In the President's Secret Service (31 page)

“The reason they do it obviously is so they can walk over to Congress and inflate the investigative success of the agency” says a former agent who joined the inspector general’s office of another federal agency. “They make a copy of the police report and make a copy of the note, and that’s about it. The FBI does not do that. It’s a game, and it’s deceptive.”

Moreover, instead of rooting out the biggest offenders, “By and large, arrests are all about the numbers,” an agent says. “Very infrequently do we go after the big fish. We work very few high-profile cases that get to the source of counterfeit currency and the stolen credit card numbers.”

When asked about the practice of padding Secret Service statistics with arrests made by local authorities, Ed Donovan, a Secret Service spokesman, did not respond.

Why the Secret Service has the dual role of protection and law enforcement in the first place is a legitimate question. While the FBI traditionally leaves counterfeiting investigations to the Secret Service, it covers all the other financial crimes Secret Service agents investigate. But since the needs of the protection side rise and fall, the Secret Service’s dual role provides flexibility. The agency can always borrow agents from the investigative side when needed. Maintaining field offices that interact with local law enforcement on a daily basis helps the protection side when the president comes to town.

Agents say that after spending endless nights in a Suburban guarding a protectee, they look forward to eventually returning to investigative work. Interviewing people as part of a criminal investigation sharpens agents’ skills when dealing with possible threats to the president. While many agents are former police officers, most are not. Investigating crimes, they learn to evaluate body language and
eye movement to get a sense of whether an individual is being deceptive.

The value of combining investigative and protective operations is that as a criminal investigator, “You learn the basics,” Nick Trotta says. “You learn about your own safety and your partner’s safety. You learn how to think on your feet when you’re out on the street and get in the mind of the criminal—whether it’s a counterfeit case or the financial fraud cases. I think that our dual mission is what makes us unique, and it makes our agents very efficient and effective in our overall missions.”

The downside of the Secret Service’s dual role is that agents often cannot show up for a meeting with prosecutors or for a court appearance because they have been pulled off for a protection assignment.

“You could be working one of the biggest cases, and if your name gets pulled to go on a protective operation, you’re off that case to perhaps stand in a hallway as a king of a small country comes to get his prostate checked at the Mayo Clinic,” says a former agent.

For that reason, U.S. Attorneys dread working with Secret Service agents.

The larger problem is that the Secret Service blindly takes on greater jurisdiction on the investigative side and more duties on the protection side without obtaining a commensurate increase in budget and agents. That is a reflection on management, not the agents, who are generally sharp and dedicated. More than officers or agents of any other law enforcement agency, FBI agents who have worked with them admire Secret Service agents.

Aside from their normal duties, agents have saved lives by giving cardiopulmonary resuscitation and have prevented murders and apprehended hit-and-run drivers, as Agent Patrick Sullivan did in New York one afternoon. Driving alone on the FDR Drive, he saw a car in front of him racing northbound at high speed. A man was changing his
tire at the side of the road underneath the Williamsburg Bridge. The speeding car hit the parked vehicle, sending the driver into the air.

Sullivan radioed the New York field office asking for police assistance and an ambulance. He turned on his flashing red light and siren and chased the car uptown, where he finally headed him off on First Avenue, in front of the United Nations. Drawing his gun and displaying his badge, Sullivan ordered the man from the car and held him until police arrived. The victim survived.

In other cases, agents prevent harm to protectees in unusual circumstances. When young Amy Carter attended Ethel Kennedy’s annual Hickory Hill Pet Show at Ethel’s estate in McLean, Virginia, in May 1978, a three-ton elephant named Suzie charged her. As the crowd scattered in panic, an agent scooped up Amy and carried her to safety.

Aside from agents who have lost their lives in the line of duty, many have contracted incurable tropical diseases like dengue fever and other maladies while protecting U.S. officials overseas. Agents will literally give protectees the shirts off their backs—as agent Harold Ewing did when the president’s limo hit a pothole on the way to Annapolis and Bill Clinton spilled coffee all over his own shirt.

“The Secret Service attracts a lot of people who have been brought up with a certain code of ethics,” says former agent Norm Jarvis, who trained new agents and later was a special agent in charge. “Those ethics mean that a person who would ordinarily be interested in preserving his own life is willing to sacrifice his life. The training that the agent goes through doesn’t necessarily say, ‘When you hear this, this is what you’ve got to do. You hear a gunshot, and step one is this. Step two is you take a bullet for the president.’ It’s basically, you go to an instinct kind of mode.”

Obviously, Jarvis says, “When you sign up for the job, you have to come to the conclusion that you would step in front of the president to
protect him from an assassin. But,” he adds, “I don’t even think it’s worth contemplating. You would just do it.”

“The greatness of the Secret Service is its people,” says former agent Pete Dowling. “Somehow we get high-quality people who are superdedicated to a mission.”

No one knows how many assassination attempts have been prevented because a gunman decided an attempt was too risky or because the Secret Service confiscated a weapon. Beyond the well-publicized attempts, presidents and other protectees have been targets of dozens of lesser-known plots. For example, when Edward M. Kennedy was running for president in 1979, agents subdued a knife-wielding woman who entered the reception room in his U.S. Senate office.

“The Secret Service’s mission of preventing a criminal act is far harder than investigating one after it takes place,” FBI director Robert S. Mueller III tells me.

Yet effective as Secret Service agents have been, their capability is diminished by a management that cuts corners when the need for tight security has never been greater, and refuses to recognize that the agency cannot properly handle all the duties it unflinchingly assumes. Just as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover managed to cover up the bureau’s shortcomings through good public relations, the Secret Service has done a brilliant job of projecting an image of infallibility that is not deserved.

Even Hoover’s obsessive emphasis on dressing sharply and wearing white shirts is mirrored by Secret Service management. In one of his first communications with agents after being named deputy director in July 2008, Keith Prewitt said that agents should dress like Secret Service agents when traveling. Yet agents point out that one way to catch a terrorist planning to take down an airplane is to dress in the most casual clothes so a terrorist does not suspect the person sitting next to him is a law enforcement officer.

In one respect, Hoover’s management style differed from the Secret Service’s: Hoover inspired loyalty to himself and the organization. Secret Service management inspires mistrust and cynicism, leading to low morale.

In explaining this counterproductive culture, agents say that Secret Service officials prefer to maintain the status quo rather than make waves and rock the boat. That way, they further their chances for promotion, resulting in high-paying jobs in the private sector. Meanwhile, top agents who head field offices drive BMWs, Lexuses, Corvettes, and Jaguars, cars that have been seized in arrests. The rationale is that the vehicles could be used for undercover work. In fact, they rarely are. Rather than providing senior agents with luxury cars, the Secret Service should sell such cars to generate money for the Treasury Department.

“If anyone did that in the FBI, we would be in hot water,” says a former FBI assistant director. “In the FBI, cars used for undercover work are designated as such, and the head of a field office would never get one.” Nor, the former agent says, does the FBI claim an arrest if it is made by local police.

Secret Service agents believe that if they press their concerns and point out shortcomings, they will suffer repercussions. “Management will label them as malcontents or implement classic Secret Service retaliation, most notably an undesirable duty station and lack of advancement, or both,” an agent says. “Everyone at headquarters sees the job as a stepping stone to something better. If you raise a big issue, you waste your energy, and they want to screw you. It creates a culture of fear.”

In 1978, the Secret Service asked Frank M. Ochberg, a former associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health, to study agents and their jobs to see if they were under excessive stress.

“I found the danger they face is not a source of significant stress,” says Ochberg, who is now clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan
State University. “Rather, it was an excessively authoritarian management style that does not respect agents enough and does not try to make arrangements so they don’t miss their daughter’s christening or graduation. The attitude was, ‘Yours is not to wonder why; yours is just to do or die.’”

Based on Ochberg’s recommendation, the Secret Service stopped its practice of forcing agents to double up in hotel rooms. Until then, agents on different shifts sleeping in the same room would wake each other up getting ready for work. But beyond that change, the problems have become worse. The Secret Service’s management has become even more rigid, insular, and even punitive. An agent who left to work for another federal law enforcement agency says with relief, “I am now being treated as an adult.”

To get ahead, agents say that, much more than in most other organizations, they need connections—juice—meaning higher-ups who take a liking to them and socialize with them. The perception of favoritism has been furthered by management’s overreaction to a lawsuit by black agents claiming discrimination. During discovery, the lawsuit uncovered two dozen or so emails with racist comments or jokes out of twenty million emails sent by Secret Service employees over a period of sixteen years. In April 2008, a black agent was confronted by a noose strung up by a white instructor at the Rowley training center. The instructor was placed on leave.

Despite these disgusting but isolated problems, the proportion of black agents in the service is 17 percent, much higher than the 12 percent of blacks in the rest of the population. An independent analyst found that for each year from 1991 to 2005, African American agents were promoted to senior pay grades more quickly than white agents. In fact, 25 percent of supervisors belong to ethnic minorities. Since 2001, three black agents—Keith Prewitt, Danny Spriggs, and Larry Cockell—have served as deputy director, the number-two spot.

“The service is very sensitive to the diversity issue, and the statistics and appointments to top posts demonstrate that,” Spriggs says.

Growing up in Detroit, “I never could have imagined that I would one day be with the president in his limousine, in the White House every day, and riding on Air Force One,” says Reginald Ball, a black agent who became a supervisor.

Ironically, several racist emails uncovered by the lawsuit had been sent by Reginald Moore, the plaintiff who is alleging discrimination by the agency. One email sent by Moore contained a joke about a black woman hitting her daughter.

Despite these facts, the Secret Service has overreacted by promoting a few black agents to high-ranking positions even though they are not generally thought to be up to the job. While other black agents are among the agency’s best, reverse discrimination does a disservice to everyone in the organization and to the people agents protect.

W
HEN ONE CONSIDERS how important to our democracy preventing an assassination is, the amount spent on the Secret Service—$1.4 billion a year, nearly two thirds of it for protection—seems like a misprint. Indeed, while the agency’s budget increased substantially after 9/11, since then it has actually decreased, when inflation is taken into account. That does not include supplemental appropriations to cover incremental costs for coverage of campaign and national security events.

This at a time when well-funded terrorists have replaced the lone deranged gunman as the greatest threat to American elected officials and when threats against the president are up 400 percent. Yet rather than ask for substantially more funds from Congress, the Secret Service assures members that the agency is fulfilling its job with the modest increases it requests, even as it takes on more duties and sleep-deprived agents work almost around the clock.