Zero fail, p.42
Zero Fail, page 42
Zamora’s boss was Vic Erevia, who had been Obama’s longtime detail leader and was now assistant director over all protective operations. Just before Sullivan left as director, he’d promoted Erevia to this powerful eighth-floor job at the president’s urging. Obama told Sullivan he thought Erevia should be the director one day. Sullivan politely explained that he wasn’t ready for that yet. But Sullivan did recognize Erevia’s dedication by giving Erevia his first senior management role in headquarters, another rung closer to director.
When Pierson heard about Zamora’s alcohol-fueled escapade the morning after, she told Erevia she wanted Zamora transferred out of presidential protection that day. She wanted him to report to a headquarters administrative job, where he’d be on a shorter leash. “He needs to know he’s on a time-out,” she said. He had shown poor judgment off duty, and he needed to prove himself anew.
Erevia had gone easier on Zamora than Pierson was expecting, giving him a memorandum of counseling, which came with no discipline at all but created a record for future discipline if he crossed the line again. Erevia should already have been on alert about other possible trouble with Nacho. Agents on Obama’s protective detail had been alleging since 2011 that Zamora appeared to be having an affair with a female agent who reported to him. In March 2013, Erevia’s deputy Rob Buster had confronted Nacho about these rumors, which Zamora denied, and counseled him about the problematic perception that he was engaged in an illicit relationship with a subordinate.
A month after the Hay-Adams incident, in mid-July, Pierson received a new report of misconduct in an unexpected call from the assistant inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security. Carlton Mann had surely delivered unpleasant news before, but this felt more delicate. Mann told the Secret Service director that his office had turned up a problem after getting a hotline tip about George Luczko, her assistant director over internal affairs. Luczko was the most senior executive in charge of ferreting out misconduct in the Secret Service—and the same man that Mark Sullivan had promoted to assistant director after discovering he had sent sexually graphic content on work computers.
A tipster had told the inspector general’s office that Luczko was misusing his government car to meet and carry on romantic relationships with younger women from foreign countries. So they decided to have a surveillance team follow him. Twice they tailed him, and twice they found him using his Secret Service car for what appeared to be private dinners and meetings with foreign women. One of the women later told investigators she didn’t feel comfortable discussing whether her relationship with Luczko was intimate.
The Secret Service considered it an open-and-shut case of misconduct for agents to use their government car for personal business. Also, Luczko ran the department that had reminded agents repeatedly after Cartagena that they had to report such contact within seventy-two hours. Pierson brought Luczko into her office and told him about the inspector general’s tail and what they had learned. She told Luczko he needed to think hard about retiring with dignity. He resisted at first, complaining it wasn’t fair. Misusing his car probably warranted a thirty-day suspension, he said. She said no. “I’m not going to be able to leave you in your position,” she said. “If you appeal, it’s going to be ugly.”
Luczko relented. He agreed to retire at the end of August. Through a Secret Service spokesperson, Luczko denied ever having inappropriate relationships with any foreign nationals and said all his contact with foreign nationals was reported through the required channels.
That October, Director Pierson learned about more troubling claims involving Zamora and another top supervisor. The Washington Post contacted her press shop that month after learning about the Hay-Adams incident and also about allegations that Zamora and presidential detail supervisor Tim Barraclough had each been separately sending sexually suggestive texts to a female subordinate on the detail, Christine Farber. All three were married. Spurred by the questions, Pierson had her internal investigators pull all the electronic communications for the two supervisors and the agent, starting the next day. The emails and texts they reviewed over the next week suggested a tawdry situation. The conversations gave the impression they were carrying on workplace flings, or indulging in heavy flirtation, while using government equipment.
Farber called Zamora “sweetie” and “baby.” She also called him “my 6,” a reference to his number in the detail roster. In another set of texts Barraclough’s estranged wife told investigators she had documented, Farber called Barraclough “my doughnut” and he called Farber “babydoll.”
Zamora told Farber in an August 2012 email that she shouldn’t worry about another woman. “I’m sure [she] doesn’t feel the same way about me as you do, so no need to be jealous!” Farber replied: “Haha…Bby, imu!” A few days later, the two signed off for the night in intimate texts. “Gdnt bby,” Farber wrote Zamora. “Swt dreams sweet girl,” Zamora replied. “Love when you call me that,” Farber texted. The three agents exchanged unusually personal information. In March 2013, for example, Farber kept Zamora up to date on her menstrual cycle. “I need my 6 so bad today,” she wrote, using his nickname. “And my monthly visitor came early!”
A few days later, Farber and Barraclough exchanged a cozy chat about her decision not to shower. “Still on couch. I need to take a shower, but I don’t feel like it.”
“Mmmmmmm,” Barraclough replied.
“Bad tj,” she wrote back, using his nickname.
In August 2013, not long after the Hay-Adams incident, Farber texted Zamora: “OMG…sooooooooooo hny.”
All three insisted to investigators they were not having affairs with their co-workers. Farber acknowledged that some might interpret her conversations with her bosses as sexual if they didn’t know all the facts. She later told investigators she was just a “friendly, flirtatious” person because of her personality and Hispanic heritage. She admitted she kissed and hugged her male bosses, but it wasn’t sexual. She said that when she wrote “hny,” she meant “hungry.”
Farber told inspectors that she and Barraclough had become close in 2009 and they had worked together on Secretary Napolitano’s protective detail. But she said she felt guilty about some of their racy texts to each other back then, and they were less close now.
Their texts and emails in 2013 suggested otherwise.
“You still mean the world to me,” Barraclough wrote Farber in April 2013.
“Really! Promise?” she asked.
“Just like I promise you are soooo h*t!” Barraclough said.
Barraclough’s wife provided investigators with more reason to probe the Obama detail agents. She gave them her written description of the lovey-dovey-sounding texts she said she found between her husband and Farber from 2009. At the time, Mrs. Barraclough was pregnant with their fifth child.
In his wife’s recounting of those older texts, Farber had called Tim Barraclough “lover” and Tim Barraclough described to Farber how he dreamed of her and wished he could hold her.
Mrs. Barraclough told investigators she had confronted her husband and Farber in 2010 about these earlier messages dating back to 2009 when she discovered them on his cellphone. Mrs. Barraclough told investigators that her husband admitted the affair and begged her not to tell the Secret Service, warning that they could lose their jobs. Her husband promised her the affair was over, she said. But Agent Barraclough told investigators he had recently separated from his wife due to the turmoil in their marriage. He said some of the texts his wife mentioned sounded familiar; others seemed contrived. He would later dispute all of her claims.
The Secret Service had had its own warning signs. In March 2013, Rob Buster, the head of the president’s detail, had confronted Zamora about rumors circulating through the protective detail that he was having an affair with Farber. Some agents had seen them openly flirting and hugging, in the office and on trips. Farber and Zamora said they were demonstrative people, but simply close friends and their texts were entirely innocent.
Two years earlier, in 2011, Barraclough had been suspended for a few days for a sexting relationship with a female family friend. The Secret Service discovered the relationship when the woman sent pictures of herself to his work email. In some, she appeared to be masturbating on a bed. In others, she posed nude or in revealing lingerie.
Now Zamora and Barraclough were under scrutiny again, but under a new director who considered it her mission to root out misconduct. When investigators pressed Farber about agents’ complaints that she was having an affair with a supervisor, she said she feared this office gossip was the product of competitive agents seeking to hurt her career. The macho Secret Service wasn’t an easy place for women to advance. Farber would later contend that she employed her bantering style of communication in order to better fit in among her peers, employing it as a means of survival in a toxic work environment, and that her texts and answers to investigators reflected this need to survive. Some top supervisors doubted the agents’ denials of an affair, given the tone of their exchanges. But all the Service could definitively prove was that the supervisors had engaged in inappropriate behavior with a subordinate.
Director Pierson, however, decided to make sure they’d all be removed from the elite assignment of the president’s protective team. Zamora had already been reassigned to a lateral position at headquarters, the same rank but a step down from the elite protective division. He was later suspended for fourteen days. Barraclough lost a promotion his bosses had recommended him for, to run an Arizona field office. Farber, who happened to be several months pregnant, resisted being transferred to New York. She had earlier told investigators she wanted to be reconnected with her husband, who was based in New York, but now she said it was unfair. Pierson passed down word that she didn’t really have a choice. Farber went to New York.
Her removal pleased several of her male Type A peers on the detail. Like most agents, they closely watched the careers of their contemporaries—people who graduated from the academy in the same year. Detail members noticed Farber getting prestigious assignments in quick succession. Some agents groused when Zamora pushed to make Farber a lead-qualified agent on the detail, arguing she wasn’t ready for that role. Zamora insisted to investigators that he’d given Farber no special treatment.
* * *
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BY THE END of 2013, Pierson was growing concerned about why it was taking so long for the Service’s recruiting teams to hire job applicants. She wanted to start filling up academy classes so the new hires could begin working in a few months. But so far, they’d offered jobs to fewer than twenty people, mostly officers.
The logjam? A new hiring system that had never been tested before.
Since as far back as Kennedy’s era, the special agents in charge of field offices largely decided who made the cut to be a Secret Service agent. That led to hiring a lot of new recruits who closely resembled the bosses, and white males dominated those ranks. The system wasn’t objective, but it did have a huge plus. The seasoned supervisory agent often had a reliable nose for candidates who would wash out in the rigorous application process. Maybe the person expressed some mild reservation about the time commitment. Perhaps they had a college drug history they hoped to hide. The senior field bosses weeded out a lot of chaff and tossed their applications in the trash at that first meeting so the Service could focus on the most promising candidates.
But that changed in 2010, when the Service overhauled its hiring process. Former director Sullivan had agreed that, due to the racial discrimination case, the Service needed to create a fairer system that encouraged more diverse candidates. Sullivan agreed to toss out three hundred files of pending applicants who had all been painstakingly prescreened and were likely hires. The goal was to start with a clean slate. The new system they devised would allow people to apply on the federal government’s USJOBS website. And they would go through each step before they could be rejected.
Of course, no one had actually used the system. No sooner had the Human Resources Division crafted the plan than Sullivan had ordered a Service-wide hiring freeze in 2011.
But by January 2014, with the hiring freeze over, field office supervisors were griping that they were drowning, having to interview hundreds of online applicants in their area who couldn’t possibly pass muster as agents. They’d met with people who didn’t know what the Secret Service did. They met one four-hundred-pound man, another with a prosthetic arm. Applicants showed up in gym shorts. Some said they couldn’t agree to a required home interview because their roommates didn’t like having cops around. These interviews sucked up supervisors’ valuable time—with almost no results.
The Secret Service was tasked with screening thirty-five thousand applicants. It was able to look at only a fraction of these. Almost all they considered would wash out, unable to meet the basic fitness and security standards. The Service hired only eighteen from that group.
Meanwhile, agents on details and officers at the White House kept doing their jobs without a breather. Officers were working half their days off. Agents and officers had to give up regular in-service training. They simply didn’t have time for training on top of their normal shifts. The already low morale continued to sink. The exhaustion level in many jobs was dangerously high.
“We kept hearing ‘The cavalry is coming, the cavalry is almost here,’ ” said former agent Jonathan Wackrow. “Really? When will that be?”
* * *
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THE MORNING OF March 7, 2014, assistant director Vic Erevia called the director at home at about 7 a.m. to let her know about a car accident. Two counter-sniper officers had been in a minor crash in the Florida Keys the night before. They’d arrived a day early—Wednesday, March 6—to be in place to receive the president and his family when they were scheduled to arrive that Thursday for a long weekend vacation in sunny Islamorada. “The vehicle was totaled, but they’re okay and they’re going to stay and work the president’s visit,” Erevia explained.
Pierson asked a lot of questions. Was everybody physically okay? Have they been checked out at a hospital? No, they were fine, he said. Toward the end of the conversation, Pierson thought of one last thing. “Vic, what time was the accident?” she asked.
Erevia was quiet for a moment. “Um, it was about two o’clock in the morning, Director,” Erevia said finally.
“Vic, the president’s not in Islamorada yet. He gets there later today,” she said. “Is there a reason these officers were out at two o’clock in the morning?” He said he heard they were coming back late from dinner. But Pierson smelled a DUI six states away.
“Okay, I’ll tell you what, Vic,” she said. “Tell those two officers to stand down. They’re not working today.” She ordered an inspection team to go down and sort out what happened.
The true tale the investigators unspooled after interviewing two dozen people was a wild one. About ten officers serving on the counter-sniper and surveillance team had headed out for dinner the Wednesday night before the Obamas’ arrival. But around 9:30 p.m., they gathered at a rowdy sports bar. They spent the next few hours downing Coronas and shots of tequila and Fireball into the early hours of the morning.
Their team leader had been compiling rosters and time sheets in his hotel room at the tony beachfront Cheeca Lodge & Spa Resort and became concerned around 11:15 p.m. when none of his team had returned. All of them had to report for duty early the next morning. The officers were in danger of violating the ten-hour rule, which banned drinking within ten hours before reporting for duty. The team leader hopped into his rented Suburban, drove north a few miles on the beach highway to the sports bar, and tried to persuade the officers to call it a night. But the officers playfully refused to leave, and someone called out for more tequila shots. The team leader suggested a compromise. One more round of shots and then everybody would leave. They did their round, but as the team leader was sipping his soda and talking, he noticed that another set of filled shot glasses had appeared on the bar. To keep people from drinking, the team leader poured one shot into another glass and quickly handed another shot glass to a customer passing by. Still the drinking continued.
The team leader finally gave up at 12:45 a.m. Only one officer agreed to go back to the hotel with him. As they drove toward the hotel, though, the younger officer threw up his crabcake dinner and drinks all over the Suburban.
The team leader’s nightmare didn’t end there. Before he could get the vomit cleaned up, he got a call from Officer Mathew Reyes at about 1:25 a.m. Reyes said he had been in a car accident across the street from the Cheeca Lodge. He and a fellow officer had been getting sandwiches and Gatorade for the next day at a nearby grocery called the Trading Post. Reyes had pulled out of the store parking lot to cross the main island highway and immediately enter the hotel driveway across the road. But he forgot to turn on his headlights and didn’t check well for traffic. As soon as he pulled out, a Publix tractor-trailer traveling down the highway slammed into the left side of the van. The truck pushed the van several feet down the highway before they came to a stop. No one was injured, but the van midsection was crushed and it couldn’t be driven safely.
A Florida Highway Patrol trooper arrived at the scene about an hour later. The team leader, according to one officer, greeted the trooper and explained they were with the Secret Service. The trooper smelled a light odor of alcohol on Reyes’s breath but didn’t test his blood alcohol level. Instead, he asked the officer to follow with his eyes a pen he held in the air. The trooper concluded the Secret Service officer didn’t show signs of being impaired. He gave the visiting security officer a ticket for causing the accident. Reyes admitted to having drunk beer, two scotch and sodas, and some liquor shots—at most six drinks over the course of the evening. Nothing too excessive for several hours, he said. He said he was sober to drive.
