As part of his health kick, Gore arranged to have bottled water delivery and a refrigerated dispenser at the residence. As part of routine security precautions, the Secret Service would test the water at the vice president’s residence. “They’ve got this phenomenal water purification system in both the White House and the vice president’s residence,” says former agent Chomicki. “We would test the water once a month, and the technical security guys used to come up and take samples from all the sinks and taps.”
But Chomicki, a Secret Service supervisor, noticed that the bottled water was not being tested. After he suggested that it be tested as well, the Secret Service sent samples of the water to the Environmental Protection Agency for testing. Two days later, EPA called Chomicki. A shocked technician told him the water at the vice president’s residence was laced with bacteria.
“He said the EPA had to expand its graph to be able to count the number of bacteria,” Chomicki recalls. “The water could cause headaches, diarrhea, and stomachaches.”
As a result of the test findings, the EPA confiscated huge batches of water from the bottled water company.
20
Cutting Corners
AFTER 9/11, THE Secret Service faced a double whammy. On the one hand, in a reflexive effort to show that the government was doing something to improve security, President George W. Bush and Congress created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an amalgam of twenty-two agencies with 180,000 employees. On March 1, 2003, the Secret Service was transferred from the Treasury Department to the new agency. After being a star at the treasury, the Secret Service became a stepchild competing for funds with other agencies, which were often dysfunctional.
On the other hand, demands on the Secret Service grew exponentially. As outlined in my book The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack, al-Qaeda’s goal is to deal a devastating blow to America, preferably with nuclear weapons. After 9/11, that threat meant that protection of the president and vice president needed to be much more extensive and robust.
In response to the attacks, President Bush roughly doubled the number of individuals given Secret Service protection to twenty-seven permanent protectees, plus ten family members. Another seven were protected when traveling abroad. By executive order, Bush provided protection to individuals such as his chief of staff and national security adviser. Others, such as the secretaries of the treasury and of homeland security received protection because they are in the line of succession to the presidency. As such, they are authorized to receive protection as decided by the secretary of homeland security. Some officials received only partial protection, such as when traveling to and from work.
The Secret Service’s expanded protective duties came in addition to protecting visiting heads of state and their spouses and other official guests, an enlargement of Secret Service duties authorized by Congress in 1971. Under the Presidential Threat Protection Act of 2000, the Secret Service was also charged with planning and implementing security arrangements at “special events of national significance.”
The winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002 was the first such event under the act. Prior to that, under a directive issued by President Clinton in 1998, some events such as the president’s State of the Union address had a similar designation. Other so-called national special security events are the United Nations General Assembly, presidential inaugurals, the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions, the Super Bowl, G8 summits, and a major visit such as Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to the United States in 2008. The state funerals of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford were also designated national special security events. At these events, the Secret Service is the lead law enforcement agency and coordinates all security arrangements.
While the vice president’s protective detail now has a hundred fifty agents and the president’s detail has three hundred agents, the details are stretched thin. These same agents undertake advance work for trips that often take place every day. With the 2008 presidential campaign being the longest in history, demands on the Secret Service went through the roof.
While the Secret Service receives modest budget increases, the annual appropriation is still a mere $1.4 billion—less than the cost of one stealth bomber. About a third of the budget goes to investigating crimes such as counterfeiting, check fraud, fraudulent use of ATM cards or credit cards, identity crimes, and computer-based attacks on the nation’s financial, banking, and telecommunications infrastructure. Likewise, about a third of the Secret Service’s agents are assigned to investigative work, but that figure is misleading because agents doing such work in field offices are routinely pulled off their assignments for protection work. In man-hours, slightly more than half of agents’ time is devoted to protection. Because it can boast of arrests, the 6,489-employee Secret Service keeps expanding its jurisdiction in the investigative areas.
To be sure, the Secret Service’s work on financial crimes is impressive.
Back in 1983, when Secret Service director Mark Sullivan started out as an agent, “When we picked up credit card fraud, a sophisticated credit card fraud back then would be somebody going to a dumpster behind some restaurant and diving in and getting somebody’s credit card numbers out of the dumpster,” Sullivan tells me.
Another scheme would be to steal an embossing machine from a hospital.
“They’d print a credit card number and somebody’s name on there,” Sullivan says. “And you know, you’d look at the credit card number, and it would be going like diagonally down the card. And that was a sophisticated credit card fraud.”
Now the Secret Service is up against the most sophisticated cyber criminals. Learning about the investigative side of the agency is enough to scare anyone. Counterfeiters have become so devious that bank tellers who are trained to spot fake bills can’t detect counterfeits even using a magnifying glass. Waiters with so-called skimmers swipe your credit card before they submit it for payment of your check. The encoded information on the magnetic strip is stored and then sold for twenty dollars per credit card.
On websites, criminals can buy the numbers imprinted on stolen credit cards. They can also fool banks into handing over all the money in your checking account, not to mention siphoning cash from ATMs. Phishing—fraudulently extracting money from people online—has been increasing at a rate of as much as 4,000 percent a year.
Then there are the Nigerian fraud artists who promise to make people rich, then wipe out their life savings. Some victims revictimize themselves: After losing most of their money, they fall for the scheme all over again. Nigeria prints and ships boxes of counterfeit treasury checks to the United States. Since the Nigerian government is often complicit, the Secret Service has closed its office in Lagos.
The North Korean government counterfeits U.S. currency using high-pressure intaglio presses that are about as good as those of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Other counterfeits are made with offset or flatbed presses or digital printers, which make the crudest counterfeits. About one in ten thousand bills in circulation is counterfeit. Most of them are hundred-dollar bills. Because counterfeit U.S. currency is so prevalent, banks and currency exchangers in many Asian countries refuse to accept U.S. bills.
Thefts of credit card numbers have become so widespread that “You have already been compromised; they just haven’t gotten around to using your number,” Tom Lascell of the criminal investigative division says reassuringly. “We used to think holograms on credit cards made them safe,” he says. He then holds up a photo of dozens of credit cards for sale with holograms.