Carol Leonnig writes in this 2021 book:
* [Delta Force sergeant:] “I feel sorry for you guys. The Service has really let you down. You’ll never be able to stop a real attack.”
It wasn’t the answer Gable had hoped for, and as he listened to John dissect the Service’s outdated equipment and spotty training, his stomach grew queasy. Deep down, he knew how ill – equipped and out of date the Secret Service was, but hearing it articulated by someone he respected made it impossible to deny. His mind drifted to all the times he had seen the Service drop the ball — most recently, a 2010 trip to Mumbai with President Obama, in which his unit had narrowly avoided a major international incident after nearly killing an unidentified gunman who turned out to be a local police officer. Scenarios like these were dress rehearsals for a real attack on the president, and in his five years with CAT, he had seen the Service fail so many of them.
Gable was now faced with a brutal truth: Increasingly, the Secret Service was fulfilling its Zero Fail mission based not on its skills, people, training, or technology, but on dumb luck. How long would it be before that luck ran out? Gable wasn’t alone. He knew other dedicated agents who felt a growing sense of disillusionment, especially with the agency’s leadership. But fear of repercussions had kept them silent. Until the stakes got too high.
* A rigid management structure that inspires discipline while also inciting resentment and rebellion. An organization whose performance standards are far higher — and whose morale and personal conduct standards are, at times, far lower — than those of any other federal agency. A working battalion whose members often sacrifice a normal life and push themselves to exhaustion to deliver on a near – impossible mission, slaving for some leaders who look after themselves first and fail to make the bold choices that could help support their corps.
My goal is to offer a behind – the – scenes look at an organization saddled with a never – ending struggle to improve its reputation, boost its resources, and raise its morale. In perhaps the ultimate irony, I present an agency that seems to improve only in the wake of the thing it is sworn to prevent: tragedy.
In the last six decades, the Secret Service has grown from three hundred agents and a $5 million budget to seven thousand agents, officers, and other staff and a budget of over $2.2 billion. Its mission has expanded as well. Instead of protecting one leader, the agency now shields his extended family, many of his deputies, and even his political opponents. It focuses not just on stopping a bullet but also on blocking a drone carrying poison gas, a cyberattack throttling the nation’s energy grid, and any threat to a stadium of spectators watching the Super Bowl. This kind of mission growth could prove challenging to any organization. But the Service hasn’t just suffered growing pains. By its own staff’s measures, the agency’s standards and capacity to fulfill its core assignment have been slipping for years, raising several crucial questions:
How did the Secret Service go from an elite, hardworking band of patriots vowing to do whatever it takes to protect future presidents in the wake of JFK’s assassination, to a frat boy culture of infighting, indulgence, and obsolescence?
…for three years running had recently been ranked as the most hated place to work in the federal government?* Kennedy kept up an unrelenting pace compared to his predecessors, and it pushed his detail close to exhaustion. He was also extremely reckless with his own personal safety. His actions made some of his protectors uneasy and a few quite angry. The agents on his detail liked the new president personally, but professionally, he was their toughest assignment yet.
* Rowley had tried twice to beef up the White House detail since Kennedy’s arrival — and largely failed. In the spring of 1962, the chief asked the White House and Congress for 58 additional agents and a $1 million increase in his total budget, a 19 percent increase for his modest force. Congressional appropriators, who had doubled the White House detail after the 1950 attempt on Truman’s life a decade earlier, gave Rowley half his request. He got 30 more agents.
In the spring of 1963, Rowley again requested additional agents — 35 this time — to help him comply with the very recent 1962 law requiring full – time protection for the vice president. This time Congress rejected the request completely.
But congressional resistance wasn’t Rowley’s only obstacle. The president himself wanted less protection. While Kennedy was always cordial to his agents, he resented the limits they tried to place on his ability to interact with the public. Kennedy regularly bounded headlong into crowds of strangers to shake hands, ignoring the Secret Service’s script without even a nod to his detail. As he told his detail leaders many times, he couldn’t very well be a politician without meeting the people.* When the Kennedy entourage returned to Washington, however, Salinger gently suggested to the president that he think of his own safety and avoid going into crowds without his agents. But Kennedy dismissed the idea that anyone, including the Secret Service, could keep him from a determined assassin. “ If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it,” Kennedy told his spokesman. “All he must be prepared to do is give his life for the president’s.”
* Kennedy gave his protective squad the slip on several late nights in Washington. He headed off the White House complex incognito, ducking into an unmarked car with his brother or a friend and returning in the wee hours of the morning. Agents could guess the reason, but Rowley and his team worried. For several hours, the Secret Service didn’t know where the president of the United States was.
Kennedy courted this sort of danger, trying to feed a seemingly insatiable appetite for sexual conquest, but members of his detail feared that within the sea of random women he met for trysts, one would try to blackmail, poison, or kill him.* McIntyre tried to make light of the president’s sexual dalliances at first, joking with other agents, “What happens if one bites him?” But eventually he stood witness to a steady parade of secretaries, starlets, and even prostitutes escorted to the president’s bedroom — in hotels and in his private residence. The Secret Service agents, who scrutinized the background of anyone who met privately with the president, weren’t allowed to so much as ask the women’s names.
* The night shift became accustomed to random female visitors arriving at the president’s private quarters, often on the arm of longtime Kennedy aide and friend David Powers. Afternoon shift members who were about to go off duty at 10 p.m. gave their shift leaders a discreet and terse status report on Kennedy’s nighttime guests.
“As we were about to go off shift, we’d explain, ‘So – and – so brought in a blonde,’ ” a former detail agent said. “Or, ‘Just so you know, boss, there are two guests in the room.’”
“You wanted to tell the midnight shift the situation,” the former detail member said. “The point of it was, if [the woman] didn’t come out by about 4 a.m., you were going to start to worry.”* U.S. intelligence officials warned that Cuban and Soviet operatives hoped to blackmail or even kill the president. Agents on the detail privately theorized that the best way to infiltrate the White House would be to send a good – looking young woman.
“We were in the middle of the Cold War, for Christ’s sake,” Newman said. “We anguished over the possibility of that happening. We were instructed, nobody was to go in that door, but the job was not done. Because we failed. We had to acquiesce to a form of behavior that was dangerous — not to us, but to the country and to the protection of the president.”
“We took an oath….Nobody goes into his office unless we clear them. Then there we are watching Dave Powers bring some women up to the suite and just walk right in.”* THAT TUESDAY MORNING, November 12, Miami special agent Robert Jamison couldn’t tell whether the Georgia Klansman on the police tape recording was exaggerating or telling the truth. But his claim on the tape was unnerving. The man said he knew of a plan in the works to assassinate President Kennedy.
Joseph Milteer, a wealthy organizer of white supremacist groups, had been on a road trip through the South and visited his childhood friend in his Miami apartment the previous weekend. He didn’t know that his friend was a police informant working undercover to infiltrate the Klan — and recording their chat.
Milteer had gotten to know some notoriously violent Klan leaders whom police suspected in a recent series of bombings and murders. Police had hoped their informant, William Somersett, could get his old friend Milteer talking…
“The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him,” Milteer repeated.
“Well, how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?” Somersett asked.
“From an office building with a high – powered rifle,” Milteer said.
“They are really going to try to kill him?” Somersett asked later.
“ Oh, yeah,” Milteer said. “It is in the working.”* “Hitting this Kennedy is going to be a hard proposition,” Somersett said. “I believe you may have figured out a way to get him, the office building and all that. I don’t know how them Secret Service agents cover all them office buildings everywhere he is going. Do you know whether they do that or not?”
Milteer gave an accurate explanation of why an advance agent like Lawson would not check nearby buildings.
“Well, if they have any suspicion, they do that, of course,” he said. “But without suspicion, chances are that they wouldn’t.”
He was right. Given the Secret Service’s small size, it was impossible to check the hundreds of buildings along any motorcade route. If there was a reason to suspect a specific problem, or a structure was very close, buildings could be checked or shuttered, as Lawson had done in Binghamton. But otherwise, the agents would do nothing about the buildings they passed.* Nine Kennedy detail agents headed to the Fort Worth Press Club in a nearby hotel, which reporters said was staying open late to serve light dinner and drinks for the traveling press. The sandwiches were all gone by the time the agents arrived, though, so they joined reporters for a few scotch and sodas and glasses of beer. Sometime after 1 a.m., press club president Cal Sutton told the group he had to shut down the party. It was against the law for the club to serve alcohol after midnight. So a reporter in the group called over to the Cellar, a legendary and slightly scandalous nightspot, and reached manager Richard Mackie. Could he bring over some fellow reporters, some Secret Service agents, and some White House people who were in town with the president?
Led by CBS News cub reporter Bob Schieffer and other members of the press, nine agents went on to the Cellar. Four of them — Clint Hill, Jack Ready, Glen Bennett, and Paul Landis — were scheduled to report for duty first thing the next morning. The men found a curious, dimly lit bar that was part gentlemen’s club, part beatnik coffee house. It was unlike any other bar they had seen in Washington. Some of the waitresses wore the skimpiest of outfits, more like bras and panties than clothes. The Cellar didn’t have a license to sell alcohol, but its owners kept hard liquor behind the bar and often served free “specials” — grain alcohol in fruit juices and other mixers — to friends. For club owner Pat Kirkwood, a wiry daredevil who wore cowboy apparel, those “friends” included anyone he felt might be useful to him: “all pretty girls, all reporters, all cops.”* In the course of the night, three agents on the midnight shift took breaks from securing the stuffy hotel hallway outside the president’s suite to check out the Cellar too. Kirkwood heard some agents giggling about leaving their posts. “ The firemen are guarding the president over at the Hotel Texas!” one said to a roar of laughter.
Hill headed back to the hotel around 2:45 a.m., and Ready and Bennett followed close behind at around three. Landis, who was single, ended up talking late into the night with a woman in the club, and left around five.
Secret Service regulations prohibited White House detail agents from drinking “intoxicating liquor of any kind” on the road. After all, they could be called for duty at any time when the president was traveling. But the rule was roundly ignored, in favor of letting grown men use their own judgment.* I knew I should have been on the back of the car! Hill thought. His body could have kept the assassin from getting a clean shot.
But Hill appeared to be the only agent who immediately connected that first sound to an attack on the president. Landis and Ready, the two agents on the right – side running boards, turned to look back over their right shoulders, scanning the spectators and buildings for the source of the sound.* Roy Kellerman, forty – eight, the ranking supervisor on the Dallas trip, turned around in his right front passenger seat to look back into the rear of the limo. He couldn’t immediately figure the source of the noise. Greer, the driver, thought maybe a motorcycle had backfired. He reflexively pulled his foot off the gas. Some police escorts on motorcycles thought they saw the limo’s brake lights flash red. Whatever the reason, the limousine slowed as Greer awaited instructions from Kellerman.
Looking back, Kellerman heard the unmistakable Boston accent of the president: “My God, I am hit.”
Kellerman saw the president’s hands clutching his neck. The senior supervisor paused just a few seconds, trying to figure out what was happening. A second shot rang out.
Hill didn’t hear it. With the first shot, he had jumped off the follow – up car and was now running for the back of the limo. He stumbled, then grabbed hold of the trunk handle. A third shot rang out, which Hill not only heard but felt. The right side of the president’s head exploded, a pinkish spray rising up near his ear, and he slumped over on his left side onto his wife.
Mrs. Kennedy wailed, “Oh my God, Jack! Jack! What are they doing to you?”
Landis hadn’t connected the first two shots to the president. But he turned back in time to see the impact of the third. The sound was sickening, he thought. Like someone had shot into a melon for target practice. “I saw pieces of flesh and blood flying through the air and the president slumped out of sight towards Mrs. Kennedy,” Landis later said.* Hill, with his feet on the rear steps of the accelerating limo and his hands holding tight to the upright handles on the trunk, found Mrs. Kennedy inexplicably coming in his direction. Standing on the bloodied backseat cushions, she stretched her torso and right arm out over the car’s trunk. She looked blankly, straight through Hill. She reached out to retrieve something on the shiny black metal of the trunk’s lid — a small chunk of her husband’s brain and skull.
Hill pressed the First Lady back into her seat and spread his body across the back of the wide convertible to shield the couple.
Only six or seven seconds had passed since Hill heard the first shot. Peering down into the limo, he saw blood, as well as gray and white bits of flesh and brain, splattered over the backseat, Mrs. Kennedy, and the Connallys. The governor, the back of his shirt inked with blood, had fallen over from his waist onto his wife.* The president was slumped lifeless on his left side on his wife’s lap, his gaze fixed. Hill could see Kennedy’s brain through a golf – ball – sized hole in the right side of his head. A small piece of skull with hair still attached sat on the car floor.
Hill looked back to his brethren in the follow – up car, his face contorted with anguish. He shook his head back and forth and gave his teammates a thumbs – down sign. Hill felt sure the president was dead or close to it.
“They got him. They got him,” Roberts shouted into the air.* Nixon’s mind immediately started calculating how this [George Wallace]shooting might help him. Working late that evening and continuing to make calls past midnight, Nixon fixated on two goals. First, he wanted to use the violent attack on one political foe to justify shadowing another rival. Then, the president wanted to control the investigation of the shooter and find a way to quickly blame the left for the shooting. In both these endeavors, the president would try to use Secret Service agents as his minions.
* DeProspero had weeks earlier advocated that the president wear a bulletproof vest. Reagan had preferred not to unless there was some special reason, a clear danger.
“Bobby, I’ll wear that vest whenever you tell me to,” he said quietly.* “The Secret Service changed policies and protocols after every shooting incident,” Ahearn said. “After Kennedy’s assassination, we don’t have any open – top limousines anymore. After the George Wallace shooting, when he just waded into a crowd…that led to the use of more [uniform] rope lines to control the crowd. And after March 1981, you couldn’t get within handgun range of the president without being magged.”
* As it had since Kennedy, the Service still overwhelmingly relied on the sheer will and determination of its people. Sweat and muscle were the Service’s standard solution for most security problems. “It’s always, ‘Let’s throw bodies at the problem,’ ” explained a former senior agent. “No strategy. Just reaction.”
* A small handful of agents on the new Clinton detail were uncomfortable when they slowly discovered that part of their job was to discreetly look the other way while the governor traveled to romantic assignations.
* “There’s a woman in there waiting for him,” the senior agent said. “They’re having sex.”
The junior agent let that information sink in. The detail was now in the business of aiding and abetting a ruse, helping the candidate pretend he was exercising a few times a week when in fact he was just meeting women for trysts. After a pause, Governor Clinton’s new protector asked what Kennedy’s detail agents had asked decades earlier: “How do you know she isn’t going to hurt him?”
To better protect Clinton, a Secret Service agent responsible for securing the site had already helped check out the private room where Clinton and one of his presumed girlfriends would rendezvous.* Some agents considered Clinton’s morning routine in 1992 — heading to the YMCA and sometimes meeting women for trysts there — a crafty accommodation to his new high profile as a presidential candidate. When he was just the governor of Arkansas, Clinton had used his early morning jogs as an excuse to dash out of the mansion and secretly meet his regular girlfriends. The women would pick him up in their cars somewhere along his route and drive off for some privacy. Clinton’s state troopers would later pick him up in his Lincoln Town Car at the downtown McDonald’s. They would sometimes teasingly ask Clinton about his unruffled appearance after his jog. He didn’t have any sweat on his face or clothes, even in the height of summer.
* Politically, most Secret Service agents leaned Republican and law – and – order, so they didn’t see eye to eye with Clinton on his Democratic social agenda.
* But after [Joseph] Clancy quietly told President Obama one day when they were alone that he was interested in staying on, the decision was all but made. Having his first detail leader back in charge sounded great to the president — and to Michelle Obama. Cockell’s instincts had been right.
* The vast majority of the Secret Service, however, detested the First Lady.
* “I’ve got to go,” Chelsea said to her friend on the phone. “ The pigs are here.”
The agent stood shocked for a moment. “Ms. Clinton, I want to tell you something,” he said. “My job is to stand between you, your family, and a bullet. Do you understand?”
“Well, that’s what my mother and father call you,” Chelsea said.* Many agents who worked on Clinton’s detail and Secret Service officers who kept watch at the White House said they never directly witnessed Clinton having sex. But they also insisted they weren’t fools and they could tell the purpose of his secret meetings behind the doors they secured. Who couldn’t recognize the obvious signs of a man ducking off to be left alone undisturbed with a series of comely twentysomethings? Secret Service agents and officers were at the door when Clinton ushered pretty young female staffers into his office for extended periods of time, and they saw the disheveled women leaving thirty minutes or an hour later with blouses loosened, hair mussed. They got the alert over the radio when Clinton told his detail late at night that he wanted to be taken alone to another random, unknown address in the nearby Virginia suburbs or a private Georgetown row house.
* “There is a line of demarcation in the Service: before and after 9/11,” said former presidential detail agent Jonathan Wackrow. Before 9/11, “we talked about an attack like Squeaky Fromme. No one ever thought of the option of this type of attack, including the military. The military considered a nuclear attack. The Secret Service worried, what if the president is shot at? But this type of attack was completely unknown.”
* Years before 9/11, Richard Clarke, a top national counterterrorism adviser, had raised his concern that the Secret Service’s solution was inadequate. In 1998, he led a tabletop exercise with the Secret Service, the FAA, and the Defense Department to game out what they could do if terrorists flew a hijacked Learjet loaded with explosives toward a target in downtown Washington.
* ON JUNE 11, 2002, U.S. News & World Report published the results of a monthslong investigation documenting a trail of horrendous behavior the Secret Service had tolerated in its highest ranks. At the time, members of Congress called it the most embarrassing moment in the agency’s history. The bombshell investigation painted a picture of the Secret Service as a team of arrogant louts, with senior leaders engaged in covering up for other lawbreakers and incompetents in their chain of command, or tarnished by misconduct themselves. The article reported on a senior agent, later promoted, who took a female informant back to his apartment for drinks and sex. She ended up dead in his bathroom from a drug – related brain hemorrhage. In one reported incident, a Los Angeles agent was caught having sex with a friend’s sixteen – year – old daughter at night and giving her methamphetamines to stay awake in her classes at high school. The report also cited several instances of agents caught stealing federal funds for personal use. In another case, agents left behind a highly sensitive and detailed security plan for protecting Vice President Cheney at a snowboard store after shopping during the Olympics in Salt Lake City.
* The investigation cited sources and sworn statements from Secret Service personnel who said that Director Stafford, former director Lewis Merletti, and A. T. Smith, a top supervisor who used to lead Hillary Clinton’s detail, had all had well – known adulterous affairs with staffers and aides in the Clinton White House.
* * [Greg] Stokes then brought up a longtime friend of McCauley’s. He said the Service should remember “certain agents who were on the detail under the Clinton administration who had open affairs and then were sued for divorce by the spouse on the grounds of adultery.” He spooled out the details he and dozens of agents had discussed about Alvin “A.T.” Smith, the former head of First Lady Hillary Clinton’s detail. “Yet that person was never found to be in violation of any sexual behavior….And he was on the president’s detail in a supervisory role at that time, in fact.”
The man he was talking about — Smith — was now deputy director, the Secret Service’s number two boss. And the man in charge of deciding discipline for the Cartagena men. During Smith’s time working on the Clinton detail, his wife accused him in court filings of adultery. Fellow agents gave sworn statements saying it was common knowledge among Service leadership that Smith was having an open affair with President Clinton’s staffer and distant cousin, Catherine Cornelius, who ran the White House travel office. Smith ended up divorcing his wife and getting remarried — to Cornelius. Now, two presidents later, the director had assigned Smith to oversee discipline for the men implicated in sexual misconduct in Cartagena.
As Stokes spoke about other agents who had gotten away with much worse conduct, he projected a strange sense of calm, but inside he was petrified. McCauley was no longer looking Stokes in the eyes. The stenographer kept clicking away at her keyboard to keep up. Stokes took a deep breath. He had saved his most damning example for last: a top supervisor on the president’s detail.
“You’ve got an ASAIC on the presidential protective division who’s had a long – standing extramarital affair with a foreign national,” he said. Stokes said he had been told the special agent in charge of presidential protection knew about it and hadn’t reported it.
At this, McCauley rolled his shoulders forward and tilted his head down to the desk. He gave out a heavy sigh. Stokes was poking the Service in a very vulnerable spot.
He never said his name, but Stokes was referring to Rafael “Rafi” Prieto, a prominent GS – 15 supervisor on the president’s detail. Prieto was no random shift agent. He stood on President Obama’s shoulder day in and day out. The president greeted Rafi by name. And yet several senior supervisors in Washington and New York knew Prieto was leading a double life with another woman — an affair that likely violated the standards for his security clearance.* Just like other senior agents who were Black, or from the South, or from the New York field office, Erevia looked out for his tribe. With the new senior position he’d gained since joining Obama’s campaign detail, he had established a notable track record of helping Hispanic agents get promoted.
* The man was a high – ranking Secret Service supervisor named Ignacio Zamora, Jr., a member of the agency for two decades who worked on President Obama’s protective detail. Zamora, better known inside the Service as Nacho, had agreed to leave the woman’s room at around 2 a.m., but soon doubled back. He asked the hotel security guard on duty if he could return to the room so he could get a money clip he left behind. The real reason: He had taken the bullet out of his gun while in her room and now needed to get it back. Zamora denied being with the Secret Service when the security officer asked. When the officer went to talk to the female guest, Zamora became anxious and left the hotel, raising the hotel’s suspicions even more. Zamora, who had drunk enough that he and the female hotel guest decided he shouldn’t drive, was scheduled to report to the White House for work in just a few more hours.
Zamora’s boss was Vic Erevia, who had been Obama’s longtime detail leader and was now assistant director over all protective operations.* “There are always two sets of rules [for discipline] in the Service,” a former supervisor on the Clinton detail explained. “There’s a rule for thirteens and below. There’s a rule for fourteens and above. The rules are totally different. I’ll tell you why. If you sting a fourteen, some of them know where the bodies are buried.”
* Zamora and presidential detail supervisor Tim Barraclough had each been separately sending sexually suggestive texts to a female subordinate on the detail, Christine Farber. All three were married. Spurred by the questions, Pierson had her internal investigators pull all the electronic communications for the two supervisors and the agent, starting the next day. The emails and texts they reviewed over the next week suggested a tawdry situation. The conversations gave the impression they were carrying on workplace flings, or indulging in heavy flirtation, while using government equipment.
* She later told investigators she was just a “friendly, flirtatious” person because of her personality and Hispanic heritage.
* President Obama announced Clancy as his permanent new director, rejecting the recommendation of the expert panel he had personally appointed to suggest reforms to fix the Service. The panel, including two lawyers who had worked for Obama, urged the president to choose an outsider as the next leader, saying it was the only way to get the Service to ditch its old, insular ways. “ Only a director from outside the Secret Service, removed from organizational traditions and personal relationships, will be able to do the honest top – to – bottom reassessment this will require,” the report found.
* Even Clancy’s fans worried about his ability to right the ship, however. At sixty – one, he had never worked in headquarters, so he lacked experience in back – of – the – house operations. He avoided confrontation, and throughout his career had warned subordinates not to try to improve on the old, proven ways. He had long – standing bonds with the leadership group that had brought the agency to this worrisome precipice.
* While Trump basked in the applause, he was also getting fed up. As he spoke, small clusters of protesters had interrupted him several times. A few weeks earlier, Trump had complained about some of these noisy detractors and urged his fans to “just knock the crap out of them.” Now, deep into his thirty – five – minute speech in this Kentucky convention center, Trump spotted a protester who had hoisted a mocking sign that showed Trump’s face photoshopped onto the body of a pig. Trump’s fuse blew, sparking a firestorm in the crowd.
“Get ’em the hell out of here,” Trump snarled into his microphone, pointing at the protester. “Get ’em out! Get ’em out!”
A scowling group of white men obediently rushed forward to surround the twenty – one – year – old Black woman carrying the sign and yank it out of her hands. For the next two minutes, Kashiya Nwanguma was threatened and shoved like a rag doll across the crowded floor of the Kentucky International Convention Center… On that day, neither Secret Service agents nor local police had come to Nwanguma’s rescue. They had been busy in another section of the convention center, rushing to separate another protester from a man who had punched him in the stomach. That vision of a Black woman being shoved by angry white men harked back to the ugly civil rights wars of the 1950s and 1960s, when lines of angry whites cursed Black students trying to enter a public school. This Kentucky rally came to typify the explosive nature of the Trump campaign events. It was a cause of great stress, and also some embarrassment within the Secret Service.[Luke: Disrupters don’t have a right to interrupt. There’s nothing wrong with removing them. There’s nothing wrong with angry white people shoving a disrupting black woman or any other disrupter. It’s not the Secret Service’s job nor the police’s to protect a non-existent right to disrupt inside an event.]
* Working detail agents fretted over the security risks that Trump created on the campaign trail, and they were annoyed that he continued to keep his personal security chief Keith Schiller at his side. The private security team Schiller led focused on removing loud protesters at events, but Schiller hovered close to the candidate like a personal bodyguard, and agents feared he would one day get in the way at the wrong time.
* Despite the chaos, members of the Secret Service were privately cheering Trump’s political message about cracking down on criminals and immigrants. Many in the agency leaned conservative politically anyway because of their law enforcement roots, and often voted Republican. A good number had been quietly rooting against Hillary Clinton, sharing jokes about what a nightmare she would be in the Oval Office. As a First Lady and secretary of state, she had earned such a bad reputation in the agency that it was hard to separate separate the reality from the lore. Some agents who had been on her protective details over the years swore she had refused to speak to them, scolded them for poor route selection when driving her to an event, and called the director to lodge complaints about them. Trump, by contrast, was normally playing bro to the agents, joshing with them about the “crazies” who showed up to boo and hiss at his rallies.
* One of the Service’s highest – ranking women supervisors, Kerry O’Grady, was aghast at Trump’s behavior… After The Washington Post released a video recording on October 7 in which Trump bragged that he could grab women “by the pussy” without asking, O’Grady couldn’t contain her building feelings. …she wrote a private Facebook post that many agents would later call a dereliction of duty but which she considered the rational response to a dangerous candidate like none the Service had protected before.
O’Grady, a twenty – three – year veteran of the agency, wrote that she realized publicly endorsing Clinton could be a violation of the law that prohibited government servants from taking partisan positions. “But this world has changed and I have changed,” O’Grady wrote. “And I would take jail time over a bullet or an endorsement for what I believe to be disaster to this country and the strong and amazing women and minorities who reside here. Hatch Act be damned. I am with Her.”
O’Grady would ultimately beat this downgrade, and the latent campaign against her. She believed Trump was pressuring the agency to fire her; she and her lawyer insisted to a judge they wanted the Service to turn over all communication between the White House and the Secret Service about her. The Service had long resisted any settlement talks, but they quickly settled the case after hearing this request. O’Grady retired.
O’Grady’s suggestion that she didn’t want to “take a bullet” was anathema to the Service’s ethos of protecting whoever was duly elected.[That’s not the type of person I’d want working in the Secret Service. Anyone upset about Trump’s private comments about grabbing women who wanted him by the pussy is a pussy. That the Secret Service couldn’t even discipline her is a disgrace.]
* But agents and alums outraged at her anti – Trump sentiments weren’t equally offended by agents who expressed racist views or personal and political disgust with Hillary Clinton.
[There’s a world of difference between sharing private views and publishing them for the world to see.]
* The Secret Service was still overwhelmingly an agency of cops who preferred long prison sentences for bad guys rather than sentencing reform, who, like Trump, tended to speak dismissively about women, minorities, and immigrants.
* Kelly was horrified as he watched the tapes showing Tran’s breach and his long walk around what was supposed to be the most secure eighteen – acre property in the world.
The worst part came as Kelly saw the shoddy state of the so – called cutting – edge technology the Service had deployed to prevent any intrusion on the White House. Nearly every piece of it had failed in some way that night. A crucial sensor that normally detects movement coming over the fence line was on the fritz, so it never sounded an alarm to the Joint Operations Center. One of the motion – activated lights that were supposed to flash when someone crossed the White House grounds didn’t work. A camera in the eastern portion of the grounds where Tran entered wasn’t functioning properly. When an officer spotted Tran seventeen minutes later, the radio on his shoulder wasn’t working, so it never relayed his location to his fellow officers when he banged the radio switch to report that he had a possible suspect. They didn’t know he had found someone someone or where he was, so they couldn’t rush to him and provide backup.Holy shit, this is bad, thought one of Kelly’s aides who was watching nearby. Kelly put his hand to his forehead and asked Callahan how in the world all of these systems could have failed. Callahan explained they had run out of money to repair some of these devices, but they hoped to eventually get the funds and get them repaired or replaced. Callahan and his deputies explained this was not the end of the world, because the Service had several duplicative layers of security on the grounds to protect against any single failure. Kelly just sat back for a minute, saying nothing. In this case, he reminded them, none of those extra layers, neither the officers nor the canines, had worked. Kelly saw a White House that was unacceptably vulnerable, and a Secret Service leadership that didn’t seem all that concerned. Callahan may not have worn it on his sleeve, but he did consider the breach a very serious one.
* Secret Service agents reported that [Don Jr’s ex-wife] Vanessa Trump had started dating one of the agents who had been assigned to her family. The agent didn’t face any repercussions, however. At that point, neither he nor the agency were her official guardians.
* Tiffany Trump, the daughter whom the president rarely mentioned as part of his family, had broken up with her boyfriend from college. In the aftermath, she began spending an unusual amount of time alone with a Secret Service agent on her detail. Service leadership became concerned at how close Tiffany appeared to be getting to the tall, dark, and handsome agent.
* Trump was pleased to see Mindy O’Donnell gone. But he remained obsessed with getting overweight agents removed from their posts when he saw them at the White House or working near him on presidential events. “I want these fat guys off my detail,” Trump told advisers, who felt the president might be confusing officers with agents. “How are they going to protect me and my family if they can’t run down the street?”
* The level of protection provided for Trump Tower wasted money and manpower the Service could ill afford, and the burden of shielding a skyscraper where the president almost never stayed only compounded as the bills kept rolling in for the glitzy places Trump was frequently visiting instead.
* Democrats in Congress began demanding investigations of Trump’s travel costs and the burden it placed on the Secret Service. The increasing media focus on the trips was starting to worry prominent Republicans.
* Trump had a close and jovial relationship with agents on his detail, especially with the top supervisor who was about to become his special agent in charge, Tony Ornato. But there was no way any supervisory agents were going to second – guess the president on his choices. Kelly tried to recommend fewer trips, explaining to Trump that this travel was forcing the Service to cut back on other parts of its work, but Trump’s only response was “Just work it out, okay?”
* Camp David was a forty – minute helicopter ride away, as well as being a naval base permanently protected by Marines and other Navy units, thus eliminating the need for most of the Secret Service officers and agents to fly in to stand guard as a human barrier around the property. But Trump, who had opted for marble bathrooms and gold leaf adorning his own homes, found the woodsy retreat in the Catoctin Mountains boring.
“ Camp David is very rustic, it’s nice, you’d like it,” Trump said with a smidge of sarcasm, talking to a European journalist just before taking office. “You know how long you’d like it? For about thirty minutes.”* Democrats pointed out to Alles all the ways the president was shortchanging his agents and their zero – fail mission at a time when the Service was still in recovery, facing a new degree of burnout from Trump duty, and still losing employees faster than it could hire them. The session got messy when Democrats on House Appropriations asked Alles to justify $26 million to protect a tower where the president didn’t live, and which his wife would soon depart.
* Secret Service is Going Broke Protecting Trump. Trump saw his Secret Service director essentially blaming him for his protection team’s empty coffers.
* …the financial problem could be attributed directly to the current administration, and more specifically to a president who made decisions without any concern for cost or consequences. In his eight months as president, Donald Trump had forced the Secret Service to shepherd him on trips to his resorts for golf trips on twenty – six out of thirty weekends. His family members had made roughly 650 out – of – town trips. The Service was working twelve times as many such trips with Trump and his family as they had with Obama and his.
* Trump never took notice of alarming bipartisan reports warning that the Secret Service was “an agency in crisis,” in desperate need of new blood to replace leadership that had grown adept at covering up problems rather than solving them and whose staff had dropped to its lowest level in a decade. He didn’t heed the warnings that the Service would continue to suffer — and falter — unless the next administration ponied up hundreds of millions of additional dollars every year to add 280 more agents, replace its outdated technology, and revive its moribund training programs.
* FOR THE FINAL year of his presidency, Trump requested a less than 1 percent increase in funds for the Service, and to cover the cost of inflation, his budget called for cutting $62 million from the funds that pay for overtime, travel expenses, relocations for promotions, repairs to the Service’s aging cars, and technology upgrades at the Joint Operations Center.
* The agent pointed to the Secret Service’s corrupt promotion system, which so closely resembles La Cosa Nostra’s that agents refer to being “made” when they win their first major promotion, normally orchestrated through horse trading among competing bosses. The agents scrambling to rise in the agency learn the importance of loyalty to their “family tree,” the first supervisors and teammates who backed them, even if it requires later covering up for their misconduct or mistakes.
* Finally, the Service’s rewards system provides no incentive for bosses to make tough choices or long – term plans, he said. Managers relentlessly chase the next promotion, the mark of their loyalty. The rapid turnover in assignments — sometimes every eighteen months — discourages managers from taking the risk of making a decision that could go badly when it can be left to the next guy to solve. Agents often use the same phrase to describe how quickly people pass through their offices on their way to the next rung of the ladder: “He was here for a cup of coffee” and then he was gone. As senior leaders near retirement, they race to cash in on their prestigious Secret Service résumé, often relying on the same family tree they obediently covered for, to help them land lucrative private security jobs at Fortune 500 corporations and giant Wall Street firms.
* While Donald Trump expressed interest in his detail agents’ lives and offered his gratitude for their hard work, Trump saw the larger Secret Service as he did any other federal agency: another tool at his disposal, one that could help him achieve his political goals. He wasn’t interested in the boring work of governing, to ensure the agency’s long – term health, and instead the employees of the Secret Service took a major hit for Trump. Rather than get the boost of money the previous administration and members of Congress had pledged, the Service — which turned 155 years old in 2020 — was stuck on the same hamster wheel, its staff racing to keep up with Trump’s jaunts, its agents waiting months to get paid for their extra sweat, its essential security system repairs delayed yet again. Trump was dragging the Secret Service back and forth to his properties for his rounds of golf, but they were ultimately pawns in a larger pattern with a lucrative payoff for Donald Trump. Yes, his travel was forcing the Secret Service, Defense Department, and other federal agencies to take money out of their pockets to support the president’s trips, and they handed a small portion of that over to the Trump organization. But something much bigger was under way and barely noticed. By traveling so often to his clubs, Trump was vacuuming up the money of not just the Secret Service and other federal agencies that secured his trips, but of everyone: scores of Republican politicians, corporate VIPs, special interest lobbyists, and foreign delegations, all of whom flocked to follow him, seeking an audience to curry his favor and paying his business for the special access.
* But that use of overwhelming force was roiling the staff of the Secret Service, with Black officers and agents demanding that their supervisors answer some hard questions. Part of their anger stemmed from a suggestion by a white officer, Joe Vadala, who had proposed that the agency use fire hoses in the future to keep protesters away from the mansion and reduce the risk of a breach. “Some said it was old school but ‘Old School’ works!” wrote Vadala, who had received awards for his life – saving reactions on the job. A flood of Black employees pelted the officer on the forum, insisting that his words were indicative of a Service aligned with the worst instincts of Donald Trump.
“There is no legal justification for ever using high – pressured hoses on American civilians exercising their First Amendment right to protest,” co – worker Rodney Grant wrote, reminding Vadala that they swore an oath to protect people’s constitutional rights. “History informs us that such tactics were used during the civil rights movement to terrorize, abuse and intimidate African – American men, women and children engaged in peaceful protest.”
“Can’t believe anyone would think that hosing people was an okay suggestion,” another wrote. “These types of ‘Old School’ thought processes is part of the reason we have the issues we have now.”[LF: It doesn’t sound like diversity is a strength. There is no First Amendment right to invade the White House. If using water hoses keeps invaders at bay, that might be a good idea, even if water hoses at some previous point in time were not used correctly. Is there any method to deter criminal behavior that has not been used incorrectly? So we should stop using valid methods of crowd control if they hurt the feelings of the aggrieved?]
* Many minority officers felt Vadala’s fire hose proposal reflected a deeper racism within the agency. One staffer asked why agents and supervisors who made racist comments had been promoted.
[LF: What constitutes racism is subjective. Why do we encourage invocations of a non-existent moral category?]
* …on Saturday, November 7, Biden emerged the clear victor as final vote counts showed he won the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania and the networks declared him the presumed next president. Still, the Secret Service leadership declined to authorize the full protection detail that had always been provided to presidents – elect, a level of security approaching that of the president’s own. The director and his team took their lead from the White House, where Trump had blocked the normal peaceful transition of power, a feature of American democracy that had long been the envy of other nations. Because of the president’s insistence that he was the victim of some inexplicable fraud, Biden did not immediately receive the protective shield of a specially equipped armored car, a twenty – four – seven counterassault team, and a beefed – up detail with more veteran agents. The Service spread the word to confused agents that they simply had to wait until the results were truly official — when Trump conceded or when the votes were certified by the Electoral College. But many agents said this delay ignored the agency’s own security training: Once he became the presumptive president – elect, Biden was automatically a bigger target for assassination.
* The decision to withhold this extra security only compounded the Biden camp’s fears that Trump had corrupted this elite band. What few realized was that clusters of agents, including some on Trump’s detail, were openly rooting for Trump, a fact hiding in plain sight. On Facebook and other forums, some of these public servants who promised to be above party were promoting Trump’s debunked conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines tossing Trump votes and a stolen election. Their views would harden over the coming weeks and shock colleagues, as they cheered a president trying ever more desperate plots to overturn the results.
* Despite the heroism of their brothers in arms that day, some Secret Service personnel again took to social media in the days after January 6, empathizing with and defending the mission of the armed rioters who breached the Capitol — the same ones who had endangered the Pence agents and pummeled Capitol Police officers with metal pipes and bats.
* Given all the ways the Secret Service had enabled Trump in the last year — from enabling his authoritarian march across Lafayette Square to the murmured support in the ranks for overturning Biden’s election — it was understandable that the president – elect and his aides had doubts. Was the agency entrusted with Biden’s life fully committed to the assignment? So serious was this concern about Trump’s corrosive hold on the Secret Service that Biden transition advisers urged that the agency swap out all members of the Trump presidential detail before Biden’s inauguration. Headquarters agreed to a compromise. They would bring back some of the senior agents whom Biden knew well from his vice presidential detail and make them supervisors on his new presidential team. Biden advisers, meanwhile, laid plans to replace Murray in the first half of 2021. The incoming team was disturbed by a director who would allow the Service to be used in an authoritarian photo op and in campaign events that jeopardized the public and their own workers’ health, and let a top official cross over to a political role in the White House.
* ONE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION official who oversaw the agency and studied the Service’s vulnerabilities up close regretted the political stain Trump had left but was more disturbed at how Trump and several presidents before him had let the agency down. The person told me it wasn’t the staff’s fault that sensors on the White House fence line didn’t work, that the full replacement of an outdated White House fence hadn’t been completed nearly six years after a humiliating breach, that overworked detail agents had to use their own cars for lack of a reliable government fleet, that their leaders hadn’t fully equipped them for a bioweapon attack or a multilayered assault on the White House.
* Today, the Service remains spread dangerously thin. In addition to protecting a president and vice president and their families, and key senior leaders, the Service also protects hundreds of foreign leaders who visit the United States every year, investigates a broad range of financial crimes, assesses and investigates violent threats whether they are made in bars, in written letters, or on Twitter, researches the traits of school shooters to help communities prevent future attacks, helps local police track down missing and exploited children, and much more.
