Zero fail, p.46
Zero Fail, page 46
“Funny thing was, that day, Director Pierson or someone in her office sent one of her agents to Atlanta to quietly investigate,” he said. “They wanted to make sure you and the public never heard about it.”
“Huh,” Chaffetz snorted.
Chaffetz thanked the official, and another agent on the line who had brought the official to Weaver, and said goodbye. Chaffetz stayed on a line with Weaver a few more minutes to strategize. As an Oversight Committee subcommittee chairman, he had an idea for how to test Pierson at the upcoming hearing.
“Now we’ll see,” he said. “Is she going to be truthful or is she going to lie?”
At the opening of Tuesday’s hearing, Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa began by recounting a series of scandals that had succeeded in tarnishing the Secret Service’s once impeccable record. “The fact is the system broke down on September 19, as it did when the Salahis crashed the state dinner in 2009, as it did when Oscar Hernandez successfully shot the White House on November 11, 2011, as it did in Cartagena when agents paid for prostitutes and compromised security, as it did in the Netherlands in 2014,” Issa said. “We cannot further allow this.”
Issa said he’d always trusted the Secret Service but now had doubts about the agency’s candor. He complained he had to learn from a Washington Post story that the Service’s claim of having arrested the jumper just inside the White House’s front door was false. Omar Gonzalez actually made it deep inside the White House, he said—“what is supposed to be the hardest target in the world.”
Elijah Cummings, a Maryland lawmaker and ranking Democrat on the committee, had been holding his breath since 2007, when Senator Barack Obama began running for president. He knew about the racist wackos who threatened to use Obama for target practice, and he had long feared for his safety. An armed man’s ability to burst into the First Family’s home shook Cummings anew. But stories in The Washington Post about the Service’s covering up details of the jumper and failing to investigate a 2011 shooting at the White House made him angry. With a preacher’s fiery admonition, he warned that the bungling of the 2011 shooting suggested a grave disease festering in the Service.
“Ladies and gentlemen, something is awfully wrong with that picture,” he said. “The Secret Service is supposed to be the most elite protection force in the world. Yet four days went by before they discovered the White House had been shot seven times.”
Over the course of the three-and-a-half-hour hearing, Pierson ended up being grilled on every security mistake and misstatement the Service had made in the last five years, most of them under the previous director. Some of her answers sounded bureaucratic and wooden. She was mindful of being a woman and not showing emotion. She kept her cool, but the result left members feeling chilly. One member accused her of showing no outrage about what had gone wrong or any commitment to fixing it. Another said he wished she cared as much about protecting the president as she did about protecting her own job.
Then came Chaffetz’s turn. He began by asking Pierson if every serious security breach triggers a review. Her answer was yes. Would the president be informed about each one?, Chaffetz asked.
“I would assume the president of the United States is informed,” she replied. “I don’t know.”
“What percentage of the time do you inform the president if his personal security is [sic] in any way, shape or form been breached?” Chaffetz asked.
“One hundred percent of the time we would advise the president,” she said.
“You would advise the president?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. She spoke reflexively for the agency. In fact, unless it was an extreme case, Pierson wouldn’t personally brief the president. In most security incidents, his detail agent briefed his deputy chief of staff. Chaffetz knew from his Deep Throat inside the agency that Pierson had never told the president or the White House about the unscreened elevator guard in Atlanta.
I have her now, Chaffetz thought.
* * *
—
AT AROUND 4:00 P.M., Pierson sat alone in her office, feeling pummeled and exhausted by nearly four hours of lawmakers’ accusations and questions. Then Ed Donovan, the agency’s chief spokesman, and his boss, Jane Murphy, the assistant director for government and public affairs, walked in hurriedly, looking exasperated as they stood in front of her desk.
Donovan said he was getting press questions about an incident roughly a week earlier in Atlanta. Reporters at the Washington Examiner and Washington Post wanted to know why the president had been on an elevator with an armed guard who hadn’t been screened.
Pierson said yes, it was true, and gave a quick summary of the advance agent’s failure to provide the names of people working at the event so they could be screened. “Why didn’t we know about it?” Murphy, upset, asked her boss. Pierson apologized, saying she had discussed it with Buster and Smith and launched a fact-finding investigation but had forgotten to mention it to them. Then Pierson’s desk phone rang. It was Christian Marrone. He was talking fast, pumped up on a mixture of adrenaline and irritation.
“Are you aware of an armed guard being on the elevator with the president in Atlanta?” he spat out quickly. “The CDC?”
Pierson took a breath.
“Yes,” she began. She was about to explain the investigation she had launched, but it was too late. Marrone had already hung up.
Marrone now had to call back his press office and also prepare the White House and Secretary Johnson. He was completely disgusted. He had championed Pierson, given her a Joe Paterno–style pep talk earlier that day, and defended her at many turns. Now he was on clean-up duty after being left in the dark. The Washington Examiner and the Post both published stories describing the failure to prescreen an armed person who had stood inches from the president. It was a terrible blunder in a kind of rote security protocol that Secret Service agents could do in their sleep.
Obama’s senior White House aides, Secretary Johnson, and Marrone had only begun to absorb the bruising hearing Pierson had endured. Now they had to quickly grapple with another horrible headline about the Secret Service. For all of them, the CDC story was the final straw. But there was an important puzzle piece everyone was missing.
Julie Pierson wasn’t looking for more bad press. But she hadn’t tried to hide this screw-up from the president.
* * *
—
IT WAS HARD to imagine the director’s brutal day getting even worse. But the CDC stories had done it. Pierson felt physically assaulted. The stories felt hyped and terribly unfair. First of all, she wasn’t trying to conceal anything. She had asked Rob Buster, Obama’s detail leader, to notify the White House about the problem with the guard that same day.
That night, she called Jeh Johnson, hoping to clear the matter up. The secretary was on a plane back to Washington from Ottawa and called her back when he deplaned around 8:30 p.m. Pierson told him the hearing had been “difficult”—an understatement—but she wanted to explain something the newspapers hadn’t said about the CDC incident. She told Johnson she had asked Buster to brief Obama on the elevator guard incident.
The secretary listened silently.
Pierson asked his opinion about who might be leaking these incidents to the Post. Johnson detested leaks. He had a strong hunch that a few senior deputies in headquarters who didn’t like Pierson were actively trying to torpedo the director. But in the end, who was leaking this stuff and who had failed to brief Obama about the elevator guard—none of it mattered. Pierson was genuinely devoted to the Service mission, Johnson could see, and she had a good business plan for the agency. But the tally of screw-ups continued to mount. The White House had been caught unaware of the CDC incident. The leaks and internal feuding were getting out of hand. Pierson’s inability to find her voice at the congressional hearing had weakened lawmakers’ and the administration’s already low confidence in the Service.
The difficult decision had already been made. The secretary had talked to Marrone at about 5:00 p.m. and they agreed Pierson had to go. The White House told Marrone they were already lining up a temporary replacement who could be named the next day. The president wanted his former detail leader, Joe Clancy.
On the phone that night, Johnson chose not to tell Pierson she was about to be forced out. She had just taken one of the most brutal thrashings Washington had seen in a long while.
“This is a problem, Julie. A real problem,” he said of the president’s being taken by surprise about the CDC guard. “We’re going to have to talk about it and I’ll get back to you.”
A day later, the White House announced that Pierson had resigned, something she was forced to do that morning, and that she would be replaced by Clancy. Many in the public rightly assumed she got canned for having one too many bad things happen on her watch, but wrongly assumed she’d tried to hide something from the president.
Johnson knew better. He knew that a series of Secret Service deputies had failed Pierson and that some had actively worked against her to leak bad news. On the day of her resignation, he told his staff to take him to Secret Service headquarters and order all the assistant directors to meet him in the main conference room, where he proceeded to give them a tongue-lashing.
“Today is rock bottom and every day after this we are going up,” Johnson said. “She took the fall for all of you. But you all bear the responsibility. You better get your asses in gear or you’re out. Now one of you, go ahead and leak this, since you leak everything else.”
They hung their heads and watched Johnson walk out.
CHAPTER 25
CLANCY’S TURN
Jeh Johnson had a job opening he believed only a four-star general could fill.
President Obama had accepted the resignation of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson amid a flurry of failures that singed the agency, and amid depressing but clear signs that her male peers were trying to torpedo her by leaking some of them. In November 2014, the secretary of homeland security wanted a demanding leader who could exert some control over the Secret Service and stop it from plunging the Obama administration into embarrassing headlines. From his old job as counsel in the Defense Department, Johnson had come to value the leadership presence that generals exuded. Not only were they able to command action from their subordinates, the best ones were able to build an esprit de corps that made soldiers race to follow them into battle and seek to prove their worth. He had watched with disappointment as Pierson had struggled to steer the agency through the shoals amid a secret mutiny against her.
But nobody in the military’s top brass was biting at this job announcement. The agency’s $2 billion budget looked puny compared to even modest Pentagon programs. On top of that, the Service was facing a well-documented string of misconduct and mismanagement problems and could expect continuing aggressive oversight from a congressional committee whose members had elevated their public profiles by calling out the agency’s failures.
When the new year opened in January 2015, Johnson was trying to size up his prospective candidates for the director’s job. He had been privately conferring with Larry Cockell, a standout manager in the Clinton era and a previous candidate for director, urging him to consider returning for the top job. Cockell, then earning a handsome salary as a security executive for Time Warner, was well known for both buttoned-down leadership and strategic planning. But he quickly backed out of the running when he heard from the Service rumor mill that Joseph Clancy, appointed initially as a temporary placeholder, was interested in applying for the permanent job. Johnson didn’t think Clancy was the best choice, given the agency’s need for fresh eyes, but Cockell knew that the importance of a president’s comfort with his director would trump all.
Johnson, who didn’t have two decades watching the relationship between presidents and their agents, ultimately believed he had found an ideal candidate to recommend. Sean Joyce had recently left his post as deputy director of the FBI. He had the law enforcement chops, and he specialized in “back-of-the-house” operations where the Service sorely needed help.
But after Clancy quietly told President Obama one day when they were alone that he was interested in staying on, the decision was all but made. Having his first detail leader back in charge sounded great to the president—and to Michelle Obama. Cockell’s instincts had been right.
In the first week of February, Johnson’s deputy called a former police chief under consideration to tell him he need not come to Washington for a previously discussed interview. The president had already chosen someone.
It was Clancy. But to get the White House’s full blessing, Clancy had to do something he wasn’t eager to do. As an acting director, he had chosen for his deputy Alvin “A.T.” Smith, an agent he had worked alongside for years but who was a divisive figure in the Service. Clancy’s support of Smith had infuriated the portion of the Service that loathed Smith. More important, it had rankled Republican representative Jason Chaffetz, who was investigating Smith’s role in several embarrassing security lapses. Keeping Smith as his top lieutenant would guarantee the Service, and the Obama administration, a continued unflattering glare from Chaffetz’s Oversight Committee.
On February 9, Clancy announced that he was removing Smith from his job as deputy director. In mid-February, President Obama announced Clancy as his permanent new director, rejecting the recommendation of the expert panel he had personally appointed to suggest reforms to fix the Service. The panel, including two lawyers who had worked for Obama, urged the president to choose an outsider as the next leader, saying it was the only way to get the Service to ditch its old, insular ways. “Only a director from outside the Secret Service, removed from organizational traditions and personal relationships, will be able to do the honest top-to-bottom reassessment this will require,” the report found.
But Clancy’s connection to Obama and his reputation as Mr. Clean helped his candidacy. From 2009 to his retirement in 2011, he had served as the head of Obama’s detail and was thus often the first face Obama saw when his workday began. There was no chance in hell of any ethical skeletons in his closet. Clancy had been faithfully married to the same woman for thirty-one years. While rumors of affairs and womanizing swirled around some senior male supervisors, Clancy was a Boy Scout who routinely turned down the after-work drink with the boys.
Even Clancy’s fans worried about his ability to right the ship, however. At sixty-one, he had never worked in headquarters, so he lacked experience in back-of-the-house operations. He avoided confrontation, and throughout his career had warned subordinates not to try to improve on the old, proven ways. He had long-standing bonds with the leadership group that had brought the agency to this worrisome precipice. His Service nickname was Father Joe, a nod to his interest in the priesthood as a young man but also to his gentle mentoring. Yet the very qualities that made Clancy so respected and well liked also made him a less than ideal choice to reform an agency characterized by arrogant defiance.
“You can’t find a better person with more integrity,” said his former Philadelphia colleague. “You can’t. But he’s not that pit bull.” And at this juncture in the Service’s gradual slide, the Service needed an attack dog.
The twenty-fourth director of the Secret Service had had only two weeks to bask in his big promotion before a brand-new pile of misconduct and embarrassment hit the fan. A disturbing breach of ethics and security—involving one of his friends and highest-ranked supervisors—would have Clancy and the Service playing red-faced defense once again.
* * *
—
THE MARCH 4 party to celebrate Ed Donovan’s retirement started at five-thirty at the dark Irish bar in Chinatown called Fado. It seemed fitting. Donovan and most of his crew, as well as so many Secret Service agents before them, were Irish. The bar’s Gaelic name, loosely translated, meant “once upon a time” and was used to start most old Irish stories. The thirty to forty guests had come for their friend, but they were also raising toasts to the victory of the Secret Service of old. Pierson, the agency’s experiment with its first female director, was gone. Obama had elevated “Father Joe” Clancy, an insider they knew well who was the very definition of old guard, rather than choosing an outsider.
Donovan and his wife had arranged a buffet of pub food as well as an open bar of wine and beer. Agents, along with a few civilian staffers, greeted Donovan inside, cracking jokes and razzing the beefy former New York agent for his luck in rising through more than two decades on the job, especially defending the agency’s reputation in the press shop the last several years during Cartagena, the White House shooting, and the jumper. Donovan had a great big loud bark but was also generally respected by reporters. Donovan had badly wanted to move out of the press office, but he was so good at dealing with the press and navigating rough waters that then director Sullivan didn’t want to let him leave his post. When Donovan’s wife shut down the open bar two hours later, at 7:30 p.m., she paid the $729 tab for the buffet, along with a bill for fifty-three beers, seven glasses of wine, and three sodas.
Two of Donovan’s close friends who had worked in the press office lingered far later at the bar. George Ogilvie, a GS-14 supervisor who then oversaw the protection squad in the Washington field office, opened a tab on his credit card at 7:44 p.m., following the tradition that the junior man pays for the drinks. He had nearly twenty years on the job. His drinking partner was the older and presumably wiser Marc Connolly. Connolly, an agent for twenty-seven years, was a senior executive who had been promoted to become the number two in charge of the Obamas’ detail in 2012. Two civilian press office staffers joined Ogilvie and Connolly at the bar for a time, then left.
For the next three hours, the two men sat and drank at Fado and told stories of the good old days at the Secret Service. By 10:45 p.m., they agreed it was time to call it a night. In addition to the three drinks he’d bought for the two staffers, Ogilvie’s bar bill listed eight scotches, three beers, two vodka drinks, and a glass of wine; he later said he had three of those drinks. Ogilvie offered to drive Connolly, who had drunk more than he had, in his government-issued car back to the White House, where Connolly had parked his government-issued car.
“Huh,” Chaffetz snorted.
Chaffetz thanked the official, and another agent on the line who had brought the official to Weaver, and said goodbye. Chaffetz stayed on a line with Weaver a few more minutes to strategize. As an Oversight Committee subcommittee chairman, he had an idea for how to test Pierson at the upcoming hearing.
“Now we’ll see,” he said. “Is she going to be truthful or is she going to lie?”
At the opening of Tuesday’s hearing, Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa began by recounting a series of scandals that had succeeded in tarnishing the Secret Service’s once impeccable record. “The fact is the system broke down on September 19, as it did when the Salahis crashed the state dinner in 2009, as it did when Oscar Hernandez successfully shot the White House on November 11, 2011, as it did in Cartagena when agents paid for prostitutes and compromised security, as it did in the Netherlands in 2014,” Issa said. “We cannot further allow this.”
Issa said he’d always trusted the Secret Service but now had doubts about the agency’s candor. He complained he had to learn from a Washington Post story that the Service’s claim of having arrested the jumper just inside the White House’s front door was false. Omar Gonzalez actually made it deep inside the White House, he said—“what is supposed to be the hardest target in the world.”
Elijah Cummings, a Maryland lawmaker and ranking Democrat on the committee, had been holding his breath since 2007, when Senator Barack Obama began running for president. He knew about the racist wackos who threatened to use Obama for target practice, and he had long feared for his safety. An armed man’s ability to burst into the First Family’s home shook Cummings anew. But stories in The Washington Post about the Service’s covering up details of the jumper and failing to investigate a 2011 shooting at the White House made him angry. With a preacher’s fiery admonition, he warned that the bungling of the 2011 shooting suggested a grave disease festering in the Service.
“Ladies and gentlemen, something is awfully wrong with that picture,” he said. “The Secret Service is supposed to be the most elite protection force in the world. Yet four days went by before they discovered the White House had been shot seven times.”
Over the course of the three-and-a-half-hour hearing, Pierson ended up being grilled on every security mistake and misstatement the Service had made in the last five years, most of them under the previous director. Some of her answers sounded bureaucratic and wooden. She was mindful of being a woman and not showing emotion. She kept her cool, but the result left members feeling chilly. One member accused her of showing no outrage about what had gone wrong or any commitment to fixing it. Another said he wished she cared as much about protecting the president as she did about protecting her own job.
Then came Chaffetz’s turn. He began by asking Pierson if every serious security breach triggers a review. Her answer was yes. Would the president be informed about each one?, Chaffetz asked.
“I would assume the president of the United States is informed,” she replied. “I don’t know.”
“What percentage of the time do you inform the president if his personal security is [sic] in any way, shape or form been breached?” Chaffetz asked.
“One hundred percent of the time we would advise the president,” she said.
“You would advise the president?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. She spoke reflexively for the agency. In fact, unless it was an extreme case, Pierson wouldn’t personally brief the president. In most security incidents, his detail agent briefed his deputy chief of staff. Chaffetz knew from his Deep Throat inside the agency that Pierson had never told the president or the White House about the unscreened elevator guard in Atlanta.
I have her now, Chaffetz thought.
* * *
—
AT AROUND 4:00 P.M., Pierson sat alone in her office, feeling pummeled and exhausted by nearly four hours of lawmakers’ accusations and questions. Then Ed Donovan, the agency’s chief spokesman, and his boss, Jane Murphy, the assistant director for government and public affairs, walked in hurriedly, looking exasperated as they stood in front of her desk.
Donovan said he was getting press questions about an incident roughly a week earlier in Atlanta. Reporters at the Washington Examiner and Washington Post wanted to know why the president had been on an elevator with an armed guard who hadn’t been screened.
Pierson said yes, it was true, and gave a quick summary of the advance agent’s failure to provide the names of people working at the event so they could be screened. “Why didn’t we know about it?” Murphy, upset, asked her boss. Pierson apologized, saying she had discussed it with Buster and Smith and launched a fact-finding investigation but had forgotten to mention it to them. Then Pierson’s desk phone rang. It was Christian Marrone. He was talking fast, pumped up on a mixture of adrenaline and irritation.
“Are you aware of an armed guard being on the elevator with the president in Atlanta?” he spat out quickly. “The CDC?”
Pierson took a breath.
“Yes,” she began. She was about to explain the investigation she had launched, but it was too late. Marrone had already hung up.
Marrone now had to call back his press office and also prepare the White House and Secretary Johnson. He was completely disgusted. He had championed Pierson, given her a Joe Paterno–style pep talk earlier that day, and defended her at many turns. Now he was on clean-up duty after being left in the dark. The Washington Examiner and the Post both published stories describing the failure to prescreen an armed person who had stood inches from the president. It was a terrible blunder in a kind of rote security protocol that Secret Service agents could do in their sleep.
Obama’s senior White House aides, Secretary Johnson, and Marrone had only begun to absorb the bruising hearing Pierson had endured. Now they had to quickly grapple with another horrible headline about the Secret Service. For all of them, the CDC story was the final straw. But there was an important puzzle piece everyone was missing.
Julie Pierson wasn’t looking for more bad press. But she hadn’t tried to hide this screw-up from the president.
* * *
—
IT WAS HARD to imagine the director’s brutal day getting even worse. But the CDC stories had done it. Pierson felt physically assaulted. The stories felt hyped and terribly unfair. First of all, she wasn’t trying to conceal anything. She had asked Rob Buster, Obama’s detail leader, to notify the White House about the problem with the guard that same day.
That night, she called Jeh Johnson, hoping to clear the matter up. The secretary was on a plane back to Washington from Ottawa and called her back when he deplaned around 8:30 p.m. Pierson told him the hearing had been “difficult”—an understatement—but she wanted to explain something the newspapers hadn’t said about the CDC incident. She told Johnson she had asked Buster to brief Obama on the elevator guard incident.
The secretary listened silently.
Pierson asked his opinion about who might be leaking these incidents to the Post. Johnson detested leaks. He had a strong hunch that a few senior deputies in headquarters who didn’t like Pierson were actively trying to torpedo the director. But in the end, who was leaking this stuff and who had failed to brief Obama about the elevator guard—none of it mattered. Pierson was genuinely devoted to the Service mission, Johnson could see, and she had a good business plan for the agency. But the tally of screw-ups continued to mount. The White House had been caught unaware of the CDC incident. The leaks and internal feuding were getting out of hand. Pierson’s inability to find her voice at the congressional hearing had weakened lawmakers’ and the administration’s already low confidence in the Service.
The difficult decision had already been made. The secretary had talked to Marrone at about 5:00 p.m. and they agreed Pierson had to go. The White House told Marrone they were already lining up a temporary replacement who could be named the next day. The president wanted his former detail leader, Joe Clancy.
On the phone that night, Johnson chose not to tell Pierson she was about to be forced out. She had just taken one of the most brutal thrashings Washington had seen in a long while.
“This is a problem, Julie. A real problem,” he said of the president’s being taken by surprise about the CDC guard. “We’re going to have to talk about it and I’ll get back to you.”
A day later, the White House announced that Pierson had resigned, something she was forced to do that morning, and that she would be replaced by Clancy. Many in the public rightly assumed she got canned for having one too many bad things happen on her watch, but wrongly assumed she’d tried to hide something from the president.
Johnson knew better. He knew that a series of Secret Service deputies had failed Pierson and that some had actively worked against her to leak bad news. On the day of her resignation, he told his staff to take him to Secret Service headquarters and order all the assistant directors to meet him in the main conference room, where he proceeded to give them a tongue-lashing.
“Today is rock bottom and every day after this we are going up,” Johnson said. “She took the fall for all of you. But you all bear the responsibility. You better get your asses in gear or you’re out. Now one of you, go ahead and leak this, since you leak everything else.”
They hung their heads and watched Johnson walk out.
CHAPTER 25
CLANCY’S TURN
Jeh Johnson had a job opening he believed only a four-star general could fill.
President Obama had accepted the resignation of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson amid a flurry of failures that singed the agency, and amid depressing but clear signs that her male peers were trying to torpedo her by leaking some of them. In November 2014, the secretary of homeland security wanted a demanding leader who could exert some control over the Secret Service and stop it from plunging the Obama administration into embarrassing headlines. From his old job as counsel in the Defense Department, Johnson had come to value the leadership presence that generals exuded. Not only were they able to command action from their subordinates, the best ones were able to build an esprit de corps that made soldiers race to follow them into battle and seek to prove their worth. He had watched with disappointment as Pierson had struggled to steer the agency through the shoals amid a secret mutiny against her.
But nobody in the military’s top brass was biting at this job announcement. The agency’s $2 billion budget looked puny compared to even modest Pentagon programs. On top of that, the Service was facing a well-documented string of misconduct and mismanagement problems and could expect continuing aggressive oversight from a congressional committee whose members had elevated their public profiles by calling out the agency’s failures.
When the new year opened in January 2015, Johnson was trying to size up his prospective candidates for the director’s job. He had been privately conferring with Larry Cockell, a standout manager in the Clinton era and a previous candidate for director, urging him to consider returning for the top job. Cockell, then earning a handsome salary as a security executive for Time Warner, was well known for both buttoned-down leadership and strategic planning. But he quickly backed out of the running when he heard from the Service rumor mill that Joseph Clancy, appointed initially as a temporary placeholder, was interested in applying for the permanent job. Johnson didn’t think Clancy was the best choice, given the agency’s need for fresh eyes, but Cockell knew that the importance of a president’s comfort with his director would trump all.
Johnson, who didn’t have two decades watching the relationship between presidents and their agents, ultimately believed he had found an ideal candidate to recommend. Sean Joyce had recently left his post as deputy director of the FBI. He had the law enforcement chops, and he specialized in “back-of-the-house” operations where the Service sorely needed help.
But after Clancy quietly told President Obama one day when they were alone that he was interested in staying on, the decision was all but made. Having his first detail leader back in charge sounded great to the president—and to Michelle Obama. Cockell’s instincts had been right.
In the first week of February, Johnson’s deputy called a former police chief under consideration to tell him he need not come to Washington for a previously discussed interview. The president had already chosen someone.
It was Clancy. But to get the White House’s full blessing, Clancy had to do something he wasn’t eager to do. As an acting director, he had chosen for his deputy Alvin “A.T.” Smith, an agent he had worked alongside for years but who was a divisive figure in the Service. Clancy’s support of Smith had infuriated the portion of the Service that loathed Smith. More important, it had rankled Republican representative Jason Chaffetz, who was investigating Smith’s role in several embarrassing security lapses. Keeping Smith as his top lieutenant would guarantee the Service, and the Obama administration, a continued unflattering glare from Chaffetz’s Oversight Committee.
On February 9, Clancy announced that he was removing Smith from his job as deputy director. In mid-February, President Obama announced Clancy as his permanent new director, rejecting the recommendation of the expert panel he had personally appointed to suggest reforms to fix the Service. The panel, including two lawyers who had worked for Obama, urged the president to choose an outsider as the next leader, saying it was the only way to get the Service to ditch its old, insular ways. “Only a director from outside the Secret Service, removed from organizational traditions and personal relationships, will be able to do the honest top-to-bottom reassessment this will require,” the report found.
But Clancy’s connection to Obama and his reputation as Mr. Clean helped his candidacy. From 2009 to his retirement in 2011, he had served as the head of Obama’s detail and was thus often the first face Obama saw when his workday began. There was no chance in hell of any ethical skeletons in his closet. Clancy had been faithfully married to the same woman for thirty-one years. While rumors of affairs and womanizing swirled around some senior male supervisors, Clancy was a Boy Scout who routinely turned down the after-work drink with the boys.
Even Clancy’s fans worried about his ability to right the ship, however. At sixty-one, he had never worked in headquarters, so he lacked experience in back-of-the-house operations. He avoided confrontation, and throughout his career had warned subordinates not to try to improve on the old, proven ways. He had long-standing bonds with the leadership group that had brought the agency to this worrisome precipice. His Service nickname was Father Joe, a nod to his interest in the priesthood as a young man but also to his gentle mentoring. Yet the very qualities that made Clancy so respected and well liked also made him a less than ideal choice to reform an agency characterized by arrogant defiance.
“You can’t find a better person with more integrity,” said his former Philadelphia colleague. “You can’t. But he’s not that pit bull.” And at this juncture in the Service’s gradual slide, the Service needed an attack dog.
The twenty-fourth director of the Secret Service had had only two weeks to bask in his big promotion before a brand-new pile of misconduct and embarrassment hit the fan. A disturbing breach of ethics and security—involving one of his friends and highest-ranked supervisors—would have Clancy and the Service playing red-faced defense once again.
* * *
—
THE MARCH 4 party to celebrate Ed Donovan’s retirement started at five-thirty at the dark Irish bar in Chinatown called Fado. It seemed fitting. Donovan and most of his crew, as well as so many Secret Service agents before them, were Irish. The bar’s Gaelic name, loosely translated, meant “once upon a time” and was used to start most old Irish stories. The thirty to forty guests had come for their friend, but they were also raising toasts to the victory of the Secret Service of old. Pierson, the agency’s experiment with its first female director, was gone. Obama had elevated “Father Joe” Clancy, an insider they knew well who was the very definition of old guard, rather than choosing an outsider.
Donovan and his wife had arranged a buffet of pub food as well as an open bar of wine and beer. Agents, along with a few civilian staffers, greeted Donovan inside, cracking jokes and razzing the beefy former New York agent for his luck in rising through more than two decades on the job, especially defending the agency’s reputation in the press shop the last several years during Cartagena, the White House shooting, and the jumper. Donovan had a great big loud bark but was also generally respected by reporters. Donovan had badly wanted to move out of the press office, but he was so good at dealing with the press and navigating rough waters that then director Sullivan didn’t want to let him leave his post. When Donovan’s wife shut down the open bar two hours later, at 7:30 p.m., she paid the $729 tab for the buffet, along with a bill for fifty-three beers, seven glasses of wine, and three sodas.
Two of Donovan’s close friends who had worked in the press office lingered far later at the bar. George Ogilvie, a GS-14 supervisor who then oversaw the protection squad in the Washington field office, opened a tab on his credit card at 7:44 p.m., following the tradition that the junior man pays for the drinks. He had nearly twenty years on the job. His drinking partner was the older and presumably wiser Marc Connolly. Connolly, an agent for twenty-seven years, was a senior executive who had been promoted to become the number two in charge of the Obamas’ detail in 2012. Two civilian press office staffers joined Ogilvie and Connolly at the bar for a time, then left.
For the next three hours, the two men sat and drank at Fado and told stories of the good old days at the Secret Service. By 10:45 p.m., they agreed it was time to call it a night. In addition to the three drinks he’d bought for the two staffers, Ogilvie’s bar bill listed eight scotches, three beers, two vodka drinks, and a glass of wine; he later said he had three of those drinks. Ogilvie offered to drive Connolly, who had drunk more than he had, in his government-issued car back to the White House, where Connolly had parked his government-issued car.
