Yet Trotta refuses to acknowledge that those demands have in any way diminished the level of protection, either as a result of magnetometer screening being waived or because overwhelmed, experienced agents are getting fed up and leaving. If agents are departing, it’s not the fault of Secret Service management practices, he says. Moreover, he says it’s fine if people leave.
Agents “look at travel, and they see the money they’re making, and it does come down sometimes to the quality of life,” Trotta tells me. “But the job is what it is. We have a responsibility to the American public, and it comes with sometimes a price: long hours, travel, missing birthday parties, and transfers. And it comes down to an employee saying, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ So they choose. They just go. And that’s okay.”
When it comes to the agency’s weapons, Trotta is similarly indifferent. Trotta says he leaves those decisions to the training facility.
“They’re the experts,” he says.
Remarkably, the assistant director in charge of protecting the president and presidential candidates expresses no interest in the question of whether an assassination attempt could be successful because agents are not equipped with weapons that the FBI, the army, and even the Amtrak Police Department use.
In fact, says an agent, “When we go for firearms training, every one of our instructors implores us to ask in the evaluation forms we submit to switch to the M4. The MP5 is a big pistol. We are outgunned by our enemy.”
Trotta’s nonchalant attitude about whether Secret Service weapons are effective, about increasing agent turnover, and about the practice of skipping magnetometer screening reflects a culture of denial. The fact that Trotta would cite the effectiveness of magnetometers in preventing assassinations and say “everyone goes through the magnetometer,” and, in the next breath, defend skipping them at major events, is astounding.
In fact, it was such a decision to stop magnetometer screening that almost led to the assassination of President George W. Bush on May 10, 2005, when a man threw a grenade at him as he spoke at a rally in a public square in Tbilisi, Georgia. Because magnetometer screening was stopped, the man was able to take a grenade into the event where Bush was to speak.
“The Georgians had set up the magnetometers all around this area,” says Thomas V. Fuentes, the FBI special agent in charge of international operations who headed the investigation of the incident. “They screened about ten thousand people, and there’s about a hundred fifty thousand that want to get in. They realize they’re not going to get them in in time on the president’s schedule, so they just shut off the machines and let everybody in.”
The grenade landed near the podium where Bush was speaking, but it did not explode. Witnesses later said a man wearing a head scarf who was standing off to the side reached into his black leather jacket and pulled out a military grenade. He yanked the pin, wrapped the scarf around the grenade, and threw it toward Bush.
Inside a grenade, the chemical reaction that creates an explosion occurs when two spoons disengage. But because the spoons got stuck, when the grenade landed, no explosion occurred. After analyzing the device, the FBI concluded it could have killed the president if it had worked. If all onlookers had been screened, the grenade would have been detected, and Bush’s life would not have been in jeopardy.
“We were within an eyelash of losing our top protectee, yet this is never brought up during our training,” says a Secret Service agent on one of the major details.
Prior to that attack, the assassination attempts on Presidents Reagan and Ford and on Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Governor George Wallace all occurred because bystanders were not screened with magnetometers.
“If someone is willing to commit suicide to assassinate the president, there’s nothing you can do about it unless you have magnetometer screening,” says former Secret Service supervisor Dave Saleeba.
Trotta’s cavalier responses are symptomatic of the Secret Service’s refusal to acknowledge or address problems that undermine the agency’s mission. In similar fashion, when asked about the increasing attrition rate and sagging morale, Mark Sullivan, the Secret Service director, says, in effect, too bad.
“The hours are tough,” Sullivan says. “We’ve all worked them, and I know what it’s like. I’ve been an agent for twenty-five years now, and I would never ask anyone to do what I wouldn’t do. And I know that they do a lot of travel. I know they’re away from home. I know they work long hours out there, and it quite frankly is not an easy job.”
If being an agent were an easy job, “Anybody could do it. But not just anybody could do it,” he says. “I think it’s because of the character of our people, and the pride that they have in their jobs that they are going to work hard. We try to get enough relief out there for them and get enough people out there to support them, to make sure that they don’t have to work any more hours than they have to.”
While Sullivan was a respected agent, he does not have the management skills to uncover problems at the agency and deal with them. Nor does he recognize how the agency’s practice of cutting corners has jeopardized the safety of agents and those they protect. Indeed, Sullivan rejects the notion that the Secret Service has been cutting corners.
“When it comes to our protective mission, we’re never going to cut corners,” the director says. “I will tell you that we will never, ever, put anybody in a position that they’re going to fail, because we can’t afford it. We’re going to make sure that we do what we have to do to make sure we get the job done. And I think we have.”
29
Padding Statistics
TO IMPRESS CONGRESS, J. Edgar Hoover, as director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, would count among the bureau’s arrests those made by local police for car thefts. At the same time, Hoover ignored some of the biggest threats, such as organized crime and political corruption, in part because they required much more time and manpower.
In many ways, Secret Service officials have the same mentality. Just as Hoover did, the Secret Service pads arrest statistics proudly presented to Congress and the public to make itself look good. In 2008, the Secret Service made 2,398 arrests for counterfeiting and 5,332 arrests for other financial crimes. But those figures include arrests that the agency never made. They are so-called in custody responses, which is when local police notify the Secret Service that they have a suspect in custody for the equivalent of a counterfeiting violation or other financial crime. The Secret Service then takes credit for the local arrest.
“When you are a field agent, you are strongly urged to call the local police departments in your district and have them contact you if they made an arrest, state or local,” a veteran agent says. “Then you write up the necessary reports and claim credit for the arrest and conviction of the subject.”
“The reason they do it obviously is so they can walk over to Congress and inflate the investigative success of the agency” says a former agent who joined the inspector general’s office of another federal agency. “They make a copy of the police report and make a copy of the note, and that’s about it. The FBI does not do that. It’s a game, and it’s deceptive.”
Moreover, instead of rooting out the biggest offenders, “By and large, arrests are all about the numbers,” an agent says. “Very infrequently do we go after the big fish. We work very few high-profile cases that get to the source of counterfeit currency and the stolen credit card numbers.”