Ronald Kessler - The First Family Detail

After dancing with the twenty-four-year-old, the married Huntington took Suarez to his hotel. On the way, she says, she stopped to buy condoms and told the agent that if he were going to spend the night with her, he would have to give her a “gift” of eight hundred dollars. He didn’t object, she said.

Under hotel policy, temporary female guests must register with the front desk for a fee and must leave by 6 A.M. At 6:30 A.M. on Thursday, April 12, the front desk called Huntington to say it was time for his guest to leave. Suarez asked for her eight hundred dollars.

“I tell him, ‘Baby, my cash money,’” she later said.

Claiming he did not know Suarez was a prostitute, Huntington, a member of the counterassault team, refused to pay her. Calling her a bitch, he gave the brunette thirty dollars in local currency and shoved her out the door.

Suarez was crying as she banged on the door to the room of another agent, who was sleeping with a friend of hers. He and a third agent scraped together another two hundred fifty dollars to pay her. The ensuing commotion led to the Colombian National Police being called in, the State Department being notified, and twelve agents being interrogated in Cartagena by Paula Reid, the special agent in charge of the Miami field office, which oversees activities in Colombia. On the morning of Friday, April 13, eleven of those agents were relieved of their protective duties, put on administrative leave, and sent home.

Later that afternoon, Obama arrived in Cartagena for the weekend’s Summit of the Americas, a meeting of thirty-three of the hemisphere’s thirty-five leaders, to discuss economic policy and trade. At about the same time, I received a call from a longtime Secret Service source. A critic of Director Sullivan, the agent told me what had happened in Colombia and that the agents were being sent home. He said Sullivan planned to keep the incident a secret. Indeed, since it could have been seen as an internal personnel matter, the agency could plausibly have said it was obligated to keep the entire matter confidential.

While he declined to give the specific reason, Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan confirmed to me that agents were being sent home. I gave the story to the Washington Post , which jumped on it and ran the story the next day, touching off a media frenzy.

During the ensuing investigation, another Secret Service employee admitted to paying for sex at a private apartment, according to a January 2013 report by the DHS Office of Inspector General. Nearly all the agents involved lost their jobs or were forced to retire.

The scandal represented a serious breach of the rules, which are designed to prevent agents from being compromised and then blackmailed to allow access to those who may wish to harm or eavesdrop on the president. According to those rules, Secret Service employees “shall not engage in criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral or notoriously disgraceful conduct or other conduct prejudicial to the [United States] government.”

Contrary to some press reports, this kind of misconduct is not common, as confirmed by a December 17, 2013, report by the DHS inspector general. While agents may have drinks after the president has departed, hiring prostitutes is a rare occurrence. But given management’s lax attitude toward security, it’s easy to see how the agents figured that if their bosses cut corners, why shouldn’t they ignore basic security rules as well?

Today about a third of the Secret Service’s annual budget goes to investigation of financial crimes like counterfeiting and fraudulently obtaining money from ATMs or checking or credit card accounts. While the Secret Service’s work in solving these crimes is impressive, with the exception of counterfeit currency investigations, the FBI probes the same crimes. Yet the Secret Service has sought greater jurisdiction in going after financial crimes even as protection demands soar.

Besides having to protect more White House staff, the Secret Service is now charged with planning and implementing security arrangements at “special events of national significance” under the Presidential Threat Protection Act of 2000. The first such event was the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002. Other events are the September meetings of the United Nations General Assembly, presidential inaugurals, the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions, the Super Bowl, G8 summits, and major visits, such as a pope’s trip to the United States. The state funerals of Presidents Reagan and Ford were also designated national special security events. At these events, the Secret Service is the lead law enforcement agency and coordinates all security.

In an apparent effort to conceal a huge increase in trips taken by President Obama and Vice President Biden compared with their predecessors, after Obama took office, the Secret Service stopped breaking out figures on their trips. But the aggregate numbers give some idea of the pressures agents face. In fiscal 2011, the Secret Service provided protection for 3,284 domestic and 376 international travel stops for Obama, Biden, and other national leaders.

As demands on the Secret Service increase, the agency fails to request a commensurate increase in funds and instead pressures agents to work long overtime hours. That has led to exhausted agents having no home life.

“We were trained to be alert and constantly on edge, yet we were forced to work a twelve-to-fourteen-hour shift, hop on a plane to another city, sleep four hours, and do it all over again,” a former agent says. “We had no set schedule and could work a midnight shift one day, a day shift another, and an afternoon shift the next and have a day off on Wednesday. Even airline pilots have mandatory rest periods, but here we were standing next to the president of the United States and were expected to make split-second, life-or-death decisions.”

“How tired do you get? Just imagine sleeping three or four hours a night for a week,” a current agent says.

As a result of management’s lack of regard for agents’ quality of life, resignations before retirement have shot up in recent years. Since 9/11, the private sector has offered lucrative compensation to anyone with a federal law enforcement background. Former Secret Service agents often sign on as vice presidents for security of major corporations or start their own security firms. For those who want to remain vested to earn full government pensions, opportunities have expanded at other federal law enforcement agencies.

“These people who are leaving are very qualified agents who are doing a really good job and are held in high esteem,” an agent says. “That’s what really hurts us.”

The Secret Service’s corner cutting and mismanagement extend to polygraph testing that would detect an infiltrator. Before being hired, applicants to the Secret Service must pass a polygraph exam. But after they sign up, agents are never again required to undergo regular lie detector testing. In contrast, the FBI polygraphs all employees—not just agents—every five years. FBI counterintelligence agents are polygraphed more often.

Given the lack of polygraphing, the Secret Service leaves itself open to a terrorist organization or a foreign intelligence service recruiting an agent to provide access to the president for an assassination or to allow installation of bugging devices or access to top secret information. Regular polygraphing would likely detect such a compromise, as well as deter it.

The FBI learned the hard way the importance of regular polygraph testing. After the arrest of CIA officer Aldrich Ames in 1994 for spying, Robert “Bear” Bryant, as head of the bureau’s National Security Division, urged FBI director Louis Freeh to approve regular polygraphs for all counterintelligence agents. But faced with opposition from many special agents in charge of field offices and from the FBI Agents Association, Freeh backed down and shelved the proposal.