force One, as she did when Obama flew to the Netherlands in March 2014. There, three agents who were assigned to protect the president were sent home for misconduct after a night of drinking. Hotel personnel found one of the agents passed out in a hallway. While the agents obviously lacked any common sense, their punishment reflected the agency’s continuing double standard: Agents in the field may suffer severe repercussions for transgressions, while management orders agents to take risks that could result in an assassination.

  The Secret Service’s annual budget is $1.6 billion—about half the cost of one B-2 Stealth Bomber. Given the importance of the presidency, doubling that figure would be money well spent. But rather than request substantially more funds, the Secret Service assures President Obama and members of Congress 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. Yet scrimping on protection of the president, the vice president, and presidential candidates risks an assassination that would undermine American democracy.

  If the Secret Service has fallen down on its duties, it is unexcelled at providing special access to members of Congress and sweet-talking them, the media, and the president into thinking that it is competent. That is one reason the press never questioned why the Secret Service would allow John Hinckley to get within fifteen feet of President Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton. Like Hoover’s FBI, which dishonestly padded arrest statistics, just as the Secret Service does by taking credit for arrests made by local police, the USSS skillfully projects a rosy image it does not deserve.

  Only an outside director with a fresh perspective—as Robert S. Mueller III had when he took over as FBI director—would be capable of reforming Secret Service management and changing the culture that fosters corner cutting and punishes agents who question it. Unlike former FBI director Freeh, who dissed anyone who brought him bad news, Mueller removed FBI officials who did not level with him.

  Obama’s failure to heed the warning signs is as reckless as President Kennedy’s refusal to let agents ride on the rear running board of his limousine in Dallas or the insistence of the staff of the Reagan White House that unscreened members of the public be allowed close to President Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton. Yet Congress has also been derelict in its duty. When it comes to selecting a Secret Service director, Congress has never demanded accountability by requiring Senate confirmation.

  The list of positions that do require Senate confirmation is long and the positions often obscure. Not only the head of the U.S. Marshals Service requires Senate confirmation but also ninety-four marshals positions, one in each judicial district. Besides the head of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the director of the Justice Department’s Office for Victims of Crime requires confirmation. So does the librarian of Congress and the deputy director for demand reduction of the so-called drug czar. The Secret Service director is missing from this list.

  Yet along with the FBI, whose director does require confirmation, the Secret Service is the paramount agency responsible for protecting American democracy. And given its powers, the service’s potential for engaging in abuses is almost as great as the FBI’s.

  In imposing greater accountability, Secret Service agents should be required to report to the director in writing any instruction to ignore the agency’s security recommendations—whether it comes from Secret Service supervisors, the president, the vice president, a presidential candidate, or their staffs. While a protectee is free to override Secret Service recommendations, the Secret Service director would then be held responsible if he or she did not take steps to persuade the individual to adhere to Secret Service advice.

  In the case of protectees’ staffs or Secret Service supervisors, the director would be responsible for failing to tell agents to disregard requests that undercut security. If that simple solution had been in effect when the Reagan White House pressured Secret Service agents to let unscreened members of th
e public approach President Reagan, Hinckley never could have shot him.

  Entering Secret Service headquarters, you see on the wall the words “Worthy of Trust and Confidence” in big silver letters. Since the Secret Service first began protecting presidents, that has been an admonishment to agents not to reveal what they see behind the scenes. After I broke the story of agents’ engaging prostitutes in Cartagena, the Secret Service reinforced that dictate by requiring agents to sign confidentiality agreements, suggesting by the timing a desire to avoid future embarrassment.

  On the surface, it may seem to be a legitimate point that if agents are not discreet, protectees may not trust them and therefore may want to evade them if the protectees choose to engage in embarrassing activities. But the American people also legitimately have a right to know about the true character of their leaders. Often, Secret Service agents are the only ones who see what those in the White House are really like. Like human surveillance cameras, Secret Service agents are uniquely positioned to assess a president’s character.

  Those who run for high office should expect a high degree of scrutiny and to be held accountable for personal indiscretions that conflict with their public image and reveal hypocrisy. Rather than expecting the Secret Service to cover up for them, they should not enter public life if they insist on leading double lives. That is particularly true when one considers that a president or vice president having an affair opens himself up to possible manipulation and blackmail.

  “If you want the job, then you need to lead the kind of life and be the kind of person that can stand up to the scrutiny that comes with that job,” says former Secret Service agent Clark Larsen.

  John Adams, the second U.S. president, said the people “have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge—I mean of the character and conduct of their rulers.”