In the President's Secret Service (17 page)

“These people who are leaving are very qualified agents who are doing a really good job and are held in high esteem,” an agent says. “That’s what really hurts us.”

The Secret Service asked an analyst then based in Washington to study the problem of retention and the costs associated with agent turnover. She found it was an increasingly serious problem. The incremental cost to the government of training a new agent is eighty thousand dollars for the agent’s salary and the cost of equipment and travel. That excludes the fixed costs of the training facilities and the salaries of instructors.

“The higher-ups basically dismissed her findings, saying, ‘Oh, we don’t have any kind of retention problem,’” says a current agent. “They didn’t want to hear it.”

Johnson, who is now a real estate investor, describes trying to raise the issue during her exit interview.

“The supervisor who was giving me the exit interview was literally saying, ‘Tell me if there are any problems we should know about’ as he was starting to escort me out the door,” Johnson says. “I said, ‘Well, yes, I’m sure you hear this a lot,’ and I began to lay out examples of unnecessary burdens imposed on agents.”

The supervisor became defensive.

“He started going on about how the military does more, and there are civilians who sacrifice more than we do in the service,” she says. “He couldn’t even listen to what I had to say.”

In a rare move, an agent raised the issue at a meeting of Secret Service officials at the agency’s Washington field office.

“You’ve got a bunch of Generation X agents,” he said. “We’re concerned about our families; we’re concerned about our wives and our kids. Something has to change.”

Shortly after that, the agent resigned.

In recent years, agents say a dismissive, insular culture and a disregard for the need to retain agents have remained constant.

“Our leadership is in absolute denial that there’s a problem,” an agent says. “They don’t want to do anything to fix it.”

Agents say the Secret Service promotes those who have a similar mind-set and that agency directors stay for two or three years, then leave without changing the culture. As one example of poor management practices, they cite a statement made by a special agent in charge of the vice president’s protective detail. The supervisor said that no agents on the detail would ever be promoted because of the number of agents who are seeking promotions.

“The best you can hope for is to get to an office you can make the most of, because the next move will probably be your last,” the official told his own agents.

“Needless to say, morale went from low to rock bottom with that,” says an agent who was at the meeting. “Several agents left saying they were done, time to move on.”

Johnson says she accepts that by its very nature, a Secret Service agent’s job is demanding. While she was assigned to protect former president Clinton, he was constantly traveling all over the world. She could hardly ever plan anything in her personal life, because her schedule was his schedule.

What Johnson and others resented was that the Secret Service ignored simple opportunities to lessen the necessary burdens of the
job. For example, the Secret Service lets agents know their schedules for the coming week late Friday afternoon, just before the weekend starts. As a result, agents are prevented from planning social and family events.

On trips, agents are expected to work virtually around the clock. In the past several years, the Secret Service imposed limits on overtime pay, offering compensatory time instead. But the agency often denies agents the opportunity to use compensatory or flextime they have earned in lieu of overtime pay. When flextime is taken, it usually must be taken within a week. If an agent has other duties already scheduled, the agent may be forced to forfeit the flextime. After seven years, an agent based in a major city might make upward of $110,000 a year without overtime.

“When you’re doing foreign advances, you’re working eighteen-and twenty-hour days, seven days a week, yet the schedule says you are working nine to five,” says an agent.

What this means is that the Secret Service pays overtime for weekends worked but not for additional hours during the week. In another twist, the agency, as a matter of practice delays paying out overtime earned for two or three years. In the fall of 2008, supervisors on the president’s protective detail even began refusing to record agents’ overtime pay. When agents began complaining to the financial management division, they were told by supervisors not to make further inquiries.

Paid or not, agents end up working eighteen-hour days.

“How tired do you get? Just imagine sleeping three or four hours a night for a week,” says an agent.

“Pilots have mandatory rest periods,” says a former agent. “But you’ve got a guy standing next to the president with a loaded gun who hasn’t had sleep in three days and has traveled through four different time zones.”

One night, the agent and his wife had an argument.

“You have no right to discipline your children, because you’re not their father,” his wife said to him. “You don’t act like their father; you’re never around.”

She was right, the former agent says.

“I was never around,” he says. “I was missing everything. I was missing Christmas, I was missing Thanksgiving.”

The agent quit.

The agency’s rigidity extends to administrative personnel. An investigative assistant who was a crackerjack at her job of providing agents with the data they needed asked for a schedule change. She wanted to come to work a half hour earlier than her current schedule called for and leave a half hour earlier so she could pick up her child at day care.

The Secret Service refused, so she left for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. There, she got the schedule she wanted. She even got to work at home on Fridays.

After being a Secret Service agent for almost ten years, Johnson finally quit. She says the agency is mostly run by agents who are “old-school” and think everyone wants to join the Secret Service at any cost.

“In the old days, the Secret Service was a great gig,” Johnson says. “People lined up to join. They had applications on the shelves for years. People would drop everything at the drop of a hat to get a Secret Service job. It was great pay and offered stability. Well, times have changed, but their mentality hasn’t. People can go out and make a lot more money in the private sector, a lot more money on their own, for much less risk. Management’s attitude is almost as though we should literally be thanking them every day we wake up and have a job.”

The Secret Service has trouble finding qualified applicants to replace those who are driven away.

“Getting a number of applicants is not a problem. Getting qualified applicants is always a problem,” Johnson says. “Because of the [service’s] high standard, a large portion of the population wouldn’t qualify to be an agent. They’ve done various things trying to recruit good people, but the bottom line is that their policies are driving away the good people they already have.”

“They chew their people up,” says a former agent. “They treat agents like the Apache Indians treated their horses: They would take their best horse and ride it and ride it, and when it dies, they finally eat it.”

T
HE VICE PRESIDENT’S residence is a handsome 9,150-square-foot three-story mansion overlooking Massachusetts Avenue NW Complete with pool, pool house, and indoor gym, the white brick house was built in 1893 as the home of the superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Congress turned it into the official residence of the vice president in 1974 and gave it the address One Observatory Circle.

Vice President Mondale was the first to live at the residence. While Mondale’s predecessor Nelson Rockefeller could have moved there, he chose to remain in his Foxhall Road estate in Washington and use the vice president’s residence for entertaining.

During the day, at least five navy stewards attend to every personal need of the second family, including cooking, shopping for food, cleaning, and doing the laundry. At night, the stewards—known as navy enlisted aides—bake chocolate chip cookies and other goodies for the second family. They also stash leftovers from parties in the refrigerator.

The Secret Service has a separate building—code-named
Tower—on the grounds. The vice president’s residence itself is referred to by agents simply as “the res.”

Back when George H. W. Bush was vice president, Agent William Albracht was on the midnight shift at the vice president’s residence. Agents refer to the president’s protective detail as “the big show” and to the vice president’s protective detail as “the little show with free parking,” because unlike the White House, the vice president’s residence provides parking for agents.

New to the post, Albracht was told by Secret Service Agent Pete Dowling, “Well, Bill, every day the stewards bake the cookies, and that is their job, and that is their responsibility. And then our responsibility on midnights is to find those cookies or those left from the previous day and eat as many of them as possible.”

At three
A.M.
, Albracht, assigned to the basement post, was getting hungry.

“We never had permission to take food from the kitchen, but sometimes you get very hungry on midnights,” Albracht says. “I walked into the kitchen that was located in the basement and opened up the refrigerator. I’m hoping that there are some leftover snacks from that day’s reception,” the former agent says. “It was slim pickin’s. All of a sudden, there’s a voice over my shoulder.”

“Hey, anything good in there to eat?” the man asked.

“No. Looks like they cleaned it out,” Albracht said.

“I turned around to see George Bush off my right shoulder,” Albracht says. “After I get over the shock of who it was, Bush says, ‘Hey I was really hoping there would be something to eat.’ And I said, ‘Well, sir, every day the stewards bake cookies, but every night they hide them from us.’ With a wink of his eye he says, ‘Let’s find ’em.’ So we tore the kitchen apart, and sure enough we did find them. He took a stack of chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk and went back up
to bed, and I took a stack and a glass of milk and went back to the basement post.”

When Albracht returned to the post, Dowling asked, “Who the hell were you in there talking to?”

“Oh, yeah, sure, right,” Dowling said when Albracht told him.

Bush’s regular vice presidential detail played a prank on an agent who was on temporary assignment, telling him that it was okay to wash his clothes in the vice president’s laundry room.

“He went down and used the vice president’s washing machine and dryer,” former agent Patrick Sullivan recalls. “Mrs. Bush came down and said to the other agents, ‘He’s doing his laundry!’”

A supervisor heard about the incident. Mortified, he told Barbara Bush that it had all been a practical joke.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said.

In fact, at the Bush home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Barbara Bush once strode to the Secret Service post and asked if agents had any laundry they would like her to do, since she was about to do a load anyway. She was so close to the agents that when Pete Dowling’s wife, Lindy was expecting a baby, the first lady instructed him to call her when the baby arrived, day or night.

As vice president, Bush flew to a fund-raiser in Boise, Idaho, during the 1982 election campaign. He was to have dinner at the Chart House seafood restaurant on North Garden Street on the banks of the Colorado River.

“The way we protected him, we had some agents inside, but typically what we’d do was situate ourselves at dining tables near him,” says former agent Dowling.

Dowling had been seated a few minutes when he heard a radio transmission that two white males in camouflage outfits with long weapons were low-crawling around the back toward their location.
They had their weapons in their hands and were crawling on their bellies, moving themselves along with their elbows.

Just then, Dowling looked up and saw the two bad guys. He recalled intelligence reports that Libya had sent a hit squad to the United States to kill American officials. The agent instinctively jumped out of his chair and tackled Bush to protect him. As food flew everywhere, Dowling threw the vice president onto the ground and flopped on top of him.

“What’s going on here?” Bush asked.

“I don’t know, but just keep your head down,” Dowling replied.

Dowling looked up. He saw about a hundred law enforcement officers with their guns drawn—Secret Service agents, sheriff’s department deputies, and state troopers. They were on the scene as part of routine protection for a visit by the vice president. The two bad guys were kneeling with their hands clasped behind their heads.

“We evacuated the VP out of the restaurant to get him away from whatever danger may have still been there,” Dowling says. “You would think I had just thwarted an assassination attempt.”

As it turned out, the restaurant was near an apartment complex where the girlfriend of one of the two men lived.