Ronald Kessler - In the President's Secret Service

“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.”

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 5,33 2 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.”

When asked about the practice of padding Secret Service statistics with arrests made by local authorities, Ed Donovan, a Secret Service spokesman, did not respond.

Why the Secret Service has the dual role of protection and law enforcement in the first place is a legitimate question. While the FBI traditionally leaves counterfeiting investigations to the Secret Service, it covers all the other financial crimes Secret Service agents investigate. But since the needs of the protection side rise and fall, the Secret Service’s dual role provides flexibility. The agency can always borrow agents from the investigative side when needed. Maintaining field offices that interact with local law enforcement on a daily basis helps the protection side when the president comes to town.

Agents say that after spending endless nights in a Suburban guarding a protectee, they look forward to eventually returning to investigative work. Interviewing people as part of a criminal investigation sharpens agents’ skills when dealing with possible threats to the president. While many agents are former police officers, most are not. Investigating crimes, they learn to evaluate body language and eye movement to get a sense of whether an individual is being deceptive.

The value of combining investigative and protective operations is that as a criminal investigator, “You learn the basics,” Nick Trotta says. “You learn about your own safety and your partner’s safety. You learn how to think on your feet when you’re out on the street and get in the mind of the criminal—whether it’s a counterfeit case or the financial fraud cases. I think that our dual mission is what makes us unique, and it makes our agents very efficient and effective in our overall missions.”

The downside of the Secret Service’s dual role is that agents often cannot show up for a meeting with prosecutors or for a court appearance because they have been pulled off for a protection assignment.

“You could be working one of the biggest cases, and if your name gets pulled to go on a protective operation, you’re off that case to perhaps stand in a hallway as a king of a small country comes to get his prostate checked at the Mayo Clinic,” says a former agent.