Protecting the President
Page 2
That’s why I decided to write this book. Although I feel strongly that the Secret Service has faced an unusual amount of unfair media coverage, the agency’s problems are very real, and they require immediate action. The president of the United States is in genuine danger if the Secret Service doesn’t change course soon and evolve with the rapidly changing threat environment. The threats to the White House and the president are swiftly evolving in this new era of weaponized drones, micro-sized video surveillance technology, vehicle attacks on civilians, small arms tactical assaults, and technologically advanced and difficult-to-detect explosives. And if the decision makers in the Secret Service refuse to evolve with this series of threats, then, tragically, we may suffer the first loss of a president since John F. Kennedy. When I was a young Secret Service agent going through their special agent training program, the primary threats we trained to stop were single-shooter-type attacks, such as the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. The response to an attack such as the Reagan shooting, and the corresponding training that accompanies it, are far different from the response to a weaponized drone flying directly into a presidential motorcade. The simplest example of this is weapons technology. The weapons most effective in suppressing a rapid-fire, single-person, handgun-based attack such as the Reagan shooting are not the same weapons that would be effective against an organized terrorist team’s assault on the White House grounds using mortars, explosives, and automatic rifles.
I know many of you reading this book may be wondering, “Why give the bad guys any ideas by writing about security problems?” That’s both a fair and an appropriate question, but I assure you, the “bad guys” already have these ideas, and worse, would carry them out tomorrow if the logistics involved with planning an attack on the White House were easier. But logistics can be figured out as long as the motivation to attack remains intact. And terrorism shows no signs of abating. Terrorist planners will find a way to acquire the technology, the weapons, the explosives, and the know-how to eventually make an attempt on the life of the president of the United States. The real question we should ALL be asking is, “What the hell are we going to do about it?”
PART 1
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE SECRET SERVICE
1
THE SPECIAL AGENT MESS
WHEN LARGE ORGANIZATIONS EXPERIENCE SYSTEMIC FAILURES, these failures can be either top-down failures, driven by poor management decisions, or a bottom-up phenomenon, where the management’s strategic plan was a good one, but the execution by the employees fails. Unfortunately, the special-agent side of the Secret Service has seen its share of both types of failures. But the critical problems facing the Secret Service special agent side today are primarily due to sclerotic management, obsessed with the “old way” of doing things. Secret Service headquarters-based upper management is dangerously risk-averse and nonresponsive to the evolving threat environment Secret Service special agents face. Combine this with the endless zeal by Secret Service management to expand the mission of the Secret Service, despite insufficient manpower and training to do so, and we have an agency on the verge of collapse.
When I joined the Secret Service in 1999, the dreaded Y2K crisis was on everyone’s mind, and the agency had just completed a successful security operation for the visit of Pope John Paul II to the United States. Morale was universally high, and job complaints were few. Being a Secret Service agent in 1999 carried with it an unmistakable swagger. The agency had long since recovered from the multiple assassination attempts on Gerald Ford by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, and the shooting of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley Jr., and the Secret Service was riding a successful, nearly two-decade-long streak of relatively scandal-free operations. The morning I reported for my first day on the job as an agent, I was seated in the small but professional-looking and well-maintained (which surprised me, given that I left the New York City Police Department to join the Secret Service, and the facilities were in atrocious condition) lobby of the Secret Service’s New York field office, located in the pre-September 11, 2001, 7 World Trade Center building. I recall being impressed by the bravado and confidence of the agents who kept walking by. The New York field office had a swipe-card-and-PIN-based entry system at the time, and to get from one side of the office to the other, or one floor to the other, many of the agents would use the lobby as a shortcut. Every agent who entered the lobby would stop at the access control box, which would make a distinct beeping sound as each number of the agent’s access PIN was entered. The scramble pad would scramble the digits on the keypad each time, so agents would have to bend over to look at the pad to see which keys to press. (This prevented any onlookers from detecting an agent’s PIN when it was entered on the keypad.) As I sat in the lobby, both excited and anxious about my first day as a Secret Service agent, I noticed that every agent who passed me did the same thing. None of them looked at me directly, but instead they would bend over the scramble pad and, thinking I wasn’t looking at them, tilt their heads to catch a glimpse at the new guy and then go on their way. Their collective glances at me all screamed the same thing: “This is the Secret Service. Are you ready?”
When I, and the other rookie agents I was hired with, were finally allowed into the office, with a special agent escort, I noticed the same confidence and swagger among the agents wandering the hallways. Everyone was talking about a big counterfeit arrest they had just made, a door they’d just knocked down on an arrest warrant, or how one of the New York field office agents had just gotten “picked up” by the ‘detail” (Secret Service jargon for being reassigned to the Presidential Protective Division). Adding icing to the swagger-cake, which all of the agents I ran into on my first day seemed to be eating, was our interaction with an agent headed out on a criminal search warrant. The agent, a solid two-hundred-plus pounds of muscle, wearing a “New York large” T-shirt (note: this is a standard medium-sized shirt, for the non-bodybuilder crowd across the fruited plains outside of New York City), paraded by with a battering ram breaching tool designed to forcibly take down a locked door while executing a search warrant. As he passed, he told us, in the loudest “inside voice” possible (note: this would be called screaming by a non-New Yorker), about the “perp” (short for perpetrator) they were going to lock up that day. If you were casting a movie about street-hardened New York Secret Service agents, you couldn’t have had a more successful casting location than the hallways of the New York field office on my first day.
The whole scene was overwhelming, and impressive. And although everyone I ran into that day had an unmistakable swagger and confidence, it wasn’t misplaced or rude. For me, a young twentysomething who had only known about the Secret Service through Hollywood movies and fiction books but had always idolized the Secret Service and their awesome mission, this air of self-assurance was simply the fulfilling of my high expectations. It would be no different from walking into the New York Yankees’ locker room after a World Series winning season and noticing that same swagger. You would probably be disappointed if you entered the Yankees’ locker room under these circumstances and saw the team with hanging heads, their shoulders hunched, bitching and moaning about how terrible it was to be a Yankee. Thankfully, that was not the case in the New York field office, and it was clear to me that these seasoned agents were proud of their chosen profession and knew how to “win.”
Athletes and coaches talk about learning how to win all the time, and it’s an indispensable part of a successful organization. Aaron Rodgers, the Super Bowl-winning MVP quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, once told the sports media before a playoff game, “I think you have to learn how to win in the playoffs.”1 Notice, Rodgers didn’t say, “I think you have to learn how to play in the playoffs.” He specifically said, learn how to win.” Learning to win is a longitudinal exercise in repeated, successful execution that imbues an organization with an attitudinal productivity factor not explainable by the sum of individual efforts. Being on a “winning” team
is the X factor teams and coaches have been trying to bottle, and re-create, throughout the history of human competition in both sports and business. But sometimes having the best players, or the brightest employees, doesn’t translate into learning how to win (just ask the 2004 USA basketball team, which finished with a disappointing bronze Olympic medal despite having a team composed of elite NBA All-Stars). In 1999, the Secret Service was an organization that knew exactly how to win.
At some point between the closing years of the Bill Clinton presidency and the Secret Service transfer from the Department of the Treasury to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003, the Secret Service stopped winning. As special agents during this 2003 transfer, many of us were unsure about how it was going to impact the mission, or us personally, in the future. But the actual transfer was relatively uneventful. We all received shiny new badges and identification cards, but other than those cards reading, “Department of Homeland Security” rather than “The Department of the Treasury,” and the badges getting bigger and shinier (the new DHS badges added a large, silver, five-pointed star overlay on top of a new gold badge), nothing really changed in the short term. Our paychecks were still direct-deposited in our bank accounts in the same amounts, and the paperwork to conduct criminal investigations, security advances, to inventory evidence, and to account for our man-hours, despite desperately needing revision, all remained unchanged. Even our offices stayed in the same locations as they were before the transfer. I, along with many agent colleagues of mine, pondering the nonevent of the transfer, began to wonder after a few months what the point of the transfer to DHS was. If consolidation and efficiency improvements through the leveraging of economies of scale and scope weren’t the goals of the transfer, and nothing really changed on the ground, then why did the politicians and bureaucratic class make this move? Looking back on the decision through the lens of the post-September 11, 2001, world, it appears that the decision was a reactionary political “solution” looking for a problem to solve. The Secret Service was “winning,” and performing admirably, under the Treasury Department and, ironically, doing so using half of the roughly two billion federal tax dollars it currently consumes.
IF YOU ASKED A HANDFUL OF SENIOR SECRET SERVICE AGENTS why the Secret Service stopped winning during the period in question, you would get an assortment of different answers, but many of those answers would include the infamous DHS transfer, poor management, a broken pay scale, a broken promotion system, and the expanding mission of the Secret Service that immediately preceded the DHS transfer. Many of the agents in my cohort called the DHS transfer the “hostile takeover” and saw almost nothing positive come from it, while simultaneously noting that the “winning” stopped after the transfer. In my experience, most of the special agent mess that occurred immediately before and pursuant to the DHS transfer can be attributed to the significant “mission creep” that occurred within the Secret Service during those years. When the Secret Service was located within the Treasury Department, they had limited criminal investigative duties, and their tacitly understood (because Secret Service management couldn’t acknowledge formally that their criminal investigations were often sidelined in lieu of protection missions or they would run the risk of losing the investigative functions altogether) primary function was protection. To the rank-and-file special agents, this was always understood to mean that whatever criminal case you were working on at the time, whether it was a counterfeit currency case or a credit-card fraud case, the investigation was going to take a backseat if a Secret Service protectee came into your district. We all knew that we were expected to drop everything when the president, vice president, their families, or a foreign head of state planned to visit our assigned areas of responsibility. This drop-everything-for-protection agency mind-set caused a lot of headaches with the local assistant United States attorneys (the government prosecutors assigned to prosecute federal investigations through the federal legal system) because if an agent was assigned to a case where a federal arrest had been made, and the prosecution phase had begun, the assistant U.S. attorneys would have to constantly juggle around the court schedule based on the ability of the Secret Service agents to appear. (Federal judges weren’t big fans of this either and wouldn’t hesitate to let us know through the assistant U.S. attorneys.)
This “drop everything” for protection approach to federal investigations hit close to home with me during the prosecution phase of multimillion-dollar credit card fraud ring I was investigating in 2000 and 2001. The suspects in the case had unlocked a proprietary algorithm that credit card companies used to create account numbers, and they were probing the numbers with small, nearly unnoticeable purchases to determine which credit card numbers were active. When they found an active card number, they would create a counterfeit credit card bearing the stolen account number, and then proceed to local chain stores to buy gift cards. They would sell the gift cards for cash, at a discount, later. The scam was enormous in size and scope. Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost to fraud in this scam, and it was suspected that a portion of the ill-gotten gains was being used to finance international terror groups. We broke up the scheme, after months of painstaking surveillance and investigative forensics, when we caught a low-level operator in the scheme on camera using one of the counterfeit credit cards in a hardware store. With a criminal case of this magnitude, a casual observer would think that the Secret Service would prioritize the investigation, but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. The Secret Service is a protection-centric agency, and Hillary Clinton was running for the U.S. Senate seat in New York at the time. Due to the competitive nature of the race, Mrs. Clinton became a frequent visitor to Long Island, the area of New York I was assigned to cover. Each visit by Mrs. Clinton delayed the investigation and prosecution of the credit card fraud case, as I was pulled off the case to do security advances and protection assignments. The size of the fraud case (based on the incredible volume of credit card numbers stolen), combined with the mounting financial losses in the hundreds of millions, made the workload for the case suffocating given my expanding protective responsibilities with Mrs. Clinton. (Thankfully, I worked the case with an understanding FBI agent who would fill in for me when I had to cancel a court appearance or an appointment with the assistant U.S. attorney.) I learned to forget about weekends because the week never actually ended. I would go from a criminal surveillance related to the fraud case, to protection, to court, and then repeat the cycle the next week. I spent weekends either on protection or formulating reports on the fraud case. Still, although it was a headache balancing the dual protection and investigative missions of the Secret Service, it was manageable outside of campaign season. (The Hillary Clinton protection workload was an exception because the Long Island Secret Service office to which I was assigned only had a few working agents assigned to it, unlike the New York field office, which had hundreds of special agents assigned there.) The assistant U.S. attorneys gave us a lot of slack (it didn’t hurt that we would get them pictures with the Secret Service protectees if they asked).
It was right around this busy time in my nascent Secret Service career that the Secret Service’s dual mission started transforming into the never-ending mission. The agents were still adjusting to the dramatic increase in protection assignments because of the unprecedented situation that had developed with Hillary Clinton. Secret Service agents had historically had a light travel schedule when they were assigned to the First Lady’s Detail (FLD), but Mrs. Clinton’s decision to run for the U.S. Senate in New York changed all of that. Her schedule mutated into a campaign schedule, not a First Lady’s schedule, which largely consisted of ceremonial events in the past. And although morale was still strong, despite the onslaught of protective assignments emanating from the Presidential Protective Division’s Operations Section (responsible for handling the logistics for the First Lady’s travel), I began to hear grumblings from agents about the relentless protection workload. Unfortunately, the growing por
tfolio of protection assignments due to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for office happened not long after the Secret Service took on the lead role for securing nationally significant events determined to be “National Special Security Events” (NSSE) in 2000 pursuant to the Presidential Decision Directive 62 (PDD-62)2 and the Presidential Threat Protection Act of 2000.3