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Clinton problems linger at Secret Service Bush
appointment of new director meant to send message
Posted: February 21, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By John Berlau As the nation is on the brink of war and the danger of
an attack on the homeland mounts, the Bush administration has made
an important personnel change that many say was long overdue: It
finally has replaced the Clinton appointee who headed the U.S. Secret
Service for almost four years with a distinguished law-enforcement
veteran of its own choosing. Brian Stafford, who was appointed in
1999, quietly announced his resignation in December in the face of
scrutiny from U.S. News & World Report about Secret Service morale
and from Insight about problems with a new White House access-control
system pushed through in the final months of the Clinton administration.
Many sources familiar with the agency tell Insight that the administration's
choice for the Secret Service's new director, W. Ralph Basham, is meant to
send a message. Unlike previous directors, Basham was not promoted from
within. He had retired from the Secret Service in 1998 after 28 years in jobs
ranging from protecting the vice president to strategic planning, and became
director of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Ga. In
January 2002, he was named chief of staff for the new Transportation
Security Administration that was created after the Sept. 11 attacks; then he
was sworn to head the Secret Service on Jan. 27, 2003.
Basham earned wide respect in the law-enforcement community for his work
at the training center, where his goal as he described it to Georgia's Athens
Banner-Herald was to "create [a climate] as close to realism as you possibly
can as to what you're going to see on the streets so that when the officers
go out there, they're not surprised." The job he did bringing the TSA online
under emergency conditions is seen by industry leaders as little short of
miraculous. Secret Service observers with whom Insight spoke are hopeful
that Basham's diverse range of law-enforcement experience will help him
tackle what they say is the wide range of security lapses at the Secret
Service, but they warn he has a big job ahead of him.
In early February, the Secret Service suffered embarrassment when the
Rev. Rich Weaver, known as the "Handshake Man," again evaded agents
and officers to deliver a personal, handwritten message to President George
W. Bush. Weaver, who shook the hands of Bush and Bill Clinton at their
inaugurations without Secret Service clearance or approval, slipped by the
Secret Service at the National Prayer Breakfast in the ballroom of the
Washington Hilton, lifted the rope around Bush's table and gave the
president a personal letter he says Jesus commanded him to write.
A Secret Service spokesman maintained to the Washington Post that
Weaver did go through the metal detectors and that the procedure would
have protected the president had someone armed and dangerous attempted
a similar stunt, but few were reassured. Much more problematic than
Weaver is the example of an illegal alien working for a catering firm who was
a supervisor of tent installation at White House events even though his
fingerprints were on file in a federal law-enforcement database, according to
an article by syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin. And, as this reporter
revealed last fall, the Secret Service's new computerized access-control
system for the White House, built in the final months of the Clinton
administration and put in place just after Bush arrived, apparently has left
the White House complex even more vulnerable.
Retired Secret Service officer Bill Castle and other sources familiar with the
system told Insight that the system frequently crashes and gives inaccurate
data about White House guests and employees. Insight also discovered
that the chief executive officer and controlling shareholder of the company
that was the lead contractor for the project was a mysterious Swiss resident
named Niklaus Zenger, who had ties to the current Russian military and its
Soviet predecessor and had been accused by former business associates of
stealing proprietary technology.
Zenger since has been forced out, largely as a result of news articles about
such matters. But critics say the whole outrageous affair illustrates why the
Secret Service must exercise more due diligence over the companies and
contractors that deal with the White House.
Meanwhile, this magazine has learned that design problems with the new
system have produced woefully inaccurate data about the length of time
visitors have stayed at the White House, opening the door to potential
threats against the president, his family and staff.
Gary Aldrich, who served as senior agent in the FBI liaison office at the
White House during the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill
Clinton, and who wrote the best-selling memoir "Unlimited Access," says
many of the current security lapses are a result of the Clinton
administration's disregard for security procedures and disrespect for the
Secret Service in general.
"There are so many ways Bill Clinton demoralized the Secret Service," says
Aldrich, now president of the Patrick Henry Center, a think tank in Fairfax,
Va. "One of the most specific ways would be to disregard the good
suggestions that were well-founded about how to protect the White House
premises and which people to keep out and which people to allow in. He
also abused them by sending them on silly errands to drugstores for
ointments or whatever. It is outrageous to misuse Secret Service agents by
trying to turn them into valets, and I think there was a tendency on the part
of the Clinton administration to abuse all the people who served them in
security capacities, including the Secret Service and the military."
U.S. News & World Report backs up Aldrich's assertion about the Clintons'
mistreatment of the Secret Service. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal,
the magazine reported in December, the Clintons lashed out at the Secret
Service because of officers telling what they knew to independent counsel
Kenneth Starr.
The magazine relates an anecdote about Hillary Clinton cursing at Secret
Service officer Matthew Hurden in 1998 after Hurden greeted her with a
simple, "Good morning, ma'am."
A spokesman for now-senator Clinton denied all, but the Washington-based
magazine reported that multiple sources "confirm the same account." The
magazine also reported that Stafford was made head of the Secret Service
despite the fact that he was "widely believed to be involved in an extramarital
[relationship] with [a woman] who worked in the White House."
Some say it was largely because he played ball with Clinton on the Lewinsky
affair and other potential embarrassments. Stafford did not return
messages. During the Clinton days some of the best Secret Service
employees left for other agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms.
Aldrich believes that by installing Basham – one of those who left during
the Clinton era – Bush is sending a signal to principled employees who left
that if they return they will work in a professional atmosphere under an able
director. "This is a way of bringing them back," Aldrich says. "Basham is a
quality guy. The Secret Service would know him by his reputation. That's
the way I read it."
But the culture at the Secret Service also needs to be changed for it to be
able to provide the highest level of protection to the president and his family
and White House team in this time of heightened alert to terrorism, insiders
say. These sources tell Insight that holdovers at the agency still are more
interested in suppressing internal criticism than in fixing security problems.
Just as there has been, according to U.S. News & World Report, "a major
leak investigation by the Secret Service's inspection division to identify
agents and officers who may have spoken to U.S. News," the Secret
Service's technical division also has been probing where Insight received its
information, grilling employees and contractors about who may have spoken
to this magazine out of concern for the president's safety.
"They responded with an internal cover-up rather than investigating what's
wrong with the [access-control] system," says a disgusted Secret Service
source who wished to remain anonymous. When this reporter recently
called Castle, the retired Secret Service officer who went on record in the
first story about the problems with the security computer system, he said
gravely, "I have no comment." Meanwhile, concerned sources say Basham
needs to get his arms around the problem with the access-control system.
And Insight has obtained a document that may indicate a major problem in
keeping records of the length of times guests spend at the White House.
This reporter received in an envelope with a California return address a copy
of a memo with the Ultrak letterhead written by the company's senior vice
president of technology, Ray Payne. Ultrak was one of the lead contractors
on the security project. Secret Service spokesmen did not dispute the
authenticity of the memo, which indicates that if a guest forgets to put his or
her pass in a scanner when leaving, the computer will assign an arbitrary
exit time. The memo, dated Feb. 5, 2002, confirms that the system will
"force" a "time of departure" (TOD) if the White House pass is not put into
the scanner upon exiting. That is, if no time of departure is recorded within
12 hours of a guest's arrival, the system will "set TOD to TOA [time of
arrival] plus 12 hours." So if a White House visitor were to arrive at 11 a.m.,
and then forget to put his pass in the scanner when leaving two hours later,
the system would record that he left the White House 12 hours later, at 11
p.m.
If not fixed, this could be a severe problem should an investigation be
required to identify who was in the White House at a certain time and for
how long. In the normal course of things it is simply embarrassing to
security.
Insight spoke with one reporter who forgot to put the pass in the scanner
when finished with covering the White House in the afternoon. The Secret
Service later asked why the reporter was on the premises until around
midnight. Other sources say the previous system simply would cancel the
pass and record no time of departure if the pass had not been returned.
They worry that innocent people might be implicated in White House
investigations if this is not fixed immediately. "If they're doing an
investigation and trying to pin somebody with something, and they're trying
to pinpoint times, it could be a nightmare," says a source familiar with the
Secret Service system. Secret Service spokesman John Gill tells Insight
that "the access-control system operates precisely in the manner in which it
was designed. We are very satisfied with the performance of this system.
... By no means does the Secret Service rely solely on the access-control
system to monitor individuals entering or exiting the complex." Ultrak did not
respond.
Ultimately, White House insiders say, the problems with the computer
system go back to the culture of the agency, something they believe
Basham will have to change. "Secret Service officers are afraid to report to
the higher-ups when they have to reboot the computers," says a Secret
Service source. "There's no accountability."
Aldrich says the Bush administration needs to do a thorough review of every
Secret Service policy change made during the Clinton administration to
identify and deal with any current security vulnerability. "As painful as it may
be for this administration, they must acknowledge that the eight Clinton
years were a national-security nightmare," Aldrich says. "They should start
off fresh, examine every policy to see where the holes are and plug those
holes."
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