Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top-Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away From It All (16 page)

The first stop was the troop rally and, although it was late at night local time, the reception by those in attendance was very warm. We worked at a distance from the president as he patiently shook every hand in the crowd, taking over an hour to greet every soldier. As the time passed, I grew more concerned about our security situation. I knew that our enemies were now aware that the president was on the ground, and with every minute the danger grew. I was also receiving minute-by-minute briefs on the status of our stranded personnel in Kabul. We desperately needed them to get in the air and on their way to Bagram.

My next stop with the president was the base hospital, where he would award Purple Hearts to the wounded heroes in the facility. I kept my distance from the president as he spoke with the soldiers out of respect for their privacy, and I saw the soldiers’ faces light up as he spent time with each one. After five years on the PPD I felt ready to move on, but it was moments like these that always reignited my passion for my work.

As the night wore on, the exhaustion started to catch up with me. It was a huge relief to get the phone call from the Kabul team telling me that a brief window had opened and, although it was risky, they were able to fly and would land at Bagram with just enough time to make the flight home. The meeting with the soldiers was taking a while and I knew we had several hours ahead before the mission was complete. The final logistics were put in place. Air Force One would take off without runway lights to avoid being hit by mortar fire, but the lights would be activated for the support plane carrying me and my team. Therefore, to reduce our risk of being taken down by mortars, we had to take off immediately after Air Force One. To expedite the departure, I asked all the support personnel we could spare without sacrificing security to board the plane.

As the president finished his visit, I ensured he would say his final words while inside the hangar and not exposed on the runway. After this last meeting we would be finished with the visit, but not without a brief moment of unintended humor. President Obama was scheduled to meet with a small group of military officials and a Delta Force operator who was patiently standing outside the meeting room with all his equipment on, including his weapons. I was approached by a staff member who asked me if I wouldn’t mind telling the Delta Force operator to relinquish his weapons before entering the room. Tired and in no mood for stupidity, I laughed loudly at this ridiculous request given that we had used every armed military unit on the base to help us secure the president and now he wanted me to ask an elite member of one of the finest military units the world has ever seen to drop his weapon. This brief interaction was a microcosm of the insulated, out-of-touch world some of the Washington, DC, cocktail party crowd operate in. One brief look into the Delta Force operator’s eyes was enough to tell his story, a story that never has a happy ending but always has a hero as its subject.

After the meeting, we hurriedly loaded the president and his team onto the plane and within a few short minutes it was traveling down the dark runway and into the air. There was no time for any sigh of relief as the runway lights were turned on and we were now in very real danger if the support plane was targeted for attack. I jogged over to the plane, thanked my military counterparts, took a head count—and to my dismay I saw we were missing one of our military support personnel.

Minutes felt like hours as I called him over and over. After ten minutes I began to grow very concerned and the team on the plane began to worry as well. We could not stay much longer with the runway illuminated like a bright target for the enemy. It was then that I saw headlights and a military vehicle driving toward me. Leaping out of the vehicle as it was still moving, our lost team member appeared and with no time for questions, he boarded the plane and I told the pilot to go. It was the fastest I had ever seen a plane take off, and we were safely on our way home.

Finally, my five-year journey on the PPD had come to a close.

A
DISTURBING MEDIA NARRATIVE
began shortly after President Obama’s inauguration that reflected poorly on the American people yet was entirely inaccurate. Despite any hard evidence, cable news outlets and prominent bloggers initiated a national conversation when they began speculating that President Obama had been receiving an unprecedented number of threats due to his race. What started in the editorial and opinion-based outlets soon became a mainstream media meme when a book about the Secret Service was released in 2009 that quoted an inside source as stating that threats to
the new president were up nearly 400 percent. This misleading and inaccurate statistic disregards a number of trends I witnessed firsthand while working in the Protective Intelligence Unit in the New York field office and while assigned to the PPD.

During my twelve-year tenure with the Secret Service, the volume of reported threats to our designated protectees increased. That is not in dispute. However, there is a clear difference between reported threats and an increased general threat level. The exponential growth in social media platforms and mobile communication created an environment where casual threats could be easily made and just as easily reported. Threats, both veiled and direct, made in bars or between friends and relatives historically were only occasionally reported to the Secret Service and only investigated when someone who had actually witnessed or heard the threat reported the person making the threat. This changed with the advent of social media and the growth in e-mail communications. Threats via e-mail could now be easily forwarded on and social media postings that contained threats could be shared and “retweeted,” enabling any concerned person reading the threat to initiate a Secret Service investigation. The stories of the “overwhelming” threat level to President Obama ignored the simple facts that the Secret Service does not publicly disclose its statistics on threats to the president and that the general threat level to President Obama was relatively consistent with historical trends.

In my experience, the social media factor alone is primarily responsible for the growth in threat reporting, yet in spite of this, the media firestorm surrounding the report of a 400 percent increase in threats and an “overwhelming” threat level because of the president’s race grew until it was finally refuted months later in congressional testimony by Secret Service director Mark Sullivan. I had never witnessed such a blatant misuse of data attributed to anonymous sources to indict a nation and broadly claim that racism was driving a desire to harm the president. Anyone who questions a media bias need look no further than the irresponsible, headline-grabbing reports on this particular story to confirm that it exists.

The growth in threat reporting will likely continue as increasing numbers of people join social media networks. The Secret Service cannot ignore any threat regardless of its absurdity, and this is creating a strain on resources. Many within the agency feel strongly that the Secret Service
should maintain its role as a lead agency in the investigation of financial crimes, and others feel that it should focus more on dignitary protection. Maintaining a dual mission as a protection agency and an investigative agency is going to become increasingly difficult in the future as threat reporting continues to grow, and it will be harder to defend in an atmosphere of constrained financial resources.

The Secret Service, along with a number of other federal law-enforcement agencies, could solve the majority of its manpower issues by agreeing to forfeit duplicative, redundant investigative mandates already filled by other federal agencies. The FBI has the capacity to absorb the Secret Service’s computer crimes division and a significant portion of its financial crimes investigations. Counterfeiting could be turned over to underused federal investigators in the Treasury Department. These simple adjustments would free thousands of agents to focus exclusively on protection and threat assessment and investigation. It is understandable that this is not what the upper echelons of power within these agencies wish to hear, but I am confident that they quietly know it to be true.

As I’ve said already in this book, with big, bureaucratic government come big, bureaucratic consequences, and one of those consequences is that the bureaucracy’s primary reason for existence over time becomes to protect itself. The reason often cited by Secret Service headquarters representatives for holding on to the investigative mission is that conducting federal criminal investigations ensures a higher quality of protection agent. In my experience this claim is not based on fact. It seems that many of the headquarters staff who continue to erroneously make this claim are also lobbying for retirement positions within financial institutions where they have supervised investigations, and they are reluctant to lose a bargaining chip.

The Secret Service criminal investigators I have worked with are some of the finest in the world, but no amount of spin is going to make two plus two equal five. In a future of strained federal government budgets, every agency is going to have to prioritize its mission and do what is done in the business world through leveraging economies of scale and scope. Having numerous federal agencies with overlapping investigative and protective responsibilities is, in my experience, not only a budget problem but a national security problem and, in the wake of the 2013 Boston terror attack, the issue should become a congressional priority.

Agencies are inherently territorial and despite post–9/11 mandates from lawmakers to better coordinate investigative missions and intelligence sharing, I have seen little progress. Protecting an agency’s budget and mission will always be priority number one for managers within an agency and no congressional mandate will change that. Unless we begin to merge the rapidly multiplying federal law-enforcement workforce into a streamlined model, we will continue to see intelligence and investigative failures similar to those associated with the Boston Marathon bombing.

Unfortunately, the trend line is moving in the opposite direction as nearly a fifth of federal law-enforcement personnel are now located within smaller agencies with limited investigative authority, such as the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. How does Congress continue to justify the criminalization and subsequent investigations of American citizens for minor infractions falling under these agencies’ limited purviews when we continue to miss the signs laid bare for us in the Boston terror attack investigation? We have roughly 138,000 federal law-enforcement personnel. Think of the possibilities if we reallocated agents involved in the now-infamous Fish and Wildlife Service raids on the Gibson guitar company to interviewing potential terrorists such as the Tsarnaev brothers responsible for the Boston bombing?

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FTER MY NEARLY FIVE YEARS
of service on the PPD, it was time to move on to the next stage of my career. There are no good-bye parties when an agent departs from the PPD. You are asked to report to the administrative section to hand in your White House pass and your key to the White House grounds, and that is the extent of the “ceremony.” Its banality is the very definition of the term “anticlimactic.” As a courtesy from the Executive Office of the President, they offer the opportunity to join the president in the Oval Office for a series of departure photos with you and your family. I gladly took the
opportunity to take the photo and was honored to be a part of it. Although my political differences with President Obama were substantial, he and his family always treated me with dignity and respect. He was one of a group of men I would have gladly sacrificed my life for. Despite the rather inglorious nature of an agent’s departure from the PPD, they typically did their best to accommodate departing agents’ post-PPD assignment requests, and I was grateful to be granted assignment to the Baltimore field office, located off Pratt Street in the inner harbor area of the city.

For years on the PPD I dreamt of a manageable work schedule in balance with my family life. One would think that after nearly five years of overseas travel, terrible airplane food, an entirely unpredictable schedule, exotic illnesses, and a level of fatigue that penetrates to the core, a nine-to-five position in an office would be a welcome change. Sadly, it was not.

After only a few days of settling in the Baltimore field office, I began to miss the White House’s organized chaos, high-stress environment, and even the food in the White House Mess (the food service area run by the US Navy).

The Secret Service is a compartmentalized agency and when you leave one section for another, you are completely shut out of your previous division. I was the lead advance agent for the president of the United States in Afghanistan just a week prior and had left the PPD with a perfect evaluation score. I was proud of what we had accomplished during my time there. Now, I could no longer enter the White House grounds without a guest pass. It was a tough transition to handle and, although the workload in my previous position on the PPD was strenuous, it was also incredibly rewarding. I was proud of the complex security plans I successfully implemented and didn’t realize how much I would miss it until I was stuck behind a desk.

I enjoyed the criminal investigative casework early in my career, but once you get a taste of protection work, there is no turning back. Having a front-row seat to the world’s most important events is like an intoxicating drug. I thought back to the moment President George W. Bush spoke from the Oval Office and how I stood just feet behind the camera at the Oval Office door watching it live, and how when Bear Stearns collapsed and the gravity of the financial crisis became apparent, I was in the limo with President Bush listening to his perspective on the issue. I thought
about standing in the private reading room of the Oval Office as President Bush was on the White House patio sprinting on his exercise bike at a breakneck pace and looking around at all the mementos he collected as president: a brick from the home of the spiritual head of the Taliban, Mullah Omar; the Glock pistol Saddam Hussein was carrying when he was taken into custody; and many others. This was now all part of my personal history, and they were memories that could not be forgotten and were tough to leave behind.