Ronald Kessler - The First Family Detail

While polygraph tests are not perfect, if nothing else they are a deterrent. If Freeh had in fact approved Bryant’s proposal in 1994 to polygraph counterintelligence agents, FBI agent Robert Hanssen likely would have decided to stop spying for the Russians. Instead, for seven years after Freeh refused to allow regular polygraphing, Hanssen continued to provide the Russians with some of the most damaging information in the history of American espionage.

In addition, the FBI’s nearly fourteen thousand agents are required to attend annual updates on law, ethics, and security. But after initial training, Secret Service agents receive no annual in-service instruction, and training in security is limited to a minimal update online. After the scandal involving agents hiring prostitutes in Colombia, the Secret Service announced it would provide ethics training—but only to a hundred agents.

“Local police departments have in-service training every year,” says a Secret Service agent. “You are updated on basic criminal law, new court rulings, about probable cause, what you need to develop in order to detain someone. The Secret Service teaches agents once, in their basic training, and there is no training on developments after that.”

Much like a car that never gets regular maintenance and oil changes, the seven-thousand-employee Secret Service lurches along until a tragedy like the Kennedy assassination forces it to rectify deficiencies. No one can rationally explain the “we make do with less” mind-set and lackadaisical attitude that prevent the Secret Service from adequately protecting presidents, vice presidents, and presidential candidates.

To let people into events without magnetometer screening, to scrimp on magnetometers to the point where Mitt Romney felt forced to deliver campaign speeches to unscreened crowds in parking lots, to bow to Joe Biden’s wishes to be without the nuclear football or adequate protection in Delaware, to divert agents from protecting the president when he takes off in Marine One from the White House so they can protect the Secret Service director’s assistant, to allow Bradley Cooper’s vehicle into a secure restricted area without screening before Obama was to give a speech, and to disregard firearms requalification and physical fitness requirements, are each so egregious that few past government scandals are comparable because so much is at stake. Each lapse by the Secret Service directly risks the life of the president, vice president, and presidential candidates.

Yet when one such scandal became public—uniformed officers allowing party crashers into the White House state dinner—President Obama took no action to prevent such debacles in the future. Even after the Colombia prostitution scandal, Obama brushed aside the signs that the Secret Service is in need of a drastic overhaul and defended Mark Sullivan, who presided over the embarrassments as director.

When addressing the Colombia scandal, President Obama said he would be “angry” if the allegations in the press turned out to be true. But in commenting to me for the original story, the Secret Service confirmed that agents were being withdrawn for misconduct. Being angry is not the way to fix an agency. Holding management accountable is.

When Sullivan retired, Obama appointed Julia Pierson as the agency’s twenty-third director, on March 27, 2013. A native of Orlando, Florida, Pierson graduated from the University of Central Florida and completed graduate course studies in public policy at George Washington University. She served as a police officer in Orlando and began her career in the Secret Service as a special agent assigned to the Miami and Orlando field offices.

During her thirty-year career with the agency, Pierson was deputy assistant director in the Office of Protective Operations, where she was responsible for daily security operations. She was also assistant director of the Office of Human Resources and Training (HRT). Most recently, she had been Sullivan’s chief of staff for five years.

While agents express approval of the appointment of a female director, they say Pierson is a clone of Sullivan. She has taken no steps to rectify problems within the agency. Despite the increased risk to the president, Pierson was slow to navigate a way around the automatic budget cuts imposed on critical functions by sequestration, as other agencies like the Defense Department did by reprogramming funds. Because of the sequester, agents say vital protective work left protectees exposed to potential danger.

“Agents are exhausted trying to backfill the assignments, and morale is the lowest it’s ever been,” an agent says.

Pierson’s response to misconduct by two supervisory agents on the President’s Protective Detail is instructive. In May 2013, officials at the stately Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington alerted the Secret Service that supervisory agent Ignacio Zamora Jr. was causing a disturbance, the Washington Post reported. An internal investigation found that Zamora had been visiting a woman in her hotel room across from the White House. When she realized that Zamora had a weapon, she became agitated.

To reassure her, Zamora removed the bullets from his gun, but she insisted that he leave. After exiting her room, he realized that he had accidentally left one round in her room. He returned and tried to persuade her to open her door so he could retrieve the bullet, but she refused. Still, he kept trying, drawing the attention of hotel security.

In investigating the incident, the Secret Service found that both Zamora and another supervisor, Timothy Barraclough, had been sending sexually explicit e-mails on their government-issued BlackBerrys to a female subordinate. What has not come out previously is that Director Pierson signed off on reassigning Zamora to a supervisory position in the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division, and on transferring Barraclough to head the Tucson resident office. Agents see the moves as a continuation of the double standard applied to supervisors versus agents.

“Zamora got a lateral transfer, same position, same title in another division,” an agent says. “So there’s no punishment there. He is still an assistant special agent in charge. Barraclough was assistant to the special agent in charge and was given what is considered a promotion at the same salary level to be in charge of his own resident office. The guy suffered nothing—no demotion, no punishment.”

While subordinates are punished severely on a regular basis, “bosses are not,” the agent says. “The problem of agent misconduct is caused by managers who do the same things themselves and are not held accountable for it.”

In a round of talks to agents, Pierson acknowledged that turnover has been increasing and said she would work on some salary issues. But she made no mention of the lax management culture that has led to corner cutting.

Confirming that Pierson learned nothing from the agency’s past mistakes, the Secret Service under her watch failed to warn President Obama to forgo speaking at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in South Africa on December 10, 2013, because local authorities were letting in spectators without any magnetometer screening. It was a repeat of how local authorities failed to screen crowds when President George W. Bush spoke in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2005, allowing a man to throw a grenade at him.

“I was shocked at the apparent lack of any real security measures, precautions, or deterrents,” reporter Scott Thuman of Washington television station WJLA told Politico. “We entered the stadium along with a steady but manageable crowd of people through the main gates, which were completely unattended. There were no workers performing bag checks or patdowns—there were no magnetometers to walk through, no metal detector wands being used—anywhere.”