Ronald Kessler - In the President's Secret Service

“We sign up to take a bullet, but that’s not the hardest part of the job,” Jessica Johnson, a former Secret Service agent, says. “It’s not anything that we normally face. The risk is there. But what makes the job very difficult is the mismanagement. If the Secret Service were better managed, you’d have a lot better workforce, a lot more people who don’t quit.”

Since 9/11, the private sector has been offering hefty salaries to anyone with a federal law enforcement background. Typically, former Secret Service agents sign up as vice president for security of a major corporation or start their own security firms. For those who want to remain vested to earn full government pensions, opportunities have expanded as well at other federal law enforcement agencies.

Until 1984, under a previous retirement system, Secret Service agents could not keep their pensions if they transferred to another government agency. Now they can. Agents can retire at any age after twenty-five years with the agency. They can retire at age fifty if they have served twenty years. For both government agencies and private companies, a Secret Service or FBI agent is a prize catch.

The FBI has taken steps to retain agents, while the Secret Service has not. In contrast to the Secret Service, after three years with the bureau, unless he or she chooses to go into management, an FBI agent can stay in the same city for the rest of his or her career. An agent going into management can remain in the same city for five years.

The Secret Service, on the other hand, typically transfers agents three to four times during a twenty-five-year career. An agent who enters management may move five to six times. The rationale is that agents need to acquire experience in different offices. But experience in one office does not translate into another. Decades ago, the FBI had the same policy. The bureau scrapped it because the constant moves were not necessary and resulted in many agents leaving the bureau. In turn, that led to high costs both for moving families and for training new agents to replace those who left.

Not having to transfer as often, FBI agents can better work out living arrangements with spouses. The FBI at least tries to take into account situations where a spouse must work in a particular city, sometimes addressing these as hardship cases.

Essentially, according to agents, the Secret Service moves agents around like checkers on a board without regard to their wishes. Rather than explaining the reasoning behind transfers or other policies that impinge on the agents’ personal lives, the Secret Service will typically give the high-handed response that the change is necessary because of the “needs of the service.” The exception is when an agent has “juice,” meaning connections to higher-ups, a situation that contributes to poor morale.

After two years on the Clinton detail based at the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, New York, Johnson wanted to transfer back to California, where she grew up.

“All of a sudden, they said they can’t transfer anyone out of New York,” she says. “They said they have no one to replace me. At the same time, they’re sending out an email that says anyone, regardless of where you are in your career track, if you would like to go to Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco, raise your hand and you’re there. So I write the little memo and I raise my hand. I jump up and down, and they tell me, ‘Oh, well, we can’t replace you. So you can’t go.’”

At the same time, Johnson says, friends in the Los Angeles office were sending her copies of emails they were receiving from management saying they had to leave Los Angeles to go to protective details.

“A year later when I went to my management, they said, ‘Oh, well, L.A.’s full. How about the New York field office?’” she says.

When the Secret Service finally agreed to transfer her to Los Angeles after three years in New York, “I find out that we were eleven bodies short in L.A. So how did we go from being full to being eleven bodies short in four months?”

In other cases, the Secret Service disregards situations where a spouse has a job in another city. Johnson and others describe one situation where an agent based in Los Angeles began dating a doctor in Hawaii. Eventually, they married, and the agent put in for a transfer to Hawaii, where his wife had an established medical practice.

“We have an office in Hawaii, so it’s easier for him to transfer than it is for her,” Johnson says. “But the management we had in L.A. at the time had no juice. He was told he couldn’t be transferred to Hawaii. He quit because he said his marriage was more important.”

About a month later, after he moved to Hawaii, he applied to return to the Secret Service. The head of the Hawaii office, who had juice, rehired him.

“Here you’re being told you can’t transfer, and the bottom line was, it was all about who your boss is,” Johnson says.

In another case, agent Dan Klish was issued orders to transfer to Los Angeles. His wife’s career as a radiation oncologist made it difficult for her to find a position there. Finally, she obtained a job near Denver. Klish asked for a transfer to Denver or Cheyenne and offered to pay for the move himself. That would have saved the government about seventy-five thousand dollars in moving costs. The transfer was denied. For more than two years, they lived apart, and the agent flew to Denver once or twice a month to see his wife and young daughter.

During that time, the service asked for volunteers to transfer to Denver. Approximately ten other agents were transferred to Denver, some with less seniority, at a cost to the government of seventy-five to one hundred thousand dollars for each move.

“If the opening isn’t available at that moment, then the service can say, ‘Oh, sorry, that office is overstaffed. Here are your only options,’” Klish says. “Then, sure enough, while you’re still on orders to move somewhere else but haven’t moved yet, an opening in a city that would work for you comes out, and you can’t even put in for it because you’re already on orders to go elsewhere. Later, after you’ve moved, they transfer several others to that city. There is a strong bond among agents, but unless you have the right connections, the Secret Service doesn’t care about the agents.”

After eight years with the Secret Services, Klish finally quit to join another federal agency in Colorado.

Joel Mullen, an agent who was based in Washington, D.C., is married to a navy lawyer. When the navy gave her orders to transfer to San Diego, Mullen asked to transfer to the Secret Service field office there, saying the navy would pay the cost. After initially approving the transfer, headquarters blocked it, even though San Diego had openings. Mullen and his wife had started building a home near San Diego. The Secret Service told Mullen to transfer to the Los Angeles office instead.

“I commuted ninety-six miles one way from my door to the office,” Mullen says. “I did that for fourteen months. Then I left and went with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.”

Besides losing an agent with ten years’ experience, the Secret Service wound up paying out $240,000 for the transfer to cover Mullen’s costs, including the decline in the value of his house in the Washington area.

Nor does the agency have an open process for listing anticipated vacancies and agents’ preferences for transfers. All are kept secret. If an agent has “juice,” he or she is bumped ahead of others.

In contrast, the FBI, which has 12,500 agents, maintains online lists of requested transfers to each field office so that agents can see who is ahead of them. FBI agents say connections play no role in transfers. Because of the open lists, if the FBI did engage in such under-the-table preferential treatment, the agents would know it.