Zero fail, p.52
Zero Fail, page 52
So into this challenging moment walked Alles, a director Trump never wanted in the first place. Many members of the senior leadership and protective detail agents resented him as well, because he wasn’t “one of them.” Alles was the first Secret Service director in at least a hundred years who had not come up through the ranks, a break in tradition that old-timers had ferociously resisted.
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AS ALLES WAS getting acquainted with his job, the president kept traveling to his properties. As temperatures turned balmy in the nation’s capital in late April and May, Trump simply changed his migration pattern. White House advisers braced themselves when they saw sunny forecasts for the upcoming weekend in the Washington area. It usually meant they’d have to generate “mini cabinet meetings” or set up work calls that weekend for the president to field at Trump’s National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, so the president could golf without looking as if his only goal was eighteen holes. As summer arrived and Mar-a-Lago closed for the season, Trump headed north—to his five-hundred-acre golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Trump had avoided paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in New Jersey property taxes by growing hay and raising goats on a corner of the property, claiming a farmland exemption, but federal taxpayers would soon be paying millions to create a security bubble around the president at his private club that aides soon dubbed Camp David North.
The real Camp David, the historic mountainside compound in the Maryland foothills near Frederick, would have been a more economical choice—and one a century of presidents had made in seeking an escape from the pressures of the White House. Camp David was a forty-minute helicopter ride away, as well as being a naval base permanently protected by Marines and other Navy units, thus eliminating the need for most of the Secret Service officers and agents to fly in to stand guard as a human barrier around the property. But Trump, who had opted for marble bathrooms and gold leaf adorning his own homes, found the woodsy retreat in the Catoctin Mountains boring.
“Camp David is very rustic, it’s nice, you’d like it,” Trump said with a smidge of sarcasm, talking to a European journalist just before taking office. “You know how long you’d like it? For about thirty minutes.”
The summer was also the season for Congress to start hammering out the final federal budget for the upcoming fiscal year. In a June hearing before the House Appropriations Committee, Alles hemmed and hawed when asked if he could really make do with the eight-tenths of one percent increase the president had proposed for the Secret Service annual budget—an increase of $18 million, less than what it cost to protect Trump Tower for one year. He eventually acknowledged he would prefer another $200 to $300 million so he could hire necessary staff and make critical investments in training and technology. Under questioning, Alles agreed it was “important” for the Service to build a mock-up White House at its training facility so protective teams could properly run drills for shielding the executive mansion from attack. Experts had deemed the multi-million-dollar training tool an urgent priority for the Service in the wake of the 2014 fence jumper failure, but the president had eliminated that allocation. Trump’s budget request would give the Service the smallest increase of all agencies in the Department of Homeland Security; Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be boosted 29 percent and Customs and Border Protection by 9 percent. In the hearing, frustrated Democrats pointed out to Alles all the ways the president was shortchanging his agents and their zero-fail mission at a time when the Service was still in recovery, facing a new degree of burnout from Trump duty, and still losing employees faster than it could hire them. The session got messy when Democrats on House Appropriations asked Alles to justify $26 million to protect a tower where the president didn’t live, and which his wife would soon depart.
“I know that we have a responsibility to Trump Tower, to protect Trump Tower when the president is there,” said Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, a New Jersey Democrat. “Now we have an additional and different responsibility here, I think, because the First Lady stays there and uses that as her primary residence. I believe that that is somewhat unprecedented to have the First Lady live someplace other than her husband.”
“The Trump Tower has been designated as one of his residences,” Alles replied, then added, “It is not unusual, I would say, and you would, we would understand this as parents, they wanted their son to finish the school year in New York, and the plan is to move down this summer, and that will alleviate some of the pressure up there in that area.”
“Okay. Let me stop you,” Watson Coleman said, sensing some potential good news. “So you won’t be providing this twenty-four-hour security three hundred sixty-five days a year at the Trump Tower? You will only be providing it when the family, the president’s family, are there?” she asked.
Alles paused, realizing he was about to disappoint.
“We will still, because the sons will be there,” he said. “We will still be providing security.”
The expensive security and road blockades had to continue, because the tower was the president’s official residence. That Trump’s sons worked there just added extra justification. The fact that the president would visit Trump Tower only three times in his first year in office didn’t matter. Under the law, the Service had to maintain a constant security presence, and they weren’t going to do a halfway job. Taxpayers suffered, but there was one winner from the Service’s dutiful compliance with the law: the president’s company. The Trump organization collected $6.3 million—roughly one-fourth of the $26 million the Secret Service spent securing the tower—as payment for rent and utilities for the space the government needed to secure the tower.
By August, just four months into the job, Alles realized he had to go to Congress to plead for more financial help. He needed lawmakers to remove the caps they had placed on the total salary and overtime he could pay agents in a year. Agents were running full throttle to cover the president’s trips to his Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, and Sterling, Virginia, properties as well as providing details for eighteen Trump family members. That required dashing to Dubai, Uruguay, Saudi Arabia, and Aspen with the president’s grown children as they played and promoted the Trump organization. Alles didn’t have the money to pay more than a thousand agents all the overtime they were owed. He began meeting with members of Congress to explain his dilemma, and his staff arranged an interview with a USA Today reporter to better spread the word of Alles’s valiant fight for his team.
Alles told the reporter that protective agents’ and officers’ duties had dramatically expanded in the Trump presidency—what he called “the new reality.” He said if the director was going to run his people this hard, he needed to pay them for work he was asking them to do and expected to keep asking them to do. He sought Congress’s permission to increase what he could pay his people—by $27,000 each—at least through the duration of Trump’s time in office. “We have them working all night long; we’re sending them on the road all of the time,” he said. “Normally, we are not this tapped out.”
The president seethed when he saw a printout of USA Today’s August 21 online story featuring Alles’s interview, with the headline Secret Service is Going Broke Protecting Trump. Trump saw his Secret Service director essentially blaming him for his protection team’s empty coffers. “This is fucking terrible,” Trump bellowed to an aide. “What the hell is he doing?”
Kelly, who had recently become Trump’s chief of staff, quickly passed along word to Alles: Trump was pissed. Kelly backed Alles’s goal, as he himself had been floored when he heard from his detail agents that they still hadn’t been paid for work done during the campaign and inauguration. Alles had been trying to boost morale, to show the troops he was fighting for them. But Kelly felt the interview was a poor choice and was disappointed that his friend had accidentally created a public relations problem for the president. Now Alles’s press aides scurried to issue a new statement on his behalf, amending and correcting his remarks to make the overtime problem appear like a modest and chronic “issue.” “This issue is not one that can be attributed to the current administration’s protection requirements but, rather, has been an ongoing issue for nearly a decade due to an overall increase in operational tempo,” Alles said in the updated statement.
In truth, the financial problem could be attributed directly to the current administration, and more specifically to a president who made decisions without any concern for cost or consequences. In his eight months as president, Donald Trump had forced the Secret Service to shepherd him on trips to his resorts for golf trips on twenty-six out of thirty weekends. His family members had made roughly 650 out-of-town trips. The Service was working twelve times as many such trips with Trump and his family as they had with Obama and his.
As was his habit, President Trump didn’t examine his own actions. He remained peeved at Alles despite the director’s efforts to walk back his remarks. Trump privately groused about Alles’s loyalty and experience, seeking to turn the tables. He suggested perhaps the Secret Service wasn’t being managed very well if it was running out of money. He complained to his advisers that Alles didn’t seem smart. In what had become his habitual way of showing displeasure, the president began to make fun of Alles’s looks. Anyone who wasn’t ready to duke it out for Trump and present well on camera earned a subpar rating from the president. “Have you seen his big ears?” Trump asked a cluster of senior advisers gathered around the Resolute Desk with him one day. “He looks like Dumbo the Elephant.”
That August, Tex Alles had his hands full trying to hire new staff and pay the ones he had without further antagonizing the president. The deputies he had inherited, most of them former protective detail agents, considered him an outsider and often withheld information from him, for fear he might make changes they didn’t like. Alles tried to prove his commitment to the front line, doing things staff hadn’t seen a director do before. “He showed up at the White House and did a night shift with the officers. He’d show up at five a.m. and walk the grounds with them,” said one administration official. But the protection agents, the people on Trump’s detail, and those who had risen to senior jobs at headquarters didn’t embrace him: “They still felt he wasn’t one of them because he hadn’t served watch.”
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THAT SAME MONTH, a new crisis arose. The State Department’s regional security officer alerted the director by classified cable to some worrisome news: A woman who had been working as an investigator for the Secret Service in the U.S. embassy in Moscow for more than a decade—and who was frequently left alone in the agency’s office—was almost certainly working as a Russian spy. In a routine five-year security check conducted on all foreign nationals working at the embassy, State Department investigators discovered that the soft-spoken woman had been meeting clandestinely, and frequently, with members of Russia’s primary intelligence agency.
Alles’s senior deputies assured him that this foreign national employee would never have had access to anything sensitive or classified and couldn’t have done any damage to national security. Alles agreed that the State Department should fire her. Normally the Service would launch a thorough “Mission Assurance” investigation in the wake of any security breach, to determine the extent of the damage and what factors had allowed the breach in the first place. But that’s not what they did in this case. The embassy’s regional security officer simply accepted the Service’s decision, and days later pulled her clearance and terminated her. The Secret Service closed its Moscow office soon after, as Vladimir Putin ordered that America reduce its presence in Russia and send home more than seven hundred U.S. embassy workers by September.
But the story behind this suspected Russian spy was more complicated. Embassy officials had first flagged a concern about her contacts with intel operatives six months earlier, and Secret Service supervisors had done nothing about it. The Secret Service’s lead agent in Moscow had received the State Department’s warning—clues that indicated she was in contact with the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. That Moscow agent alerted his boss, who supervised Russia and numerous offices in Europe, Chris Henderson, the special agent in charge of Paris. The Moscow agent complained that Henderson never responded. Henderson said he kept leadership apprised of important developments in the case.. With no actual investigation, Alles’s senior deputies told him they had reviewed the potential for the Russian employee to have done damage or to have stolen or accessed anything sensitive. There was none, they said.
The Russian woman may have done nothing other than be interrogated by FSB officers about her embassy work. On the other hand, she had worked at the office when the Russian government hacked White House emails in 2014. She had access to the Secret Service’s email system. State Department security officials warned the Moscow agent that she could have compromised any electronic devices in the office. With no serious investigation, the Secret Service would never know whether she had shared sensitive material with an American adversary.
“You know the hostile work environment of the Secret Service, and the current director is looked upon as an ‘outsider’ because he was never a Secret Service agent,” one agent told me about the way the Moscow case was handled. “The deputy director and [assistant directors] withhold a lot of information from the director to sabotage his agenda, just like they did to former director Julia Pierson. There was no protocol in place; neither was there any follow-up investigation to assess the amount of intel she took and shared with the FSB.”
There was another reason for the Secret Service to sweep this unpleasantness under the rug quickly. At that moment, Russia was a four-letter word inside the White House and a topic sure to draw the president’s fury. The president was still fuming to all of his advisers and friends about a special counsel who had been appointed in May to investigate both Russian state efforts to interfere in the 2016 election to his benefit and also his campaign advisers’ secret contacts with shadowy Russians. Trump regularly complained that the investigation was casting a cloud over his presidency, bellowing in one memorable exchange with his White House counsel and attorney general that he was “fucked.” The president was not going to want to hear that a Russian spy had penetrated the U.S. embassy during his campaign for office.
Still, the failure to probe what information the foreign national accessed in the Moscow office struck former agency supervisors as bizarre. “You have a building full of professional cyber security investigators—and a need to know,” said one former high-ranking Secret Service official. “They could have taken a look at what was she accessing. Internally, you would want to know that. Why didn’t they look into it?” A year later, when The Washington Post found out about the Russian investigator and new details surrounding her firing, the Service began a quiet investigation—which mostly consisted of trying to find out who had leaked this information to the press. Some people familiar with the operation in Moscow complained that David Deetz, who was then the supervisor overseeing internal misconduct investigations, appeared to have a personal relationship with the female investigator from his time as the resident agent in Moscow. He left his job leading internal investigations the month after the Post’s report.
EPILOGUE
By June 2018, the president had just about had it with his Secret Service director. A delusional survivalist in Pennsylvania had threatened on Facebook to put a bullet in Trump’s head and was now a fugitive—and believed to be armed and dangerous. Police went to arrest twenty-six-year-old Shawn Christy after he lodged his threat, but he fled into the woods and disappeared. Pieces of his backstory suggested to the Secret Service that he could be the real thing, the next John Hinckley. He had had a protective order for stalking vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and arrests for threatening her lawyers, a signal of a volatile obsession with the spotlight. However, none of the many federal law enforcement agencies under Trump’s command had been able to catch him. Trump asked the special agent in charge of his protective detail, Tony Ornato, what in the world was the holdup. But Trump liked Ornato, a tough-talking agent who had served in the New York office, been at Trump’s shoulder for the last year, and had the classic bodyguard look, so the president chose to blame Alles, the Secret Service director he never wanted.
On and off that year, the president’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, had been asking Kelly and Nielsen whether Trump could just make Ornato the Secret Service director. The couple also felt closer to Ornato because he was someone they spoke to frequently about security arrangements and who tried to accommodate their requests. Ivanka and Jared were also at war with White House chief of staff Kelly. He had refused to overrule career experts who warned against giving Kushner the highest top-secret security clearance. Alles was a longtime friend of Kelly’s, so the director became suspect in their eyes. Homeland Security officials tried to explain to Ivanka and Kushner that making Ornato director wasn’t appropriate. Just because someone was a devoted and well-liked protective agent didn’t automatically make them a good manager of a complex $2 billion organization. But as had been the case in previous administrations, President Trump and his family weren’t looking for an executive to be a steward for the Secret Service and chart its strategic mission. They were looking for the comfort of someone with proven loyalty to them.
