Many agents trace cutting corners to the Secret Service’s absorption into DHS. Being submerged in what many view as a dysfunctional agency, and having to compete for funds with other national security agencies, led to a lowering of standards. The fact that the Bush White House itself periodically asked the Secret Service to skip magnetometer screening undoubtedly contributed to an indulgent attitude. Indeed, Michael Chertoff himself, secretary of DHS, contributed to the lowering of standards in a very personal way.
In October 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within DHS fined James D. Reid $22,880 for allegedly employing illegal immigrants when his Maryland cleaning company worked at Chertoff’s home and at other Washington homes. On the face of it, that did not make sense, since Secret Service agents protecting Chertoff would have been expected to check the background—including citizenship—of anyone allowed in the DHS secretary’s home. Indeed, in response to a December 11, 2008, Washington Post story reporting the violations, a Secret Service spokesman said that agents protecting Chertoff would have “run the appropriate checks, screened, and escorted people as appropriate in order to maintain the security of the residence and our protectee’s security.”
But an agent who was periodically on Chertoff’s detail says that while the Secret Service initially performed routine screening of workers, the secretary’s wife, Meryl J. Chertoff, an adjunct law professor at Georgetown law school, in recent years “admonished agents for ‘hassling’ the workers.”
Agents in charge bowed to Mrs. Chertoff’s wishes. As a result, “no name checks [were] done for some time,” the current agent says. When checks were done at times, “It was obvious the workers were providing bogus identifying information to agents, but [the agents], out of fear of Mrs. Chertoff, allowed them through,” the agent says. “The workers also were rarely escorted, as that pissed her off, too.”
“Mrs. Chertoff would belittle the agents for trying to do their jobs by doing the name checks before the workers entered the residence,” another agent confirms.
Asked for comment, William R. Knocke, a DHS spokesman, said, “These are baseless and sensational allegations that I’m not going to dignify with a response.”
Knocke referred to his previous statement to The Washington Post that every contractor has the responsibility of ensuring his workers are legal.
“As customers, the Chertoffs obtained assurances from Mr. Reid that any personnel he dispatched to their home were authorized to work in the United States,” Knocke said. “As soon as the Chertoffs learned that Mr. Reid deceived them by employing some unauthorized workers, they fired him.”
That the Secret Service allowed itself to become complicit in flouting immigration laws and even directed its agents to ignore violations is shocking. But skipping magnetometer screening when the lives of the president, vice president, and presidential candidates are at stake is far more shocking.
Retired agents who served in prior years before the Secret Service began cutting corners after its absorption into DHS say they have never heard of stopping magnetometer screening. When told of the practice, they assert that the Secret Service would never do such a thing.
“The [political] staff sometimes would propose stopping the magnetometers when an event was about to start,” says former agent William Albracht, who retired in 2001 and was an instructor. “I don’t know of any agent that has ever done that. That’s just not what we do. It doesn’t matter to us how your person looks in the media or to the crowds. It’s not really our concern. Our concern is that person’s safety.”
“You face pressure from political staffs all the time, but you don’t stop magnetometer screening,” says Norm Jarvis, who also taught new agents, was on Bill Clinton’s protective detail, and left the Secret Service in 2005 as a special agent in charge. “Sometimes things happen and the flow rate is a little slow. But nobody in the Secret Service would allow the staff to impair security and jeopardize the life of the president by stopping magnetometer screening.”
“Requests were made by staff to expedite or stop magnetometer screening,” says Danny Spriggs, who headed protection and retired as deputy director of the Secret Service in 2004. “I would never have acquiesced to that.”
23
Trailblazer
ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, the Secret Service rushed President Bush to Air Force One from a school in Sarasota, Florida, where he was reading to children in a classroom. Usually a Boeing 747 known as the doomsday plane accompanies Air Force One and is parked nearby when the president lands. Packed with ultrasensitive communications gear and military hardware, it is designed as a mobile command post in case of a devastating attack, such as a nuclear one. Consideration was given to transferring Bush to the doomsday plane after the 9/11 attack. The idea was rejected because just the sight of him entering the plane could have created panic.
“I spoke to him about not going back to Washington,” recalls Brian Stafford, the Secret Service director at the time. “The first time he was agreeable. Later when I spoke with him, he wasn’t as agreeable. By that time, we owned the skies. Even though we didn’t have all the answers we wanted, we were more comfortable about his going back than [we had been] earlier in the day.”
After landing at Andrews Air Force Base, Bush rode on Marine One to the White House.
Agents took Laura Bush from Capitol Hill to the basement of Secret Service headquarters. During such national emergencies, the Secret Service works with the military to ensure continuity of government and coordinates protection of those in the line of succession to the presidency. Because of that coordination function, even if officials in the line of succession receive protection from the State Department, as is usually the case with the secretary of state, or from the Capitol Police, as is the case with the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate, they receive a Secret Service code name. The secretary of labor, for example, was code-named Firebird after Elaine Chao objected to her assigned code name, Fireplug.
At the time of the attack, Laura traveled with only two cars and four agents. Before driving her to headquarters, the agents called for additional cars and backup. After 9/11, the number of agents on Laura’s detail was more than doubled.
Bush entered the White House at six fifty-four P.M. to find it surrounded by agents in black carrying submachine guns. Laura met him in the Emergency Operations Center, a bunker of rooms deep underground. That night, they were sleeping in their bedroom on the second floor at eleven-thirty when a Secret Service agent, breathing heavily from running, woke them up.
“Mr. President! Mr. President!” the agent said. “There’s an unidentified aircraft heading toward the White House!”
In their bathrobes, the Bushes returned to the underground bunker, where an aide pointed out a roll-out bed. Then word came that it had been a false alarm. The plane was friendly.
“George had to literally lead her to go downstairs,” Nancy Weiss, a close friend of the Bushes, says. “She can’t even find the bathroom without her contacts. She is very, very blind. She wears hard lenses because the correction is so much better.”
More than a month after 9/11, Laura Bush was at the Crawford ranch with her close friend Debbie Francis while Bush was in China. Laura’s Secret Service detail informed them of a threat they had picked up.
“They had me move from the guesthouse into the main house in case we had to evacuate quickly” Debbie Francis recalls. “I stayed in one of the girls’ rooms. For that one night, they didn’t want us to have any lights on in the house. So we closed all the curtains and just had a little candle burning.” Throughout the ordeal, Laura remained “totally calm,” Francis says.