Zero fail, p.38
Zero Fail, page 38
Chaney didn’t need it. He signed the paper. He would retire and get his pension. He handed over his gun and badge and walked down to his car in the lot outside. Less than seventy-two hours after returning from Cartagena, Chaney was effectively out of the Secret Service.
That same Tuesday, Stokes was told to report at 1 p.m. to headquarters. Like Chaney, he entered the room where O’Connor sat in wait. Stokes and O’Connor knew each other well—at least twenty years. They had both grown up in and around Boston, part of an unofficial Boston fraternity in the Service.
But that fraternity could help only so much. Unlike Chaney, Stokes was four years away from retirement, not four months. “Greg, I’ve never had to do this in my entire career,” O’Connor began. “I’d give anything not to be here now.”
He pushed a piece of paper across the desk to Stokes. The words on the paper that caught his eye were “removal…for cause.” It was a proposal for termination. Stokes’s head was spinning.
“I have to ask you for your resignation,” O’Connor said.
“Dave, I get it. This is serious. Presidential trip. But for you guys to ask me for my resignation? No. It ain’t going to happen.”
“I understand,” O’Connor said. This was a man’s career and honor at stake, so close to the finish line.
Stokes pulled a green 3x5 index card out of the breast pocket of his jacket. On it was a Bible reference. John 8:7. He began the passage from memory: “He that is without sin among you…”
O’Connor, a fellow Catholic, finished the verse, but louder and faster: “let him be the first to cast a stone.”
O’Connor sat back in his chair. He had been feeling sorry for Stokes, but now he was angry. Was Stokes accusing him of something? “What the fuck are you saying, Greg?” O’Connor asked.
Stokes looked surprised—he wasn’t talking about O’Connor personally. He just wanted to send a message to the higher-ups in the Service that he had knowledge about far worse misconduct. He considered it leverage, not a threat. “You take this upstairs and you show every one of them,” Stokes told O’Connor. “Take it to the director. Tell them: I would really recommend you think about this.”
O’Connor took the elevator up to the eighth floor and Sullivan’s office. They hashed it out for the next several minutes. What kind of threat was Stokes really making? The truth was that Stokes was bluffing at this point. He believed the Service would never really fire him, if they were just reminded of all the truly serious misconduct they had covered up and excused.
* * *
—
WHILE COPING WITH the furor over Cartagena from outside the agency, Sullivan faced a major loyalty problem inside his own ranks as well. A small tribe within the eighth-floor management team considered Sullivan a weak imitation of directors from the past, and they didn’t try hard to hide it. Rick Elias, who oversaw protective intelligence for the Service, and his deputy, Craig Magaw, were leading members of that tribe. They hailed from an elite fraternity within the agency who considered the Secret Service a family business they were destined to control. Elias, a brainy, bearded professor type, was the aloof brother-in-law of Brian Stafford, the former director under President Clinton. Craig Magaw was the son of John Magaw, who had been a director briefly under President Bush.
Both these former directors, Brian Stafford and John Magaw, had a chilly relationship with Sullivan. They privately groused to alums that he didn’t run the place as shipshape as they had. He focused too much on politicking and diversity hires. On top of their families’ bond, Rick Elias and Craig Magaw both nursed more personal grudges against Sullivan as well. They felt he hadn’t given them the promotions and power they deserved.
A few years earlier, Magaw’s father had called Sullivan up urging him to make his son Craig the head of the president’s detail. Officials believed the elder Magaw hoped to lay down the landing lights for his son to be director—following his same path.
Sullivan was surprised, but respectfully suggested the son wasn’t ready yet. The two men had barely spoken to each other since. Now, with a sizable dose of schadenfreude, Elias and the younger Magaw watched the Cartagena scandal dominate the news. Sullivan was in danger of losing his job. And these two critics in his midst knew something that could make Sullivan even more vulnerable.
Elias’s Intelligence Division had asked the CIA to run the names of the Cartagena prostitutes through a CIA database called CENTS (CIA Electronic Name Trace System) and had gotten a “hit” on one woman whom an agent had brought back to his room. The item described in two or three lines that a person with her name was of interest to the intelligence community because of a past bank account traced to money laundering for a drug cartel.
A hit with the CIA tracing system was pretty rare. In the many thousands of names that the Service asked the CIA to run through its database, agents had seen only a couple come back with a positive hit. “Even one is concerning,” Sullivan would later explain.
When Magaw and Elias learned about the problem with one woman’s name around April 19, Elias went to Sullivan’s office to brief him. Meanwhile, on that same Thursday, two of Rob Merletti’s inspectors learned another inconvenient fact. They paid a visit to the local Hilton’s business office and obtained the names of three U.S. personnel who the hotel said had presented prostitutes to the front desk as their overnight guests. One was a CAT agent. Another was a military official assigned to the White House Communications Agency. A third, the hotel reported to investigators, was a White House advance staff volunteer who helped with presidential travel.
The last one surprised the inspectors. So far the prostitution scandal had embroiled the Service, the Defense Department, and the DEA. Now the White House too? Merletti heard the news and quickly sent word up the chain of command to the director.
Sullivan then alerted the White House to the discovery that a White House advance staffer had been identified in the hotel logs. But White House Counsel Kathy Ruemmler and Obama’s deputy chief of staff Alyssa Mastromonaco both made it clear to Sullivan in different ways that the Cartagena sex scandal had tarred other agencies, but it did not involve the White House. First, the advance staffer wasn’t technically part of the Executive Office of the President, the real White House staff, Mastromonaco said. Ruemmler also noted that her office had interviewed him and concluded he was telling the truth when he said there must be a mistake.
Nevertheless, Sullivan faced several questions about the matter from the Hill. In April, Representative Pete King, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, sent the Secret Service a list of fifty questions about the scandal. In one, he asked whether any members of the president’s staff had been linked to the prostitution scandal.
Sullivan wrote back his answer on May 1: “No. The USSS has uncovered no information suggesting that any member of the EOP was involved in the incident.” The answer was technically accurate—and a dodge.
On May 10, Sullivan gave a closed-door briefing to members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. The toll of the past few weeks had begun to show on the director’s face. The leader who once could so easily pour on the charm now had a bewildered look at some of the questions fired his way.
He focused on his response to the scandal thus far. He told them that everyone who’d paid a prostitute would lose his clearance and his job. Senator Ron Johnson, a Homeland Security subcommittee chair, wanted to know whether men, especially married men, who simply had a one-night stand with a foreign woman would be punished. Sullivan explained that that wasn’t a fireable offense.
Republican senator Susan Collins of Maine called this kind of behavior “every bit as troubling.” Senator Lieberman agreed, noting that adultery was an offense in the military and would make agents susceptible to blackmail. Sullivan said he felt he could try to root out some of the agency’s macho boorishness by increasing the percentage of women—now just 11 percent—in the Service.
Johnson warned Sullivan about any attempts to bury other embarrassing information. His comments proved prescient. “The worst outcome would be if something were to be revealed months later,” he told Sullivan. “You need to rip the whole Band-Aid off.”
* * *
—
ON MAY 23, Sullivan was scheduled to testify publicly for the first time about the scandal. That morning, the director entered the cavernous wood-paneled hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building and was immediately engulfed. If he had any doubt before, now he could see: This was the Secret Service’s Watergate, Tailhook, and Clinton-Lewinsky scandals all rolled into one.
More than forty cameramen and photographers stood up at once from the well of the room. A wave of flashes and clicks kept pulsing at Sullivan for several minutes. He looked understandably nervous.
As the hearing got rolling, Senator Joe Lieberman, the chairman, asked Sullivan what he thought of a Washington Post story that described the Service as having an informal motto of “Wheels up, rings off” while out on the road—a reference to the libertine celebrations that often commenced when the president’s plane had lifted off to wing him home and dozens of agents remained behind.
Sullivan shook his head. “You know, the thought or the notion that this type of behavior is condoned or authorized is just absurd, in my uh, opinion,” Sullivan said. “I’ve been an agent for twenty-nine years now. I began my career for seven years in Detroit. I’ve worked for—I was on the White House detail twice. I’ve worked for a lot of men and women in this organization. I never one time had any supervisor or any other agent tell me that this type of behavior is, uh, condoned. I know I’ve never told any of our employees that it is, uh, condoned.”
Actually, Sullivan and his executive team knew more about the Vegas-like behavior lurking in the Service’s culture than they let on.
The director didn’t mention a relatively junior agent who, eighteen months earlier, had gotten so drunk with local women believed to be prostitutes that he threw a major wrench into President Obama’s four-country tour of Asia. During a layover in Thailand, investigators found, the agent lingered in what his fellow agents described as a brothel and showed up at the airport the next day reeking of alcohol and four hours late for the next leg of the trip. The younger agent delayed a team of fellow agents who were supposed to be winging their way to the president’s next stop in South Korea. A supervisor, a by-the-book CAT agent, had to stay behind in country to make sure the agent returned home safely. His recommended punishment was watered down when a top headquarters deputy overruled the agent’s immediate supervisor.
Nor did the director mention an agent on President Obama’s detail whom the Service had very recently investigated. After an ex-girlfriend called to report his secret life on the road, the Service discovered he had used his presidential work travel to facilitate his appetite for random group sex hookups. The detail agent had posted lewd videos of himself having sex on an adult swinger site. Then he secretly arranged to meet swinging couples and small groups for sex on the road—connecting online with like-minded strangers just before he arrived in a city with the president or for another assignment.
The director didn’t mention, either, an old Secret Service tradition among some site agents of stocking hotel bathtubs with ice and booze—all for their colleagues’ arrival before the president touched down in a city.
The chairman, Senator Lieberman, asked Sullivan whether any of the men implicated in Cartagena had done something like this before. “Let me ask you, with respect to your own investigation thus far and the individuals alleged to have behaved improperly, were they asked whether they had engaged in similar conduct on other occasions?” Lieberman questioned.
“Yes, sir, they were,” Sullivan said.
“And what was their answer?” Lieberman asked.
“Their answer was that they had not,” Sullivan said.
He wasn’t telling the full story. Two agents admitted they’d met up with foreign women for casual sex on presidential trips, their interview records show. Huntington said he had improperly hid the fact that he had sex with foreign nationals and other women on trips to Italy, Ireland, Russia, and the Republic of Korea. Two agents implicated in Cartagena would later admit to investigators that they had previously engaged or assisted in identical behavior on the road. One had hired prostitutes while on work assignment in El Salvador and Panama. A CAT agent fluent in Spanish revealed that fellow agents had frequently bought him drinks on past trips—in exchange for his serving as their translator with prostitutes and negotiating their fees. The CAT agent had also told investigators about a time he shared a cab with his boss back to the agents’ hotel, and the supervisor alerted the front desk to send up a female visitor he was expecting for the night.
Then it was Senator Collins’s turn to ask some questions. She wanted to know about the risk that these women in the agents’ rooms in Hotel Caribe might have been spies or worse. “Have you now been able to definitively conclude that the women were not associated with—that they were not foreign agents? That they did not work for drug cartels? That they were not involved in human trafficking?” Sullivan said the Service had worked with the intelligence community to thoroughly check the women’s backgrounds. “All of the information that we have received back has concluded that there was no connection either from a counterintelligence perspective or a criminal perspective,” he said.
Sullivan’s answers would come back to haunt him. Whether he was misinformed or following a Secret Service habit of papering over bad news, some of the things he said weren’t true. One of Sullivan’s central goals in the hearing was to assure lawmakers that the Service didn’t foster a culture of boozing and womanizing—and that he wouldn’t tolerate it now. But the chairman and the ranking member, the key people he had to convince, didn’t buy it.
Senator Collins gave Sullivan her own read of the facts from the dais that day: “Two of the participants were supervisors—one with twenty-two years of service and the other with twenty-one,” she said. “That surely sends a message to the rank and file that this kind of activity is tolerated on the road. The numbers involved, as well as the participation of two senior supervisors, lead me to believe that this was not a one-time event.”
She had confided to her staff before the hearing that she thought the director was just naïve about the dysfunction in his agency and didn’t believe he was intentionally lying. “He has a difficult time coming to grips with the fact that he has a broader problem than just this one incident,” Collins told reporters as she left the hearing. “He kept saying over and over again that he basically does think this is an isolated incident, and I don’t think he has any basis for that conclusion.”
Many rank-and-file agents shook their heads watching Sullivan’s live testimony in the down room as he said he was “dumbfounded” by the bad-boy behavior of his agents. They all knew better. With their own eyes, they had seen their supervisors’ and colleagues’ romper-room antics on trips for years before Cartagena.
One agent thought a few years back to a drunken detail supervisor at a wheels-up party, the traditional celebration that advance agents and post standers had after the president departed an official visit. This particularly raucous one was in a cavernous bar in another South American resort. Grinning and slurring his words, the supervisor congratulated the brand-new baby agents working the detail on the perks of being a Secret Service agent.
“You guys don’t know how lucky you are,” he told them. “You are going to fuck your way across the globe.”
CHAPTER 21
OUTED
The way Greg Stokes saw it, he had only one card left to play if he wanted to get his job back.
The Secret Service discipline process gave Stokes a final chance to make his case in August—an informal hearing at which he could verbally appeal the agency’s decision to revoke his security clearance and take away his job. Stokes’s lawyer, Larry Berger, warned the agent the night before that the Secret Service had grounds to fire him and, given the national embarrassment they suffered, plenty of motivation. Stokes could plead for leniency in the hearing, but his chances of success were slim.
“This is a very difficult case, Greg,” Berger said.
Stokes wasn’t ready to give up. He told Berger to plead with his bosses to reassign him to the Department of Homeland Security, even in a lowly position, just anywhere he could finish his last few years until retirement. He knew of several agents the Service had caught in worse misdeeds and protected until they could retire. He also knew that an intelligence supervisor who had self-reported getting a sexual massage from a prostitute while in Cartagena had been able to hold off the Service from taking his clearance. The threat of more disclosures appeared to have played a role. The supervisor’s lawyer warned senior management that the intelligence supervisor knew compromising information about one of the highest-ranking supervisors on the Cartagena trip, Nelson Garabito, being involved in similar activity. Garabito, who oversaw sensitive intelligence at headquarters, told investigators that the claims of his engaging with prostitutes were baseless and encouraged them to check the hotel video and his room key records to verify his innocence. Investigators couldn’t do a full investigation and would conclude they could not substantiate the allegations. Word spread to a cluster of agents that headquarters was panicky about more bad news eruptions, especially involving a top supervisor.
The night before the hearing, Stokes told Berger he was going to put the eighth floor on notice about all the buried bodies he could identify. He planned to lay out the Service’s hypocrisy and share his inventory of secrets that Sullivan and the Service had tried to keep under wraps. He hoped his examples would make the eighth floor reconsider flushing his career down the drain simply to make the director look like a responsible leader.
