Investigations by the criminal side of the agency sometimes lead to strange findings. In 1986, Patrick Sullivan and other agents learned from an informant that Gregory Scarpa, Sr., a capo, or captain, in the Colombo Mafia family, was involved in creating counterfeit credit cards. After Sullivan arrested him, he was driving him to the Secret Service field office in New York when Scarpa asked Sullivan to stop the car.
“We pull over, and he tells us he is the highest-level Mafia informant in the FBI,” Sullivan recalls. At the time, Sullivan was the Secret Service’s representative to the Department of Justice’s Organized Crime Strike Force in Brooklyn. He knew Scarpa was a prime target of the strike force.
“I was stunned,” Sullivan says.
As later documented in court filings, Scarpa revealed that for at least twenty years, he had betrayed to the bureau secrets about the Mafia—including murders planned and committed. Moreover, Scarpa disclosed that at the behest of the FBI, he terrorized a Ku Klux Klan member into disclosing where the bodies of three civil rights workers who were murdered in 1964 were buried in Mississippi.
As important as the criminal side of the Secret Service is, with the exception of counterfeit currency investigations, the FBI investigates the same crimes. Each agency pursues leads it happens to receive. Yet the Secret Service seeks greater jurisdiction in these areas even as protection demands increase.
From its early days, the Secret Service’s culture dictated that the job got done, regardless of obstacles. While that ethic is admirable, taking on more duties without enough resources is not. Rather than taking a long-range view and making waves by demanding the necessary funding or shedding jurisdiction in some areas, Secret Service management makes do, boasting, “We do more for less.”
The result, according to current and former agents, is that since it became part of DHS, the Secret Service has been cutting corners and covering up deficiencies to the point where the security of the president, vice president, and presidential candidates is compromised.
“They will cut a protective detail down to the bone to save on costs, but throw every agent into an operation that will result in arrests,” an agent says. “The service either needs twice as many agents or half as much responsibility. The priorities are all messed up.”
Some of those compromises are a result of the turnover rate that, in turn, stems from senseless transfer policies. Because so many agents are leaving before retirement, less experienced agents remain to do the job. On the vice president’s detail alone, agents are being brought in from the counterassault team to stand protective duty.
“This acknowledges that we are losing people and now have to borrow from other divisions just for our daily activities,” an agent on one of the major details points out. “I have never seen them have to resort to doing this.”
Even more shocking, for presidential candidates and many protectees below the president and vice president, the counterassault teams themselves have been slashed in the past few years from the requisite five or six agents to only two agents.
“CAT is trained to operate as a full team of five to six men,” a current agent who was formerly on CAT says. “Each member has a specific function based upon the direction of the attack. A two-man element responds to the problem, while another responds to the attack with a base of fire—providing cover fire and trying to suppress the attackers—while the other element moves on them to destroy them. The other two-man element—or solo member, if there are only five operators—provides coverage in the rear and assists the element that is moving to address the attack.”
A team of only two men “cannot do all of those tasks, on top of communicating to the protective detail a status report detailing number of attackers, number of good guys or bad guys killed or captured, and then requesting direction from the detail leader about the next course of action,” the agent says.
William Albracht, a founding member and four-year team leader of the counterassault teams, could not believe that the Secret Service now cuts corners by reducing the team in many cases to only two agents.
“CAT team members are comprised of highly trained and extremely motivated agents,” Albracht says. “All are volunteers, and after an exhausting selection process, those that qualify are hand-picked for the assignment. The counterassault team itself is organized as a coordinated unit.”
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.”