Ronald Kessler - The First Family Detail

“I immediately looked down at the guest list and saw that they weren’t on it,” Roberts recalls. “I have never in all the years covering state dinners seen a guest come through who wasn’t on the list.” The idea that they had not been invited did not occur to her. Rather, Roberts was shocked to think they were.

“I knew that they weren’t wealthy,” Roberts notes. “I knew they were not big political donors or moved in any significant political circles. They were not what I would call part of Washington’s power establishment, by any stretch of the imagination.”

Wanting to hear Argetsinger’s opinion, Roberts asked a Washington Post photographer to e-mail her colleague a photo he had just taken of the Salahis.

“I recognized them, and my first reaction when I saw the photos of them was ‘Oh my God, they crashed,’” Argetsinger says. “Because they are not the kind of people you expect to see at the White House. If the one thing you knew about them was that Michaele Salahi was vying to be on the Housewives show, it would be inconceivable that the White House would want them there. This is a reality TV show, and one that in recent years is best known for pretty vapid material—plastic surgery, catfights, table flipping, hair pulling.”

Argetsinger e-mailed Rox, as she calls her, urging her to include in the story she would write with Robin Givhan that the Salahis attended but were not on the guest list.

“The most curious and unexpected sighting: Tareq and Michaele Salahi,” their story said in the sixth paragraph. “The notorious Fauquier County vineyard socialites, who are filming Real Housewives of D.C ., swanned in, even though their names did not appear on the official guest list.”

“Everyone who enters the White House grounds goes through magnetometers and several other levels of screenings,” Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan was quoted in the article as saying. “That was the case with the state dinner last night. No one was under any risk or threat.”

That is the standard Secret Service line when the agency has screwed up. What Donovan failed to say was that the Salahis had managed to enter the White House without the required background check. Normally, those attending a White House function will receive an invitation in the mail. If they are to attend, they must e-mail or call in their full name, Social Security number, and date of birth. The Secret Service’s Uniformed Division checks to see if they are listed by the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) or the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (NLETS) as having been arrested or violated laws. If no problem surfaces, invitees are told they have been cleared to attend.

None of that took place in the case of the Salahis. For all the Secret Service knew, the couple could have been wanted terrorists or serial killers. While they passed through magnetometers at the checkpoint at Fifteenth and E Streets NW, they could have had chemical or biological weapons. Inside, they could have grabbed a knife from a table and stabbed the president in the heart.

After Roberts kept pushing, the White House and Secret Service confirmed that the Salahis had not been invited. The story ran on all the networks.

On Friday, the White House released a photo of the couple in the receiving line. A smiling Michaele Salahi is pictured clasping Obama’s hand, as her husband, wearing a tuxedo, looks on. Prime Minister Singh is standing next to the president.

Secret Service director Sullivan finally stepped forward and issued a statement saying the agency was “deeply concerned and embarrassed” by the incident. He said preliminary findings indicated that “established protocols were not followed at an initial checkpoint, verifying that two individuals were on the guest list.”

In administrations past, aides from the White House Social Office have stood outside the Secret Service guard post, performing a preliminary check to make sure that arrivals were on the guest list. Acquiescent as always, the Secret Service this time had agreed at a meeting with the Social Office that their representatives would not have to be there. Instead, social secretary Desiree Rogers took the unusual step of attending the dinner herself as a guest.

Yet the fact that the Salahis were able to crash the White House was the fault of the Secret Service. The Secret Service is solely responsible for the security of the president and the White House. Regardless of what the Social Office did, it was up to the Secret Service uniformed officers at the first checkpoint to verify that the couple was on the guest list. If they were not, the officers should have called the Social Office to see if they had inadvertently been left off the list. If the answer was yes, the officers would then have asked the couple to step aside while they did a background check. They did none of this.

As I later reported, it turned out that a third crasher, Carlos Allen, had also been allowed into the state dinner. Weeks after the event took place, the Secret Service pinpointed him while reviewing surveillance videos of guests arriving at the dinner.

The publisher of a minor Washington society blog called Hush Society Magazine , Allen, thirty-nine, claimed he fell in with the India delegation congregating at the Willard Inter-Continental Hotel and rolled on in with them.

Like the Salahis, the man turned out not to pose a threat, but because the Secret Service failed to perform a background check, the agency never would have known if he was, for example, wanted for murder or involved with terrorist groups. Ironically, in the movie In the Line of Fire , an assassin gains access to the president in similar fashion. Like the Salahis, Carlos Allen claimed he had been invited. But the “invitation” he later showed on a television show appeared to be the dinner program for the evening, according to the Washington Post ’s Reliable Source.

Until I reported the story on Allen, mortified Secret Service officials had failed to notify the House Homeland Security Committee investigating the Salahi security breach of yet another embarrassment to the agency. It would have made little difference, since the committee whitewashed the incident. At a hearing, the House members called as a witness only Sullivan, who rejected any notion that the intrusions were a symptom of deeper problems within the Secret Service.

Why would Secret Service Uniformed Division officers let in three individuals who were not on the guest list and had not undergone a background check? The fact that Secret Service management removed Mary Cheney’s detail leader after he refused to violate the rules to allow agents to take her friends to restaurants suggests the reason.

Agents and uniformed officers say their perception is that the Secret Service’s spineless management, which condones cutting corners, likely would not back them if they turned away glamorous crashers and it later came to light that they had been left off the guest list by mistake.

The same management culture contributed to Secret Service agents’ engaging prostitutes while assigned to protect President Obama in Cartagena, Colombia. The saga began when agents checked into the Hotel Caribe, a beachfront resort, and decided to explore local bars and nightclubs. On the evening of Wednesday, April 11, 2012, agent Arthur Huntington, forty-one, made his way with some other agents to Tu Candela, a bar and dance club in the city’s old town.

Huntington spotted the alluring Dania Suarez, who later told the New York Times she was not a common streetwalker. Rather, she said, she was a woman of “higher rank” whom a “man can take out to dinner. She can dress nicely, wear nice makeup, speak and act like a lady. That’s me.”