Monday, April 30, 2012
Associated Press
WASHINGTON
The Secret Service does not often get a black eye behind those oh-so-cool sunglasses. It’s got a shiner now.
The public face of the service is one of steely professionals in impeccable suits, wearing discreet earpieces and packing even more- discreet weapons. Agents are expressionless except for their ever-searching gaze, lethal automatons ready to die for a president.
By reputation, stoked by Hollywood myth and the public’s fleeting glances at dark-windowed motorcades, they are anything but party animals.
But what happened in Colombia didn’t stay in Colombia.
The exposed Secret Service secrets have put the storied agency under a different line of fire, as lawmakers and internal investigators try to get to the bottom of officers’ behavior and any implications for the safety of those they protect, starting with President Barack Obama.
Eight Secret Service officers have been fired and three disciplined, and a dozen military personnel have had their security clearances suspended, in the unfolding investigation of sexual misbehavior by agents who traveled to Cartagena, Colombia, this month to set up security for Obama’s visit.
The agency says it also is looking into whether agents hired prostitutes and strippers in El Salvador in advance of the president’s trip last year. More reports are emerging of allegedly ribald conduct, off duty, on official trips.
John Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, said Sunday investigators want to know whether there was any time “these activities put at risk either classified information or security.” He said officials are satisfied the Colombian episode did not pose a threat to the president.
Obama joked about agents being on a shorter leash in his remarks to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night. “I really do enjoy attending these dinners,” he said. “In fact, I had a lot more material prepared, but I have to get the Secret Service home in time for their new curfew.”
Altogether, the perception is forming of frat boys being frat boys, except these ones have top security clearance, access to the president and constant knowledge of his whereabouts.
“They’re on the receiving end of this incredibly powerful fire hose” of allegations and rumors, says Eric Dezenhall, a scandal- management consultant and author who counsels corporations and institutions. “They’re going to be under it for a while. You cannot control this torrent.”
The Secret Service was formed to chase counterfeiters at the end of the Civil War, a mission it still carries out as part of its portfolio of financial crime investigation. Its protective work began informally, as part-time security for President Grover Cleveland in 1894.
After President William McKinley’s 1901 assassination by an anarchist who hid his gun in a handkerchief, Congress put the agency in charge of protecting presidents, then an expanding list of family members, U.S. and visiting foreign officials, and political candidates.
The book “In the President’s Secret Service,” tells stories of men behaving badly, but those men were president or vice president, not agents. For all the bawdy tales of Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy, their protectors are portrayed as loyal if overworked and, with some leaders, underappreciated.
The author, Ronald Kessler, said in an interview that the Colombian episode “is the biggest scandal in the history of the Secret Service” yet, from his knowledge of how agents conduct themselves, “an aberration.”
Consorting with prostitutes opened agents to the risk of blackmail or other avenues to eavesdrop on or harm the president, had the women been tied to terrorists or spies, Kessler said. To his mind, that makes the breach worse than the 2009 infiltration into Obama’s state dinner by Michaele and Tareq Salahi, a security lapse that could have had grave consequences if pulled off by people other than two social-climbers from Virginia.