Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  But the Secret Service’s problems didn’t begin with the Clintons and surely didn’t end with them either. Of the twenty-five presidents protected by the Secret Service, the problems involved in protecting Bill Clinton were not unique. Each officer and agent charged with protecting our president, and the agency’s leaders up to the highest level, know the Secret Service motto: “Worthy of Trust and Confidence.” But they must also ask themselves, of whom are they “worthy of trust and confidence”? During the Clinton years, the agency’s inner circle landed on a shocking answer: to itself. From then on, the agency has been turned against itself.

  Like so many of those who joined the Secret Service, I joined because I wanted to see the Secret Service win—and winning meant enabling the president to live and lead without fear. Keeping the president safe keeps the country together. Can you imagine the grief, the anger, and the fallout if any future president—or any member of the first family or a foreign dignitary—were assassinated?

  It seems impossible, even unthinkable, but four US presidents have been murdered. Four presidential candidates have been shot: two killed, one paralyzed. Especially in recent years, there have been far too many “near misses” in which the deciding factor between a living protectee and another assassination was luck. Since 1951, when the Secret Service was officially tasked with permanent presidential protection, the agency has had a 91.7 percent success rate, but it drops down to less than 66.7 percent when also considering the nearly catastrophic failures on the attempts of Presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush in which the deciding factor was largely luck. That’s unacceptable.

  After each near miss, the Secret Service puts on a “shake-up,” a big show in which it promises the nation that it really is the “elite” protection force it claims to be. “You can trust us,” its spokespeople say. “The president is safe in our hands.”

  But can we believe it? Through all the failures, can we trust it this time?

  The Secret Service will say whatever it needs to to achieve its goals—but so will I. Answer the question yourself: If the Secret Service were focused on its main priority, would it have allowed so many serious breaches in just the last few years?

  In 2011, a man fired several shots from a rifle at the White House, but responding officers were told to “stand down” and that their eyes and ears had deceived them; the shooter even initially got away.

  In 2012, more than a dozen agents and their management planned to use President Obama’s trip to Colombia to party and hire prostitutes. They went ahead with their plan and nearly got arrested for refusing to pay the prostitutes—and in the investigation that followed, the director even misled and deceived Congress.

  In 2014, advance agents screened everyone at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ahead of a visit by President Obama—everyone, that is, except the private armed security guards. A guard with a criminal history managed to get onto an elevator with the president—he simply walked past all of the Secret Service’s security. He caught the Secret Service’s attention only when he started snapping pictures inches away from the president’s face. Afterward, the director misled, deceived, and failed to inform Congress and the president, who had to find out about the breach from the news media. Once again, the only thing that protected the president that day was hope and that the unscreened man, who was armed with a handgun, wanted merely to snap a picture and not to shoot the president. If he had wanted to shoot Obama, the Secret Service would have been responsible.

  Then there’s the 2015 incident in which two intoxicated agents—one of whom was part of the president’s protective detail—drove drunk in a government car into an active bomb investigation at the White House. The agents intimidated those on duty to not breathalyze or arrest them, to falsify reports, and even to withhold the incident from the director, who found out about the incident through an internal message board five days later. But the cover-up afterward really took the cake!

  We are led to believe that each incident is isolated and not indicative of the rest of the Secret Service. We can judge the US Secret Service only by the standards it sets for itself. Each recent director has testified, “We are only as strong as our weakest link,” and “The bad guys only have to be right once, while we have to be right one hundred percent of the time.” Then there’s the official motto, emblazoned on the back of every Secret Service commission book: “Worthy of Trust and Confidence.”

  So what’s the truth? Is the Secret Service elite? Is its primary enemy an assassin, or is it transparency and change?

  The 2016 “Best Places to Work In the Federal Government” report, which was created by the Partnership for Public Service on the basis of employee responses, named the Secret Service as the worst place to work. Out of 305 federal agencies, the Secret Service came in dead last. Even Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees had better morale and more confidence in their agency than Secret Service employees did.

  Just to give you an idea of how bad morale is and how the old adage “The beating will continue until morale improves” plays out within the Secret Service, after the 2016 “Best Places to Work in the Federal Government” rankings came out, an officer bought a cake and took it into the break room for the other Uniformed Division officers to share. The icing said, “Congrats on making 305 out of 305.” The officer who had bought the cake was given two days off, unpaid, as punishment for insubordination. Compare that to the two high-ranking agents who received no punishment after driving drunk, armed, in a government car into an active bomb investigation at the White House, intimidated officers to falsify reports, and more.

  The rankings were based on employees’ responses to three simple prompts: “I recommend my organization as a good place to work”; “Considering everything, how satisfied are you with your job?”; and “Considering everything, how satisfied are you with your organization?”

  The 305 participating agencies averaged 59.4 points out of 100, but the Secret Service scored a mere 32.8. The numbers have been going down since 2011. This is especially incredible considering that the most downtrodden agents, officers, and technicians continue to leave in droves, which means that each year the most disgruntled are no longer participating in the surveys. The House Oversight Committee has called this an “exodus.” How long can it go on?

  Meanwhile, the agency seems to have as a good a handle on its finances as it does on its employees. In 2017, the director of the Secret Service surprised Congress by reporting that he was out of money and hadn’t seen it coming—as the agency has done numerous times in the past. The current director, Randolph Alles, told the press, “The Secret Service estimates that roughly 1,100 employees will work overtime hours in excess of statutory pay caps during calendar year 2017. To remedy this ongoing and serious problem, the agency has worked closely with the Department of Homeland Security, the Administration, and the Congress over the past several months to find a legislative solution.”

  Is it a legislative solution that’s needed, or maybe one brought about by changing the agency’s internal culture?

  The legislative branch has certainly expressed its concern about the direction the Secret Service is going in. The 2015 bipartisan House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report entitled “United States Secret Service: An Agency in Crisis” said this about the agency’s ballooning $2.8 billion budget: “One of the major problems with USSS’s current budget system is that there is no system.… In fact, the Panel [in meetings with the director] could not even determine who at USSS should be responsible for answering budgetary questions.” In other words, the agency in charge of fighting counterfeiters, which has made history by “following the money,” has no clue how it spends its own? So is the problem “legislative,” purely in the hands of Congress not to be stingy, or is the problem the Secret Service leadership ?

  A panel of independent experts organized by the Department of Homeland Security had something to say about that. T
he United States Secret Service Protective Mission Panel (USSS-PMP) released its findings in 2014. They wrote, “Of the many concerns the Panel encountered, the question of leadership is, in our view, the most important. The Panel found an organization starved for leadership that rewards innovation and excellence and demands accountability.… We heard a common desire: More resources would help, but what we really need is leadership.”

  According to that same report, “The Panel found that, due in large part to limitations on personnel, the Service’s training regimen has diminished far below acceptable levels. The Presidential Protective Division’s (PPD) so-called ‘Fourth Shift’ had once ensured that for two weeks out of every eight, the President’s detail was maintaining its strength, practicing, and getting better. But Secret Service reports show that in FY 2013, apart from firearms re-qualifications and basic career development technical requirements, the average special agent received only forty-two hours of training.”

  That’s an abysmal forty-two hours of training a year for the people who protect the president of the United States! The supposedly “elite” Secret Service agents who protect the most powerful man in the world train for less than three leisurely weekends. The report went on to note that “In FY 2013, Service data shows that the [Secret Service] Uniformed Division as a whole received 576 hours of training, or about 25 minutes for each of over 1,300 Uniformed Division officers.”

  This means that a private citizen in Washington, DC, who has a concealed-carry handgun permit has more annual firearms training than a Secret Service officer or PPD agent. By law, to receive a concealed-carry handgun permit and requalify every two years, a private citizen must prove that he or she has received at least sixteen hours of firearms training, including two hours of range time. It should frighten every American that a concealed-carry permit holder in our nation’s capital has more annual firearms training than the average officer or PPD agent employed by the Secret Service!

  The culture has deteriorated so much that agents’ reports, such as requalifications and performance evaluations for physical training and tactical proficiency with a firearm, are “self-reported.” As one agent reported to Ronald Kessler, “Standards are so lax that agents are actually handed blank evaluations for possible promotions and fitness ratings and asked to fill them in themselves!” During my time in the Secret Service as a firearms instructor, I saw this firsthand. Today the practice is far more rampant.

  That’s not all that’s swept aside by “self-reporting.” According to the 2015 House Oversight Committee report, “USSS senior supervisors believed fellow senior supervisors would self-report their own misconduct,” and therefore various types of ‘misconduct’ such as drinking, hiring prostitutes, and driving a government car drunk over an active bomb investigation at the White House, were not reported because other supervisors expected that the criminal behavior would be ‘self-reported.’”

  What happens if an upstanding agent or officer has finally had enough and decides such incidents shouldn’t be swept under the rug? The same report found that “USSS utilized non-disclosure agreements [for its employees] that do not comply with whistle-blower protections.” In layman’s terms, this means that the Secret Service coerced its employees to sign nondisclosure agreements that were against the law in an effort to shield the agency from bad PR and transparency even to Congress! According to a Department of Homeland Security report, less than half of employees felt they could report to Congress without unlawful retaliation from the agency.

  So the answer is clear: the Secret Service cares more about protecting itself from transparency and change than about stopping assassins.

  That’s why I felt a moral obligation to “speak out of school,” as the Secret Service calls it. Between interviewing officers and agents outside the White House, I stood on Pennsylvania Avenue observing my former colleagues. It was just as I remembered, only worse, just as so many other agents and officers told me. This has to stop.

  What does this all add up to? As the House committee report put it: “The UDLC [Uniformed Division Labor Committee] leadership described a workforce on the verge of collapsing due to understaffing and pending attrition.”

  “Collapsing” was its word, not mine.

  The panel of independent experts stated clearly that mismanagement and poor leadership were to blame—not the budget or pay caps.

  But let’s dig deeper to the roots of how and why the Secret Service is failing.

  The House committee report continued, “[The Labor Committee] cited the exhaustive nature of the job, constant overtime, and lack of respect from Presidential Protective Division leadership as a major factor in UD attrition.… Approximately 1,100 of 1,300 UD officers were eligible for retirement, and USSS personnel estimated over 1,000 officers accepted the offer.” Instead of fixing the systemic problems causing this exodus, the Secret Service leadership made it far worse by forcing agents away from counterfeiting and financial fraud investigations around the world and the country to fill the gaps in the White House’s protection, for which they lacked training and understanding. As a result, the agents’ morale plummeted and their performance tanked.

  The committee wrote, “As with the UD, many factors may contribute to high attrition and low morale among special agents,” noting that “At the end of fiscal year 2015, USSS was [net] down 285 special agents from 2011 levels.”

  The agents and officers of the Secret Service are at their breaking point. It is not sustainable to work Uniformed Division (UD) officers at the White House twelve hours a day, six to seven days a week. Though the agents have pay caps, the Secret Service had to get rid of the pay cap on officers’ wages more than a decade ago.

  Right now, there are officers standing post around the White House who have a base pay of about $70,000 per year, who are working so much overtime, both voluntary and involuntary, that they are making more than the director of the Secret Service and even more than the director of the Department of Homeland Security. Some accrue near a quarter of a million dollars each year.

  But money doesn’t matter when they hardly ever see their families. They’re exhausted and at the point of snapping. Many plan to make insane salaries for a few years, then quit. This is not a sustainable practice for any workforce. The service’s workforce is aging rapidly. An experience vacuum is approaching. But soon, as new recruits quit and old-timers retire, the agency will collapse.

  The president needs to be protected by agents and officers who are well rested, well trained, and supported by their leadership. We need an agency management and culture that value individual rest, good mental health, training, morale, and family. Instead, the divorce rate is the highest of any agency. Suicide, dangerous sexual behavior, drug and alcohol use, and other reckless behaviors are serious problems at rates far higher than in any other federal law enforcement agency. Agents are having sordid affairs with presidential staffers; directors are lying to Congress and our presidents; DUIs are rampant; there is a reason the Secret Service doesn’t track or make public its statistics on suicides, depression, or dangerous sexual habits among its employees. One officer serially clubbed squirrels to death just to stay awake on the White House lawn, and agents have exchanged gunfire among themselves in anger.

  After two moles brought the FBI to its knees, the agency began polygraphing its agents five times a year to prevent another lethal traitor within its own ranks. But the Secret Service wouldn’t dare to implement such measures, because corruption, coercion, incompetence, and waste can be found at all levels.

  These are not the actions of well-cared-for employees, and the agency’s current environment is dangerous to everyone.

  So my service isn’t really over, not when the state of the Secret Service is worse than ever—worse even the day we last lost a president, November 22, 1963. Our current president is not safe.

  This book digs deeper and answers two questions: How the hell did things spiral so hard and so far out of control? And how can we save our c
urrent and future presidents from the Secret Service’s impending systematic collapse?

  This book is not meant to critique the men and women “in the arena,” who, despite everything, are standing post and putting their lives on the line as best they can. I, too, was once in that arena, and through this book I still am. My hope is that this book can spur the change that will save them. If our president and the frontline men and women of the Secret Service weren’t at high risk due to the Secret Service’s systemic failings and ignored history, I wouldn’t have written this book.

  This is still my fight. The good men and women of the US Secret Service, long undermined, deserve to have their stories told; they deserve to win; and they deserve to work for an agency that won’t abuse them, lie to them, and sacrifice them at the altar of indulgence, corpulent ineffective government, or brand management.

  The Secret Service needs to start winning again. If we start the fight to drain the “Secret Service swamp” now, we still have a chance to make that happen.

  ONE.

  CLINTON CHARACTERS

  It should come as no surprise that President William Jefferson Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s time in the White House had a pivotal and irreversibly negative impact on the Secret Service. This has nothing to do with their politics. It’s an obvious fact.

  If a frog is dropped into boiling water, it will jump out and avoid being cooked. But if it is dropped into placid waters that are then slowly brought to a boil, it will remain unsuspecting and meet a horrific end. This metaphor applies to the Secret Service as it arrogantly readied for major external threats throughout the Clinton era but never for the internal threats a protectee would and did present. It simply was not prepared for the kind of president who would crash it headlong into one of the most divisive moments in American political history.