Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  The shameful excuses only got worse when Pierson’s replacement, Joe Clancy, who had been brought out of retirement to head the agency, blamed the Secret Service’s inability to keep intruders out of the White House on its lacking a mock White House to train in. His proposed solution was to build a $8 million mock White House to scale, including realistic shrubbery and landscaping. The proposal was a mockery and an insult to everyone’s intelligence. They already had a building that resembled the executive mansion on one side and an embassy/hotel on the other. The truth was that officers and agents (flown in on temporary assignment) were too distracted, complacent, and exhausted to do more than watch, yell, and radio when faced with a real-life intruder.

  The Obama White House was threatened yet again on the night of March 4, 2015. At least, that’s what it looked like at first—an attack pitting the Secret Service against a crazed individual seeking to attack the White House. But the resulting conflict actually ended up pitting the Secret Service against itself.

  That night, Officer Samuel Mason of the Uniformed Division was approached by woman who pulled her car up to his post, got out, and, after a brief exchange, dropped a package at his feet, declaring that it was a bomb, and ran back into her car to flee. Mason didn’t hesitate; he ran up to the car, yelled for her to get out, and even reached in and put the car into park. She fought him and reversed, taking Officer Mason with her, as he was halfway into the car. He pulled out at the last second, and she sped off. He radioed the situation in and gave a description of the car but couldn’t make out the plates. Meanwhile, the bomb was still at his feet.

  The alert went out. All Secret Service mobile phones were updated that the White House was at “condition yellow,” meaning there was an active investigation of a serious crime. Mason’s post was cordoned off. Washington Metropolitan Police’s Bomb Squad was suiting up and on their way.

  Meanwhile, two Secret Service supervising agents, Marc Connolly and George Ogilvie, had been the last to leave a fellow supervisor’s retirement party and had racked up quite a serious bar tab. In Ogilvie’s government car, they drove to the White House. These were not two “low-ranking” agents. Connolly was the deputy special agent in charge of President Obama’s PPD, making him one of the most powerful men in all of the Secret Service. Ogilvie was a senior supervisor for the DC Field Office protection squad. According to interviews of Secret Service personnel on-site that day and the DHS Office of Inspector General, the two supervisors, made men of the Secret Service, were driving drunk. And they ended up in the middle of a suspected bomb site.

  Belligerent and arrogant, they drove past a UD officer who had tried to wave them away. They never bothered to check their phones and never saw the “condition yellow” update. They drove past police tape and numerous barriers.

  The two agents had come within inches of the bomb when officers, at first in total disbelief, ran bravely toward the car, trying to save their fellow Secret Service members’ lives. At least they hoped it was a Secret Service car—they had no idea who else would be either so stupid or so crazy as to try to breach the White House’s barricades. That’s when the confrontation began. According to interviews with anonymous Secret Service members, the agents were furious at the officers and accused them of abandoning their posts. Equally furious and afraid that the bomb might explode at any moment, the officers coaxed the arrogant agents to a vehicle blocking gate a hundred yards further into the White House complex. There they could contest the issue among themselves and away from the bomb. The officers, seeing the sorry state of the agents, knew them to be drunk and sought to breathalyze them as soon as they exited their car. The agents, on the other hand, doubled down, threatening the livelihoods and careers of the new officers. The officers sought backup from their chain of command.

  But guess where the Uniformed Division chain of command led to now, thanks to the Master Plan rules? To the same agent they were trying breathalyze, Marc Connolly.

  As the bomb was found to be a hoax, Agents Connolly and Ogilvie pressured their way into not being arrested or even so much as written up. As they were the highest ranking on-site (once they arrived), the Secret Service supposedly expected them to “self-report.” Having been thoroughly intimidated despite Ogilvie and Connolly having admitted that they were indeed driving drunk in their government car, none of the high-ranking UD officials passed the report on to the DHS OIG, and neither did Ogilvie or Connolly. For days it seemed the incident was going to be kept a secret. Meanwhile, the woman, arrested several days later after Secret Service agents missed her several times, was likely going to get a lesser sentence to keep the Secret Service’s catastrophic failure from coming to light.

  In the days that followed, word of the incident spread like wildfire throughout the Secret Service. Many agents and officers were ashamed. The entire incident underscored the fact that the service’s made men held themselves in much higher regard than the White House’s and president’s safety and that the agency that purported to be “worthy of trust and confidence” was anything but.

  The entire incident was going to be swept under the rug. The director only happened to catch word of the incident through an offhand mention on an internal message board.

  The story broke publicly when an anonymous Secret Service source leaked it, and the director and every person involved were called before DHS OIG investigators and a congressional investigation.

  During the investigation, the Secret Service relied on a collective sense of stupidity to thwart investigators when asked to explain why no one had passed on the incident to the DHS OIG, the Office of Integrity, or the Office of Professional Responsibility. None of it had been passed along, neither the gross dereliction of duty and crime of drunk driving nor the endangerment of other Secret Service members, the public, the White House, and the investigation. When Congress asked UD deputy chief Alfonso Dyson, the third-highest-ranking officer in the UD and the highest ranking at the White House, why he hadn’t passed on the incident to the agency’s Office of Integrity, he replied, “There is a wide range of things. If an officer violated some policy, but that’s not necessarily always going to go to Integrity. It really varies. It’s kind of difficult. There’s no set rule on every single misconduct issue.”

  Of course, the rules for everyone else are much clearer. Whereas any normal employee or citizen would be in severe trouble and face serious jail time for driving under the influence (DUI) the Secret Service holds its men to the lowest of standards. Then, even when their dirty laundry is shown to the world and numerous agents and officers are pulled in to testify before Congress, they play stupid and claim that there is not a specific policy to deal with driving drunk over an active bomb investigation, intimidating officers, withholding information related to an investigation, and so on.

  And despite specific training just two months prior detailing exactly the limitations and protocols of using a government car that stipulated that all government-issued cars were supposed to have a mileage log to make sure they were not being used for personal purposes, Ogilvie admitted that he never updated the log for any personal trips. As congressional investigators reported the “misunderstanding,” “USSS personnel may have employed creative means to circumvent this ethics rule; Ogilvie told DHS OIG that he understood that government-owned vehicle driving logs were not to record any mileage other than the drive from home to office or office to home. As a result Ogilvie’s driving log for March 4, 2015, listed no usage of the government-owned vehicle to drive to the retirement party and back to the White House Complex.” These are the people worthy of the agency motto?

  And what happened to the two Secret Service agents? Not much: Connolly retired as planned; Ogilvie was transferred, demoted from GS-14 to GS-13, and received a small suspension. A few other supervisors were given letters that stayed in their personnel files for three years. DHS OIG, even when it uncovered the fact that many who attended the retirement party had also driven drunk and even returned to work, did not pursue
the investigation.

  This is the Secret Service’s “plantation mentality.” The agents consider the Uniformed Division as subservient and “less than.” No matter what an officer’s rank and no matter what an agent’s rank, USSS has cemented a culture in which agents are always above officers. Not all agents wear that mentality on their sleeve, but “UD bashers,” such as A. T. Smith and Brian Stafford, did. New officers with naive notions of justice and accountability would try to push their limits, but as older officers tried to educate the new guys, some agents would make it their prerogative to hammer the plantation mentality home, making it clear that like the fence, the White House presidential helicopter, and most every Secret Service pillar, the service was stuck in its ways and loathed accountability more than anything else.

  Instead of changing the plantation mentality, the service’s made men sought to expand it. In the weeks afterward, several dozen agents conspired and lashed out against the leading congressmen on the House Oversight Committee. Those agents were so arrogant and cavalier that they even used their government emails to hatch their plot: The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA), a nonprofit law enforcement advocacy group, attempted to coerce Congressman Jason Chaffetz by releasing a sealed job application file from when Chaffetz had applied to the Secret Service in 2003 but been rejected. The leak of the application was designed to create a story to embarrass Chaffetz, as if to send the message that he had no right to critique and provide oversight to the Secret Service when he had not been accepted as an agent himself. Members of the service and FLEOA contended that Congress—which had the mandate to conduct oversight—had no right to conduct its oversight while the DHS was supposedly investigating the March 4 incident. The assertion that the Secret Service was above Congress was beyond absurd. Forty-one Secret Service agents were lightly disciplined, but the culture remained. As no one was severely punished or let go, the service’s made men essentially got away scot free.

  The media almost missed the story entirely, but the Washington Post carried the scoop, as it has with many other Secret Service mishaps. But it was around this time that the media’s role in the relationship among the Secret Service, the president, and the public was in the midst of change. A new, potent weapon against the president was emerging. The Secret Service had become a tool to manipulate the presidency by cavalierly writing off endemic failures as if they were unrelated scandals and by blaming the service’s failures on new presidents that are at the agency’s mercy; then, of course, there’s the demagoguery, the “soft endorsements” of assassination by celebrities and the media, that drives the mentally ill and easily manipulated onto a collision course with the Secret Service.

  But it might be that the media know exactly what they’re doing. The trend of treating Secret Service mishaps as presidential scandals is only getting worse.

  EIGHT.

  THE SECRET SERVICE SWAMP

  In April 2009, New Yorkers once again evacuated buildings and ran for their lives, fearing that another plane was about to crash into New York as they looked up and saw two F-16 jets and a Boeing 747 inexplicably flying low, circling over the waters off lower Manhattan. The planes flew off and the public, furious, demanded answers.

  It turned out that ninety-seven days after President Obama’s inauguration, unbeknown to the president, someone in the administration thought it would be a nifty idea to have the backup plane for Air Force One fly low over the Statue of Liberty to pose for a photo. The plane was not transporting the president or anyone else; the flight had been solely for a photo that was to be printed on souvenir cards sold at the White House gift shop. The head of the White House Military Office, who had approved of the flyby, resigned.

  A souvenir photo? Such a preposterous reason left the public demanding more explanation. How could “elite” government agencies—the FAA, the air force, the FBI, and especially the Secret Service—have allowed this or been so careless as to keep the flyover a secret from the people they were supposed to protect?

  The answer: the FAA had made the trip secret and threatened to jail anyone who leaked advance notice of Air Force One’s movement. In the aftermath, the Secret Service and other agencies apologized and pledged never to let “secret” get in the way of doing the right thing by the people they are supposed to serve.

  President Obama made it clear that he had had no knowledge of the flyby, but the media hounded him for weeks, expecting answers and solutions. It was his office’s plane, after all; the photo was for the White House gift shop; and the president was the man at the top.

  With time the public outcry subsided. The media later found new distractions, but the damage had been done: weeks of President Obama’s political agenda had been hampered as the media and the nation focused on the flyby scandal.

  This mishap spurred a change in the attitude of the media that came about during the Obama presidency and now seems poised to define the tenure of Donald Trump. During the Obama years, journalists and political operatives in the DC media world had an epiphany. A new form of “killing” a presidency came into its own. Even if a scandal was the fault of the Secret Service, in the future it could be used to hamper, impugn, malign, distract, and obstruct a president. As the Cartagena scandal demonstrated, a Secret Service scandal could be pinned to the sitting administration and become a presidential scandal. As the Secret Service spiraled downward, the agency responsible for protecting the president would soon become the vehicle by which political opponents attempted to blame the next president.

  Political opponents were going to use the Secret Service to politically assassinate the president, and Donald Trump is now in the crosshairs.

  One of the candidates in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, had been protected by the Secret Service nonstop since 1992. As a first lady and former first lady she had had a Secret Service detail for twenty-four years—every former first lady, like every former president, will have Secret Service protection until she passes away or decides she no longer wants it. When she became secretary of state under President Obama in 2009, after losing to him in the Democratic primary, she had a mix of State Department and Secret Service protective details.

  As Ronald Kessler correctly reported, Secret Service agents regarded her detail as a form of punishment. During the 2016 election, candidate Clinton had an incident in which she appeared to collapse, faint, or, stumble after she unexpectedly left a September 11 remembrance event in New York. For most pundits the word used to describe her fall depended on their political affiliation or their Secret Service expertise. Her detail agents caught her, braced up her limp body, and lifted her into her van as discreetly as possible without causing extra attention. Had one passerby not filmed the incident, the Secret Service would never have made the episode public. Aside from that incident, which called her health into question, she then coordinated a staged photo op outside her daughter’s New York apartment, where she greeted a little girl in an attempt to head off the scandal of her fainting spell.

  She had instructed agents to be far outside the viewing angle of the cordoned-off camera people across the street. After all the talk of the Secret Service leaders citing the “executive protective function privilege” during her husband’s tenure to be a matter of life and death, candidate Hillary Clinton put her protectors far beyond arms’ length for a mere photo op.

  But the Secret Service agents on her detail despised working it for so many reasons more than her indignant behavior toward them. For decades, agents had suffered the tirades and disrespectful attitudes of Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and others. They were exasperated with candidate and former first lady Clinton for not wearing the standard-issue belt designed as an aid for agents to use in extricating a protectee in a hurry—not that the Secret Service had ever planned ahead for a different style that would be favorable to a female candidate. Body armor for all female protectees had always been a nonstarter over the protectees’ concerns of “looking fat,” and the service’s leadership had given
up on the issue. But most of all it was things such as the unarmored van she insisted on using. The belt, body armor, and especially the van were part of a litany of examples where candidate Clinton jeopardized her protection for a mix of optics and comfort without the Secret Service being able to provide adequate alternatives.

  The van was a security nightmare. It was unarmored; its double doors, known as “suicide doors,” opened in different directions, one before the other, making extrication more difficult. The unarmored small engine could hardly take on gunfire or accelerate away from danger fast enough or ram other cars—that being the most important. Because of the reduced ground clearance due to the small tires and low running boards and bumpers, the van wouldn’t be able to run over an attacker, hop a curb, or power over loose terrain. Even if it had been armored, armor is extremely heavy, and the armor would have had to be minimal—that’s apparent to anyone with even a bit of expertise. So how much weight could that rear-wheel-drive van handle? How fast could the van extricate a protectee from an ambush? The bottom line was that the agents on her detail felt one of two ways: futile and angry or futile and in denial.

  During the Reagan assassination attempt, the presidential limousine had stopped one bullet from hitting President Reagan directly and saved his life; a sliver of the other bullet had ricocheted into his lung, but his armored limousine, which had powered him to the hospital in the nick of time, was prepared to ram anything that got in its way. It could even take a direct rocket hit. While not the presidential limo, candidates had specially made armored Secret Service SUVs that were tanks in their own right, only with greater ground clearance and better maneuverability. Clinton’s van, with its tiny wheels and high roof, was top heavy. Any armor or added weight would have made that worse, which meant it would have become more unstable at higher speeds and more likely to flip on a sharp turn.