Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  The “misconduct” was very well known and accepted within the agency. One senior agent forwarded an email to fifty-four of his fellow agents that “Our motto for this trip is una mas cerveza por favor,” meaning “One more beer, please.” Another agent responded, saying “Swagg cologne-check. Pimp gear-check. Swagg sunglasses-check. Cash fo dem hoes-check.” Agents carried on in Spanish, saying “I’m dying for the report from last night,” and “Tonight we ride.”

  Between thirteen and seventeen agents—many of whom were married—drank, partied, and became the center of attention for hours into the night at a nearby strip club in Cartenega—at some point soliciting at least twenty sex workers—and kept repeatedly showing off their abs. The party then continued back at the Hotel Caribe, where many of the agents checked their sex workers in at the front desk. Partying with the agents were at least five military Special Forces members. They partied together and then went to their hotel rooms with the sex workers. Afterward, a few agents tried persuading the sex workers to stay the night after the services were rendered. But that wasn’t the problem in the eyes of the “secret” Secret Service.

  Their problems began the following morning, when one agent, who had persuaded his sex worker to stay the night with him, refused to pay her and kicked her out of the room. Some believe the agent had done so in an attempt to save money, as he might have thought that sex work was illegal and the woman would not turn to the hotel or police. But she returned, and the Caribe hotel manager demanded to speak with the agent in his room. He refused, so the manager pulled the list of all seventeen Secret Service agents and even the five Special Forces operatives members and called the police. When the hotel and police got involved against the agents, the agents had to fall back on their diplomatic immunity to keep from being arrested. Agents and police then took the matter up with the State Department and US Embassy, which had issued their diplomatic identification granted by the Colombian government.

  That day the Secret Service recalled eleven of the agents to DC. and sent out replacements. The military recalled the five Special Forces members and confined them, pending its own investigation. The local Colombian police, the US Embassy, the State Department, the president’s administration, and the Secret Service were now in diplomatic contention, all because of one agent’s exceptional arrogance.

  It became a diplomatic nightmare when an anonymous someone alerted Ronald Kessler. He then alerted the Washington Post, which broke the story the very same day with the headline “U.S. Secret Service Agents Recalled from Colombia.” The media went wild, covering the story for weeks. The Secret Service contended that the recall had not impacted President Obama’s security while on the trip. Not only was that claim far too premature to be certain, it also posed the question: If those agents (and Special Forces operators) didn’t matter, why had they been there in the first place? As the media ate the story up, revelations poured out.

  Some White House aides knew of Secret Service agents who used the trips for sex tourism. One of the sex workers even landed an interview on NBC’s Today show. On Comedy Central, Jon Stewart ran the headline “The Bangover.” Six Secret Service agents resigned and were allowed to retire without punishment. The media found that one of the supervisors involved in the scandal, Agent David Cheney, had posted a picture of himself on Sarah Palin’s detail with the comment “I was really checking her out, if you know what I mean?” He, too, was allowed to retire with full benefits. The media learned many of the details as four of the agents contested their dismissals. One of their rebuttals cited cavorting and partying as a long-standing USSS habit. Another told investigators that he knew the Secret Service condoned hiring sex workers and picking up “nonworking” FFNs because in other countries he had translated the negotiations between PPD agents and high-ranking supervisors. “Wheels up, rings off” had been a motto for at least decades.

  Neither the DHS inspector general nor the Secret Service interviewed the women involved, because the Department of Justice believed that the DHS should have pursued the investigations as part of a criminal investigation. Instead, the inspector general only pursued the interviews with the FFNs as they related to congressional queries. As the DOJ and the DHS inspector general played chicken, neither budged, and the FFNs were never interviewed by anyone other than the media.

  Then Director Sullivan, appearing before Congress, got himself into a jam four different ways. When asked about the flagrant abuses, he said that he “[did] not believe [the agents] did it because they believed that this type of behavior would not be tolerated.” But with the emails being known to investigators before his testimony, the brazenness of the agents’ actions, and the incredible history of prostitution and extramarital affairs within service going back decades and climbing to its highest ranks, it seemed that either the director was either completely out of touch with his own organization’s present and past or he was covering for the sake of the agency’s future—his future.

  Next, Director Sullivan told Congress that none of the twelve agents had had any sensitive documents or equipment in his hotel room—a dubious assertion considering that agents are supposed to keep their radios, cell phones, pagers, identifications, wallet contents, commission books, guns, and other standard-issue items with them at all times. The congressional investigators later decided that Director Sullivan was either lying or out of touch with his agency, having learned that, naturally, the agents had had their standard items on them. Something as rudimentary as an agent’s cell phone could be a treasure trove of information for a terrorist planning an attack or a foreign spy organization wanting to gain intelligence that would give its country an edge against the United States.

  The third “inaccuracy” from Director Sullivan was his assertion that none of the sex workers or other FFNs involved had known associations with drug cartels, human-trafficking organizations, terrorist Columbian revolutionary forces, or the like. In fact, one of the women did have a partial association with such a group.

  The fourth jam was the Secret Service’s defense as a whole. The service had recalled eleven agents back to DC, yet in its internal investigation of thirteen agents, despite not interviewing the FFNs, only three agents had been proven to have taken FFNs to their rooms and engaged in “sexual activity.” But those agents claimed not to have known that the women they took back were prostitutes. Perhaps that explained the argument that started the mess for the Secret Service? But those three received only slaps on the wrist and were fully reinstated afterward, without so much as a permanent blemish on their personnel record. They also fell back on the preposterous excuse that the incident had been the result of not having clear guidelines, for which they claimed the solution had been found when a chart had been created explaining that prostitution and FFNs were, in a word, bad.

  If those “elite” agents couldn’t understand this on their own and the Secret Service’s “elite” leadership couldn’t make it clear, are they really so “elite,” and is the president really safe in the hands of people so systematically moronic?

  Because of the director’s less-than-forthcoming answers, Congress referred him to the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, which believed it wasn’t enough to prosecute the director.

  Two years later, the DHS investigator working on the Cartagena scandal moseyed into a brothel under surveillance by the sheriff’s department in Broward County, Florida, and a prostitute positively identified the investigator as a customer.

  One unanswered question: Did the agents use their personal funds, voucher money, per diem expenses, or even government cards at the hotel or when they visited other businesses—legal or otherwise? It’s standard procedure to ask a business where a fed is using a card “What will this charge show up as on my credit card statement?” because every purchase has to be justified to a supervisor. The agents had to pay in some way, and each method, even paying large sums in cash, violates protocol and training.

  Such a clear desire on the part of the S
ecret Service to sweep the scandal under the rug, such little punishment, and Director Sullivan’s cavalierly inaccurate responses to Congress under oath make it clear that the service holds criminals to a much higher standard than it does its own agents. It shows how little importance it places on pursuing the truth and being “worthy of trust and confidence.”

  Not only was the incident a potential major security breach, but the Secret Service completely failed the president because his trip to Colombia was overshadowed by the scandal, which kept him from making the most of the trip on behalf of the United States.

  Many congressmen’s and pundits’ proposed solution was to pressure the agency to hire more women, as if simply hiring more women would solve the service’s long-standing ills.

  There was no doubt for many inside the Secret Service, that this was a factor in Julia Pierson replacing Director Sullivan on March 27, 2013. During my time in the service I knew Pierson and I have mixed feelings about her, but there can be no doubt that she was set up for failure. She was forced into the quagmire in which the Secret Service still exists. To toe the Secret Service line is to watch it tiptoe toward collapse and catastrophe, but turning her back on the agency’s made men and reforming the agency might not end well. The jungle of problems doesn’t need a butter knife, it needs a chain saw. Pierson tried the butter knife and lasted until October 1, 2014, after a year and six months amid even worse scandals that she couldn’t adequately explain to Congress.

  Had the culture changed, as Secret Service leaders promised?

  In March 2015, there was the Amsterdam mission, when one Counter Assault agent passed out drunk in a hallway. The next day, that agent and two others, despite Director Pierson’s presence, got so drunk again that they made public fools of themselves like a bunch of juvenile frat boys and had to be sent home, put on administrative leave, then given twenty-eight- and thirty-day suspensions. One agent even admitted that he had done the same exact thing, getting so drunk as to pass out, during a presidential visit to Chicago.

  But most of all Director Pierson was set up for failure by the Master Plan put into place by made men years before. The plan degraded the Uniformed Division and therefore the White House’s defense. On September 19, 2014, a fence jumper hopped the White House’s North Fence and sprinted several hundred feet across the lawn unhindered. He ran up the stairs leading to the White House’s front door, opened it, plowed into an officer, who was surprised to see him and with whom he wrestled as far as the Green Room, where he was finally tackled and stopped by an off-duty agent. The DHS and Secret Service blamed failures of equipment including their radios alarms and even the White House’s infrastructure.

  The truth was that the officer in the interior of the White House had neglected to hear the alarm because the Secret Service had rolled over for the ushers’ request to turn the pesky intercom volume all the way down. Protocol had been to lock the door at the first sound of an alarm, but the service made no adjustments to its plan even after it turned off the intercom. Its operators had never bothered to ask themselves: Does the plan still work with the intercom turned down? The radios would in theory have worked, except as with any radio, when several people hit the transmit button at once, it interrupts the signal. The radios were also vulnerable to cutting one another off as the encryption caused a one-second delay in transmissions. But that, of course, could still be mitigated if the officers were well rested and focused enough to be alert and yell out to others when a fence jumper made an attempt.

  Director Pierson’s responses to Congress were so unbelievable that many congressmen felt she was insulting their intelligence. They became frustrated because her responses and answers lacked any clear substance. She especially got into trouble when she seemingly contradicted herself and the Secret Service’s arrest report with two conflicting stories of whether the intruder had been stopped at the White House entrance or as far into the building as the Green Room—which latter had been true.

  Things didn’t get much better for Pierson in the wake of the September 16, 2014, incident at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. That day, while under Secret Service protection, President Obama was as close to death as any president has ever been. All that stood between life and death was the whim of several armed men whom the Secret Service assumed were unarmed and one armed man who placed himself next to the president—not once but three times. Anyone who asserts that this was an isolated incident doesn’t know the details that the service tried desperately, pathetically to keep secret.

  Since the CDC houses many of the world’s worst diseases and helps cure them around the world, it maintains its own 24/7 security, including armed guards. When the president visits a facility such as CDC, the Secret Service doesn’t replace the existing security; it augments it and adds its own layers, such as plugging into the organization’s security cameras and assigning employees to augment the organization’s security as needed. The CDC employed numerous armed security contractors for its daily defense. The Secret Service had to make sure it didn’t interfere with the CDC’s operations while still guaranteeing presidential security.

  For President Obama’s visit in Atlanta, the Secret Service asked the CDC Security Services for a spreadsheet with the names of its guards and their basic information (birth date, sex, Social Security number, and so on) and then did nothing more. It didn’t even run a background check on the names on the list—despite those employees being armed with handguns. It even sent a questionnaire to the CDC asking if its guards were armed. The CDC answered “Yes.” Still the Secret Service failed to follow up.

  Here’s how bad things got: in the after-action report, while agents were scrambling to figure out how they had screwed up and how they could downplay the issue, one senior agent wrote to another, “No other armed CDC security officers were in our secure areas. They were in non-secure areas. We did have unarmed CDC officers in our secure area. They were not name checked and should have been.” But there were in fact no unarmed CDC officers—all of them had guns. The Secret Service leadership had no idea that the men were armed, and the agents on site assumed they had all been vetted and were trustworthy. Therefore they didn’t bat an eye at the guns all around them. It was a volatile cocktail, a complete and catastrophic systematic failure.

  Things got worse. Against Secret Service policy, despite the officers’ not being on the service’s checklists, the service handed out “shift pins”—lapel buttons that serve to identify screened personnel—to all the unscreened armed guards. That meant agents would even be less likely to question them. Some guards did not get pins, but nobody seemed to notice either way, despite the pins’ being central to the president’s security.

  The utility elevator operator, an armed, unscreened guard, did not have a shift pin, but Secret Service agents took no notice. Unbeknown to the service, he had a criminal history of three arrests (but not convictions)—one of which was for, according to the congressional report, “reckless conduct with a weapon, when [the guard] intervened in a shooting incident at a neighbor’s apartment by shooting at and hitting a fleeing suspect’s vehicle while a three year old was in the back seat, though this charge was Nolle Processed due to the death of the defendant (the fleeing suspect) and a primary witness.” The other two arrests were for domestic disputes with family members.

  The Secret Service’s survey plans included no mention of an elevator operator, yet on the day of the event, some agents knew that the elevator operator was armed; others did not. But against all policy, PPD allowed the president to board the elevator with the mystery armed guard who did not have an identifying shift pin. They rode the elevator together, and by the grace of the guard’s goodwill the president and his Secret Service agents left unharmed. The special agent closest to the president didn’t even realize that the guard was armed.

  But after the doors opened and the president and his protection detail exited, the guard left his post and followed them. PPD’s special security
formation was thereby compromised. The guard managed to follow the president closely, creating gaps in the president’s protection, then began rudely taking pictures of the president with his cell phone as they left the building and went into a nearby security tent. Only then was he noticed and escorted out of the tent by an agent. The lead agent would only later discover that the guard had been armed the entire time.

  How the Secret Service and CDC handled the fallout from this incident says a great deal about the two agencies. Once the CDC learned of its guard’s behavior, that he had lied in an follow-up interview and had left his post in the elevator, it immediately fired him. The Secret Service, on the other hand, went into tried-and-true cover-up mode. No one was fired or disciplined. Instead, it blamed the CDC, as if it had been its job to guarantee that everyone surrounding the president was up to the Secret Service’s security standards and protocols.

  In the aftermath, the disconnect continued. The Secret Service chose not to inform the president of the series of lapses at the CDC, except for the cell phone photos. Director Pierson did not inform the president or his staff, who found out about it two weeks later, when the story broke on the news. The day after the president was made aware of the danger he’d been in, he accepted Pierson’s resignation. Joseph Clancy, appointed acting director after Pierson left, swore that the guards in the secure areas had not been armed except for the elevator operator—but he was wrong.

  But what was the central reason for the lapsed advance preparations? The agent in charge of the advance had been “overwhelmed.” The same reason applied to everyone else involved.