Zero fail, p.40
Zero Fail, page 40
Sometime late that Friday night, receipts would later show, Prieto headed to the Home Depot on Rhode Island Avenue. He bought rolls of duct tape, packs of cardboard, and some small hoses.
His close friend on the detail, Neil Hegarty, called and texted Prieto to see how he was doing, but he never got an answer. Others tried calling too. Hegarty fretted about the silence. That Saturday, he tried again. But Rafi never picked up. Anxious, Hegarty drove over to his Mount Pleasant row house on Kenyon Street. Prieto paid rent to share the house with a diplomatic security agent at the State Department. His roommate was traveling at the time. When Hegarty neared the narrow alley behind Prieto’s house, he heard something humming in the detached brick garage.
Behind the white garage door, Rafi was dead in the passenger seat of a 2009 Toyota FJ Cruiser he’d just bought from a friend. A laptop computer sat on the front seat, opened to pictures of his two young sons. Brookstone earbuds still hung from his ears, attached to his iPod.
The small SUV’s engine had been running as long as twelve hours. Prieto had thoughtfully, painstakingly taken his own life here, on his own terms. He’d taped panels of cardboard at the bottom of the garage door to keep the noxious exhaust trapped inside with him.
Hegarty felt sick. He called some fellow detail members and 911. An ambulance and fire truck arrived, but there was nothing they could do. Several of Prieto’s friends rushed to the scene. A supervisor who had worked with Prieto got word of his suicide and walked through Prieto’s house looking for clues about his final moments and state of mind, agents said later. The D.C. medical examiner arrived and took pictures, and eventually the rescue crew loaded up his body on a stretcher so they could perform an autopsy back at the city morgue.
Prieto’s death set off tremors at headquarters and eventually shook the whole Service. Prieto had a loyal band of friends in important places, starting with aides to the president, the president’s detail, and also going back to his old days in the powerful New York field office, where he had worked on former president Bill Clinton’s detail. In the White House, Obama was stunned when aides shared the news. He’d had no indication that Prieto was struggling with something so personally painful, and he knew nothing of his security clearance investigation.
Greg Stokes hadn’t been close to Prieto, but he had worked with him years before on an assignment or two. He was speechless when he heard the news from another agent, then broke down crying on the phone.
As word of Prieto’s suicide ricocheted across the Service on Saturday night and Sunday, many agents, including Erevia, blamed the director. If headquarters hadn’t shamed Prieto by making him a Do Not Admit, he might not have felt so despondent. “I don’t think Vic is ever going to forgive me,” Sullivan told a colleague later.
Word trickled down to Stokes from friends that senior headquarters officials were telling others in the agency that Prieto’s death was Stokes’s fault, not theirs. He heard from colleagues on the White House detail and in New York that they were explaining that they’d had no choice but to investigate Prieto after Stokes brought up his likely security violations. Stokes was furious. All he had done was confront supervisors with their own double standard.
DeProspero-Philpot heard through the Secret Service grapevine that Sullivan was also criticizing how she had handled Prieto’s case. She felt a great weight on her shoulders about his death, but she also felt she’d done the right thing. She insisted on scheduling a meeting with the director. When she met with Sullivan, she got no comfort. He was testy. Why did she have to do a second polygraph so soon after the first? he asked. He questioned if that followed protocol. Why dig so urgently? “Come on, Robin,” Sullivan asked her. “Did you really think he was a security risk?”
She was stunned at Sullivan’s about-face. How could the director now be so cavalier about an agent who’d been lying to the Service and who might have mishandled its most sensitive secrets?
At Prieto’s memorial service, his family stood numb and red-eyed in the Catholic church on the Lower East Side. The collective grief of relatives, friends, and co-workers filled the sanctuary. But the tension and recrimination within the Secret Service family hung palpably in the air, too.
Both Sullivan and Stokes had wanted to attend Prieto’s funeral, and with some trepidation, they decided they had a duty to go. Sullivan hoped that by showing up he would temper the New York office’s desire to blame him. Still, when the director entered, agents quietly muttered behind his back.
Stokes also insisted on going, a cauldron of emotions. He was devastated that Prieto had killed himself; he was furious that headquarters was blaming him for something Prieto’s supervisors had known about and should have dealt with long ago. Stokes got worse treatment at the church than even Sullivan, however. A cluster of Prieto’s New York buddies glared at him as he passed their rear pews after communion.
But no one in the church that day, not even Stokes, knew the full truth about Rafi. As it happened, Prieto had been lying about much more than one love affair.
Three weeks after his death, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general and the Secret Service launched a joint investigation to determine exactly what Prieto had been keeping from them. His secret life soon came spilling out from the pixelated data of ten different electronic devices. In addition to his Secret Service–issued laptop and BlackBerry, Prieto had access to two heavily encrypted personal BlackBerrys, three personal laptops, and three other data storage devices.
Investigators couldn’t break through the encryption on his personal phones. But using files synchronized between his phone and other devices, they eventually discovered he used them to privately communicate with various women, including several from foreign countries. He appeared to have a habit of visually documenting his love life. He’d kept racy photographs and videos of a number of women whom he appeared to have either dated or met for a brief fling.
Prieto had also been secretly taking personal trips out of the country without reporting them as required. He’d sworn to the Secret Service that he’d never left the States for a personal reason in the last seven years. He’d said his only foreign trips were for work with the president. But in that time, investigators found, he’d actually taken twenty foreign trips for unexplained personal reasons. And some of the women he was associating with on those trips gave the Secret Service enough pause that they sought the help of the CIA to check their backgrounds. One was from a former Communist Eastern Bloc country, which raised some eyebrows. Another woman’s background made investigators cringe: She was of Middle Eastern descent, from Iran, a repressive theocracy and an enemy of the United States. Investigators initially feared she or her family had ties to her country’s government, which the State Department ranks as one of the world’s leading sponsors of terrorism. But U.S. intelligence analysts looked into both women and could find no evidence that either one had ties to foreign intelligence services.
Prieto had been read into some, though not all, of the most sensitive top-secret programs that protected the White House and the president. He knew the hidden “safe places” where you were supposed to take the president in a time of emergency—and how to get in and out of them. He knew about a web of classified military and NSA tools that shielded the president when he traveled abroad.
And yet Prieto had also led a secret life in the highest-profile job a Secret Service agent could have. He had been able to do this under the noses of a team of trained observers.
By all accounts, Prieto was a gentle soul who deeply loved America. Though he’d used terrible judgment in his personal life, and exposed himself to blackmail, he’d adored his job. Investigators interviewed nineteen fellow agents, family members, and friends, and every last one said Rafi was a patriot who would never have turned traitor. But what if he’d casually shared presidential secrets with one of these women? The Secret Service couldn’t know for sure.
None of Prieto’s peers or supervisors had pressed him about the relationship with one foreign woman, so they didn’t learn about any others. “It’s horrifying,” one of the Secret Service’s former top officials said of the discovery of Prieto’s multiple foreign contacts. “And the special agent in charge of the president’s detail, Vic Erevia, is turning a blind eye to it.” Erevia had insisted he didn’t know the woman was Prieto’s girlfriend.
Stokes had been unfairly branded as the guy who outed Prieto, and he was devastated by the suicide and the accusations. He’d never mentioned Prieto’s name and had only pressed supervisors to face their hypocrisy: They tolerated and covered up all sorts of private misconduct and then the director took the agents publicly caught in misbehavior to the gallows as proof of his good stewardship. In reality, Prieto’s cover story had already begun to unravel. Several supervisors knew about the double life Prieto had been concealing from his wife and the Service for years. Prieto took his own life, his friends said, because his sense of self-worth was so tightly wound around his identity as a Secret Service agent.
Stokes was ultimately stripped of his Secret Service identity too. For spending one night with a prostitute in Cartagena, Stokes was told he would have to leave the Service. For many months Stokes fought and appealed the agency’s decision to take away his clearance, but eventually lost the legal battle. He was terminated as an agent just two years before he was eligible to retire and lost his right to a government pension.
CHAPTER 22
A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN
Rachel Weaver thought she smelled a cover-up. The determined staff director for Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on a Homeland Security subcommittee, had a voracious curiosity and a good bullshit detector. After most of Washington had moved on to the next hot topic, she resolved to find out what was really going on inside the Secret Service. She was after the truth, but her own and her boss’s politics added an incentive. They were Republicans questioning the Obama administration’s accountability.
That early fall of 2012, the coming presidential election vacuumed up much of Washington’s energy and dominated the news. Polls that month showed President Obama with a narrow lead against his Republican challenger Mitt Romney. The Secret Service’s hooker scandal in the spring had now fallen off the front pages and cable news roundups.
Behind closed doors, however, Secret Service headquarters was a boiling cauldron. Greg Stokes and others angry about the harsh punishment and double standard for the agents caught in Cartagena had been threatening to go to the press. Meanwhile, Director Sullivan and his top deputies were extremely anxious about a broad Department of Homeland Security investigation looking at Secret Service punishment decisions that threatened to unveil much of the Service’s past misconduct. The inspector general’s fifty-member team had gone further than the Service expected and pulled dozens of old internal investigations of agents and officers over alleged conduct and policy violations. Some of the files contained evidence that agents had engaged in disturbing and salacious behavior. They also included accusations of domestic abuse, statutory rape, viewing pornography at work, and sexually harassing subordinates. A lead investigator brought in from Miami, David Nieland, started to question the end results of these cases. Some personnel had received light punishment when investigators confirmed violations that should have been grounds for termination.
Director Sullivan was genuinely fearful about his own exposure. The investigation had taken a sideways detour into whistleblowers’ claims that the director had lied to Congress when he said they’d found no criminal or national security concerns about the prostitutes in Cartagena. Sullivan felt the allegations were baseless. Still, he had to hire a lawyer. Investigators planned to refer their findings to the Justice Department so they could determine whether to open a full-blown criminal probe.
Weaver didn’t know any of that, but she was about to uncover it. Back in May, when Congress was still grappling with the Cartagena scandal, Weaver had attended a closed-door briefing with Director Sullivan as he assured her boss, Republican senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and fellow lawmakers that serious steps were being taken to punish the culprits and make sure that sort of incident never happened again. Johnson was then the ranking member of a Homeland Security subcommittee closely following the Service’s handling of the Cartagena affair. Weaver remembered thinking that Sullivan and his deputies had given a lot of information in their briefings without saying much of anything. They provided a lot of numbers and exact times: the second car plane landed at this hour, there were this many agents in Colombia, this group of agents were interviewed on these dates. Though the briefings gave the impression of transparency, none of those minutiae really told the lawmakers what had happened.
Now, months later, Weaver was curious what the inspector general’s team had found. Did they think the Service leadership had tolerated sexual hijinks in the past? Had they learned anything new that Sullivan had not shared about Cartagena?
On the morning of September 25, the inspector general’s lead investigators came to the Hill at Weaver’s urging to brief the Homeland Security committee staff. Weaver had prepared a list of detailed questions. But the investigators working for Acting Inspector General Charles Edwards sheepishly explained that they lacked many of the answers. These investigators now had been on the case for five months but hadn’t been allowed to look at billing records for the Cartagena hotels, or to interview the hotel staff, the strip club owners, or the prostitutes whom the Secret Service agents brought to their rooms. The Justice Department had refused to green-light investigative work in a foreign country, saying they weren’t conducting a criminal probe.
Meanwhile, investigators working for Edwards heard that Secret Service supervisors had been discouraged from cooperating. About thirty-two agents, including ten senior headquarters officials, had refused to be interviewed. It sounded to Weaver as though the IG team had gotten played by being stiff-armed on records and interviews.
She was also a Republican suspicious of the political motivations of the Obama White House and certainly looking to catch them if they were covering up something. Was the incumbent administration trying to fend off any unflattering news during the final months of Obama’s reelection campaign, she wondered.
Weaver was a street fighter in stylish feminine clothing. At thirty-three years old, she was a tall, attractive, long-haired blonde who wore high heels and sported the retro cat’s-eye glasses of a person wanting to look both serious and fashionable. In the male-dominated bastion of Capitol Hill, lawmakers typically treated pretty young females as worker-bee eye candy. But Weaver wasn’t looking to endear herself to anyone. An evangelical Christian, she’d grown up the oldest of four in a modest, blue-collar home in Sacramento—the daughter of a pool contractor. She’d been the first person in her family to go to college. After graduating Sacramento State, she kept going, getting a master’s degree in security policy studies at George Washington University while also working on Capitol Hill as an intern for her hometown congressman. Her career hero was Condoleezza Rice.
Weaver had earned her way into this committee job and was focused on making the country more secure. She told Edwards’s lead supervisor on the investigation that she wanted to see his team’s draft report. The investigator checked into it and said Edwards would allow her and other key committee staff to review a confidential draft at their headquarters. They could not have a copy.
Weaver was the only staffer who took up the offer to come read the draft report. Her counterpart in the ranking Democrat’s office said he was busy with something else. The morning of October 2, Weaver went to the inspector general’s office, and Charles Edwards greeted her at the entrance. The round-faced man with a formal manner escorted her to a second-floor conference room with no windows. The draft report, thick as a metropolitan telephone book, was plunked down in the middle of a long table. He showed her a laptop on which she could review sensitive attachments and documents cited as supporting materials for the report. Edwards explained that she was not allowed to take any notes.
“I’m sorry. I must take notes,” Weaver replied politely. Edwards and Weaver stared at each other for a moment. “I have to brief my boss. I can’t remember all this,” she said, pointing to the thick stack of papers on the table. Edwards relented. He agreed that Weaver could take notes, and then excused himself.
In Weaver’s mind, Edwards was only letting her and other committee staff review the Cartagena report in the hope of creating warm relations with key lawmakers. He was angling for the permanent inspector general job. This strategy would end up backfiring spectacularly.
Weaver chose a chair, flipped open the first page of the draft report, and dug into her chore. She’d only reached the middle of page 2, and already she’d found something interesting.
“OIG received reports that USSS employees had engaged in similar misconduct on other occasions,” it read. But Director Sullivan had insisted to Congress that Cartagena was an aberrant, one-time incident. She kept reading. A few lines down, she saw “OIG confirmed incidents of prostitution solicitation during official visits in El Salvador and Panama.” Sullivan had told Congress that the Service sent teams to check into reports of agents hiring prostitutes in El Salvador and found they were false.
A couple of paragraphs farther on, she read the interview of an agent who’d worked advance in Cartagena. He said that on trips to Spanish-speaking countries, his fellow agents routinely used him to translate with prostitutes and negotiate fees for them because he was fluent in Spanish. He said he also returned to his hotel one night in a cab with a top-level boss, and that supervisor told the front desk he was expecting a female for the evening and to please send her up.
