Zero fail, p.35
Zero Fail, page 35
Flying back on her plane was Secret Service director Mark Sullivan. By this time, Sullivan’s agents had conducted more interviews and knew Ortega was a delusional man who had told his friends Obama was the devil and “he was going to put a stop to it.” The director decided it wasn’t time for the Service to share this news with the First Couple. Sullivan later said he needed more information to confirm the seriousness of the threat.
Reginald Dickson, an assistant White House usher, had come to work early to prepare the residence for the First Lady. Around noon, a housekeeper asked Dickson to come to the Truman Balcony, where she showed him the broken window and a chunk of white stone on the floor. Dickson saw the bullet hole and cracks in the antique glass of a center window, with the intact bulletproof glass on the inside. Dickson spotted a dent in another windowsill that turned out to be a bullet lodged in the wood. He called the Secret Service agent in charge of the complex.
With that, Ortega became a suspect in an assassination attempt on the president of the United States—and he was about to become the target of a national manhunt.
Aides rushed in around noon to alert Bill Daley, the White House chief of staff, to the discovery of bullets on the second floor of the residence. The First Lady was still napping, and Daley and Deputy Chief of Staff Alyssa Mastromonaco knew it was their job to notify her and the president. They debated whether they should wake her up and give her the news. “I know these people,” Mastromonaco said. “Let me handle it.”
They would let Mrs. Obama sleep, they decided. Mastromonaco said she would brief the president so he could decide how to tell his wife.
Dickson, the usher, had meanwhile gone upstairs to the third floor to see how Michelle Obama was doing. He assumed she knew all about the bullets and began describing the discovery on the balcony and the clean-up. But she was aghast—and then furious. She wondered why neither Sullivan nor her own detail leader had mentioned anything about a shooting during their long flight back together from Hawaii, according to people familiar with the First Lady’s reaction.
That afternoon, four days after the shooting, Secret Service investigators began interviewing officers and agents about what they had seen and heard while on duty the previous Friday night. They put out an all-points bulletin for Ortega and circulated his picture. Local police officers up and down the Eastern Seaboard were tasked with checking train and bus stations. Meanwhile, a team of FBI agents met early that evening to plan how they would take over the investigation and secure the crime scene at the White House.
At 7:45 the next morning, FBI agents arrived at the White House complex. They interviewed some of the Secret Service officers who had been on duty that Friday night and scoured the Truman Balcony and nearby grounds for casings, bullet fragments, and other evidence. They found $97,000 worth of damage to the exterior of the mansion.
The Secret Service had sent pictures of Ortega to places where he had been seen before, asking people to be on the lookout. That Tuesday morning, a hotel desk clerk at a Hampton Inn in Indiana, Pennsylvania, called police after recognizing the man by his distinctive neck tattoo. State troopers arrested Ortega on a tip the Secret Service provided and kept him in a holding cell until FBI agents could arrive to question him.
Michelle Obama was still upset when her husband arrived home five days later from Australia. The president was fuming, too, former aides said. Not only had the Secret Service stumbled in its response, their deputies had failed to immediately alert the First Lady. “When the president came back…then the shit really hit the fan,” said one former senior aide. “He was outraged that the incident had happened and was found out the way it was. He was upset there wasn’t a better briefing of the First Lady. He had gotten an earful from her.”
Tensions were high when Sullivan was called to the White House for a meeting with the First Lady; Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to the president; and other Obama aides about the incident. Michelle Obama tried to keep her outrage in check. “I’m speaking to you now not as the First Lady, but as a mother,” she said slowly. But as the meeting continued, she addressed the director and his aides in such a sharp and raised voice that she could be heard through a closed door, according to people familiar with the exchange.
She had many questions. Why hadn’t her daughters and mother been moved to a safer place when gunfire was first heard? Why hadn’t the threat level at the White House been raised to Condition Red, which would have triggered more safety precautions for her family? How did agents and officers miss bullets from an assault rifle lodged in the walls of what was essentially her living room? One of the bullets hit the window of one of her favorite spots to read and relax, the Yellow Room. She was appalled to learn of the more “casual” security posture at the complex when POTUS was away. “Her general frustration was—‘Oh! So when he’s not at the house, what are we? Chopped liver?’ ” the former Obama agent said.
White House staff generally liked and trusted the director, and he survived in his position despite the bungled shooting incident. But the First Lady and White House chief of staff Bill Daley stressed that this wasn’t confidence-inspiring. “It was made clear to him this was a fuckup,” a senior Obama adviser said.
Sullivan later disputed that Mrs. Obama raised her voice at him. But he declined to describe the meeting.
* * *
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FOR MANY FORMER Secret Service officials, the 2011 shooting was a sign of far deeper troubles. The Service preferred to keep a security breach a secret, even when open discussion could improve protection for the president in the future. With the public and even with their own rank and file, Sullivan and his top deputies acted as if the shooting had never occurred. Sullivan never ordered a formal after-action review. The first time the Service sought out video surveillance footage of the area for the night of the shooting was on November 15, when the housekeeper found the bullet hole in the Yellow Room window.
The Secret Service stressed that Ortega had been bizarrely lucky in his aim. The agency never expected that a rifle could strike the residence from that distance, roughly 750 yards. But that was the problem. The Service hadn’t imagined a risk that proved quite imaginable—and real.
Sullivan and his deputies found serious protection gaps as a result of the shooting. Quietly, they made changes meant to beef up security. New York City police had rafts of cameras scattered around the city to help identify and catch criminals. But Sullivan had to reluctantly acknowledge that the exposed southern border of the White House had none. In 2012, the Service purchased and installed a suite of cameras there. At the urging of the newly promoted special agent in charge, Vic Erevia, the Service increased the number of officers on the perimeter posts and added countersurveillance patrols. In typical Secret Service fashion, the agency threw bodies at a problem. In another new policy, officers at the White House complex had to clear all members of the public from the E Street area of the South Grounds whenever the Obamas used the Truman Balcony.
Ortega was charged with attempted assassination and later pleaded guilty to slightly lesser charges. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.
Ortega turned out to be a deeply confused person, but also a classic presidential assassin: a young man, developing paranoid schizophrenia as he aged into his twenties, who felt compelled to take dramatic action to right some vague, ill-defined wrong. He succeeded in hitting the president’s house. He just happened to show up at the White House when the president wasn’t home.
Ortega’s friends traced his troubles to about a year earlier, when he had become agitated watching an antigovernment film. The movie, called The Obama Deception, was written and produced by Alex Jones, a Texas-based conspiracy theorist and talk show host. It claimed that a cluster of wealthy families were engaged in a conspiracy with President Obama and had installed him in the White House to use the government to surveil and hurt the interests of most Americans. Soon Ortega bought a powerful rifle and began practicing his aim.
In early fall, Ortega asked a friend to record his video testimonial about his role as Jesus Christ. Ortega asked Oprah Winfrey to broadcast it to her national audience. “You see, Oprah, there is still so much more that God needs me to express to the world,” he said. “It’s not just a coincidence that I look like Jesus. I am the modern-day Jesus Christ that you all have been waiting for.”
Ortega’s attack revealed that an elite force of selfless and highly skilled patriots—willing to take a bullet for the good of the country—was still not always up to its job. “It was obviously very frightening that someone who didn’t really plan it that well was able to shoot and hit the White House and people here did not know it until several days later,” Daley said. “The handling of this was not good.”
CHAPTER 19
“I WOKE UP TO A NIGHTMARE”
Dave Chaney was ready to retire. He still reported early to work, a habit of many agents, but he felt less zip each morning when he was getting ready. After twenty-one years with the Service, Chaney had reached the respectable but modest grade of GS-14. Now a senior supervisor, he oversaw a small headquarters division that worked with foreign countries. His unit helped train foreign security forces in how to create a safe bubble around their leaders.
In just a few months, the forty-eight-year-old supervisor could turn in his retirement papers. He was looking forward to deciding for himself how to spend his hours.
Chaney had enjoyed a special perch, not just as a Secret Service agent, but as a Secret Service legacy. He was the son of George Chaney, a World War II veteran who had protected President Eisenhower’s grandchildren and President Johnson and then risen to become a well-respected head of personnel. He reaped the benefits of his dad’s reputation, as the elder Chaney had hired many of the agents who became Dave Chaney’s bosses.
Dave Chaney loved the Service, but not in the same way his dad’s generation had. Certainly Chaney valued the brotherhood, the history he’d witnessed, and the lifetime friends he made in an all-consuming mission. He became known as the guy who jumped to take up a collection for a sick co-worker or a retirement party. But Chaney was also irreverent, joke-cracking, and clear-eyed about the Service’s flaws. He noticed how the senior leadership seemed surprised every four years when a presidential campaign arrived. He watched a mass exodus of supervisors in the late 1990s—a bleeding wound the Service didn’t try to patch until too late. The Service overworked a small team of horses to make ends meet—all in the name of duty and valor.
Chaney had long ago hopped off the promotion track, and for seven years as a supervisor opted not to bid for a promotion. This made him a huge exception in an agency stocked with Type A’s furiously jockeying to grasp another rung of the career ladder. One day, his deputy assistant director urged Chaney to consider putting in for a higher job.
“What does the director make?” he asked his boss, noting that his wife made twice that. “You want me to transfer to Detroit? So I can get a better title? So maybe one day I can make ten thousand dollars more than I do now? No thanks.”
Chaney felt strongly about this. When he was in grade school, his father had moved their entire family—five kids—from Austin to El Paso with just two years left before his retirement. His sister had to change high schools. “Why did you do it, Dad?” the younger Chaney once asked. “I wanted to retire as a special agent in charge,” the elder Chaney replied. The son was dumbfounded. He had admired his father greatly, but he vowed he wouldn’t do this—disrupt his child’s high school experience for a better title.
Now, as Dave Chaney prepared for his own retirement, one of the best perks of being a Secret Service agent landed in his in-box: an exotic foreign trip. He had volunteered to provide extra help on President Obama’s trip to Cartagena in mid-April, and headquarters emailed to say he’d been chosen to go. He’d be the jump team supervisor—a pretty easy gig. Jump team members would fly in with the president’s limo and other tricked-out vehicles on two Air Force cargo planes, dubbed “car planes,” about forty-eight hours before Obama. While the president was in country, they would serve as “post standers”—the worker bees who covered manageable but boring shifts. They usually stood guard at perimeter posts or security checkpoints, all while staying in a five-star hotel in a beautiful city.
Before POTUS arrived on April 13 and after he left, the post standers were free to party. And Cartagena—with its late-night club scene—specialized in just that. “See logistics below,” Chaney emailed the fifty-four guys on his newly assembled jump team on Monday, April 9, the day before they departed. “Our motto for this trip is Una Mas Cerveza por favor.” Nothing wrong with partying on Uncle Sam’s dime a couple of nights, the men reasoned. Not when agents and officers that year had spent so many hours standing in stairwells or cold streets on the midnight shift, walked so many miles a day on a campaign detail, or missed countless kids’ games, anniversaries, and birthdays.
Cartagena also boasted a Vegas-like approach to sex. Prostitution was legal there, and the local clubs made the transaction all the more civilized by letting men pay for a woman’s sexual services on their bar tab. It had become so commonplace that locals took to calling prostitutes prepagos—“prepaids.” Some members of the jump team toyed with the idea of how to round out the trip with a bit of the city’s X-rated fun.
The first cargo plane took off Tuesday night and landed at 2 a.m. Wednesday, April 11. The second plane arrived a little after 4 a.m. due to some mechanical repairs it needed at the base. In prearranged teams, the jump team guys drove their SUVs, trucks, and the president’s limo, loaded with guns and detection equipment and luggage, down the ramp and out of the plane. In an unofficial motorcade, the vehicles sped the men to their home away from home for the next five days: the Hotel Caribe in the heart of Cartagena’s tourist district.
Agents often joked that they brought so much gear and hardware and personnel into town for each presidential visit, their presence was hardly a secret. It was why some agents mockingly nicknamed their enormous troupe the Secret Circus.
President Obama was scheduled to arrive Friday at the Hilton Cartagena, a luxury high-rise on the farthest end of a hook-shaped stretch of pristine beachfront. The Service’s advance and logistics teams had already been at the Hilton for a week, working hard to prepare for his weekend visit.
But Party Central was the Hotel Caribe, about six blocks away, at the other end of the hotel-lined beach. Of the 175 Secret Service personnel in town, 133 were staying at the Caribe. Many of the 100 military personnel, who provided extra security, counterintelligence, and bomb detection, were booked there too.
Chaney’s and fellow agent Greg Stokes’s jump teams arrived in the early morning hours Wednesday and crashed in their Caribe hotel rooms to get some sleep. By midday, most of them had awoken and found the Caribe’s enormous pool buzzing with a spring-break vibe. Speakers blasted a mix of hip-hop and country. Some of the military guys had stocked Styrofoam coolers with beer and booze from a local liquor store and kept them next to their lounge chairs.
Some of the Secret Service jump team members hit the pool or went to the nearby grocery store for provisions. They exchanged emails about meeting up for dinner at dusk, making plans for a night on the town. Chaney and Stokes met at the pool at about 6 p.m. and left together for dinner with about eight younger agents. One of the Spanish-speaking agents led them to an unassuming local restaurant he knew from previous visits. They moved on to a well-known club nearby, Mister Babilla, for a few drinks.
But Stokes, who was single, and Chaney, who was married, had discussed another plan: visiting a strip club. An advance agent had even sent Chaney a recommendation. “Pleyclb bosque off hook!” the agent wrote, referring to a strip club and bordello in the Bosque neighborhood. Sometime around 10:30 p.m., the two supervisors got in a taxi and told the younger guys they were heading back to the hotel for the night. They left on their own, not knowing the other agents and wanting to be discreet.
Once inside the back of the cab, Stokes told the driver, “Take us where the girls are.” They pulled up a few minutes later to a windowless building on the backside of Cartagena Bay that had a neon sign depicting a naked woman swinging her leg around a large anchor at the entrance. The men presumed it was the Pley Club. In fact, the club was El Paraiso del Marina—Paradise on the Water—about ten blocks away. A bouncer escorted the men to a table. No women were dancing onstage, but soon a group of them paraded by in a line and introduced themselves.
Stokes and Chaney began talking to two women, who gave their escort names of Juliana and Maria. They bought the women some drinks. The club was full of white American men—some Secret Service and some military men, Chaney noticed. He guessed it was about 11 p.m., but time was fuzzy. By now Chaney had had a mojito and at least eight beers. Stokes had about four or five beers.
Juliana smiled at Stokes. “We can spend all night together if you ask the boss,” she said. She told him it would cost 200,000 pesos—about $100—plus a “tax” for her to leave the club with him.
Separately, Chaney tried figuring out Maria’s price, but he had trouble understanding her because he knew very little Spanish. Stokes went to the cashier to ask about the exact fee.
When the men had paid what the women and the club required—roughly $140 each—they got into a taxi with the two prostitutes and headed back to the Caribe.
* * *
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THE MEN FROM the Counter Assault Team started their night with a bottle of Grey Goose at the hotel.
“I have goose and some mixers in my room for a pre-game,” Joe Bongino wrote to his buddies Art Huntington and Todd Bratz. “How about 545 in room 710 for a few?”
