Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  In the year that followed, the Secret Service had to contend with additional panic over the terror threat, on top of the flaws and gaps it had been contending with for decades. With so many new responsibilities taken on already as part of the Master Plan, the bloated middle management, and no idea how it spent its money, the agency had already been stretched beyond thin. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Secret Service’s leadership tried to stretch the agency further. Defense of the White House again became a chief concern, and more officers were posted there. The security officers and trainers at the training center were even pulled from training duties. Officers were recalled from time off or ordered to take more overtime shifts to stand post at the White House. But what good was that? It just added more overtired officers to a location that was still just as unprotected from airborne threats as before Pearl Harbor.

  That’s when the agency’s attrition problems went into overdrive and people started to recognize the situation for what it was: an exodus. No amount of money could justify the strategy of adding more officers to a target that was still defenseless from the air. For Secret Service personnel, what good was more money if you worked twelve-hour days seven days a week and had neither the time to spend with your family nor time to spend the money you earned?

  So agents and officers flocked to the new Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) in droves. The attrition got so bad that the training center had the Internet technicians block the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) website to try to prevent officers and agents for applying to FAMS while at work—as if that were a solution.

  SIX.

  SHAKY WARTIME FOOTING

  Immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the nation reeled. Americans watched firefighters and first responders pull the living and the 2,976 lost innocents from the wreckage of four plane crashes. The question was: What now?

  The Secret Service needed a strategic pause more than ever, a complete reevaluation of all it was doing and all it was still doing wrong. This could have been the time to fix the rift between the UD and the agents, fix the manpower shortages, give up the extraneous missions that detracted from presidential protection, tackle the airborne threats, make morale a priority, make sure personnel were well rested and trained, and even hire accountants to make sure the agency was using its budget correctly—or figure out how it was spending its money to begin with.

  But like any national catastrophe, the attacks put an immediate and incredible strain on the Secret Service, especially in the first days after. The service had a number of immediate tasks: to rally the New York Field Office agents, protect all the foreign diplomats visiting the nation to pay their respects and coordinate the new war effort, and create new security details for everyone in line to succeed the presidency. Of course, it also had to bolster the defenses of the top terrorist targets: the White House and the president.

  President Bush didn’t hesitate to get moving. Just one day after the attacks, he did something very unexpected and against the wishes of many in the Secret Service. With Air Force One the only transport plane in the sky, he hopped from one military base to another to reach “ground zero,” the site of the attacks on the Twin Towers. When he arrived on the scene, he gave a speech, visited firefighters, and roused the nation and the world to fight back and begin the War on Terror. The Secret Service and PPD would have preferred that he stay home at the White House or at Camp David or any one of the bases he had visited in the hours prior. But the goal of executive protection is not only to protect the president’s life but to protect his or her ability to lead with confidence, and that’s what Bush wanted to do.

  Like the president and his administration, Secret Service director Brian Stafford and his managers had not expected to have their tenure defined by a major attack, despite so many past chiefs and directors being faced with major crises. All the men and women in the Secret Service found themselves standing in the shoes of their predecessors, facing yet another unexpected and terrible challenge, just as Chief Baughman in the Cold War, Agent Reilly in World War II, Agent Starling in World War I, and Agent Warne in the Civil War had. Now they were the ones “in it,” and the president’s life and leadership rested on their every strategic decision and split second reaction. The culture went from “all quiet” to a desperate “go-go-go” and “all hands on deck” mentality. Haste was the name of the game. Everyone felt that a second wave and another series of attacks were imminent. The Secret Service leadership found itself surprised by a war they had ignored, trying to figure out how to win it after it had already begun.

  The New York Field Office agents and technicians were especially hard hit. Their beautiful brand-new office, one of the largest staffed in the agency, was completely demolished. Except for Agent Craig Miller, everyone on duty that day only narrowly escaped the ensuing inferno and collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 and the North and South Towers. Protocol dictates that if a Secret Servicer member is in so much as a serious on-duty car accident, he or she is pulled off duty and ordered to take time off for health services. But since the whole field office staff couldn’t be taken off duty, that was swept aside. Secret Service leadership ordered the New York City agents to report and stand post to protect President Bush’s trip to New York City on September 14 instead of pulling agents from nearby state offices. Some agents never reported, and others walked off the job then and there. It would be easy to blame this on the shock that came from facing such devastation as the New York agents witnessed on 9/11, but the sad truth is that the Secret Service has treated its employees like machines, often dispensable ones, so why change now?

  Still, it was a new scenario for the Secret Service. It had protected presidents following each war after 1901, and it had lost six employees and its entire Oklahoma City Field Office in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The New York City Field Office had been moved in part due to its acknowledged vulnerabilities after the 1993 World Trade Center attack. But none of those lessons had been enough to spur the agency to be ready for the total loss of a field office on 9/11.

  A month after the towers and the Pentagon were hit, my boss’s boss phoned me while I was an instructor at the training center. They were sending me a group of New York City Field Office agents, two men and a woman, to requalify on their handguns so they could go back on duty. Secretly, the service was so desperate for personnel that it was pressuring the shocked and wounded New York agents to get back on their feet. Management considered it “tough love” therapy; it was not a good mix.

  As soon as I laid eyes on the agents when they arrived, it was clear that this was a horrible idea. I insisted our supervisors end the training; the agents needed mental health services, not a pressured “tough love” qualifier.

  As we waited for the guns to return from the armorer, the agents wanted to tell their 9/11 stories. Every American had his or her own story from that day, and these men and women had some of the most harrowing. They needed to share them. The dissociated memories were clearly flashing in their heads and poured out of them, and I listened. Those agents had been buried, one person twice, and had had to dig themselves out. Each person had seen and experienced things he or she couldn’t shake—certainly not as early as three weeks after.

  The Secret Service agents in New York had a reputation spanning two centuries of harrowing investigative and protection missions. These three were some of the grittiest the service had had. Aside from some physical wounds, their eyes were red from stress; one agent said he couldn’t “get the smell out of my head.” It had been his first day back on the job. All instructors were trained first responders or had advanced medical training. I knew those three were still damaged. The armorer and I had to ask ourselves: Why does the agency want these agents back on the job? Does it really want someone back on the job protecting someone when he or she is visibly trembling? Passing the qualifier was going to prove on paper that the agents were fit to return to work, but no leadership is complete without seeing
the state of things firsthand.

  The armorer came emotionally unglued at the sorry sight of the agents’ pistols. It was a red flag that spoke to their mental state. While the three agents were still in the hospital and couldn’t report to protect President Bush on September 14 and thereafter, some of their colleagues could have been protecting the president with guns in an equally sorry state. The three agents’ barrels were completely occluded by rubble. Dust had seeped in through the gun’s orifices and been caked by gun oil and sweat, then packed against their holsters into a sort of concrete plug. Was that the kind of agent and firearm you want protecting the president? Though they had had their handguns on them after the attack, if they had ever had to fire them, the guns would’ve blown up in their hands. The armorer pulled himself together and returned the pistols, fully serviced.

  During the firing range portion, the agents trembled and shook from feeling the reverberations of gunfire echoing around them. The once familiar sound of gunfire and the smell of gunpowder triggered the hell they had experienced only a month before.

  All the agents were passed. They left the training center with prayers and hope that time would truly heal all wounds.

  But the haste didn’t stop there. The Secret Service set up a temporary New York City Field Office on some of the highest levels of a NYC high-rise. Many agents refused to enter the building or go up the elevator. When the agents’ families heard of it, they broke out the phone book, called every Secret Service number they could find, and furiously berated anyone who answered.

  After a series of misunderstandings, a small building in New Jersey served as the temporary New York City Field Office.

  Agencywide, the future was just as uncertain as the wheels of the Secret Service began to completely fall off.

  President Bush and Congress focused on the means, motive, opportunity, and intent of the 9/11 hijackers, and their solutions addressed each aspect of the attack. The attackers had been born of a festering and unhindered hateful ideology. They had infiltrated the country and slipped through the US intelligence dragnet due to lack of intelligence sharing. They were well funded and trained. Once in the country, at their flight schools, at the airports, and on the planes, nothing had stopped them—except for one planeload of passengers. Presuming they had been targeting the White House and the executive branch as well, it appeared that their plan had been to decapitate the nation’s leadership structure and its economy. Following 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) were created, while the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), and the National Security Administration (NSA) ballooned rapidly in a mad dash rush to create better security. FAMS went from around thirty air marshals on the payroll before 9/11 to the goal was to have enough to place one air marshal on every major flight within a year. Among those new organizations, future terrorists would have neither the resources nor the access to carry out further plots. The plan was that they would be hunted around the globe and, if they managed to get inside the United States, would be sniffed out and fought at every level.

  DHS became the umbrella organization for most every federal law enforcement, intelligence-gathering, and counterterrorism organization. The FBI and US Marshals Service were excluded because they were under the Department of Justice. The CIA was also excluded, as it was the foreign espionage wing and forbidden to operate inside the homeland—without a homeland agency liaison, at least. The Secret Service argued that it, too, should be excluded from the umbrella because it was unique; its protective and investigative missions operated both in the homeland and abroad. As part of the Master Plan, the agency had established dozens of regional and national field offices in foreign countries that the president was likely to visit. The agency also conducted major counterfeiting and financial fraud investigations. The majority of counterfeit American dollars were printed in foreign countries and had been since World War II. Nigeria, Iran, and North Korea had become the biggest counterfeiters and perpetrators of defrauding Americans and stealing US citizens’ identities; Iran and North Korea in particular were using those operations to sponsor nuclear programs and global terror and circumvent US sanctions. But for all its investigative efforts, the Secret Service was hamstrung to interdict those operations in any way. But the service was also viewed as an organization that was far too secretive and wasn’t doing its part in notifying its fellow agency partners in the group efforts to fight terror. It was commanded to transition from the Treasury Department to the new Department of Homeland Security and to finally find a solution to the century-old problem of airborne threats.

  After the temporary airport closings in the DC area subsided, the Secret Service’s only answer to airborne threats was to create a committee or suborganization to find an answer. The “no-fly” area was extended, but it could be extended no farther than the two airports only miles away—Reagan National’s runway was still pointed at the White House, and planes taking off still had to make a sharp turn to follow the Potomac River and not fly into the restricted airspace.

  The Secret Service got the FAA to include it in the permitting process—not that 9/11 hijackers bothered with permits anyway—but it wanted as much notice as possible to evacuate the president. Extremely advanced blimps equipped with radar were set up in the area to increase the capability of detecting low-flying drones and small aircraft, and it was said that if someone dropped a tennis ball out of a high-rise window, the blimps’ radar would record which way the ball was spinning. Representatives from the Secret Service, the FAA, and others joined the Office of National Capital Region Coordination (ONCRC) as part of the new Secret Service Airspace Security Branch (ASB). The Secret Service was finally giving itself the greatest possible notice of airspace breaches to evacuate the president, but what about other agencies?

  In 2013, a man who had been investigated by the Secret Service and deemed not to be a threat landed his home-made gyrocopter on the Capitol lawn, completely unhindered by Secret Service or Capitol Police until he was pulled out from the copter and arrested. Unlike in the 1970s, none of the officers in DC was willing to shoot at airborne threats—because they were too afraid of their leadership not backing their decision to engage and protect.

  The Secret Service was clearly having problems dealing with the realities of the post-9/11 world, as it had failed to prepare and, as the saying goes, it had prepared to fail. But there was one easy way for Secret Service agents and officers to deal with the problems that still faced their agency on the ground: get out—leave the Secret Service and transfer to another agency. When President Bush called on every able-bodied trained protector to join FAMS, no one was more willing than those who had been neglected by the Secret Service.

  Leaving the Treasury Department to join the DHS meant that the Secret Service no longer had a patsy in the Treasury Department and Secret Service employees became employees under the DHS. The Secret Service’s leadership and culture and the Master Plan to expand and consolidate power, paired with the transition to the DHS, was a recipe for collapse.

  The Secret Service was gambling on the blind loyalty of its agents and officers. For the White House’s defense, the Secret Service’s reaction was to throw more bodies onto the White House’s perimeter. The American people did not want the White House, “the people’s house,” a chief symbol of freedom, to be turned into an imposing armed camp, but within the agency, the likelihood of an attack on the White House seemed certain. The Uniformed Division was given greater permission to wear bullet-resistant and tactical vests and carry submachine guns or other long guns in full view of the public.

  But the man-hours increased dramatically. The personnel shortages were already a problem, but they went from strained to desperate to dire.

  Overtime went from sometimes voluntary to far more “volun-told,” the sarcastic term for mandatory. Leaves were canceled. UD security details were pulled from the training center, Foreign Missions Branch (where the vice president lived), and all ov
er the DC area to send more officers to the White House. Specialized training classes, courses, and seminars ranging from shooting in low light to new tourniquet practices, how to address civilians with possible disabilities, and even routine refresher trainings and qualifications for health, fitness, and shooting ability—all were slashed dramatically to get as many officers protecting the White House as possible.

  Agents were mustered from all over the country to report for additional presidential protection duties and, for the first time, to stand posts around the White House. Those agents weren’t hired out of thin air for that specific purpose, they were pulled off investigations into counterfeiting, white-collar crime, or the numerous new missions the Secret Service had acquired in the past few years. They were flown in from around the country to pull perimeter and basic area protection duties at the White House.

  Agents and officers had a collective sense of dread and fatigue at padding the White House’s defenses, a supposedly temporary measure that they knew would last indefinitely. Agents joined the Secret Service to serve on protection or investigations, not to stand post around the White House for twelve-hour shifts or longer. For the UD officers, many of whom loved their jobs as police officers around the White House, the work hours were crushing, as there were simply not enough people to do the job. However, there were plenty of people—some might say too many—in middle management who made those questionable decisions.

  As far as the century-old lingering threat of airborne attacks was concerned, the Secret Service dithered and put its hope in the DHS, TSA, and FAMS to keep that angle covered. But so many of the UD officers and agents were facing crushing work hours that they felt were futile in protecting the president, so they decided to leave USSS and go where the nation needed them most: the TSA and FAMS.