Carol Leonnig - Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

When I began reporting on the United States Secret Service in 2012, this unique law enforcement agency was rocked by what seemed like the most humiliating scandal in its modern history: A dozen agents and officers stood accused of turning a presidential trip to a South American resort town into a kind of Vegas bachelor party, complete with heavy drinking and prostitutes. At the time, the misconduct shocked the country precisely because the men and women of the Secret Service had for so long been synonymous with tireless and selfless vigilance, a band of patriots willing to take a bullet to protect Americas democracy.

But as I reported more deeply, I learned of a more worrisome scandal than these Mad Menstyle antics: This long-revered agency was not living up to its most solemn dutyto keep the president safe. Agents and officers gave me a guided tour, showing me step by step how the Secret Service was becoming a paper tiger, weakened by arrogant, insular leadership, promotions based on loyalty rather than capability, years of slim budgets, and outdated technology. With their help, I decided to dig deeper still to understand how this had happened and to chart the previous five decades of the proud Secret Service. How had it recovered from the assassination of President Kennedy, rebuilt its security force to be the envy of the world, and later begun a slow slide that had worried and angered its frontline workers?

An important note about my purpose: Some Secret Service leaders and alumni have vowed to attack my work, claiming that I seek to embarrass their venerable institution and highlight its blemishes. But it is for the Secret Services front line and its future that I write these hard truths. I am in awe of the agents and officers who pull together for their critical common purpose, and what they still accomplish every day under considerable strain. They toil on, often without thanks, proper support, or a proactive strategy from above. I write because they deserve better.

This book is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with more than 180 people, including current and former Secret Service agents, officers, and directors, cabinet members, advisers, and senior government officials in eight previous presidential administrations, and members of Congress and their staff, as well as other witnesses to the events described herein. I spoke with Secret Service staff who worked a heartbeat from the president and in far-flung field offices, and with the equally dedicated members of their families. Most of the people who cooperated in my research agreed to speak candidly on condition of anonymity, either to protect their careers or because they feared retaliation from the agency and alumni who seek to tamp down bad news and burnish the agencys brand. Many shared their experiences in a background capacity, allowing me to use their information as long as I protected their identities and did not attribute details to them by name.

I am an objective journalist dedicated to sharing the truth with the public, and here I have aimed to provide an account that is as close to the full truth as I could determine based on rigorous reporting. Scenes you read in this book are reconstructed from firsthand accounts and, whenever possible, corroborated by multiple sources. They are also vetted by my review of internal government reports and memos. While there is a tendency to discount the words of anonymous sources, many of the people who spoke to me in confidence also submitted to rigorous fact checking and shared with me contemporaneous notes, calendars, and correspondence to buttress their accounts. Dialogue cannot always be exact, but it is based here on multiple peoples memories of events. In a few instances, different sources disagreed about substantive elements, and when necessary, I note that, acknowledging that different narrators can remember events differently.

This book is an outgrowth of my reporting for The Washington Post. Some of the episodes you read in Zero Fail began with stories I wrote for the newspaper, often with the help of my wise colleagues. The majority of the scenes, dialogue, and quotations are original to my book, however, and based on the extensive reporting I conducted exclusively for this project.

This historical account benefited significantly from contemporaneous news reports in The Washington Post and other publications. I also relied on a handful of compelling books covering specific periods, including some written by former agents who recognized that their experiences are indeed the stuff of history. I credit key information gleaned from those accounts, either with a direct reference in the narrative or in the endnotes.