In the President's Secret Service

by Ronald Kessler

  One donor who handled contributions for the inauguration told The Washington Post that he was shocked at the difference between Secret Service security during Bill Clinton’s inaugurations and Obama’s.

  “The lack of security was absurd,” he said.

  As usual, the Secret Service claimed some security measures are not visible.

  “We take a layered approach to security and don’t rely on any one countermeasure to ensure that a site is safe,” spokesman Ed Donovan said.

  Yet for all the mumbo jumbo about layered security, the fact is that by failing to properly screen spectators, the Secret Service exposed the new president to possible danger.

  28

  Grenade

  IN HIS OFFICE on the ninth floor of Secret Service headquarters, Nicholas Trotta, who heads the Office of Protective Operations, is talking about lessons learned from previous assassinations and assassination attempts. After the attempt on President Reagan’s life, “We expanded our use of the magnetometers.” Now, he says, “Everyone goes through the magnetometer.”

  Often, just seeing a magnetometer in use is a deterrent, Trotta notes. He recalls working an outdoor event in Denver with President George H. W. Bush. A deranged woman with a handgun in her backpack arrived early at the site, thinking she would get close to the president.

  “She sees one of the limos go into a tent,” Trotta says. Because onlookers were being screened with magnetometers, “She can’t get in. So she waits.” She thought she would then shoot the president as he entered his limousine, but she got distracted by people next to her. As agents were flying back to Washington, they learned that the woman had been committed to a mental hospital. She revealed her aborted plan to family members.

  “There’s been so many like that—ones we don’t know about because they were not successful,” Trotta says. “How many [assassins] have been stopped or have seen a police officer, have seen a magnetometer? I don’t know how many times I’ve been briefed where people, as they are getting in line, see the magnetometer, and they turn the other way. That’s a trigger for us. Teams will go and interview, and all of a sudden a person has weapons on them.”

  But what about instances when the Secret Service buckles under pressure from campaign personnel or White House staff to let people into events without being screened? Suddenly, Trotta changes his story. “When we have a crowd of seventy thousand people, we may or may not need to put all those people through magnetometers,” Trotta says. “Because some of those people in certain areas might not have a line-of-sight threat that can harm the protectee.”

  But what if an assassination occurred because someone was not screened? Trotta looks uncomfortable. Still, he plows on ahead, saying that a lot of factors come into play.

  “The president can go to a sports arena or stadium and may stay in a box,” Trotta says. “Let’s say if he’s on the third base up in a box, the people on first base side, center field, they might not be the threat. But the people around him may be the threat. So now we screen that area, and the critical part is to make sure that there’s no handoff, so you have a dead space that is secure.”

  Has Trotta never heard of a gunman leaving his seat to zip off a shot or throw a grenade at the president? When told of Trotta’s rationale for stopping magnetometer screening, Secret Service agents cannot believe he said what he did indeed say.

  “I was in absolute shock regarding his comment about the mags closing down and potential attackers being too far away to cause any problems,” says an agent on one of the two major protective details. Imagine, the agent says, if three or four suicide assassins came in with guns firing.

  “I cannot believe the head of our protective operations actually said that,” the agent says. “Yeah, let’s drop those magnetometers. Thank God you have it on record, because he would be one of the first people to be called to testify before a congressional committee if such an incident happened.”

  “Saying not everyone in a seventy-thousand-person event is close enough to shoot the protectee is an amazing answer,” says another agent on one of the major protective details. “I’m embarrassed that an assistant director would give you that answer.”

  Danny Defenbaugh, the former FBI agent who criticized the Secret Service’s decision to stop magnetometer screening at an Obama event in Dallas, notes that word can quickly spread that the agency engages in such lax practices.

  “The people who want to assassinate the president will watch and look for the Secret Service to close down the magnetometers before an event starts,” he says.

  Shutting down magnetometers as an event is about to start is shocking enough, but when Vice President Biden threw the opening pitch at the first Baltimore Orioles game of the season at Camden Yards on April 6, 2009, the Secret Service had not screened any of the more than forty thousand fans. Moreover, even though Biden’s appearance at the game was announced beforehand, the vice president was not wearing a bulletproof vest as he stood on the pitcher’s mound.

  “A gunman or gunmen from anywhere in the stands could have gotten off multiple rounds before we could have gotten in the line of fire,” says a current agent who is outraged that the Secret Service would be so reckless. According to this agent, before the Baltimore event, senior management on Biden’s detail decided “We don’t need magnetometers,” overruling stunned agents on Biden’s detail and the agency’s Baltimore field office.

  In addition to being vulnerable to assassination at the Orioles game, Biden sabotages his own security by insisting on having only two vehicles instead of eight in his Secret Service motorcade, especially when visiting Delaware. Nor does he want the usual police escort. “He doesn’t understand protection,” an agent says. “Our bosses have no backbone. Instead of folding, they should explain why protection is needed and insist that he have it.”

  Biden’s lack of regard for security was evident when, chatting with journalists at the head table at the 2009 Gridiron Dinner, he revealed the location of a top-secret bunker beneath the vice president’s residence. Biden later tried to claim that he was talking about a study used by his predecessor Dick Cheney at the upper level of the residence. But the Secret Service emailed agents to warn them that Biden had compromised the location of the vice president’s secret underground bunker.

  “It was a shock to all of us that the vice president did that,” says an agent. “If we had done that, we would have been prosecuted.”

  Referring to the decision to dispense with magnetometer screening, an agent says, “The Secret Service has dismantled the first line of defense against an assassination. They can say it’s okay, but it will not be okay when the president or vice president is killed.”

  As Trotta acknowledges, demands on the Secret Service have been exploding. Moreover, as presidents travel more, the Secret Service has to devote more resources to advance work. Near the end of his term, President Bush traveled somewhere almost every day. In 2008, he visited thirty countries.

  In April 2008 alone, the Secret Service provided protection during trips to twenty countries on five continents. In that month, “We had all our protective assignments—the former presidents—and you had the Pope come in; you had heads of state coming into the U.S. because of the Pope’s trip,” Trotta says. “Then we had the Caribbean summit in Miami. You had the president’s North American summit in New Orleans. We had huge campaign rallies.”

  Yet Trotta refuses to acknowledge that those demands have in any way diminished the level of protection, either as a result of magnetometer screening being waived or because overwhelmed, experienced agents are getting fed up and leaving. If agents are departing, it’s not the fault of Secret Service management practices, he says. Moreover, he says it’s fine if people leave.

  Agents “look at travel, and they see the money they’re making, and it does come down sometimes to the quality of life,” Trotta tells me. “But the job is what it is. We have a responsibility to the American public, and it comes with sometimes a price: long hou
rs, travel, missing birthday parties, and transfers. And it comes down to an employee saying, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ So they choose. They just go. And that’s okay.”

  When it comes to the agency’s weapons, Trotta is similarly indifferent. Trotta says he leaves those decisions to the training facility.

  “They’re the experts,” he says.

  Remarkably, the assistant director in charge of protecting the president and presidential candidates expresses no interest in the question of whether an assassination attempt could be successful because agents are not equipped with weapons that the FBI, the army, and even the Amtrak Police Department use.

  In fact, says an agent, “When we go for firearms training, every one of our instructors implores us to ask in the evaluation forms we submit to switch to the M4. The MP5 is a big pistol. We are outgunned by our enemy.”

  Trotta’s nonchalant attitude about whether Secret Service weapons are effective, about increasing agent turnover, and about the practice of skipping magnetometer screening reflects a culture of denial. The fact that Trotta would cite the effectiveness of magnetometers in preventing assassinations and say “everyone goes through the magnetometer,” and, in the next breath, defend skipping them at major events, is astounding.

  In fact, it was such a decision to stop magnetometer screening that almost led to the assassination of President George W. Bush on May 10, 2005, when a man threw a grenade at him as he spoke at a rally in a public square in Tbilisi, Georgia. Because magnetometer screening was stopped, the man was able to take a grenade into the event where Bush was to speak.

  “The Georgians had set up the magnetometers all around this area,” says Thomas V. Fuentes, the FBI special agent in charge of international operations who headed the investigation of the incident. “They screened about ten thousand people, and there’s about a hundred fifty thousand that want to get in. They realize they’re not going to get them in in time on the president’s schedule, so they just shut off the machines and let everybody in.”

  The grenade landed near the podium where Bush was speaking, but it did not explode. Witnesses later said a man wearing a head scarf who was standing off to the side reached into his black leather jacket and pulled out a military grenade. He yanked the pin, wrapped the scarf around the grenade, and threw it toward Bush.

  Inside a grenade, the chemical reaction that creates an explosion occurs when two spoons disengage. But because the spoons got stuck, when the grenade landed, no explosion occurred. After analyzing the device, the FBI concluded it could have killed the president if it had worked. If all onlookers had been screened, the grenade would have been detected, and Bush’s life would not have been in jeopardy.

  “We were within an eyelash of losing our top protectee, yet this is never brought up during our training,” says a Secret Service agent on one of the major details.

  Prior to that attack, the assassination attempts on Presidents Reagan and Ford and on Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Governor George Wallace all occurred because bystanders were not screened with magnetometers.

  “If someone is willing to commit suicide to assassinate the president, there’s nothing you can do about it unless you have magnetometer screening,” says former Secret Service supervisor Dave Saleeba.

  Trotta’s cavalier responses are symptomatic of the Secret Service’s refusal to acknowledge or address problems that undermine the agency’s mission. In similar fashion, when asked about the increasing attrition rate and sagging morale, Mark Sullivan, the Secret Service director, says, in effect, too bad.

  “The hours are tough,” Sullivan says. “We’ve all worked them, and I know what it’s like. I’ve been an agent for twenty-five years now, and I would never ask anyone to do what I wouldn’t do. And I know that they do a lot of travel. I know they’re away from home. I know they work long hours out there, and it quite frankly is not an easy job.”

  If being an agent were an easy job, “Anybody could do it. But not just anybody could do it,” he says. “I think it’s because of the character of our people, and the pride that they have in their jobs that they are going to work hard. We try to get enough relief out there for them and get enough people out there to support them, to make sure that they don’t have to work any more hours than they have to.”

  While Sullivan was a respected agent, he does not have the management skills to uncover problems at the agency and deal with them. Nor does he recognize how the agency’s practice of cutting corners has jeopardized the safety of agents and those they protect. Indeed, Sullivan rejects the notion that the Secret Service has been cutting corners.

  “When it comes to our protective mission, we’re never going to cut corners,” the director says. “I will tell you that we will never, ever, put anybody in a position that they’re going to fail, because we can’t afford it. We’re going to make sure that we do what we have to do to make sure we get the job done. And I think we have.”

  29

  Padding Statistics

  TO IMPRESS CONGRESS, J. Edgar Hoover, as director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, would count among the bureau’s arrests those made by local police for car thefts. At the same time, Hoover ignored some of the biggest threats, such as organized crime and political corruption, in part because they required much more time and manpower.

  In many ways, Secret Service officials have the same mentality. Just as Hoover did, the Secret Service pads arrest statistics proudly presented to Congress and the public to make itself look good. In 2008, the Secret Service made 2,398 arrests for counterfeiting and 5,332 arrests for other financial crimes. But those figures include arrests that the agency never made. They are so-called in custody responses, which is when local police notify the Secret Service that they have a suspect in custody for the equivalent of a counterfeiting violation or other financial crime. The Secret Service then takes credit for the local arrest.

  “When you are a field agent, you are strongly urged to call the local police departments in your district and have them contact you if they made an arrest, state or local,” a veteran agent says. “Then you write up the necessary reports and claim credit for the arrest and conviction of the subject.”

  “The reason they do it obviously is so they can walk over to Congress and inflate the investigative success of the agency” says a former agent who joined the inspector general’s office of another federal agency. “They make a copy of the police report and make a copy of the note, and that’s about it. The FBI does not do that. It’s a game, and it’s deceptive.”

  Moreover, instead of rooting out the biggest offenders, “By and large, arrests are all about the numbers,” an agent says. “Very infrequently do we go after the big fish. We work very few high-profile cases that get to the source of counterfeit currency and the stolen credit card numbers.”

  When asked about the practice of padding Secret Service statistics with arrests made by local authorities, Ed Donovan, a Secret Service spokesman, did not respond.

  Why the Secret Service has the dual role of protection and law enforcement in the first place is a legitimate question. While the FBI traditionally leaves counterfeiting investigations to the Secret Service, it covers all the other financial crimes Secret Service agents investigate. But since the needs of the protection side rise and fall, the Secret Service’s dual role provides flexibility. The agency can always borrow agents from the investigative side when needed. Maintaining field offices that interact with local law enforcement on a daily basis helps the protection side when the president comes to town.

  Agents say that after spending endless nights in a Suburban guarding a protectee, they look forward to eventually returning to investigative work. Interviewing people as part of a criminal investigation sharpens agents’ skills when dealing with possible threats to the president. While many agents are former police officers, most are not. Investigating crimes, they learn to evaluate body language and eye movement to get a sense of whether an individual is being deceptive.

  The
value of combining investigative and protective operations is that as a criminal investigator, “You learn the basics,” Nick Trotta says. “You learn about your own safety and your partner’s safety. You learn how to think on your feet when you’re out on the street and get in the mind of the criminal—whether it’s a counterfeit case or the financial fraud cases. I think that our dual mission is what makes us unique, and it makes our agents very efficient and effective in our overall missions.”

  The downside of the Secret Service’s dual role is that agents often cannot show up for a meeting with prosecutors or for a court appearance because they have been pulled off for a protection assignment.

  “You could be working one of the biggest cases, and if your name gets pulled to go on a protective operation, you’re off that case to perhaps stand in a hallway as a king of a small country comes to get his prostate checked at the Mayo Clinic,” says a former agent.

  For that reason, U.S. Attorneys dread working with Secret Service agents.

  The larger problem is that the Secret Service blindly takes on greater jurisdiction on the investigative side and more duties on the protection side without obtaining a commensurate increase in budget and agents. That is a reflection on management, not the agents, who are generally sharp and dedicated. More than officers or agents of any other law enforcement agency, FBI agents who have worked with them admire Secret Service agents.

  Aside from their normal duties, agents have saved lives by giving cardiopulmonary resuscitation and have prevented murders and apprehended hit-and-run drivers, as Agent Patrick Sullivan did in New York one afternoon. Driving alone on the FDR Drive, he saw a car in front of him racing northbound at high speed. A man was changing his tire at the side of the road underneath the Williamsburg Bridge. The speeding car hit the parked vehicle, sending the driver into the air.