Protecting the President
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Initially, the Secret Service’s new role in securing NSSE events was limited by the infrequency of the designation. Before the DHS transfer it was relatively uncommon for an event to be designated an NSSE, and as a result, the detailed planning and manpower requirements needed from the Secret Service to secure these NSSE events were limited. But after the DHS transfer, these events became more regular, as seemingly every national summit or sports event tried to pass off their security costs to the federal government by obtaining an NSSE designation and having the Secret Service pick up the security tab. These NSSE events – from the Salt Lake City, Utah, Winter Olympics, to the Sea Island, Georgia, G-8 summit – were all vacuums sucking up Secret Service manpower and forcing agents into unmanageable professional lives, and even more stressful personal lives. As a result of the growing demand for its security services through the NSSE designation, the Secret Service expanded and started a new division to handle NSSE events. The new division was called the Major Events Division (MED), and as with every new government creation, this division has to be staffed with Secret Service agent personnel, with a fresh influx of taxpayer dollars to the agency to pay for it. The MED and the NSSE designation began a few years before the transfer to DHS, but in the eyes of many of the agents working through the DHS transfer, the correlation between the mission creep of the Secret Service and their deteriorating home lives and unmanageable work schedules left an indelible mark. And the DHS transfer became a convenient source of blame and agency scorn.
Pursuant to the Secret Service’s new NSSE responsibilities as national “event planners,” special agents were now being asked to act as elite protection agents for the world’s most threatened men and women, to function as tier-one financial crimes criminal investigators, and, as a result of the NSSE designation, to function as security guards for events with a lobbying staff big enough, or connected to enough of the “right people,” to obtain an NSSE designation. This is a story about the fall of the Secret Service that is rarely told in the media, but I lived it, and the complaints started to pile up as the NSSE events did. One of the complaints I heard often in the early 2000s, as the Secret Service was expanding at an uncontrollable rate, was “I didn’t sign up to be a security guard for a bunch of connected insiders.” Keep in mind, many of these men and women signed up to be Secret Service special agents aspiring to protect the president of the United States, but the NSSE designation meant that many of these agents were securing events that the president didn’t even necessarily attend. Skipping a few court dates on a big criminal investigation to protect the First Lady, the president, or a foreign head of state was what most of the agents understood as their calling, not watching a door for twelve hours outside of some international summit of self-important international wannabe big shots. The hit to special agent morale was devastating.
UNFORTUNATELY, THE SECRET SERVICE MISSION CREEP didn’t end with the expansion into NSSE events and the founding of the Major Events Division. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, the New York field office started informally investigating cellular phone fraud occurring within New York City. No one in Congress, the Treasury Department, or the Department of Homeland Security told the Secret Service to do these investigations; the New York field office was simply responding to a barrage of complaints about “cloned” cellular phones and the subsequent requests from the cell phone industry to do something about it. The “cloning” of cell phones was an enormous problem for both the cellular phone industry and their customers during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it was doing real damage to consumer confidence in the burgeoning industry. Every cell phone has an electronic serial number (ESN) in addition to the phone number, and technologically savvy thieves were using radio frequency interception devices to steal the phone number and the ESN combinations from cell phone owners and “cloning” them onto other cell phone devices. This enabled the thieves to sell “cloned” cellular phones, which would then be billed to the legitimate owner of the phone with the authentic ESN/phone number combination. Seeking help with this problem, representatives from some of the major cell phone service providers, who had worked previously with members of the Secret Service’s New York field office on financial crimes cases, began to work with their special agent contacts on investigating and prosecuting the cell phone fraudsters. Seems harmless enough, right? Well, it wasn’t. As agents from the New York field office investigated increasing numbers of these cases, the Secret Service’s investigative mission began to expand correspondingly. The investigative mission at that time was clear: the Secret Service was charged with investigating counterfeit U.S. currency, and financial crimes, such as check-kiting, bank fraud, credit card fraud, and U.S. Treasury check fraud. The Secret Service was not set up in the late 1990s to be an agency responsible for the investigation of electronic crimes such as cellular phone cloning. Yet, this is exactly what happened. The Secret Service and its headquarters management got starry-eyed seeing the potential gusher of post-retirement jobs in lucrative technology fields, such as the cellular phone industry. Add to that the pressure from a group of mid-level Secret Service managers in the New York field office and – voilá! The Secret Service became an electronic crimes investigative outfit as well as a protection agency, national “event planners,” and a financial crimes outfit. It happened. I was there.
At this point, you may be asking, “Was there an act of Congress, based on some study of Secret Service capabilities to take on this mammoth investigative responsibility in the electronic crimes sphere, that led to the Secret Service becoming the federal law enforcement agency responsible for leading the federal electronic crimes task forces?” Unfortunately, no, there wasn’t. The Secret Service’s humble electronic crimes beginnings, investigating cell phone cloning, rapidly evolved into one of the largest cases of federal law enforcement mission creep in modern history as the investigation of cell phone fraudsters morphed into the New York field office’s Electronic Crimes Task Force (ECTF). Led by a charismatic first-level supervisor at the time whom I’ll call Bill, the New York field office ECTF began to expand its tentacles into computer crimes, Internet child pornography, unauthorized movie and music trading over the Internet, and, critically, the trading of stolen credit card information over the Internet. Bill was a smooth operator with a Rolodex of contacts that would make the phone book jealous, and he rapidly expanded the mission of the New York field office ECTF and, by proxy, the Secret Service. He almost single-handedly expanded the mission of the Secret Service by contacting technology leaders and offering to work with them in the investigation and prosecution of criminals exploiting the still relatively new Internet for criminal purposes. Bill was a hardworking and dedicated agent, and I am in no way attempting to impugn his character by writing about his efforts to stem the growing menace of Internet-based crimes, but as with many good intentions within government, the real-world results of this new and expanded Secret Service mission was an expansion of the Secret Service mission not commensurate with its experience, manpower, or equipment capabilities. This further damaged special agent morale as the agency workload continued to expand unabated.
The impact of this dramatic expansion of the Secret Service’s traditional, statutory investigative role, and into the electronic crimes arena, impacted me personally, and many of the other members of the special agent workforce in 2003 and 2004. The origins of the dramatic drop in Secret Service morale within the New York field office, based on my many conversations with agents working in the office at the time, can be traced to this time period due to the New York Office ECTF’s investigation of “Shadowcrew,” a fraud case later made famous when it was featured on CNBC’s popular television show American Greed. This large, and nearly unmanageable, Secret Service electronic crimes case, dubbed “Operation Firewall” by the agency, was, in the eyes of many of the Secret Service’s headquarters managers, their way to show the world what the Secret Service could do in the electronic crimes arena. Operation Firewall was a complicated, intern
ational investigation where an organized group of technologically sophisticated thieves traded in large numbers of stolen credit card numbers over websites they monitored and managed. One of the Secret Service’s key informants in the case, a man named Albert Gonzalez, was to provide a window into the operations of the websites trafficking in these stolen credit card numbers. Gonzalez later made a fool of the agency when it was discovered that during the course of his informant work for the New York ECTF, he was also committing additional Internet-based crimes by hacking into corporate networks to steal more credit card information.
Operation Firewall could have appropriately been called “Operation Chaos” within the Secret Service’s New York field office because chaos is exactly what this case caused. The Secret Service’s dual investigative mission was becoming unmanageable as the 1990s ended and the new millennium began. The use of Secret Service agent manpower to plan for and secure NSSE events, the corresponding staffing of the new Secret Service “Major Events Division,” the expanding portfolio of people under Secret Service protection after the 9/11 terror attacks, and the new electronic crimes investigative mission strained the agency to the point of bursting. When the George W. Bush reelection effort, and the corresponding presidential election campaign season, began in 2003, agency morale soured across the country. I was assigned to a satellite office of the New York field office at the time, based on Long Island, and I recall a steady stream of complaints from agents forced to spend months on the road supporting presidential travel for the campaign, while many of the Operation Firewall agents were “hands-off.” “Hands-off” was Secret Service manpower jargon for agents taken off of the protection travel rotation, known as the ROTA (short for rotation). To ensure that agent travel from the Secret Service field offices around the country, and the world, in support of the protection mission of the agency, was equitably distributed among its international workforce, the Secret Service developed the ROTA to prevent agents from burning out on the road. Traveling for protection assignments in the Secret Service wasn’t much of a hardship when I was a young agent, full of vigor and eager to see the world. But after years spent on the road, and after marriage and children, I, along with most of my agent coworkers who had families, found travel to be incredibly tedious and we all looked forward to our own beds, time with our families, and home-cooked meals. Operation Firewall screwed up the ROTA for agents all across the country because the size of the investigation had vacuumed up dozens of agents, across multiple field offices, who were all pulled off the ROTA to support the Operation Firewall investigation. The complexity of the Operation Firewall case only stoked the flames of division within the Secret Service because many of the agents, forced to spend additional weeks on the road in protection assignments because of the shrunken ROTA, didn’t even understand what the hell the case was about and why the Secret Service was even involved in electronic crime.
Put yourself in the shoes of a married agent, with children, during this period, trying to explain to a wife working her own eight-hour day while also driving the kids to school, preparing their lunches, bathing them, and soothing crying young ones, that you’re on the road for an additional three weeks because of an electronic crime case being run out of the New York field office ECTF. Understandably, many of the spouses were pissed off, and they let their special agent husbands and wives know about it. Many of the spouses had been with their agent husbands and wives through the early 1990s, and they remembered protective travel assignments, but few could recall their husbands or wives being endlessly on the road. Compounding matters, and aggravating the souring morale among agents outside of the “hands-off” Operation Firewall, was the arrogant attitude some of the agents involved in the investigation of the case displayed toward the many of us in the New York field office and its satellite offices who were managing our own complex criminal investigations while also traveling around the globe to support protection missions. “Why am I canceling court dates and putting my investigations on hold to support the Operation Firewall agents?” we asked.
One of the ironic, and lasting, consequences of the Operation Firewall investigation wasn’t just its role in damaging morale and causing a spike in attrition as many New York agents simply left the job when work conditions deteriorated. The mishandling of the case was also damaging to the Secret Service’s investigative reputation. This is troubling because the gravity of the case, as measured by the catastrophic losses to the credit card industry and the unprecedented use of the “dark web,” presented a real opportunity for the Secret Service to shine when it broke up this major, international fraud ring. But it wound up having the opposite effect. The Secret Service entered the electronic crime sector through its early work on cell phone fraud cases and the industry contacts “Bill” had developed working these cases. It expanded, largely without the training and expertise to do so, into the Internet crimes sector and immediately plunged itself into the enormous Operation Firewall investigation. New York field office ECTF agents then broke the case by turning a member of the criminal organization running the fraud scheme into a paid federal law enforcement informant. This informant, hired as a government cooperator, then turned on the Secret Service and used his vastly superior computer knowledge (given the Secret Service’s lack of training and expertise in electronic crimes at the time) to commit additional crimes while, astonishingly, on the government payroll. The agents investigating this case were then pulled off of the travel ROTA, forcing the government to pay extra taxpayer dollars in overtime to overworked Secret Service agents forced to stay on the road and remain on the ROTA to cover for the agents monitoring the informant who was screwing over the Secret Service. This series of unfortunate events further damaged Secret Service agent morale and subsequently led to a spike in resignations. The disastrous handling of the case was a source of more fuel for the brewing discontent and worsening morale within the once-proud agency. In addition, many of the Operation Firewall agents, with their favorable work schedules due to their roles in the investigation, had availed themselves of some of the best contacts the technology industry offered as a result of being assigned to the ECTF. They then used these contacts to leave the Secret Service and take lucrative positions within many of the companies that were part of the Operation Firewall investigation or working with the ECTF. It’s an almost unbelievable story until you realize that it’s the federal government at the heart of it. Only the government can manage screwups like this with virtually no long-term accountability.
The federal law enforcement bureaucracy has countless stories like this, which provides additional evidence pointing to an aimless law enforcement alphabet soup of federal agencies, with no credible long-term plan, that delegates both de facto and statutory investigative authority to federal law enforcement agencies based on “connections,” parochial desires, and accidents of history. Ironically, even the Secret Service’s role as a protection agency came about, not as a result of a detailed plan based on the Secret Service’s capabilities and expertise, but because of public pressure to protect our presidents after the assassination of President William McKinley in September 1901. The Secret Service was informally protecting McKinley’s successor, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, after McKinley’s assassination, but they only became formally responsible for this mission years later, in 1906. The Secret Service was founded in 1865 not to protect the president, but to investigate the growing stock of counterfeit currency in the United States. Protecting the president is not a mission that requires the same set of skills necessary to conduct complex financial crimes investigations. Yet, similar to its usurpation of investigative responsibilities in the electronic crimes arena, it took over as the nation’s premier personal protection agency based on proximity to power, and an accident of history.
The Secret Service’s lead federal law enforcement role in the investigation of electronic crimes is now formal, despite its inability to manage its pre-electronic crimes investigative and protection missions. The 2001 P
ATRIOT Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush, cemented into law the Secret Service’s role as the lead agency responsible for the coordination of the nation’s electronic crimes task forces. And though this expansion has greatly widened the window of opportunity for postretirement employment for Secret Service agents, and for current agents with electronic crimes experience looking to escape the federal government for the more lucrative confines of the technology industry, it has been a disaster for Secret Service morale. This quote from a 2015 Washington Post piece sums up the catastrophic Secret Service morale problem: “The Secret Service ranks 319 out of 320 agencies, with a ‘sizable drop in employee satisfaction in all 10 workplace categories.’ The agency’s current index score measuring employee engagement is at a new low, 28 percent lower than last year and just half what it was 10 years ago.”4 With the exception of one worse-off agency, number 320 out of 320 on the agency morale scale, it literally couldn’t get any worse for the Secret Service.
IN MY EXPERIENCE AS A SECRET SERVICE AGENT from 1999 through 2011, mission creep was a significant factor in the destruction of Secret Service special agent morale. But it wasn’t the only factor. The Secret Service also had a problem with unresponsive management during this same time period. The management became infamous among the working agents on the protective details, and in the field offices, for answering nearly every critical question about systemic problems within the Secret Service with “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.” The 2014 United States Secret Service Protective Mission Panel’s report, which analyzed problems within the Secret Service, clearly fingered this problem by stating, “The Panel found an organization starved for leadership that rewards innovation and excellence and demands accountability. From agents to officers to supervisors, we heard a common desire: More resources would help, but what we really need is leadership.”5