Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  The exodus was on.

  In 2002, 130 UD officers left for the TSA alone. Not long after, about 300 UD officers left for TSA and FAMS in one year. The ranks of UD Training Center instructors, ERT, and Counter Sniper teams were especially hard hit, causing a massive shortage on those teams and a huge loss of expertise. FAMS hired anyone with advanced law enforcement or military experience, issued him or her a gun and badge, and put him or her onto aircraft to improvise on how best to protect the cockpit from hijackers. FAMS was willing to pay handsomely for such recruits, even $20,000 more than what they were making in the Secret Service. For decades, the service’s field office transfers had been notoriously corrupt, but FAMS would allow anyone to choose his or her field office—it needed air marshals in every large airport. The new air marshals knew they were entering a dicey environment—it could be just them alone in a plane with one or more hijackers, likely armed—but many Secret Service agents and officers figured that FAMS gave them a better chance to fulfill their mission to protect the public and the president from airborne threats. Unlike in the Secret Service, they could restore confidence in the nation’s security.

  The fact that both the Secret Service and FAMS were under the DHS umbrella made things easy. Transferring from one DHS agency to another was especially simple because all DHS employees were in the same computer system. Agents and officers were quitting the Secret Service and giving zero notice. Officers took advantage of their compensation time guaranteed by law for overtime served. Agents and officers started new jobs in FAMS seamlessly afterward. The migration from the Secret Service to FAMS became so bad that the service had its IT team block the DHS and FAMS recruitment website pages so that employees would stop applying during work hours. Still, the exodus continued. With the Secret Service working UD officers basically 24/7, the officers didn’t have time to interview with TSA recruiters. So the TSA recruiters went to the White House at night to interview officers. It was like a fire sale on UD officers.

  Not only had the Secret Service been unprepared to face the 9/11 threat and protect the president, the entire agency was set to collapse because of 9/11 and the corrupt choices in the Master Plan its managers had made leading up to it.

  One thing helped stymie the exodus: as the DHS, TSA, and FAMS were created almost overnight, they needed to fill their entire leadership structure at breakneck speed. Guess who answered that call? Current and retired Secret Service agents.

  Former Secret Service director John Magaw became the first director of TSA and built the agency we know today. Thomas Quinn, a former Secret Service agent, became the first director of FAMS. They brought some of the cronyism rampant in the service’s upper ranks with them to their new agencies. Both Quinn and Magaw resigned suddenly after the air marshals basically mutinied, citing policies that put air marshals and the planes they were on at risk. It was rumored within the agency that the Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta began looking into allegations that Magaw was misappropriating government funds and engaged in cronyism. It was also rumored that Magaw wasn’t misappropriating funds but that he was operating under the kind of nonexistent Secret Service budgeting protocols that TSA didn’t allow.

  Dana Brown became the second director of FAMS, but Brown’s successor, Robert Bray, also entered into a settlement agreement that allowed him to retire without any disciplinary action amidst allegations of an illegal gun-selling operation within FAMS.

  In 2006, Magaw of the TSA; Quinn, Dana, and Bray of FAMS; and FAMS’s thirteen agency leaders as well as eleven of field office heads were all former Secret Service agents, and made men at that. Under them, Secret Service cronyism kept on chugging along.

  Many officers and agents decided against joining FAMS, the DHS, or the TSA, not out of a sense of loyalty to the Secret Service but because they knew that the worst of the service’s made men were filling the ranks of those agencies. With the incestuous connections between the Secret Service and many of the other DHS agencies, recruits would be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

  The Secret Service’s made men purposefully took advantage of post-9/11 “solutions” to establish cronyism in other agencies. Years later, those agencies, fraught with similar scandals and low morale, are following the same downward spiral. Even worse, former Secret Service agents—but not officers—took advantage of a loophole that allowed them to keep their Secret Service pensions even after they began working at the new DHS agencies.

  Director Stafford was called into Congress to explain the problem. His goal was to convince Congress that the exodus was not as bad as anonymous whistle-blowers inside the agency were reporting. He acknowledged the shortages and attrition but in fact the Secret Service was “double-counting” its roster, which actually downplayed the severity of the exodus. Officers who quit were kept on the roster as if they had stayed on until the end of the quarter. The few officers who applied to become agents were counted on both the officer roster and the agent roster for the same period.

  The exodus caused a domino effect that impacted the entire agency. The exodus put a greater strain on the UD officers who stayed, as they had to work more shifts of longer hours, with less flexibility of posts and rotations and less time for training and rest. Those who left did so immediately, but hiring replacements took on average well over a year and sometimes even longer.

  Even if a candidate was recruited and took the job, “poaching” became a massive problem for the service even before its new employees ever stood a post. Secret Service recruits do their first leg of training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Glencoe, Georgia—where most other law enforcement agencies, such as the Border Patrol, ICE, and the ATF, also do their training. Since the ATF, ICE, Border Patrol, FAMS, and others were all at FLETC, recruiters from each agency would pay visits to the gyms and locker rooms to persuade Secret Service recruits to transfer to them while still at FLETC. They didn’t have to worry about doing background checks on the poached recruits because they had already been cleared by the Secret Service. It was cheaper and more efficient for those agencies to steal from the Secret Service than recruit brand-new agents for themselves! ATF poachers would even brag to Secret Service supervisors, “I got three of your guys. Keep treating them the way you are. Don’t change a thing.” Then, as class sizes shrank by the time they arrived at the Secret Service Training Center, everyone would know that the missing recruits had been poached.

  The rift between agents and officers widened as more agents were pulled from field offices around the nation to do UD jobs. The agents had not been trained for police jobs such as traffic stops, leading to tension with the UD officers, who did know what they were doing. To make matters worse, many agents viewed those kinds of duties as grunt work, beneath their lofty feelings of self-worth. Many agents and their families were seriously perturbed to discover that after graduation from agent training their stints on perimeter detail at the White House were becoming more frequent, increasingly long, and mandatory. They were flown out for weeks at a time and put up in hotels to fill in for UD jobs they had been promised they’d never have to do. Naturally, all this was extremely expensive. The solution of the service’s leadership was to create barracks-style housing at the training center for agents to be bused to and from each day. That solution was not received well.

  Recruitment had its own problems, which had gone back years. Delegating UD recruitment to agent field offices had been a disaster. Recruitment was a part-time responsibility that was in addition to field office agents’ investigations or protective duties. The Secret Service had very stringent prerequisites, and the administrative approval process sometimes made hiring take years. Many of the recruitment steps were also out of order. Why conduct a week’s worth of background investigations on someone who can’t pass the physical?

  But the response from the highest ranks of the Secret Service to 9/11 was “more”: more officers posted at the White House, more agents surrounding the president, more collective hour
s on the job. It hadn’t been sustainable before 9/11, and it was even less so afterward, and the broken recruitment process didn’t help.

  Agents and officers had to ask themselves, “Will the additional hours served do anything to stop the kind of attack that spurred this response in the first place?” And the answer was absolutely not.

  President George W. Bush thought extremely highly of the Secret Service based on the image that PPD presented and had earned. What the presidents saw of PPD was not indicative of the rest of the Secret Service or even behind the scenes of PPD, CAT, and the rest of those who protected him closely. The president assumed that there was careful oversight of the PPD and other divisions. But in truth, the Secret Service had always inspected itself. Still, his trust remained.

  In 2005, President Bush traveled on a five-day, four-nation European tour commemorating the end of World War II. On May 10, he gave a speech in Liberty Square in Tbilisi, the capital of the nation of Georgia. The crowd estimate for the event was 10,000. In reality, there were more than 150,000 people in the crowd. It was the same scenario that had faced the Secret Service protecting President Eisenhower in India in the 1950s. Georgians came from all over the country to cheer and see the US president who had become a hero to many of them. President Bush had become so popular for fighting the war on terror that the highway leading to the country’s main airport was renamed George W. Bush Street.

  In the days after the speech, news reports ran headlines of President Bush drawing one of the largest crowds in the former Soviet republic’s history, the largest since its independence. The event was praised for going off without a hitch. It was seen as another job well done, another success by default, as no one had made an attempt on the president—except that someone had. In the hours and days following, it was discovered that behind the stirring scene, the event had been a systematic failure and the president had only narrowly survived by luck.

  One man in that crowd carried an old Russian-made hand grenade wrapped in a handkerchief. It was the smallest item in the cache of weapons he kept in his apartment. He was willing to trade his life for the smallest chance to kill the president, and he figured the grenade would be an ideal weapon of choice due to its balance of small size and serious firepower. Once the pin was pulled and the grenade thrown, so long as it landed within ten feet it stood the best possible chance to kill. To the assassin’s surprise, the metal detectors, run by the Secret Service Uniformed Division, were turned off and the crowd of thousands was being waved through into the square. The security checkpoints had been inundated, and the Secret Service and Georgian authorities faced a crushing mob of people rioting their way through the metal detectors. Once the security checkpoints had been so grossly overwhelmed, they faced a choice: shut down the metal detectors and let people through unscreened, or cancel the president’s appearance. They let everyone through and informed the president of the situation. The president’s protection thus relied almost solely on a buffer zone, the president’s armored podium, behavioral analysis of people in the crowd, and luck.

  As the agents and local Georgian military and police scanned the crowd of 150,000 cheering frenzied Georgians, the assassin worked his way through the crowd to get as close as possible. He then pulled out his handkerchief with the grenade wrapped inside, took the grenade in his hand, pulled the pin, and hurled it at the president. But nothing happened. No one noticed. Police never closed in. The grenade never went off—as if some Secret Service magic had made it disappear. Panicked, the assassin simply walked out.

  But the grenade had not disappeared. It had hit a little girl in the back of the head and landed at the feet of a Georgian police officer, fifty feet shy of the president. The grenade had a kill radius of ten feet and could inflict severe wounds on people up to fifty feet away. Though the president had his Secret Service Technical Services Division–issued podium, which was highly resistant to high-caliber bullets, it wouldn’t have stopped anything from being thrown over or around it. The officer picked up the item, immediately realized it was a grenade with the pin pulled, and, fearing it could explode any moment, he, too, simply walked off through the crowd without even informing his fellow officers. He went to a park underpass and hid the grenade in a brick wall. In case it went off, it would mitigate the damage to others nearby.

  It was later found that the grenade’s safety lever, known as the “spoon,” had been tightly wrapped by the handkerchief. Even as the lever had released and the grenade had been activated, the grenade’s primer had been lightly struck, and the detonator had not gone off. The president had been saved by the Secret Service’s buffer zone, a quick-thinking Georgian officer, absolute luck—yet again.

  As the agents believed that the grenade had been a hoax when they learned about the attempt hours later aboard Air Force One, it is unknown when the Secret Service informed the president.

  In the aftermath of the event and the investigations that ensued, numerous Secret Service officials swore that “to the best of their knowledge” this was the first time metal detectors had been shut off. It was an utter lie.

  In the ensuing manhunt, led by Georgian authorities with the help of a US task force including FBI and Secret Service representatives, one journalist’s photo from that event held the key to the would-be assassin’s identity. In the raid on the man’s apartment, one Georgian officer was gunned down, but the man was finally brought to justice.

  As President George W. Bush survived two terms, most of which played out in the tense post-9/11 environment, it seemed as though the Secret Service was improving and evolving to meet the challenges of the modern era. But the consequences of strategic follies often become clear only decades later. Though all seemed quiet, the catastrophic cocktail of the Clinton years fighting the Starr investigation, the exodus, the transition to the DHS, and the Master Plan were taking effect. All these together had done more than add strain to the Secret Service—they had exacerbated the worst of the agency’s culture, which valued complacency, arrogance, and keeping secrets for the sake of the Secret Service “brand,” even at the expense of presidential protection.

  Agents and officers who rocked the boat were squashed and pushed to the agency’s fringes or pushed out entirely, while agents and officers who knew how to play ball thrived. The culture was even willing to overlook criminal misconduct, as long as the perpetrators were willing to tow the “secret” line. Those agents were rewarded and rose in the ranks to become middle managers or even the made men of the upper ranks, who only made the culture worse.

  SEVEN.

  LOSING CONTROL

  The Art of War teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming but on our readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.…Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

  —SUN TZU, SIXTH CENTURY BC

  When President Barack Obama took office on January 20, 2009, the nation witnessed a historical milestone, but there was concern in the air as well. Since his election, headlines had declared that as the first African American to hold the office, after a racially charged election, Obama would be the most targeted president in history. That could not have come at a worse time for those charged with protecting him.

  Yet again, just as the nation needed the Secret Service more than ever, it was falling apart and setting up a new president for failure. President Obama just happened to take the office when the Secret Service was at its worst. The truth about the agency’s inner workings was finally getting out.

  Though many pundits focused on exploring the possible motives behind the surge in threats against President Obama, it was often overlooked that behind each new crop of threats against a president is some increase in the means to make the threats. There had been threats against President Kennedy, for instance, for being the first Roman Catholic president. But as technology advanced, the number of aven
ues for making threats to the president increased. In the past, they had been made mostly by mail, telegram, or phone, and it had been far more difficult for threateners to travel to see the president or visit the White House. But the Internet and social media have increased the platform for hate spewing, and advances in travel have made it easier for words to become real-world dangers, be they spontaneous acts of rage or premeditated attacks.

  The media often purports upticks in threats, attempts, and demands on the Secret Service as surprising, but in reality these are routine. There are always new threats to look out for. While the Secret Service does experience upticks in threats, attempts, and demands on time during election cycles, it is a complete myth that there is ever a lull for the Secret Service. The president never stops traveling, and too often at the last minute. There is never a shortage of the stupid, dangerous, crazy, violent, or methodical would-be assassins.

  The Secret Service had still never had the time to take a strategic pause to look seriously at its internal operations. Even in 2009, it still didn’t have an accountant to analyze how it spent the taxpayers’ money. But around the time Obama took office, the curtain began to be pulled back, bit by bit, revealing the inner workings of this “secret” agency.

  It took plenty of guts to start to bring the truth to light. Some Secret Service insiders spoke out anonymously to their home-state representatives in Congress, and they knew the risks: if the agency discovered any employees “speaking out of school,” the repercussions would be brutal. On the outside, the journalist Ronald Kessler conducted a series of mostly anonymous interviews with former agents, which he turned into a series of books on the Secret Service. The most damning was In the President’s Secret Service, published in August 2009, which contained what USA Today called “often disturbing anecdotes about the VIPs the Secret Service has protected and still protects.” Newsweek pointed out that Kessler also addressed “why the under-appreciated Secret Service deserves better leadership.”