Zero fail, p.43
Zero Fail, page 43
Pierson knew in her gut that alcohol was the culprit, even if the trooper said Reyes passed a field sobriety test an hour after his accident. She couldn’t believe the stupidity. Young officers in a four-star oceanfront resort on the government’s dime, bored and looking for something to do for one night, decided they had to do tequila shots till somebody threw up.
Pierson wanted headquarters to send a signal. The officers on the Keys trip received much stiffer punishments than others had suffered in the past for the same kind of drunken behavior. Several counter snipers were suspended for more than a month, some for a week, and the officers involved in the car accident lost their coveted spots on specialized tactical units and were bucked back down to patrolling the White House complex.
Pierson called an all-supervisor meeting on March 13 with the Special Operations Division. This division oversaw the Counter Assault and Counter Sniper teams, which were most often implicated in the blackout drinking, bar brawls, and car accidents. She began the meeting describing the crash in the Florida Keys. “All of us know what was going on,” she said. “The challenge here is, if this was a football team, would your guys be out at two o’clock in the morning and ready to play the next day? No, they wouldn’t. It puts everyone and our mission at risk.”
Supervisors had to make sure their agents and officers knew the binge drinking and road-warrior antics had to end, she said. Then the director made a not-so-veiled threat. “If this leadership team doesn’t work, I’m going to continue to make changes until we get a team that does work,” she said.
The first big test came on Saturday, March 22. More than a hundred agents and officers descended on the Netherlands to help provide security for President Obama’s coming visit. The president would arrive in about thirty-six hours. At about seven o’clock that Saturday night, Counter Assault Team leader George Hartford escorted his agents from their hotel to dinner in a touristy section of The Hague. He had gotten a briefing from his supervisor and knew Pierson was ticked about a group of officers who got shit-faced in the Keys. He had Florida on his mind as he prepared to return to the hotel around 9:30 p.m.
The team leader gave his agents a collegial warning: Have another Heineken or two. Then go to sleep. No craziness, he told them. Scrutiny on the Service and CAT was high. He reminded the group that the manpower briefing was at 10 a.m. Sunday. He said good night.
But some agents still couldn’t resist the chance to party. At about 5:30 a.m., a Marine stationed in the hotel that would soon welcome President Obama was doing his normal patrols. A hotel employee alerted him to a thirty-four-year-old man passed out on the hallway floor outside his room. It appeared he’d tried to use his key card and simply collapsed. The badge in his pocket identified him as a special agent of the Secret Service. The hotel worker and some other agents lifted the unconscious agent and put him in his own bed. Within the hour, Hartford got a call about the hallway scene. He was soon banging on the drunk agent’s door, trying to find out what the hell had happened the previous night.
Pierson got word about the passed-out agent before she boarded Air Force One. She was scheduled to travel with the president for the trip on Monday.
The next day, March 25, Pierson met with President Obama in his hotel suite in Belgium to brief him on the embarrassing incident. She explained that she had ordered the agent who’d passed out and his two drinking buddies back to the States. She laid out some steps she planned to take with their supervisors. Then it was the president’s turn.
He began sternly listing, in methodical order, every ugly Secret Service headline since his inauguration. He started with the dinner crashers and kept right on going without a breath. “And these are just the screw-ups that happened during my administration,” he said. “This is a Secret Service problem, not a President Obama problem.” He controlled his temper, but she could feel it in the room. “You know what?” Obama said. “The problem with the Secret Service is you don’t have enough women in the Secret Service.”
Pierson looked at him. “I’m working on it,” she said.
On Friday, Pierson flew back to the States, stewing about what had just happened for fifteen hours in a cramped seat. She landed at Dulles at 3:30 p.m. and ordered an all-hands meeting for senior executives and GS-15s at five o’clock. It wasn’t a popular time for a meeting, but she didn’t care. She started by stating how valuable the Special Operations Division was to the Service, but immediately went on to note that at the moment it was serially embarrassing the president, the director, and the whole Service. “I’m not going to let SOD tarnish the star and you shouldn’t let SOD tarnish the star,” she said. Then she told them to get ready for some changes in management.
Pierson removed Dan Donohue from his job overseeing Special Operations. She concluded he had a friendly, go-along personality and had made no consistent effort to curb these misconduct eruptions. But the transfer shocked the Service’s top managers. Donohue was well liked and well connected, and the brother-in-law of Mike White, a senior leader on Obama’s detail. Erevia told Pierson it was a mistake.
It dawned on Pierson that Erevia, at the time President Obama’s favorite person in the Secret Service, just couldn’t seem to get with the program. The Service needed accountability, not more brotherhood and cover-up. She believed he had tried to go soft on punishing Zamora. He’d tried to soft-pedal the Keys incident as a simple car accident. And now Erevia was resisting her efforts to hold managers accountable. This was strike three. Pierson told Erevia she was transferring him out of his job as assistant director of Protective Operations.
“Nobody wants to say it…but the Secret Service has a culture problem,” she would later explain. “It’s really a culture of managers failing to want to recognize a problem and deal with it. And it’s also a culture of not wanting to report up bad news and circle the wagons” instead.
Pierson’s decision to impose consequences on senior managers shook the Secret Service firmament. People couldn’t remember the last time that had happened, other than in a director’s power play. She had had the guts to specifically target the Counter Assault Team, the Secret Service’s last all-male bastion and a source of macho pride for many detail agents and prominent alumni.
But Pierson shared one of the weaknesses of Sullivan’s tenure as director. Several on her team lacked the expertise and strong management skills to help her implement her vision for the Service. Now some in her midst would work hard to undermine her. “She had a weak team,” said one of her deputies. “The people gunning for her were smart.”
The week after the Netherlands and the president’s scolding, Pierson had a regularly scheduled Monday meeting with the new inspector general on March 31. She and John Roth weren’t chums, but they sized each other up as worthy of professional respect. Pierson looked at Roth, a former federal prosecutor, and saw a man serious about thorough, independent investigations from whom she wasn’t going to hide the facts. Roth listened to Pierson and could tell she deeply cared about the Service and was trying her best to fix it.
Pierson told Roth the passed-out agent would likely lose his job and the other two would likely face some temporary suspension. She vented about how lately she only met with the president to apologize for some new eruption of frat boy behavior. She shared how disgusted President Obama was with the Secret Service at the moment.
“We fired a bunch of people who got caught in Cartagena. We’re going to fire some people here. I just don’t understand why they aren’t getting it…” she told him, her voice trailing off. “I am one drunk driving incident away from getting fired.”
* * *
—
WHILE JULIA PIERSON was trapped in a game of whack-a-mole, identifying one systemic problem in the Service only to have another pop up elsewhere, Rachel Weaver, staff director for Senator Ron Johnson, the ranking Republican on a Homeland Security subcommittee, was busy prying open the Service’s closet of secrets.
Weaver had been pushing to get hold of the Secret Service’s internal investigative report on Cartagena for six months before Pierson got her job. Director Sullivan and Secretary Napolitano had successfully stonewalled the minority staffer, but Weaver wasn’t giving up, especially after Sullivan stepped down.
“Who is this Rachel Weaver, anyway?” a leader of the Service’s congressional affairs team asked a friendly Democratic committee staffer one day. “What did we ever do to her?”
The Secret Service had enjoyed a protected status on Capitol Hill. It rarely faced hardball questions. Senior lawmakers, several of them potential presidential candidates (whether in reality or in their own head), greeted the directors and their deputies as collegial chums. Congress hadn’t asked the Government Accountability Office to probe a Secret Service program for more than a decade. But Weaver had evidence suggesting that the Service and Sullivan had misled the public and Congress about Cartagena and wondered what else the Service was hiding. So Weaver had been politely relentless in pushing the committee to get the inspector general’s finished report on Cartagena.
At a tense April 9 meeting, Weaver’s boss, Senator Johnson, angrily pressed Director Pierson and Committee Chairman Tom Carper to deliver the final report. Pierson said she’d been director for only a few weeks and didn’t have all of it herself.
Pierson considered Carper a friendly advocate. When they were alone after the meeting, she told him the Service needed a breather from bad publicity about sex scandals. She needed to focus on hiring and training, and to get her staff refocused on the mission. She recalled that Carper had served in the Navy. “How long did it take the Navy to get back to normal after Tailhook?” she asked, as Carper nodded that he understood. “That’s what I need,” she said. “I need some time.”
By early May, Weaver’s phone was ringing regularly with calls from whistleblowers from both the Secret Service and the inspector general’s office. Those whistleblowers would include people supremely unhappy with Pierson, including some from the highest levels of her executive team, working alongside her every day.
Weaver had a breakthrough when she was introduced to one of the Acting Inspector General Edwards’s investigators. He said an Edwards deputy had ordered the deletion of key findings from the Cartagena investigation, and also the removal of references to other agents hiring prostitutes in the past and to evidence that a White House volunteer had brought a prostitute to his room. Another set of Edwards’s employees told Weaver they had evidence that Edwards had had staff write his dissertation and had pushed to get his wife hired at the agency. That summer, at Weaver’s urging, Johnson convinced his subcommittee chairwoman, Democratic senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, that they had to open a joint investigation of Edwards.
Meanwhile, Weaver was immersing herself in the world of the Secret Service and was surprised to discover the story was more complicated than she first believed. She interviewed dozens of agents, including many who had been implicated in the Cartagena scandal. They were all shell-shocked at their punishment, having witnessed peers and supervisors engage in bad-boy behavior for years with no consequences. She listened to their stories of much worse misconduct that had never been reported or punished.
“I’m spending my entire day on the phone with these guys,” Weaver said. “I’m starting to feel really sorry for them. I’m developing relationships with them to a certain [extent], which is the last thing I thought—that I would feel sorry for them.”
Most had lost their jobs. Now some were overdue on mortgage payments, burning through their retirement savings, or trying to patch their marriages back together. She realized the Service had two sets of rules: one for well-connected supervisors and another for the rank and file. Many of the guys she interviewed had become expendable when Director Sullivan and his team were facing public heat over Cartagena.
Starting in late 2013, however, Ron Johnson’s interest in the Secret Service was beginning to wane. Weaver was exhausted from her investigations and pregnant with twins. She was ordered to stay home on bed rest for the last trimester.
Working on her laptop on the third floor of her Alexandria townhome, Weaver battled to get Chairwoman Claire McCaskill’s staff to agree to publish the details of what the committee had found: first, that Acting Inspector General Edwards had softened his reports as he tried to please Obama appointees, and second, that the Secret Service had misled Congress about the misconduct it had tolerated and covered up. The Republican and Democratic staffs haggled over every phrase that might embarrass the White House. But the final report, while covering only a tiny fraction of what Weaver had uncovered about the Secret Service, did clearly document one thing: Edwards was not an independent or ethical inspector general. It was published April 24, 2014. He stepped down before the report’s public release. Two weeks later, on May 9, Weaver delivered two healthy babies, a boy and a girl.
In September 2014, just as Weaver was nearing the end of her maternity leave, her phone rang. It was a miracle that she picked up. With her twins taking turns crying and demanding to be fed, she rarely answered the phone. Jason Chaffetz, a telegenic, ambitious Republican congressman from Utah, was on the line and asked her to come to his office for a chat. He had designs to replace Darrell Issa, who was stepping down as chairman of the House Oversight Committee at the end of the year. He was interested in hiring her to help him with that, and with investigations generally. He had noticed how she had grabbed the Secret Service by the teeth and wouldn’t let go.
“So how many whistleblowers do you have, anyway?” he asked her.
Weaver was elated at the idea of a boss who was interested in dogged investigations, and in a subject she had studied intensely. She started working for Chaffetz from home the first week of September 2014.
Timing is everything in life, and something unfathomable was about to happen in downtown Washington. It would rock the White House and make Weaver the expert on the most important subject in town.
CHAPTER 24
“HE’S IN THE HOUSE”
At around 6 p.m. on a warm Friday evening in September, most of Washington had begun to shut down their computers, pack up their things at work, and officially commence their weekend.
President Obama still had a few senior staff meetings before he, too, would head out for a weekend getaway at Camp David. He was scheduled to depart the White House with his two teenaged daughters in an hour, flying to meet his wife at the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains.
Six blocks south, though, a former Army scout had just arrived in the city. Suffering from delusions and panicky dreams, Omar Jose Gonzalez could feel the adrenaline in his veins. He was itching to set off on his important mission.
Gonzalez parked his 1996 Ford Bronco off Fifteenth Street near the Holocaust Museum, cracked his windows a little, and hopped out. The disabled Iraq War veteran had lost his wife and his home near Fort Hood, Texas, and had been living in his car, short-term motels, and campgrounds for the last several months. Part of his foot was missing after the Humvee he was riding in rolled over a roadside bomb in Baghdad. His family felt he had been struggling to keep hold of reality after he returned from three tours and eventually retired with a disability in 2012. A cavalry scout, he described watching friends getting blown up. At his home near Fort Hood, he kept guns leaning behind the doors. He feared children he didn’t know and warned his wife they could be deadly.
As he set off for the White House on foot, he left hints of a life that was unraveling: two dogs in the Bronco’s backseat, jars filled with his urine on the floorboards, and eight hundred rounds of ammunition, two hatchets, and a machete in the trunk.
At 6:25 p.m., Gonzalez reached the southeastern corner of the White House’s fenced grounds and began casing the perimeter for a way in. The forty-two-year-old soldier marched up the western border on Seventeenth Street, then along the north fence on the Pennsylvania Avenue pedestrian plaza, then down Fifteenth Street on the east.
Four Secret Service officers who patrolled the compound for trouble—two on bikes and two on foot—noticed Gonzalez at different points in his walk. A few even recognized the caramel-complexioned man with a shaved head from a visit the previous month. That day, he had been walking along the south fence line with a hatchet tucked into his pants belt. He said he used it for camping and stowed it in his car. Today, in his dark T-shirt and baggy cargo pants, he didn’t appear to be carrying anything or behaving oddly. They let him pass.
Gonzalez doubled back to the north fence line, where most tourists were content to snap photos. But this Army vet knew he had to get inside. He had a life-or-death matter he had to discuss with the president.
As dusk fell, two starkly different scenes played out on opposite sides of the White House grounds. On the South Lawn, order and serenity ruled. An orchestrated routine that the Secret Service had rehearsed over and over repeated itself. On the North Lawn, a modest problem set off a series of cascading disasters. Every last one of the Secret Service’s defenses disintegrated. And officers sworn to tell the truth would lie about the mistakes they made.
