Zero fail, p.37
Zero Fail, page 37
“Look, Dave, before we start this, I have to report to the ambassador in a little while,” she said, looking him squarely in the eye. “I need to know everything that happened so I’m not looking like a fool and having to correct myself later.”
That did it. Chaney copped to everything: The dinner with a cluster of agents. The mojito and the many beers that followed. The taxi ride with Stokes to a strip club. The fees they paid the club to bring the prostitutes back to the Caribe. Everything.
Reid asked him whether the woman he took to his room could have learned sensitive details about Obama’s visit. He explained he never told the woman he was an agent, and he had no sensitive security information lying around his room. “I’m sorry I put you all through this,” Chaney said as she ushered him out of the room.
Then it was time to interview Stokes. “This is a big shitstorm, Greg,” she began.
Stokes was adamant that he hadn’t violated any rules or regulations. He was single. Prostitution was legal in Cartagena. He hadn’t told the woman what he did for a living. He knew agents and supervisors on the job who had done this much before—and some who had done a lot worse. He soon told Reid the full story of their night out, and it was largely a carbon copy of Chaney’s account.
* * *
—
MICHAEL MCKINLEY, THE U.S. ambassador to Colombia, was mostly worried this large-scale indiscretion by the president’s protectors—on the eve of the president’s arrival, no less—would leak out. McKinley, an Oxford-educated diplomat who had spent most of his childhood and career in South and Central America, knew that if it did, it could very well jeopardize his team’s careful preparation for a thoughtful exchange with Latin American leaders. The U.S. government had pledged in international conferences to help fight sexploitation and female sex trafficking. Now a bunch of agents threatened to make their government look like a bunch of hypocrites.
McKinley, who was busy welcoming members of Congress as they arrived for the summit, kept getting periodic updates from his staff that afternoon. With each new report, the number of U.S. employees who’d entertained women in their taxpayer-funded rooms rose. In scouring hotel guest logs, U.S. military leaders in the Southern Command learned that five of its members had registered overnight guests. Later they realized the number was closer to ten, including men from Special Forces and explosive ordnance teams. Eventually, a total of twenty-two U.S. delegation members were implicated—twelve Secret Service and ten military.
After the 2:30 p.m. meeting ended at the Hotel Caribe, one of McKinley’s security officers called to warn Reid. McKinley wanted a meeting to discuss whether the agents were going to be allowed to stay in country. “The ambassador was extremely angered,” he said.
The Service assured the embassy staff they weren’t trying to cover anything up. Reid was busy investigating so the Service could decide what to do. The military, meanwhile, insisted it had to keep the implicated men on the ground because it needed their specialized bomb detection and security training for the president’s protection.
Around 4 p.m., Holloway, the ambassador’s deputy chief of missions, got a call from a Los Angeles Times reporter. He wanted to know if Holloway knew anything about the Secret Service getting into trouble with prostitutes. Holloway quickly got off the call without giving an answer. McKinley girded for the story to break.
Between 3 p.m. and 10 p.m., Reid had interviewed twelve men, all of whom, according to Caribe and Hilton records, had signed local women in to their rooms as overnight guests. In addition to the two jump team leaders and the three CAT members, Reid also interviewed three Washington field office agents, three officers on a counter-sniper team, and one magnetometer officer.
That magnetometer officer insisted Reid had the wrong guy. He had been on duty on the midnight shift from Wednesday night to Thursday morning. A few men acknowledged bringing women back to their rooms but denied having sex with them. One relatively new agent had visited a club called Isis, which turned out to be a bordello, with two other agents. The new agent said he thought the two women he brought back to the hotel were just out for some fun. He insisted he kicked them out of his room when they told him they wanted money for sex. Three men, including Bongino, said they’d had sex with the women they invited to their rooms but that these were harmless one-night stands for which they had paid nothing.
Cavorting with foreign prostitutes sure looked like a stupid lapse of judgment for men holding security clearances and preparing for the president’s arrival. But the Secret Service manual didn’t specify the severity of the violation, or the proper punishment. Was a one-night stand with a foreign national forbidden—whether you paid or not? Did it make it worse if the agent or officer was married? The Service would have to sort that out back at headquarters. Sullivan told Reid to fly all the men who were under investigation back home to D.C. the next morning.
* * *
—
AT MIDNIGHT, CHANEY, Stokes, Huntington, Bongino, and eight more Secret Service agents and officers got an email from the logistics team telling them to pack up and report to the Caribe lobby at 8 a.m. Friday. They were being shipped home.
At a second layover, in Miami, the acting top supervisor of the Miami field office, Vance Luce, greeted Chaney as he disembarked. “Dave, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are to report to inspection at ten a.m. Saturday,” the Miami chief said. “You need to report with your badge and your gun.”
With that, Chaney knew they were all going to be put on administrative leave pending a full investigation. What might come after that? Chaney had a bad feeling that this wasn’t going to end with a slap on the wrist, like most Secret Service investigations.
Once on the ground in Miami, Stokes spoke on the phone with his supervisor at the Rowley Training Center. “Just hang tight, Greg,” the boss said. “Weather the storm. You’re probably going to do some days on the beach.”
At different times on the long flight home, the younger guys on the plane came up to Stokes and Chaney to ask different versions of the same question: “Is everything going to be okay?” Stokes, a pugnacious agent from the Boston area who ran the canine unit, shrugged it off. In his mind, there was a long list of agents and supervisors who’d gotten in worse scrapes: guys who’d gotten DWIs, had stolen agency money, had been accused of statutory rape. Most got just a short suspension or a letter to their file and stayed on the job.
“This is probably going to blow over,” Stokes told them.
“Nah, this is not going to be okay,” Chaney said. “A U.S. ambassador is involved. Twenty-two guys on a presidential trip. This is big.”
The two friends did agree on one thing: They were worried about Art Huntington. Chaney and Stokes kept checking on the agent, who was barely speaking to anyone and wore the expression of a wounded animal.
On his ride home that evening from the airport, Chaney thought about the mess he had gotten himself into—It would be so easy to drive into those barriers, he thought—but he also knew he would never do it.
The first thing he did after he closed his front door behind him was walk upstairs to his bedroom and tell his wife everything. Within hours, The Washington Post published a breaking news alert: U.S. Secret Service Agents Recalled from Colombia.
CHAPTER 20
SULLIVAN’S STRUGGLES
Director Sullivan had survived some headline-grabbing screw-ups before. Whenever he’d found himself under the gun in the past, he’d turn on his guileless “aw shucks” charm. His manner telegraphed trustworthiness rather than cover-up. Like some previous directors, he was also pretty good at stroking politicians’ egos.
After an uninvited couple sneaked past the Secret Service into a 2009 White House dinner—and shook hands with President Obama—Sullivan made a series of supplicant visits to lawmakers’ offices to brief them personally. He shared the details of his team’s findings on how protocol broke down at a White House entry checkpoint. Lawmakers then went on television to show how important and “in the know” they were, telling viewers of the one-on-one download they’d received from the director. Congressional staffers dubbed his rounds on Capitol Hill “the Mark Sullivan self-preservation tour.”
Though the public had no idea, Sullivan had also survived the First Lady’s anger in 2011 over the agency’s botched handling of the November shooting at the White House. Sullivan had promised Michelle Obama that nothing like that would ever happen again.
This time, though, the director had reason to fear he didn’t have any more professional lives left. The words “Secret Service” and “hookers” now led the front page of every newspaper and scrolled across the chyron at the bottom of every cable television news program.
Ed Donovan, the Service’s top spokesman, told Sullivan and his senior deputies the Cartagena story was hot now, but it would flame out. A two-day story at the worst, he said.
Sullivan wished that were the case, but he didn’t have much faith the furor would die down. On Saturday, he approved a statement to the press announcing that the Service had put eleven men on leave pending an investigation. At the same time, the statement oddly—and some would argue prematurely—concluded that the men had violated the service’s “zero-tolerance policy on personal misconduct.”
When the statement was released, some of the men were still denying ever having hired prostitutes. Had they engaged in misconduct simply because they’d gone drinking off duty? If so, nearly every Secret Service agent and supervisor was in the crosshairs.
Still, there was no doubt the salacious image of agents carousing with prostitutes had splashed mud on the president at his own summit. News organizations that Saturday hastily dispatched teams of reporters to Cartagena. They bypassed the summit and instead taxied to the red-light district to interview bartenders, escorts, and cabdrivers for any sordid details they might have seen or heard. White House chief of staff Jack Lew told Sullivan there had to be consequences for embarrassing the president. Some heads might have to roll on this one.
On Sunday, Obama held his first joint press conference with Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos. The first reporter to get a question in immediately asked about Hookergate: “I wanted to ask quickly about the issue that has sort of hung over this Summit for the Americas, is the controversy that involved members of the detail that is sworn to protect you,” New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes asked Obama. “Were you angry when you heard about this as you came here?”
President Santos looked over at the world’s most powerful leader sympathetically. Obama looked down at the lectern to gather his thoughts, first saying a few words about his hopes for expanded freedom in Cuba. “What happened here in Colombia is being investigated by the director of the Secret Service. I expect that investigation to be thorough and I expect it to be rigorous,” he finally said. “If it turns out that some of the allegations that have been made in the press are confirmed, then of course I’ll be angry—because my attitude with respect to the Secret Service personnel is no different than what I expect out of my delegation that’s sitting here. We’re representing the people of the United States. And when we travel to another country, I expect us to observe the highest standards because we’re not just representing ourselves, we’re here on behalf of our people. And that means that we conduct ourselves with the utmost dignity and probity.”
He paused, his face tightening. “And obviously what’s been reported doesn’t match up with those standards.”
Early Monday morning, all the platoon leaders were called to the ramparts at headquarters. A haggard Director Sullivan asked the members of his Executive Resources Board to strategize a way out of the disaster. The board was made up of all eight of Sullivan’s assistant directors and his deputy director.
Sullivan told his team that he was getting calls from the Hill for heads to roll, the White House was pissed, and they had to act swiftly to control the potential damage and demonstrate how seriously the Service took this misconduct. He put nearly the entire unit of internal investigators on the case, sending a team led by Rob Merletti, a highly respected investigator and the former director’s nephew, to Cartagena. But the polygraphers, security clearance staff, and inspectors were shocked at how fast they were being pushed to get answers, and how rapidly the bosses were making critical decisions about men’s careers. For years, the Service had slow-walked investigations of internal misconduct and often turned a blind eye altogether to the misdeeds of favored agents. But those old car crashes, allegations of statutory rape, sexual misconduct, and claims of serial sexual harassment hadn’t leaked to the press. Now that this dirty laundry had been aired, Sullivan needed to persuade lawmakers this was an honorable agency with just a few bad apples that he was more than willing to throw into the trash.
The board hashed over the men’s various accounts of their night out in Cartagena. Some still denied having sex with women they brought to their rooms, but most acknowledged they did. Some admitted paying the women; others insisted they paid nothing. The Service didn’t know for sure who was lying, but they felt they would learn soon—they’d hook them up to polygraph machines starting the next morning.
Before they’d gathered all the facts, the board tackled the thorny matter of which acts were fireable offenses. Firing was something, frankly, the Service rarely did, and sex with a stranger in a foreign land was hardly unheard of. In fact, at a security briefing just a month earlier, a top supervisor told the entire Washington field office staff that they didn’t have to report one-night stands with foreign nationals on trips—they had to notify their bosses only if the relationship continued beyond one night.
To help navigate these tricky waters, Sullivan turned to David O’Connor, a tough-edged Irish agent from Boston. O’Connor had twenty-six years on the job, and had done time in nearly every office in the Service, from counterfeit ring investigations in Newark to the Clinton family detail to overseeing security for the 2008 presidential campaign. He had just been promoted to be the assistant director in charge of all field offices—one of the two most important AD jobs. He raised the central question: “Do we have grounds to remove these guys or not?” he asked the table.
The Service’s longtime attorney Donna Cahill didn’t say yes or no exactly. She said paying prostitutes was illegal in the States, and a violation of the agency manual wherever it occurred. A onetime misconduct violation didn’t normally trigger removal. But some sexual behavior and personal conduct could be used as grounds for stripping someone of their security clearance—if it showed “questionable judgment” and “lack of discretion.” When it brought discredit—bad press—to the agency, that was an aggravating factor. Revoking a clearance was a sledgehammer, a surefire way to bounce someone from the agency. Agents and officers couldn’t work for the Service without a top-secret clearance.
The investigation was in its early stages. But even then, Sullivan and the board agreed that the men proven to have paid for prostitutes would get the boot, and the ones who had one-night stands might be disciplined. The Service would urge the former group to resign quickly, informing them that if they didn’t, they would soon lose their security clearance and job anyway.
O’Connor, nicknamed the Enforcer, was known for his exacting standards. Sullivan trusted him more than any of his other deputies. The director asked him to sit down with several of the agents. The unspoken assumption: O’Connor would have the best shot at getting the guys to resign without a fight.
The Service was a small family. Many of the bosses had worked alongside one or more of the guys now jammed up. The loss of a clearance raised the specter that some of them would never work again as an 1811—a federal investigative agent.
Mike Merritt, an assistant director over administration, acknowledged that the agents’ behavior in Cartagena had been stupid and brazen. But he warned Sullivan and his fellow assistant directors that firing employees because they paid for sex on the road could open the Secret Service to more humiliating scrutiny. He stressed the punishment had to be consistent with how they’d disciplined previous agents who’d done the same thing. “Remember, we need to be careful here,” he said. “If we treat these people differently, some are going to get pissed off, and the skeletons will come out of the closet.”
From then on, Sullivan barred Merritt from any discussions of the subject. But his warning couldn’t have been more prescient.
One by one, the Cartagena jump team was called in for a tough talk. On Tuesday morning, Chaney entered the windowless conference room at headquarters where O’Connor waited. O’Connor normally wore a fierce expression, but he looked slightly less ferocious today, and more somber. Chaney took it as a sign of respect for his two decades of service.
O’Connor said he was sorry about the reason that brought them together. He pushed a single piece of paper across the desk. It was a proposed legal agreement, just three paragraphs. It spelled out that Chaney would agree to retire on a set date in August—after taking some accumulated leave—and the Service would pursue no disciplinary action against him. Chaney raced to read the key words then reread from the top more carefully. After more than a minute, he looked up at O’Connor and asked, “This would help you guys out?”
O’Connor’s tough face melted a little hearing Chaney’s question. “It says volumes about you that you ask that, Dave,” O’Connor said. “And yes. Yes, it would.” O’Connor told Chaney he had one hour to decide.
