Book review: Portrait of an agency in crisis
Carol Leonnig is an expert investigative reporter. Picture: Win McNamee/Getty Images
With Zero Fail, Carol Leonnig has written an exposé of the US Secret Service, but she has also written a history of the modern presidency, a palace intrigue following several American royal families and a book on corporate culture.
She paints the picture of the landscape the Secret Service operates in, allowing the reader to see where and how cracks in the defences have formed. Critically, we learn that improvement and transformation in the Secret Service follow catastrophic failure.
Leonnig quotes a former senior agent saying: “The policies and procedures of the Secret Service are born out of blood.” When Lincoln was shot at Ford’s theatre the policeman who was protecting him walked off his post to get a drink in a bar. This gave rise to the birth of the service as an arm of the Treasury department. Even in the new Secret Service though, reaction to failures remained the quality management modus operandi.
Leonnig recounts many failures. On the night before the Kennedy assassination, his protectors stayed out far later than they should have, drinking until early morning. The assassination of Bobby Kennedy prompted the service to protect high-profile presidential candidates but in 1972 a lapse in protocol allowed candidate George Wallace to be shot and nearly killed in Wheaton, Maryland.
Though the Secret Service comported itself well in thwarting the attempted assassination of Reagan in 1981, in the modern era there have been breaches of security procedure and failures of technical equipment that allowed armed men access to the president and the White House on several occasions. On 9/11 the vice-president was locked out of the emergency bunker and exposed because his protector just did not have the key.
The Secret Service is intended to be apolitical and to remain emotionally agnostic to those whom they protect. In fact, Leonnig shows there have been consistent attempts by the executive branch to politicise the Secret Service, from Nixon’s attempts to use agents as informants on political rivals to Anthony Ornato’s journey from Secret Service detail leader to holding a position in the Trump administration and then returning to the Secret Service.
During Ornato’s stint in the Trump administration, he orchestrated the infamous visit to the church at Lafayette Square, where agents took part in clearing the protesters for Trump’s ‘photo-op’ walk.
As far as remaining emotionally agnostic, Trump’s daughter-in-law began dating one of the agents on the Trump family detail shortly after divorcing Donald Trump Jr, and Trump’s daughter Tiffany broke up with a boyfriend and “began spending an unusual amount of time alone with a Secret Service agent on her detail”.
Lapses of judgment are commonplace in the Secret Service according to Leonnig, because of the agency’s culture, and ‘conduct unbecoming’ is commonplace.
The frat boy culture led to multiple and recurring incidents of drinking and impropriety where agents were impaired when they should not have been. These include the well-publicised Colombian prostitution scandal where the investigator researching the events was forced to resign after his own prostitution-related arrest came to light.
Leonnig recounts instances of misappropriation or misuse of Secret Service resources and equipment. She describes an environment conducive to misogyny and racism where inappropriate emails and memes were allowed to circulate on government devices. In 2000 a group of Black agents filed a suit alleging that the Secret Service’s racist culture had blocked them from advancing their careers.
When all of this is overlayed on an organisation with aging and insufficient infrastructure, an ever-expanding mandate, and a budget stretched far beyond its limit by Trump’s reckless spending, we see a portrait of an agency in crisis. Budget cuts and skimping impair the agency’s capabilities to do its job now and decreasing investment impair its capabilities in the future.
The agency lives in constant crisis mode and responds to immediate needs by throwing bodies at gaps as they appear. Demands on lower-level agents cause both increasing turnover and operating budget shortfalls, but senior managers have little incentive to make strategic decisions that will incur short-term costs.
Although Zero Fail is meticulously researched, the breadth of scope and intimacy of detail do not detract from the storytelling. Leonnig is an expert journalist, as her Pulitzer Prize attests, and her writing is as engaging as it is fluid and informative. She has given us a clear window into a notoriously secret world. Through this window, we see a Secret Service that still has much to improve.
- Zero Fail
- Carol Leonnig, Scribe, €37.50
