Zero Fail, page 30
To those watching the drama from outside the Service, Basham’s selection didn’t seem so strange. He was an agent the president and his aides knew well, just as Clinton had known Stafford well. “I can see why they chose him: calm, steady, model of rectitude,” said a former senior Bush appointee. “He was head of [George H. W. Bush’s] detail at some point. That’s the route to becoming director. Maybe that’s not the best way to choose the director. But that’s how the White House gets to know the agents.”
Both Basham and Pickle had been clued in by friends to Stafford’s behind-the-scenes complaint about considering former agents, and the complaints raised at the former SAICs Christmas luncheon. They’d also both heard from friends that Stafford went so far as to dispatch senior agents to lobby key lawmakers against their selection.
In his standoff that day in January, Stafford told Basham: “You know this is wrong.”
Basham smiled with gritted teeth. He knew something the current director didn’t. He’d already accepted Stafford’s job.
CHAPTER 15
“HE PREDICTED ALL OF IT”
In the late summer of 2005, Secret Service officer Charles J. Baserap stood at his post at Fifteenth and E streets and watched two supervisors approach. Known by officers as South Park 15, the post straddled an eastern drive into the compound and faced the grassy plaza between historic Hotel Washington and the Department of Commerce. The men seemed relaxed, friendly. They said they’d like Baserap’s thoughts on something.
The supervisors asked Baserap, a college graduate and brand-new Secret Service officer who’d been on the job less than a year, whether he had any ideas about improving security at the White House complex. He was part of the Service’s Uniformed Division, a twelve-hundred-officer unit that was primarily responsible for guarding the White House but also provided security at the vice president’s residence, foreign embassies, and important events. Most people thought of agents with earpieces when they heard the words “Secret Service.” But officers like Baserap were the guards and sentries who played a critical role in the protection of the White House and the president. The supervisors told him they were putting together a security awareness team and were conducting this informal survey of officers to collect suggestions for a stronger defense of Crown.
They had walked up to the right guy. Baserap beamed at hearing his bosses ask for some ideas. He had quite a few. After eight months on the job, Baserap had reached the sad conclusion that terrorists could easily pierce the White House complex if they wanted to. The newly minted graduate of Fordham University had been in his parents’ home in the Bronx when the towers fell on September 11, and he feared the country was gradually growing complacent about the risk of more attacks. While standing midnights, early mornings, and afternoons on the White House’s lonely southern flank, and on other perimeter posts that ring the complex, Baserap mentally cataloged a series of holes in the safety net around the president’s house.
For one, the Secret Service officers who guarded the White House relied on handguns that couldn’t compete if organized attackers showed up with a rifle or shotgun. White House posts were frequently left unmanned when staff was short. Officers at some posts couldn’t reliably communicate with other parts of the complex in a crisis because radios were often broken or got spotty reception. Officers didn’t regularly check administration staffers for weapons or explosives when they entered the complex on foot. And for reasons Baserap couldn’t figure, his bosses assigned the most junior, inexperienced officers to the most remote perimeter entry points, the first line of defense if plotters wanted to infiltrate the complex. The most senior posts were the ones closest to the house.
Officer Baserap also saw that the sinking morale among the officers of the Uniformed Division was fraying the security net. Agents, with higher pay and profiles, occupied all the senior positions in the agency and controlled the Service. Their jobs were more coveted and required a college degree and a more rigorous screening by senior agents. They commanded respect. But the less-noticed part of the Secret Service were people like him, the lower-ranking officers, who were feeling taken for granted, tired, and beaten down. They had the typical guard roles, manning security posts at the White House, the vice president’s residence, and presidential events. The Service leadership took away officers’ vacation days on a whim and regularly forced them into grueling “short change” shifts. On top of the bad hours, officers were often treated dismissively, with agents issuing curt orders and calling them “box trolls” after the boxlike sheds in which they stood watch on the White House grounds.
In their draining hamster wheel of schedules, officers would routinely work a full eight-hour afternoon shift from 2:30 until 10:30 p.m., drive an hour to the faraway suburbs where they could afford to live, catch four or five hours’ sleep, and then be required to report for duty at 6:30 the next morning. Their next shift could easily be the midnight shift that started later that same day. Such a schedule required an officer to stay alert for twenty-four out of forty hours. The result was predictable. Officers felt mistreated, as if they were faceless factory workers on an assembly line.
* * *
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IN THE SUMMER and fall of 2005, officers were resigning faster than new ones could be hired and trained. In the worst month, thirty officers left—an average of one resignation a day. It amped up the exhaustion of those left on the job and further reduced the average experience level on each shift. Now Baserap felt a rush of hope. He offered to write up a few thoughts for his higher-ups, and the next day he began crafting a memo. Several friends and even his closer supervisors privately warned him not to put his thoughts in writing. And absolutely do not attach your name, they said. Your memo could make it all the way to the eighth floor—the director’s floor at Secret Service headquarters. “You don’t want to get a reputation as a troublemaker,” Capt. Bill Vucci told Baserap.
“Everybody’s tried to tell them. For years,” one older officer warned, chuckling at Baserap’s naïveté. “It goes nowhere.”
But other officers were sick of being silent. Agents and supervisors at the time had just given a tongue-lashing to a fellow officer. His only crime was having the temerity to walk up to Director Ralph Basham at a social function and share his concerns about staff morale.
Baserap kept scribbling down his thoughts whenever he had free time. He was wary, but also excited at the chance to contribute to the Service and help fix the problems he saw after so many mindless hours at his post.
In early December, Baserap received what he considered an open invitation from the Secret Service equivalent of a four-star general. Joseph Clancy, the new number two in charge of President George W. Bush’s detail, visited the officers’ roll call in the East Wing. As the Deputy Special Agent in Charge of the detail, Clancy not only helped run the Service’s most important protective detail, he also had overall responsibility for security at the White House complex. The chief of the officers reported to him.
Clancy got his nickname, Father Joe, because he’d studied to be a priest before joining the Service, but the name stuck because he was known for delivering his counsel and advice gently. That day at roll call, Clancy told the group his door was open to their concerns. “Even though there are agents and officers, we’re all part of the same team with the same goal,” Clancy explained. “If any of you have concerns or issues, feel free to ask me. You can always come to me or Nick Trotta.”
Baserap took Clancy at his word. A few days later, on December 12, he finished typing up an email to Clancy and Trotta. In it he listed an inventory of security concerns he had been jotting down. He also revealed his fears: “I want a chance to do my job well…but I fear being a marked man if I openly criticize” leadership, he wrote.
A few days later Clancy called Baserap on his cellphone and asked him to come to his office in the Old Executive Office Building on December 22 at 5 p.m. Baserap showed up promptly at Clancy’s office in room 60. Clancy asked Baserap what precisely he was putting in his list of security concerns. Later, Clancy asked who else had seen his list. Baserap told the DSAIC he had shared his concerns with a few officers to get feedback, but he explained he would never discuss it outside the Service. Clancy asked if he could have a copy of whatever the officer had drafted. Baserap had a copy in his jacket and happily handed it over to Father Joe. “Here’s what I have,” he said. “It’s not really complete. But I’ll give you a real copy when it’s finished.”
The meeting ended cordially. In fact, for Baserap, the last seventy minutes were a rush. He really seemed interested in my ideas, Baserap thought as he shut the door and headed for home.
The compound was quiet over the Christmas holiday week; the Bush family was at Camp David for Christmas Eve and then decamped to their Crawford ranch until after New Year’s.
But on Monday, January 3, 2006, Baserap got a call from another top Service leader. He was surprised that Julia Pierson, the deputy director for protective operations, was calling him at home on his day off. Pierson, then one of the highest-ranking women in the agency, suggested they talk “off campus” and asked him to meet her at a favorite Secret Service stop: the Starbucks on G Street near headquarters. But outside the Starbucks, Pierson’s driver waved Baserap into a black Secret Service Tahoe outside. He talked with Pierson while the driver silently steered the car to a nearby parking lot.
“I thought it would be more comfortable for us to meet on neutral ground,” Pierson explained. “I received word that you have some security concerns about the White House complex, and also some concerns about your career.”
Baserap gave her the broad outline of what he had told Clancy: He had noticed White House security weaknesses and had been informally compiling them after two supervisors asked what he would improve.
“What are you hoping to do with this memo?” Pierson asked. “Where are you going with this?”
Terrorists want to get into the White House complex, Baserap said, and he believed it could be much more secure. He talked through the list that was now imprinted in his head: overworked officers, inexperienced staff placed on the hardest posts, posts that were left unmanned, failing radios, inadequate firepower, failure to wand pass holders entering the building. On the last one—the failure to wand pass holders—he shared his fear about how easily a disgruntled staffer or contractor could smuggle in a weapon or a bomb. “There is no reason why they shouldn’t be doing that,” Baserap complained. “It could be put into place in twenty-four hours.”
After thirty minutes together, Pierson thanked Baserap for his candor and dropped him off at the Chinatown Metro stop. Despite the somewhat odd circumstances, Baserap climbed down from the deputy assistant director’s truck feeling good about the exchange. “She was really receptive,” he later told his friends.
When he returned to work, Baserap soon saw a sign that Pierson had listened to his concerns. For the first time in his career, he watched a vehicle inspection team run a hand wand over the body of a person entering on Fifteenth Street. The teams had always swept trucks and cars entering the complex but hadn’t ever checked the drivers or passengers. At roll call that morning, a sergeant told officers the vehicle inspection team must always hand-wand people entering at South Park 15.
The next week, the morning of January 9, a sergeant called Baserap at his post next to the Treasury building. Clancy wanted him to come to his office at 11:30 a.m. It was important enough that the sergeant was sending another officer to relieve Baserap. Baserap cut directly across the complex and walked quickly past the posts he knew like the back of his hand: Baker 14, Alpha 1, Charlie 3, Charlie 6, Delta 10, and then to the Old Executive Office Building. This is such an honor, Baserap thought, hoping he might impress his superiors or at least win them over on some of his points.
But in room 60, Baserap found quite a different Clancy. The deputy chief of the Uniformed Division, Kevin Simpson, sat opposite Clancy’s desk, his face a deep frown as Baserap entered. On Clancy’s instructions, Baserap took a seat, then switched off his radio, turned off his cellphone, and removed his earpiece.
“Officer, is there a tape recorder or microphone in your bag?” Simpson asked. Baserap, taken aback, said no. Simpson asked him again. “Because I heard a click,” the chief said.
The only things in Baserap’s gear bag were a gas mask, a set of keys, and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. “Would you feel more comfortable if I removed my bag?” Baserap asked. Clancy and Simpson both nodded. Baserap hung his bag and jacket on a hook on the wall outside the room and returned to his seat.
“Officer, when we met in December, I gave you a considerable amount of my time,” Clancy said. “Since then, I have had a chance to read your report about the security vulnerabilities at the complex, and I have to tell you, it is completely inaccurate. Many of the things you say are simply not true.” Clancy believed Baserap was well-spoken and genuinely well-intentioned, but also very junior and a bit presumptuous to survey his fellow officers and bypass the chain of command to resolve his concerns. Clancy insisted that White House employees were always properly wanded, there was no need for two officers at posts where they now have one, and officers did not need to be swaggering around with long guns.
“This is not the Green Zone, Officer Baserap,” Clancy said. “You think you have these great ideas. But you haven’t been here long enough to know what you don’t know. You don’t have the big picture.”
Clancy continued, “You seem to believe that since you are from New York you have a higher interest in preventing another terrorist attack. Well, you don’t.”
Baserap stammered at first, explaining that many of his fellow officers shared his concerns about the complex’s security holes. Baserap searched his mind for someone whose opinion Clancy would value. He mentioned a Seal Team Six trainer who worked on drills with the Service and had recommended long guns as a critical deterrent on the perimeter.
“Long guns would cause the public to panic,” Clancy interrupted. “And we don’t do things by polls and surveys around here, Officer Baserap.”
Clancy had one key question for Baserap: Who else had he told about his concerns? Who else had seen his draft report? “Did you make additional copies of this and share it outside of the Secret Service?” Clancy asked.
“No, sir, I did not,” Baserap said. Clancy asked him two more times.
“Did you ever share this with anyone outside the Service?” Clancy says.
“Sir, I’m not sure what’s happening here,” Baserap stammered. “My intention was to share this only with my chain of command.” Baserap could not believe the turnaround. Clancy was accusing him of trying to publicize the very security flaws that Baserap was trying to flag for remediation. Clancy seemed to believe that writing down concerns constituted a threat to leak them to the public.
“Officer, you are very close to crossing the line of the disclosure clause,” Clancy warned. “And that could be grounds for dismissal. By putting your opinions on paper you have done a great disservice to the organization. If you keep pushing this and this material winds up getting out, it could be detrimental to White House security…and to you.”
With that, the meeting was over. “You may return to your post,” the DSAIC announced.
Baserap left the meeting shocked and dismayed. Over the next few days, he confided in a handful of co-workers. Some officers cursed the leadership. Others reminded Baserap they’d told him what would happen. “We’ve been trying for years,” a senior officer said. “They don’t want to hear it.”
Baserap later noticed that a tiny handful of security tweaks he had recommended—all of which had been dismissed by Clancy—were implemented almost overnight at the White House. He’d warned about unreliable communications at the South Park 17 booth. Days later he discovered a cellphone placed in the booth as backup.
The excitement Baserap once felt at playing a leading role in improving White House security turned to anger. “I got mad,” he said. “I had been treated like a common criminal and I had done nothing wrong. I was hoping to communicate the list of security risks and the culture of fear that people are afraid to speak up….They acted like I was going to go out to Pebble Beach and start handing out copies to the press.”
So on his night off, after the March 21 midnight shift’s roll call at 10:30 p.m., Baserap set off on a bold and mutinous course. He walked into the officers’ down room in the Old Executive Office Building to a secure Secret Service computer. He made a precise number of copies of a fifteen-page memo—enough for each member of his chain of command all the way up to the chief—and placed one in each of their work mailboxes. The memo documented not only the security risks he’d flagged, but the way he’d been unfairly accused and ridiculed by his superiors. Word spread quickly.
Early the next morning, a fellow officer called Baserap on his cellphone. “Dude, we read what you wrote in this memo,” his friend said. “This is amazing. It’s being circulated on all the posts”—the designated positions around the White House complex where officers were assigned to stand guard.
Baserap learned his memorandum had been copied dozens of times and shared with almost everyone on the force. Officers he’d never met were celebrating that someone had finally spoken up for the redheaded stepchildren, the officers of the Uniformed Division. Officers even gave his memo a name: the Uniformed Division Officer’s Manifesto.
