In the President's Secret Service (21 page)

Albracht, who taught new agents, says a counterassault team cannot operate with only two agents. “When an attack initiates, one team deploys immediately, tries to flank and go to the actual source of the attack,” he says. “The other lays down a base of fire. Once the counterassault team achieves fire superiority, the second prong of the counterattack moves in.”

If the team is cut to two members, “It’s not a team,” Albracht says. “Then it would be just two guys with submachine guns.”

Similarly, Reginald Ball, who was on the counterassault team for three years, says, “The team is always at least five members. Otherwise, the concept does not work.”

When first daughter Barbara Bush was in Africa in 2004 and 2005, a majority of the CAT team leaders and assistant team leaders signed a letter to the then assistant special agent in charge (ASAIC) of CAT, conveying their concerns over the fact that her CAT had been cut to two agents.

“The ASAIC responded by denying there was any problem and saying we should do the job we are tasked with, whether it is a full team or a two-man element,” an agent who was on the trip says.

Besides cutting CAT teams, since its absorption by DHS, the Secret Service has cut back on protection of the U.N. General Assembly. When the General Assembly is in session, every spare agent is
assigned to guard the more than one hundred thirty heads of state and the sixty-three spouses they bring to New York City. High-level protectees receive a full detail, with both counterassault and counter-sniper teams.

But the Secret Service now assigns lower-level protectees what is called a dot formation—only a detail leader and two agents working twelve-hour shifts. In many cases, agents are reassigned from protecting the president and vice president or from being on their CAT teams to go to New York. During this period, an agent is not allowed to take annual leave unless he has a death or major illness in his immediate family.

Before the Secret Service became part of DHS, it would make sure lower-level protectees had adequate protection by assigning officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; Customs and Border Protection; or the U.S. Marshals Service to supplement each detail.

“The dot formation is a joke and simply window dressing that allows us to accomplish our taxi service mission,” an agent detailed to protect heads of state at the U.N. General Assembly says. “Any attempt on a protectee would in all likelihood be successful.”

While U.N. coverage and CAT teams have been cut, in-service training, time for workouts, physical fitness and training, and firearms training and qualification also have been slashed.

“Every six weeks, you are supposed to cycle out to training for two weeks,” says an agent. “For two solid weeks you should be training, shooting. These are the agents that are assigned to protect the vice president and the president. But I’ve been on the detail for nineteen months, and I’ve gone to Beltsville [the Secret Service training facility] once. Instead, you’re told you have an assignment to go sit for the grandchildren of the vice president.”

“Most law enforcement agencies require anywhere from forty to a
hundred twenty hours per year of in-service training for its officers,” says an agent on one of the top protective details. “Do you know how many days of protective training I’ve had in the last two years? Zero. No review of legal rulings, interview techniques, investigative trends, protective intelligence investigations, or advance protection work. No constant training in ambush response, emergency medicine scenarios, or emergency vehicle operation.

“Training is almost nonexistent, and it shows,” says the agent. He cites one training scenario where a motorcade is ambushed. The shift leader is supposed to identify where the attack is coming from. Based on that, the agents know how to deploy and go after the attackers.

“What we saw was just an absolute embarrassment, people running around in circles, not knowing where to go, what to do, couldn’t identify where the attack was coming from,” the agent says. “They would have all been killed within a matter of seconds had that been an actual attack. We’d have lost everybody and the protectee.”

According to Secret Service policy, “We are supposed to be given three hours a week just for physical training,” another current agent says. “Well, that’s never going to happen.”

Secret Service rules require agents based in Washington to qualify with a pistol once a month and with long guns every three months. But, in contrast to years past, many agents find they are given time to take the qualifying test for long guns only once or twice a year.

“I’ve had conversations with special agents in charge who say they are not able to get the requalification training in they would like because of the operational demands they have,” says Danny Spriggs, who retired from the Secret Service as deputy director in 2004. In previous years, “We never sacrificed training,” he says.

Agents who have left the Secret Service to join other federal law enforcement agencies report that, in many cases, training in firearms
and counterterrorism tactics in those agencies far exceeds the quality of what the Secret Service offers.

“They actually encourage training here rather than making up excuses for not training,” one of those agents says.

Unlike the FBI, the Secret Service has no use for outside education.

“If you wanted to go out and get a master’s degree or a doctoral degree, it’s on your own, and they won’t work around your schedule,” a Secret Service agent says. “The FBI will give you sabbatical time.” The bureau also will pay for outside education if it is related to an agent’s field of work. “Management’s mentality at the Secret Service is that the agent doesn’t need to know that. The agent just needs to do his job and shut up.”

Standards are so lax that agents are actually handed blank evaluations for possible promotions and fitness ratings and asked to fill them in themselves. According to agents, those who have “juice” or “hooks” with management because they play golf with someone receive good evaluations. Agents who don’t have hooks are told, “You’re getting a rating of forty-six out of fifty, no matter what.”

“You are supposed to do your physical training test quarterly, but I haven’t done one in two, three years,” an agent says. “When you do, you enter your scores yourself on a form and hand it in.” In fact, the agent says, “I’m one of the PT instructors. And because the service takes physical training so lightly, I don’t take it seriously either. Just give me a sheet, and I trust that what the agent says he did is accurate.”

A third agent estimates that 98 percent of the agents provide their own scores for the PT test. “You fill out a form, hand it to the guy, he enters it in, and he doesn’t know if you did your PT test or not,” he says. “You test yourself.”

As a result, agents say, many of their colleagues are out of shape.

“Some of them, you just roll your eyes,” an agent says. “One agent
cannot even do a sit-up. I know for a fact he can’t because his belly’s already up to his chin. Just look at some of the details, and you can really see where the standards have gone—downhill.”

“We had a post stander last weekend, a female agent, and I was in shock,” says an agent, referring to agents assigned to guard a specific area or site on a temporary basis. “Overweight, out of shape, just disgusting. And you look at this person and say, ‘If I’m going to go through a door with you to execute a search warrant, are you going to have my back? If I get shot, are you going to be able to carry me out? Or are you going to be able to get up four flights of stairs because I’m in a fight with somebody?’ Probably not.”

T
HE CURRENT LOCATION of the president is displayed by an electronic box at key offices in the White House and at the Secret Service. He is listed as POTUS, for president of the United States. Called the protectee locator, the box also shows the location of the first lady (FLOTUS), the vice president (VPOTUS), and the president’s and vice president’s children. If they are not in Washington, the locator box displays their current city. In addition, Uniformed Division officers stationed at the White House update one another by radio on the location of the president and first lady within the Executive Mansion.

When the Clintons were in the White House, “It was funny, because on the radio you’d hear that she went somewhere, and then you’d hear that he went to the same location, and every time he went to her, she would go somewhere else,” a former Uniformed Division officer says.

Like most other presidents, Clinton got a charge out of greeting his fans. One evening, he was to attend a high school reunion in Little Rock. The Secret Service had sealed off the floor of his hotel room and had checked out the hotel employees who would be given access to the
floor. Two maids who had been cleared asked Agent Timothy Gobble if they could stay near the end of the hall to catch a glimpse of Clinton as he left for his motorcade. Already late, Clinton saw the two women waving at him and walked to the end of the hall to chat with them.

“You could see how thrilled they were,” Gobble says. “Here was the leader of the free world who took three minutes to talk to them. They thanked me profusely for giving them that opportunity. There were no cameras around, so it was not for show.”

Clinton not only loved greeting people but had a gift for remembering who they were. After a speech in New York at an AFL-CIO convention, Clinton was shaking hands. Agents noticed a busboy eyeing him and moving closer.

“Clinton saw him and called him by his name,” says an agent on his detail at the time. “The president shook his hand and asked how his father was. The busboy got teary-eyed and said his father had died. Commiserating with him, Clinton turned to an aide and said the man’s father had had cancer.”

“When presidents get into a crowd, they just seem like they feed on the energy from the people they are shaking hands with,” Albracht says. “They may be dragging from a long day of travel and campaigning, but when they hit the rope line, they start to get energized all over again. I’ve seen it time and time again. It seemed to have the strongest effect on Clinton. He’d replenish his energy from theirs and get charged up and ready to continue. They all did it, but it seemed to have the strongest effect on him.”

Clinton liked to go running, presenting the predictable security problems.

“There were people waiting for him to run every morning,” says Pete Dowling, who was second in command of Clinton’s detail during the first term. “So it was nice for him, but quite frankly, for us they were unwanted guests. They weren’t screened; we didn’t know who they
were. People were trying to hand him water bottles, so we were really concerned about that. If the president were to run up the Mall every day with the same regularity it’d be pretty easy for a terrorist group, who would observe his actions, maybe to plant a bomb in a trash can. And if he didn’t run by that day? They’d just take it away and come back again. That kind of presented a threat to us that we hadn’t seen before.”

The Secret Service discussed its concerns with Clinton, but he continued to run. That changed after he fell walking down the stairs at golf pro Greg Norman’s house in Florida in the early morning hours of March 14, 1997. The Secret Service Joint Ops Center then woke agent Norm Jarvis at home to ask him to secure the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where surgery would be done on the president to reattach a tendon torn from his right kneecap.

Later that morning, Clinton arrived by motorcade from Andrews Air Force Base. Jarvis arranged for an agent to stand in the operating room throughout the surgery.

“I’m not sure if they knew we had guns on under our scrubs, but sharp cutting instruments so close to the president—even in the hands of a trusted military physician—needed a countermeasure in the hands of a trusted agent,” Jarvis says.

Clinton’s doctor, Admiral E. “Connie” Mariano, who traveled with the president, oversaw the operation. But Jarvis was startled to see an orderly line of dozens of surgeons in the operating room waiting to step up and do part of the knee reconstruction.

“Each one had a tool, probe, scalpel, or whatever, waiting to take their turn to poke, cut, or saw so they could claim they operated on the president of the United States,” Jarvis says. “After the anesthesia was administered, the first surgeon did the initial incision. The next exposed the tendon. Then another cut the tendon to even out the jagged remains. Another surgeon cleaned and exposed the kneecap. On and on it went for hours.”

In one form or another, Jarvis had seen this phenomenon played out dozens of times: For most people, any contact with a president is a highlight of their lives.

Clinton did not want to return to the White House in an ambulance, and Secret Service vans were not equipped to transport him in a wheelchair. Because Jarvis knew Sarah Brady, wife of the former Reagan press secretary James Brady, he asked if the Secret Service could borrow her husband’s wheelchair-accessible van for the trip.

Clinton faced about eight weeks on crutches and months of physical therapy. He had to wear an adjustable leg brace to restrict knee movement. After that incident, Clinton gave up running and started using exercise machines.