“If anyone did that in the FBI, we would be in hot water,” says a former FBI assistant director. “In the FBI, cars used for undercover work are designated as such, and the head of a field office would never get one.” Nor, the former agent says, does the FBI claim an arrest if it is made by local police.
Secret Service agents believe that if they press their concerns and point out shortcomings, they will suffer repercussions. “Management will label them as malcontents or implement classic Secret Service retaliation, most notably an undesirable duty station and lack of advancement, or both,” an agent says. “Everyone at headquarters sees the job as a stepping stone to something better. If you raise a big issue, you waste your energy, and they want to screw you. It creates a culture of fear.”
In 1978, the Secret Service asked Frank M. Ochberg, a former associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health, to study agents and their jobs to see if they were under excessive stress.
“I found the danger they face is not a source of significant stress,” says Ochberg, who is now clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University. “Rather, it was an excessively authoritarian management style that does not respect agents enough and does not try to make arrangements so they don’t miss their daughter’s christening or graduation. The attitude was, ‘Yours is not to wonder why; yours is just to do or die.’”
Based on Ochberg’s recommendation, the Secret Service stopped its practice of forcing agents to double up in hotel rooms. Until then, agents on different shifts sleeping in the same room would wake each other up getting ready for work. But beyond that change, the problems have become worse. The Secret Service’s management has become even more rigid, insular, and even punitive. An agent who left to work for another federal law enforcement agency says with relief, “I am now being treated as an adult.”
To get ahead, agents say that, much more than in most other organizations, they need connections—juice—meaning higher-ups who take a liking to them and socialize with them. The perception of favoritism has been furthered by management’s overreaction to a lawsuit by black agents claiming discrimination. During discovery, the lawsuit uncovered two dozen or so emails with racist comments or jokes out of twenty million emails sent by Secret Service employees over a period of sixteen years. In April 2008, a black agent was confronted by a noose strung up by a white instructor at the Rowley training center. The instructor was placed on leave.
Despite these disgusting but isolated problems, the proportion of black agents in the service is 17 percent, much higher than the 12 percent of blacks in the rest of the population. An independent analyst found that for each year from 1991 to 2005, African American agents were promoted to senior pay grades more quickly than white agents. In fact, 25 percent of supervisors belong to ethnic minorities. Since 2001, three black agents—Keith Prewitt, Danny Spriggs, and Larry Cockell—have served as deputy director, the number-two spot.
“The service is very sensitive to the diversity issue, and the statistics and appointments to top posts demonstrate that,” Spriggs says.
Growing up in Detroit, “I never could have imagined that I would one day be with the president in his limousine, in the White House every day, and riding on Air Force One,” says Reginald Ball, a black agent who became a supervisor.
Ironically, several racist emails uncovered by the lawsuit had been sent by Reginald Moore, the plaintiff who is alleging discrimination by the agency. One email sent by Moore contained a joke about a black woman hitting her daughter.
Despite these facts, the Secret Service has overreacted by promoting a few black agents to high-ranking positions even though they are not generally thought to be up to the job. While other black agents are among the agency’s best, reverse discrimination does a disservice to everyone in the organization and to the people agents protect.
30
Dereliction of Duty
WHEN ONE CONSIDERS how important to our democracy preventing an assassination is, the amount spent on the Secret Service—$1.4 billion a year, nearly two thirds of it for protection—seems like a misprint. Indeed, while the agency’s budget increased substantially after 9/11, since then it has actually decreased, when inflation is taken into account. That does not include supplemental appropriations to cover incremental costs for coverage of campaign and national security events.
This at a time when well-funded terrorists have replaced the lone deranged gunman as the greatest threat to American elected officials and when threats against the president are up 400 percent. Yet rather than ask for substantially more funds from Congress, the Secret Service assures members that the agency is fulfilling its job with the modest increases it requests, even as it takes on more duties and sleep-deprived agents work almost around the clock.
Inevitably, when asked if the Secret Service needs more money, Director Sullivan makes a comparison with challenges faced by soldiers in Iraq.
“Let’s face it,” he says. “Everybody would like to have more money in their budget. I was looking at my budget, and I was saying, ‘Boy I would love to have this or have that.’ Then in thinking of all the sacrifice that all of us have to do—I mean we’re in the middle of two wars now—and I looked at the front page of The Washington Post one day, and I saw several marines going to bed that night. They were going to bed on a concrete floor with like a foam cushion maybe an inch thick for a mattress.”
These men, he says, are fighting for our country, not knowing “when they wake up tomorrow morning and go through their day if they’re going to be alive to go to bed again.”
In contrast to soldiers in Iraq, “We don’t have it bad at all,” Sullivan says. “And everybody has to do their part. And I think I owe it to them. I think this whole organization owes it to the people that pay our salary, to be just as efficient and effective and be as good a steward of the government resources as we can. And I think we are.”
Sullivan’s effort to compare Secret Service agents with twenty-two-year-old soldiers in Iraq shows how out of touch with reality Secret Service management is. In contrast to soldiers serving in Iraq, veteran Secret Service agents are being offered up to four times their salary by the private sector to leave the agency.
One director who understood this was Brian Stafford, who headed the agency from 1999 to 2003. Because Stafford perceived the problems, the Secret Service’s budget, even before the 9/11 attack, rose by as much as 25 percent a year after adjustment for inflation.
“When I became director, one of the first things I did was pick the brains of the special agents in charge of each field office,” Stafford tells me. “What I learned was we had quality-of-life issues and an attrition rate that was going up. It wasn’t because agents weren’t passionate about their jobs. It was because they didn’t have a life.”
With the budget increases, Stafford hired another thousand agents.
“The overtime was way too high,” he says. “We were working people too hard.”
Today while the Secret Service fosters conditions that lead experienced agents to resign, it compromises the security of the president, vice president, and presidential candidates by not assigning enough agents to screen everyone with magnetometers. Under pressure from politicians’ staffs, it allows people to enter events without having been screened.
Yet ironically, when Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren defended the agency’s performance when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at President Bush at a Baghdad news conference in December 2008, he pointed out that everyone had been screened with magnetometers. Thus, he said, while shoes were thrown, no weapons were brought into the room, so the president’s life was not in jeopardy.