In the President's Secret Service

by Ronald Kessler

  While the Secret Service receives modest budget increases, the annual appropriation is still a mere $1.4 billion—less than the cost of one stealth bomber. About a third of the budget goes to investigating crimes such as counterfeiting, check fraud, fraudulent use of ATM cards or credit cards, identity crimes, and computer-based attacks on the nation’s financial, banking, and telecommunications infrastructure. Likewise, about a third of the Secret Service’s agents are assigned to investigative work, but that figure is misleading because agents doing such work in field offices are routinely pulled off their assignments for protection work. In man-hours, slightly more than half of agents’ time is devoted to protection. Because it can boast of arrests, the 6,489-employee Secret Service keeps expanding its jurisdiction in the investigative areas.

  To be sure, the Secret Service’s work on financial crimes is impressive.

  Back in 1983, when Secret Service director Mark Sullivan started out as an agent, “When we picked up credit card fraud, a sophisticated credit card fraud back then would be somebody going to a dumpster behind some restaurant and diving in and getting somebody’s credit card numbers out of the dumpster,” Sullivan tells me.

  Another scheme would be to steal an embossing machine from a hospital.

  “They’d print a credit card number and somebody’s name on there,” Sullivan says. “And you know, you’d look at the credit card number, and it would be going like diagonally down the card. And that was a sophisticated credit card fraud.”

  Now the Secret Service is up against the most sophisticated cyber criminals. Learning about the investigative side of the agency is enough to scare anyone. Counterfeiters have become so devious that bank tellers who are trained to spot fake bills can’t detect counterfeits even using a magnifying glass. Waiters with so-called skimmers swipe your credit card before they submit it for payment of your check. The encoded information on the magnetic strip is stored and then sold for twenty dollars per credit card.

  On websites, criminals can buy the numbers imprinted on stolen credit cards. They can also fool banks into handing over all the money in your checking account, not to mention siphoning cash from ATMs. Phishing—fraudulently extracting money from people online—has been increasing at a rate of as much as 4,000 percent a year.

  Then there are the Nigerian fraud artists who promise to make people rich, then wipe out their life savings. Some victims revictimize themselves: After losing most of their money, they fall for the scheme all over again. Nigeria prints and ships boxes of counterfeit treasury checks to the United States. Since the Nigerian government is often complicit, the Secret Service has closed its office in Lagos.

  The North Korean government counterfeits U.S. currency using high-pressure intaglio presses that are about as good as those of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Other counterfeits are made with offset or flatbed presses or digital printers, which make the crudest counterfeits. About one in ten thousand bills in circulation is counterfeit. Most of them are hundred-dollar bills. Because counterfeit U.S. currency is so prevalent, banks and currency exchangers in many Asian countries refuse to accept U.S. bills.

  Thefts of credit card numbers have become so widespread that “You have already been compromised; they just haven’t gotten around to using your number,” Tom Lascell of the criminal investigative division says reassuringly. “We used to think holograms on credit cards made them safe,” he says. He then holds up a photo of dozens of credit cards for sale with holograms.

  Investigations by the criminal side of the agency sometimes lead to strange findings. In 1986, Patrick Sullivan and other agents learned from an informant that Gregory Scarpa, Sr., a capo, or captain, in the Colombo Mafia family, was involved in creating counterfeit credit cards. After Sullivan arrested him, he was driving him to the Secret Service field office in New York when Scarpa asked Sullivan to stop the car.

  “We pull over, and he tells us he is the highest-level Mafia informant in the FBI,” Sullivan recalls. At the time, Sullivan was the Secret Service’s representative to the Department of Justice’s Organized Crime Strike Force in Brooklyn. He knew Scarpa was a prime target of the strike force.

  “I was stunned,” Sullivan says.

  As later documented in court filings, Scarpa revealed that for at least twenty years, he had betrayed to the bureau secrets about the Mafia—including murders planned and committed. Moreover, Scarpa disclosed that at the behest of the FBI, he terrorized a Ku Klux Klan member into disclosing where the bodies of three civil rights workers who were murdered in 1964 were buried in Mississippi.

  As important as the criminal side of the Secret Service is, with the exception of counterfeit currency investigations, the FBI investigates the same crimes. Each agency pursues leads it happens to receive. Yet the Secret Service seeks greater jurisdiction in these areas even as protection demands increase.

  From its early days, the Secret Service’s culture dictated that the job got done, regardless of obstacles. While that ethic is admirable, taking on more duties without enough resources is not. Rather than taking a long-range view and making waves by demanding the necessary funding or shedding jurisdiction in some areas, Secret Service management makes do, boasting, “We do more for less.”

  The result, according to current and former agents, is that since it became part of DHS, the Secret Service has been cutting corners and covering up deficiencies to the point where the security of the president, vice president, and presidential candidates is compromised.

  “They will cut a protective detail down to the bone to save on costs, but throw every agent into an operation that will result in arrests,” an agent says. “The service either needs twice as many agents or half as much responsibility. The priorities are all messed up.”

  Some of those compromises are a result of the turnover rate that, in turn, stems from senseless transfer policies. Because so many agents are leaving before retirement, less experienced agents remain to do the job. On the vice president’s detail alone, agents are being brought in from the counterassault team to stand protective duty.

  “This acknowledges that we are losing people and now have to borrow from other divisions just for our daily activities,” an agent on one of the major details points out. “I have never seen them have to resort to doing this.”

  Even more shocking, for presidential candidates and many protectees below the president and vice president, the counterassault teams themselves have been slashed in the past few years from the requisite five or six agents to only two agents.

  “CAT is trained to operate as a full team of five to six men,” a current agent who was formerly on CAT says. “Each member has a specific function based upon the direction of the attack. A two-man element responds to the problem, while another responds to the attack with a base of fire—providing cover fire and trying to suppress the attackers—while the other element moves on them to destroy them. The other two-man element—or solo member, if there are only five operators—provides coverage in the rear and assists the element that is moving to address the attack.”

  A team of only two men “cannot do all of those tasks, on top of communicating to the protective detail a status report detailing number of attackers, number of good guys or bad guys killed or captured, and then requesting direction from the detail leader about the next course of action,” the agent says.

  William Albracht, a founding member and four-year team leader of the counterassault teams, could not believe that the Secret Service now cuts corners by reducing the team in many cases to only two agents.

  “CAT team members are comprised of highly trained and extremely motivated agents,” Albracht says. “All are volunteers, and after an exhausting selection process, those that qualify are hand-picked for the assignment. The counterassault team itself is organized as a coordinated unit.”

  Albracht, who taught new agents, says a counterassault team cannot operate with only two agents. “When an attack initiates, one team deploys immediately, tri
es to flank and go to the actual source of the attack,” he says. “The other lays down a base of fire. Once the counterassault team achieves fire superiority, the second prong of the counterattack moves in.”

  If the team is cut to two members, “It’s not a team,” Albracht says. “Then it would be just two guys with submachine guns.”

  Similarly, Reginald Ball, who was on the counterassault team for three years, says, “The team is always at least five members. Otherwise, the concept does not work.”

  When first daughter Barbara Bush was in Africa in 2004 and 2005, a majority of the CAT team leaders and assistant team leaders signed a letter to the then assistant special agent in charge (ASAIC) of CAT, conveying their concerns over the fact that her CAT had been cut to two agents.

  “The ASAIC responded by denying there was any problem and saying we should do the job we are tasked with, whether it is a full team or a two-man element,” an agent who was on the trip says.

  Besides cutting CAT teams, since its absorption by DHS, the Secret Service has cut back on protection of the U.N. General Assembly. When the General Assembly is in session, every spare agent is assigned to guard the more than one hundred thirty heads of state and the sixty-three spouses they bring to New York City. High-level protectees receive a full detail, with both counterassault and counter-sniper teams.

  But the Secret Service now assigns lower-level protectees what is called a dot formation—only a detail leader and two agents working twelve-hour shifts. In many cases, agents are reassigned from protecting the president and vice president or from being on their CAT teams to go to New York. During this period, an agent is not allowed to take annual leave unless he has a death or major illness in his immediate family.

  Before the Secret Service became part of DHS, it would make sure lower-level protectees had adequate protection by assigning officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; Customs and Border Protection; or the U.S. Marshals Service to supplement each detail.

  “The dot formation is a joke and simply window dressing that allows us to accomplish our taxi service mission,” an agent detailed to protect heads of state at the U.N. General Assembly says. “Any attempt on a protectee would in all likelihood be successful.”

  While U.N. coverage and CAT teams have been cut, in-service training, time for workouts, physical fitness and training, and firearms training and qualification also have been slashed.

  “Every six weeks, you are supposed to cycle out to training for two weeks,” says an agent. “For two solid weeks you should be training, shooting. These are the agents that are assigned to protect the vice president and the president. But I’ve been on the detail for nineteen months, and I’ve gone to Beltsville [the Secret Service training facility] once. Instead, you’re told you have an assignment to go sit for the grandchildren of the vice president.”

  “Most law enforcement agencies require anywhere from forty to a hundred twenty hours per year of in-service training for its officers,” says an agent on one of the top protective details. “Do you know how many days of protective training I’ve had in the last two years? Zero. No review of legal rulings, interview techniques, investigative trends, protective intelligence investigations, or advance protection work. No constant training in ambush response, emergency medicine scenarios, or emergency vehicle operation.

  “Training is almost nonexistent, and it shows,” says the agent. He cites one training scenario where a motorcade is ambushed. The shift leader is supposed to identify where the attack is coming from. Based on that, the agents know how to deploy and go after the attackers.

  “What we saw was just an absolute embarrassment, people running around in circles, not knowing where to go, what to do, couldn’t identify where the attack was coming from,” the agent says. “They would have all been killed within a matter of seconds had that been an actual attack. We’d have lost everybody and the protectee.”

  According to Secret Service policy, “We are supposed to be given three hours a week just for physical training,” another current agent says. “Well, that’s never going to happen.”

  Secret Service rules require agents based in Washington to qualify with a pistol once a month and with long guns every three months. But, in contrast to years past, many agents find they are given time to take the qualifying test for long guns only once or twice a year.

  “I’ve had conversations with special agents in charge who say they are not able to get the requalification training in they would like because of the operational demands they have,” says Danny Spriggs, who retired from the Secret Service as deputy director in 2004. In previous years, “We never sacrificed training,” he says.

  Agents who have left the Secret Service to join other federal law enforcement agencies report that, in many cases, training in firearms and counterterrorism tactics in those agencies far exceeds the quality of what the Secret Service offers.

  “They actually encourage training here rather than making up excuses for not training,” one of those agents says.

  Unlike the FBI, the Secret Service has no use for outside education.

  “If you wanted to go out and get a master’s degree or a doctoral degree, it’s on your own, and they won’t work around your schedule,” a Secret Service agent says. “The FBI will give you sabbatical time.” The bureau also will pay for outside education if it is related to an agent’s field of work. “Management’s mentality at the Secret Service is that the agent doesn’t need to know that. The agent just needs to do his job and shut up.”

  Standards are so lax that agents are actually handed blank evaluations for possible promotions and fitness ratings and asked to fill them in themselves. According to agents, those who have “juice” or “hooks” with management because they play golf with someone receive good evaluations. Agents who don’t have hooks are told, “You’re getting a rating of forty-six out of fifty, no matter what.”

  “You are supposed to do your physical training test quarterly, but I haven’t done one in two, three years,” an agent says. “When you do, you enter your scores yourself on a form and hand it in.” In fact, the agent says, “I’m one of the PT instructors. And because the service takes physical training so lightly, I don’t take it seriously either. Just give me a sheet, and I trust that what the agent says he did is accurate.”

  A third agent estimates that 98 percent of the agents provide their own scores for the PT test. “You fill out a form, hand it to the guy, he enters it in, and he doesn’t know if you did your PT test or not,” he says. “You test yourself.”

  As a result, agents say, many of their colleagues are out of shape.

  “Some of them, you just roll your eyes,” an agent says. “One agent cannot even do a sit-up. I know for a fact he can’t because his belly’s already up to his chin. Just look at some of the details, and you can really see where the standards have gone—downhill.”

  “We had a post stander last weekend, a female agent, and I was in shock,” says an agent, referring to agents assigned to guard a specific area or site on a temporary basis. “Overweight, out of shape, just disgusting. And you look at this person and say, ‘If I’m going to go through a door with you to execute a search warrant, are you going to have my back? If I get shot, are you going to be able to carry me out? Or are you going to be able to get up four flights of stairs because I’m in a fight with somebody?’ Probably not.”

  21

  POTUS

  THE CURRENT LOCATION of the president is displayed by an electronic box at key offices in the White House and at the Secret Service. He is listed as POTUS, for president of the United States. Called the protectee locator, the box also shows the location of the first lady (FLOTUS), the vice president (VPOTUS), and the president’s and vice president’s children. If they are not in Washington, the locator box displays their current city. In addition, Uniformed Division officers stationed at the White House update one another by radio on the location of the president and first lady within the
Executive Mansion.

  When the Clintons were in the White House, “It was funny, because on the radio you’d hear that she went somewhere, and then you’d hear that he went to the same location, and every time he went to her, she would go somewhere else,” a former Uniformed Division officer says.

  Like most other presidents, Clinton got a charge out of greeting his fans. One evening, he was to attend a high school reunion in Little Rock. The Secret Service had sealed off the floor of his hotel room and had checked out the hotel employees who would be given access to the floor. Two maids who had been cleared asked Agent Timothy Gobble if they could stay near the end of the hall to catch a glimpse of Clinton as he left for his motorcade. Already late, Clinton saw the two women waving at him and walked to the end of the hall to chat with them.

  “You could see how thrilled they were,” Gobble says. “Here was the leader of the free world who took three minutes to talk to them. They thanked me profusely for giving them that opportunity. There were no cameras around, so it was not for show.”

  Clinton not only loved greeting people but had a gift for remembering who they were. After a speech in New York at an AFL-CIO convention, Clinton was shaking hands. Agents noticed a busboy eyeing him and moving closer.

  “Clinton saw him and called him by his name,” says an agent on his detail at the time. “The president shook his hand and asked how his father was. The busboy got teary-eyed and said his father had died. Commiserating with him, Clinton turned to an aide and said the man’s father had had cancer.”

  “When presidents get into a crowd, they just seem like they feed on the energy from the people they are shaking hands with,” Albracht says. “They may be dragging from a long day of travel and campaigning, but when they hit the rope line, they start to get energized all over again. I’ve seen it time and time again. It seemed to have the strongest effect on Clinton. He’d replenish his energy from theirs and get charged up and ready to continue. They all did it, but it seemed to have the strongest effect on him.”