U.S. Secret Service agents in prostitution scandal

[John Dolva]

Quite right. Therefore one can use the present event as a template even if in reverse. Statements made then and statements made now shows a lot. I wonder also if it is then important to reassess the SS role in the assassination. Personally I wonder if a key lies in the guy who reportedly decided on the bubbletop based on a call to dealey plaza. I wonder if there was a continuous check. Anyway the other guys partied, didn't sleep enough. That's quite a hold on (with a potentially disastrous outcome) a guy when life choices are to be made. A stranglehold for many. So it was in their interest to justify unwitting roles born of circumstances with similarity to this matter. If you don't get it forget it. But if you do, I'd really like to see some direct input now as we are pasasing through a telling event involving ther same players(personas) right now..

edit typos

Edited April 22, 2012 by John Dolva

[Guest Tom Scully]

I'm sorry, John. I think you are hyping the present circumstances to a degree greatly out of proportion with what you could be considering if you were not already convinced that a strong connection and comparison must exist between the background of presidential protection in 1963 and last week.

Just as there was little comparison to be made between secret service protection failure of McKinley in 1901 (only a span of 62 year to 1963, vs. 48-1/2 years for your present attempt to make a relevant comparison.), there was no attempt similar to the one you are making, between the secret service make up and conduct in 1901, vs. 49 years later when at least one agent died protecting president Truman during an armed attack on his temporary residence in 1950.

I think you are grasping at straws here, John, because of your disregard of the scope and impact of presidential protective detail misconduct on the night before president Kennedy came to Dallas in 1963, vs. reports of the conduct of 11 agents and an equal number of military liasons in the hours before President Obama arrived in Colombia.

Did you know that the JFK administration took office just after a time when the Secret Service total force numbered less than 400 and was budgeted at $5 million annually, and that 12 years later, the number of agents had "more than tripled" to a total of about 1300, with an annual budget of $98 million? Info at top of page, in three columns on the right..

Are you aware that currently the Secret Service is no longer part of the U.S. Treasury and that it is now part of the Dept. of Homeland Security and that the Secret Service has 4400 employees and an annual budget of $1.515 billion in the fiscal year ended on 30 Sept., 2011?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secret_Service

The parent agency, DHS, has 216,000 employees, presumably including the 4400 of SS, and spent 66.4 billion in the year ended 30 Sept., 2011.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Homeland_Security

I think there is a reported contemporary failing of a portion of presidential protection resources so small in proportion, relative to the numbers of personnel and dollars devoted to the task today, vs. in 1963, that comparison is futile.

Consider also that the depth of today's protective force permitted the almost immediate replacement of members of the detail caught up in the accusations of excessive drinking and carousing. I doubt replacement of the impaired agents in Dallas on the morning of 22 Nov., 1963, was even feasible, even if the supervisory integrity and the will to do so, had emerged.

[John Dolva]

I think it's a matter of scale. What I'm trying to get at is the role of the agents as in a way puppets where their behaviour is not unusual but the way they are treated is and has a deeper reason. It doesn't matter whether they are whatever they are. They are used, like soldiers in wars, and just as eaily lauded as discarded. This is a focus I think if redirected will actually look at the deeper politics of the situation.

[Douglas Caddy]

Secret Service scandal: Rising supervisor set uncovering of misconduct in motion

By Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura,

Published: April 21, 2012

Washington Post

Paula Reid, the new Secret Service boss for the South American region, was in Cartagena preparing for the president’s visit when she received an urgent report: A prostitute, upset because she had not been paid by a Secret Service agent, had created a disturbance in a nearby hotel, knocking on doors and yelling in the hallways at daybreak.

With roughly 24 hours left until President Obama was due to arrive in the Colombian town, the 46-year-old Calvert County native instructed her staff to swoop into the Hotel Caribe at midday April 12 and inspect hotel registration records for all Secret Service employees. Reid, who had been staying at a nearby hotel, swiftly rounded up 11 agents and officers and ordered them out of the country. She alerted her superiors that she found early evidence of “egregious” misconduct involving prostitutes and set in motion the public uncovering of the most wide-reaching scandal at the agency in decades, according to government officials involved in the case.

It fell to Reid, recently promoted to head the prestigious Miami office, to ride herd on a rowdy group of male colleagues, including two who were assigned to supervise the group, the morning after a drunken bender, according to the officials. While details about the scandal and the men who took the prostitutes to their rooms are now well documented, less is known about the role played by one of the agency’s highest-ranking African Americans in the decision, with the clock ticking, to replace them on an assignment for which there is no room for error.

For Reid, the moment was not without risk, opening her to a potential internal backlash for ruining the men’s careers and, once the news became known, embarrassing an agency that prides itself on maintaining a stoic public face. Officials familiar with the probe said Reid had Director Mark Sullivan’s endorsement as she took swift steps to handle the matter, and that he gave the final decision to remove the agents. But some service members said another senior manager might have been less aggressive.

Those who know Reid said the move revealed a steely resolve that has marked her 21-year rise through the ranks of an agency whose macho reputation has again come under scrutiny. Her story offers a counterbalance to critics who contend the Secret Service has been slow to clean up its act from the “Mad Men”-era days when some agents joked that their off-duty mantra was “wheels up, rings off.”

Not that Reid, an intensely private person, would admit it. In an interview, she offered few new details of her role, sticking to what colleagues described as her businesslike approach.

“I am confident that as an agency we’ll determine exactly what happened and take appropriate action,” she said in the interview with her and an agency spokesman. “Despite this current challenge facing the Secret Service, my job is to keep Miami personnel focused on our core protective and investigative missions. Anything less is counterproductive to the many critical functions we perform each day.”

Reid is still in the thick of it, assisting in the investigation. Those who have worked with her since she joined the Secret Service in 1990 described her as well suited for the challenge.

One former agent who worked with Reid in Miami during her previous stint in that bureau said she was exacting in the extreme, able to quote the agency administrative manual the way “fundamentalists quote the Bible.” This ex-colleague said that he did not always agree with her management approach but that he respected her work ethic and ability.

“If every boss was Paula Reid, the Secret Service would never have a problem,” the former agent said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about a former colleague. “It would be a lot more boring, but never a problem.”

Reid has never married. She describes herself as very close to her siblings, including her twin sister, and her family, most of whom still live in the Maryland suburbs.

Tall and lean, Reid is regularly seen at the gym at 5:30 in the morning and at her desk by 7 a.m. She is always serious when on the job, the former agent said.

After growing up in Calvert County, Reid graduated from the University of Maryland. She joined the Secret Service at age 25 after visiting an NAACP job fair that sought to encourage minority applicants for law enforcement jobs.

According to a promotional interview years later that Reid granted to help recruit more female agents, she studied criminal justice in college and was debating whether to go to law school or become an investigator when she chose the service.

“I can’t imagine not being in law enforcement,” she said then, according to the interview, published in an online newsletter, Women for Hire.

Reid’s time in the agency has not been rosy throughout.

Ten years after entering the service at the bottom rung, she joined as a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that claimed the agency engaged in racial discrimination against African American personnel. She provided a declaration giving examples of ways black agents were relegated to lesser assignments. In the broader suit, some of the plaintiffs contended that senior managers had often used racial epithets to describe criminal suspects but were not reprimanded for their comments.

She eventually withdrew from the case, which continues but has since dwindled to a smaller number of plaintiffs. Still, as a black woman, Reid stood out in a mostly white-male agency.

“The general public is intrigued to see a black female in my position,” she said in the Women for Hire interview. “They always need to confirm that I really am a special agent. I enjoy being a role model for women and minorities.”

In a 1997 USA Today interview about the Secret Service’s desire to recruit more female agents, Reid was quoted as saying that when she and male agents were working together on an assignment, their managers would usually ignore her in favor of her male counterparts.

Until the perception of agents as big, bulky men changes, Reid said at the time, women have to “learn not to take it personally.”

Whatever the challenges, Reid has earned a steady stream of promotions. After spending time as a special agent on the presidential protective detail, Reid joined management as a supervisor in the Miami field office in 2004, overseeing administrative duties. In 2007, she was summoned back to Washington, where she had two prominent jobs in the next four years.

She was special agent in charge of the protective intelligence and assessment division, which ensures that threats to the president and other officials are identified and carefully monitored, and she was deputy special agent in charge of the presidential protective division, overseeing the White House complex and access to it in the middle of Obama’s term. That included overseeing protection for the East Wing, coordinating events and regular contact with first lady Michelle Obama and her family.

Reid’s most recent promotion, this year, was to the highly coveted position of top boss of the Miami office, a division of more than 150 employees that oversees the South America region and rivals the Los Angeles and New York offices in prestige among national bureaus.

Her move prompted grumbling among some longer-serving white supervisors that she was unqualified, according to people with knowledge of the situation, including a former agent who left recently. A lot of the “good old boys” were not happy, said the former agent, who, because of the sensitive nature of personnel decisions, asked not to be identified.

This month, Reid headed to Cartagena to serve as liaison between the dozens of agents and officers representing several divisions of the Secret Service and the other local governments and U.S. agencies involved in preparing for the president’s visit, Secret Service officials said.

Even under ideal circumstances, such a job is a headache of tight scheduling within a vast operation that includes several hundred personnel in a foreign country. But some said they could have predicted — before Reid took the call that set in motion the frantic chain of events ahead of Obama’s arrival in Cartagena — that this is how she would have performed.

“She’s the ultimate boss for that whole region,” one agent said. “You did it in her house, so you better know she’s going to come down hard.”

Staff writer Ed O’Keefe and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

[William Kelly]

Secret Service also partied before Kennedy assassination

by REBECCA LOPEZ

http://www.wfaa.com/news/national/Secret-Service-also-Partied-before-Kennedy-Assassination-148338385.html

WFAA

Posted on April 20, 2012 at 10:40 PM

DALLAS - It's a part of the Kennedy assassination many people don't know about.

On the night before President John F. Kennedy was killed, 10 members of his Secret Service detail were partying at a Fort Worth club called The Cellar.

Farris Rookstool is a former FBI analyst, who served as custodian of the John F. Kennedy assassination files.

"Nine out of the 10 had consumed alcohol, [of] which four of those agents were also assigned PPD, or presidential protection detail, in the follow up car behind President Kennedy’s motorcade," Rookstool said.

In sworn statements, the agents admit to drinking on the night before the death of President Kennedy. The documents state that some the agents left their post at the Texas Hotel to party with waitresses at The Cellar, who served drinks wearing only their underwear.

Some of agents didn't get back to their rooms until five the next morning.

"Some of these agents that were out until five in the morning, that were supposed to be guarding the president's suite, bragged to the owner of The Cellar, Pat Kirkswood, that they were out having a few cocktails while they got the Fort Worth Fire Department guarding the presidential suite," Rookstool said.

He said among those drinking was Agent Clint Hill, who you see running to the back of the presidential car and being helped by Jaqueline Kennedy after her husband had been shot.

"Reaching the rear end of the car, Clint blamed himself," Rookstool said. "Not based on the alcohol, but the fact is, had he gotten to the back deck of the car, he was hoping to shield the first lady as well as perhaps the President.”

The Secret Service investigated the agents, but found that the drinking did not impair them or slow down their reactions when the President was shot. None of the agents were disciplined or fired.

"The Warren commission was very upset when they found out," Rookstool said.

Now, nearly 50 years later, a similar investigation is shaking the secret service.

E-mail rlopez@wfaa.com

Jim Marrs · University of North Texas

Thanks for this story. In the 1960s and 70s when I reported this story after interviewing members of the local news media and Pat Kirkwood, owner of the Cellar, I was called a conspiracy theorist. The local media wouldn't run the story. What made you change your minds so many years later?

Frank DeBenedictis · Florida Atlantic University

This Secret Service scandal IMO has not bottomed out. There will be other revelations and resignations. And it also could cause the conduct of those in Dallas to be looked at more critically. You referred to the Dallas Secret Service episode in CROSSFIRE.

Darrel McNutt · Vancouver, British Columbia

How about SS Bolden's treatment after exposing Dallas shennanigans--LaterD

Carlton Riley · Courier at Currently a 29 year employee at federal express

Darrel McNutt with this revelation, agent bolden should have his name cleared, given an OFFICAL PARDON, and be paid ALL the money he would have made, plus interest, TAX FREE. his book was very interesting reading. i bought 1 for my sister after she showed interest in mine.

Vince Palamara · Duquesne University

I was much aware of this- have been reporting it for years. Please see this story: http://vincepalamara.com/2012/04/18/precedent-drinking-partying-and-sex-became-part-of-traveling-with-the-president-jfk-agent-tony-sherman/.

Joe Sturgis

& as you can see, they haven't improved much since then.

Jimmy Orr · Greenville, South Carolina

Kennedy himself set the standard for the detail's conduct by his own personal behavior. Period.

gemantel (signed in using yahoo)

Jimmy Orr ... you didn't by chance play football for the Baltimore Colts (formerly the Dallas Texans), did you?

Vince Palamara · Duquesne University

Clint Hill doesn't care---he's making alot of money off his book now. The bigger story is this- JFK did NOT order the agents off his limo: http://vincepalamara.com/2012/04/16/jfk-did-not-order-the-agents-off-his-limousine/.

Jimmy Orr · Greenville, South Carolina

There were not enough agents, you morons. And Vince will allow on his sites only what he wants you to read. "The Cellar" in Ft. Worth did not serve alcohol. The agents had been looking for food. Most of them had not eaten anything all day, they were so few in number that they were not allowed time or opportunity. Prince Kennedy enjoyed his last meal, the agents were left to scrap for themselves after hours and on a meager per deim. This entire line is sooooooo misleading.

Joe Sturgis · School of Hard Knocks, The University of Life

Jimmy Orr~ They did serve drinks at the Cellar Orr, Google it. Are you a shill for the 'lone nutters' btw? Is that hat of yours tin foil plated? You sound like a tea bagging repug with an ax to grind against JFK. SMH...& FYI Vince Palamara is well respected as an objective investigator, and researcher in JFK forums and such. As opposed to you who's just here to be a dissenter with subterfuge in mind.

David Starks

Farris Rookstool is not as source I would normally trust or consider reliable, but he got this one right! I saw it recently reported in the lame mainstream press that the current incident in Columbia was the first major SS scandal, but lets applaud the WFAA person who wrote this story for showing that was an absurdly incorrect claim. This is one of *many* parts of the Kennedy assassination story that begs for the light of day by the major press. When will the media get the Abraham Bolden story right? Does any major news agency have the guts to champion the cause of the African American Secret Service agent who went to the Warren Commission trying to blow the whistle on this SS scandal, racist behavior towards him by JFK's guards, the SS guard's hatred of JFK, who they called a "Ni**er lover" and a plot in Chicago just before the...See More

Dede Juntila Caplett · Journalism Teacher at North Forney High School

Will Greer applied the brakes after the first shot. He can be seen in the Zapruder film, looking back at JFK as he continued to apply the brakes. He looks back, looks forward, then back... until the head shot, frame 313, after which Greer assumes the tuck position and floors the big limo.

The Secret Service, a couple hours later, used profanity and pulled weapons when Dallas County authorities, including medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, insisted that Texas law stated the body of a homicide victim must remain in Dallas County for an autopsy. Secret Service agents, as documented by Aubrey Rike, of the O'Neill Funeral Home, kidnapped the casket away from Dallas authorities and brought it to Air Force One, where it was flown to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the autopsy was controlled by military personnel, including a general and admiral, according to Navy technician Paul O'Connor.

Judge Brent Keis · Fort Worth, Texas

Finally, someone else remembed this!

gemantel (signed in using yahoo)

We look forward to Clint Hill response, since he's been otherwise very active of late.

vferroson2 (signed in using yahoo)

Hell, the way Kennedy snuck around getting laid with other.

women (including spies) it all makes perfect sense!

Darrel McNutt · Vancouver, British Columbia

Let's hope it doesn't affect one's brain or there will be a lot of dummies running around HMMMNNNN!!!! maybe alchohol is better!!!==LaterDonebellplaza (signed in using yahoo)

I bet JFK was sneaking back to his hotel room at 5 AM on the day he got shot.

David Starks

Can a moderator please delete this post? Thanks!

James Stephen Courts · The Ohio State University

You are an idiot. Any chance you are mr. Anderson? Stephen Courts

Joe Sturgis

onebellplaza proves that evolution can go backwards..

.

Phil Melanson (The Secret Service)

(p.67)

“Washington columnist Drew Pearson discovered that at least nine Secret Service agents stayed out late drinking the night of November 21-22, 1963. The first unofficial response from the Service was that the establishment patronized by agents was only a coffeehouse and served no liquor at all. This was a deceptive assertion, because at many clubs and restaurants in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, it was customary, given local liquor laws, for patrons to bring their own liquor, with the management providing setups. The fact that the establishment in question held no liquor license to serve liquor did not assure that none was consumed.”

“Pearson’s allegation gained additional credence when Warren Commission investigators found that a ‘breach of discipline’ involving nine Secret Service agents had occurred. After President and Mrs. Kennedy had retired for the night in their Fort Worth hotel, nine of the twenty-eight agents went to the Fort Worth Press Club for beer and mixed drinks. Agents stayed there for times varying from a half hour to two hours, with two agents heading back to the hotel, but a group of seven others gathering at The Cellar, a coffeehouse, until between 1:30 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. One stayed until 5:00 a.m.”

“Even if the Warren Commission investigation is correct in its conclusions that the agents drunk moderately at the Press Club and consumed no alcohol at The Cellar, every one of the agents involved had been assigned protective duties that began no later than 8:00 a.m. on November 22, 1963. The president was scheduled to deliver a breakfast speech in Fort Worth at 8:30 a.m., and then make the very short flight to Dallas.”

“In Dallas, the nine agents who, at the least, had spent a late night, were handed a range of assignments: One provided security at Love Field, four were assigned to the Trade Mart, and four were in the follow-up car behind the presidential limousine in the motorcade.”

“Even if the agents had quaffed only a few beers at the Press Club, Secret Service regulations strictly forbade the consumption of alcohol at any time during travel that involved protective assignments. Agents accompanying the president were considered to be “on call’ at all times during a trip, even if they were off their eight-hour protective shift, as were the agents who went out the night of November 21-22. Additionally, Secret Service regulations stated that “violations or slight disregard” for this rule “will be cause for removal from the Service.”

“The regulations notwithstanding, Secret Service Chief James Rowley later testified before the Warren Commission that a Secret Service investigation of the breach of regulations had found that the performance of the nine agents involved was in no way impaired. He asserted that each of the nine agents reported for duty on time, was in full possession of all mental and physical abilities, and performed all duties satisfactorily on November 22, 1963. Further, he claimed that the agents’ activities the previous night did not in even the slightest manner impede an action that might have saved the president’s life.”

“…Rowley contended that although, under ordinary circumstances, some disciplinary action would have been taken against the offending agents, in this case it was not appropriate because it would be ‘unfair’ to agents and their families: It would create the impression that the breach of conduct contributed to the assassination which, according to Rowley, it did not. For the first time, the Secret Service had lost a president, but Rowley’s chief concern was weighted to protecting agents who had flaunted the agency’s own professional code of conduct. He was more concerned to whitewash the Dallas debacle with his edict that none of the nine agents was in position to have performed any action that might have saved the president, because none were in the president’s car – only in the follow-up car. From Rowley, the Warren Commission learned that the agents involved were aware of the seriousness of their breach of conduct and ‘would not do it again.’ The president had been killed, but Rowley was telling the public and Congress that agents derelict in their duties ‘would not do it again.’”

Earl Warren: “Now other people, as they went along there, even some people in the crowds, saw a man with a rifle up in this building from which the president was shot. Now don’t you think that if a man went to bed reasonably early, and hadn’t been drinking the night before, he would be more alert to see those things as a Secret Service agent, than if they stayed up until three or four or five o’clock in the morning, going to beatnik joints and doing some drinking along the way?”

[Guest Robert Morrow]

Here is Scully's "salacious and unconfirmed" gossip being confirmed: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/report-says-military-members-brought-prostitutes-to-colombia-hotel-let-dogs-soil-rooms/2012/08/03/69274534-dd8f-11e1-8ad1-909913931f71_story.html

Report says military members brought prostitutes to Colombia hotel; let dogs soil rooms

By Associated Press, Updated: Friday, August 3, 2:36 PM

WASHINGTON — A dozen U.S. service members brought women, likely prostitutes, to their hotel rooms in Colombia and also allowed dogs to soil bed linens and building grounds shortly before President Barack Obama arrived in the country for an April summit, according to a military investigation that followed the announcement of punishments for the men.

The report provided to The Associated Press on Friday revealed new details about the conduct of the service members in the prostitution scandal that engulfed both military and Secret Service personnel.

Seven Army soldiers and two Marines have received administrative punishments for what the report described as misconduct consisting “almost exclusively of patronizing prostitutes and adultery.” Three of the service members have requested courts martial, which would give them a public trial to contest the punishments.

One Air Force member was reprimanded but cleared of any violations of the U.S. military code of justice, and final decisions are pending on two Navy sailors, whose cases remain under legal review.

According to the investigator’s report, the problems involving the servicemen came to light when hotel staff complained to U.S. officials that military members had female guests in their rooms after 6 a.m., a violation of hotel policy. They also complained that dog handlers allowed their dogs to sleep in beds, soil hotel linens and soil other public areas around the building. It’s not clear, the report said, whether the dog problems were limited to military handlers, but officials said those issues were corrected right away.

The wider scandal involving the Secret Service erupted after a public dispute over payment between a Secret Service agent and a prostitute at a Cartagena hotel. The Secret Service and the military were in the Colombian coastal resort to prepare for Obama’s participation in a Latin American summit. Twelve Secret Service employees were implicated, eight of them ousted, three cleared of serious misconduct and one is being stripped of his security clearance.

The military report concluded that “the combination of unstructured free time, the prevalence of legalized prostitution and military members’ individual choice to commit misconduct,” were the primary causes of the transgressions. It also found that there was no evidence that the interaction with prostitutes presented any risk to national security, and that no sensitive materials were compromised.

Prostitution is legal in Colombia but is a violation of the U.S. military code of justice. Hotels in Cartagena require that any guests, including prostitutes, must be signed in, must pay a guest fee and must arrive after 11 p.m. and leave by 6 a.m. The time constraints, the report said, are largely because the hotel doesn’t want families or other guests to witness the prostitutes’ presence.

U.S. Southern Command, headed by Gen. Douglas Fraser, conducted the investigation into the military members’ involvement in the April incident, which brought shame to the elite presidential protection force and unearthed revelations of other episodes of misconduct within the Secret Service.

The military contingent included seven Army soldiers — including six special operations forces, two Navy Explosive Ordinance Disposal technicians, two Marine dog handlers and an Air Force airman. All of the military had behind-the-scenes roles and were not directly involved in presidential security.

The report said that 12 military members brought women to their rooms — 11 in the Hotel Caribe on April 11 and one in the Hilton Hotel the previous week.

The investigation also concluded that there was no broad coordinated effort to commit the misconduct or to cover it up later, although there were some instances where military members may have made misleading or “factually unlikely” statements when questioned about the matter. It said that all of the women were over the age of 18, were not criminals or terrorists or part of any human trafficking network.

The report said evidence substantiating the wrongdoing came from statements from the military members, eight of the prostitutes, hotel log books and security video.

The report also discounted leadership problems, saying that military and civilian leaders “did not create or foster an atmosphere of tolerance for prostitution or marital infidelity.”

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press