The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service by Carol Leonnig

Episode Date: June 13, 2021

Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service by Carol Leonnig NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “This is one of those books that will go down as the seminal work—the determinative work—in this field. . . . Terrifying.”—Rachel Maddow The first definitive account of the rise and fall of the Secret Service, from the Kennedy assassination to the alarming mismanagement of the Obama and Trump years, right up to the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6—by the Pulitzer Prize winner and #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of A Very Stable Genius Carol Leonnig has been reporting on the Secret Service for The Washington Post for most of the last decade, bringing to light the secrets, scandals, and shortcomings that plague the agency today—from a toxic work culture to dangerously outdated equipment to the deep resentment within the ranks at key agency leaders, who put protecting the agency’s once-hallowed image before fixing its flaws. But the Secret Service wasn’t always so troubled. The Secret Service was born in 1865, in the wake of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but its story begins in earnest in 1963, with the death of John F. Kennedy. Shocked into reform by its failure to protect the president on that fateful day in Dallas, this once-sleepy agency was radically transformed into an elite, highly trained unit that would redeem itself several times, most famously in 1981 by thwarting an assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan. But this reputation for courage and excellence would not last forever. By Barack Obama’s presidency, the once-proud Secret Service was running on fumes and beset by mistakes and alarming lapses in judgment: break-ins at the White House, an armed gunman firing into the windows of the residence while confused agents stood by, and a massive prostitution scandal among agents in Cartagena, to name just a few. With Donald Trump’s arrival, a series of promised reforms were cast aside, as a president disdainful of public service instead abused the Secret Service to rack up political and personal gains. To explore these problems in the ranks, Leonnig interviewed dozens of current and former agents, government officials, and whistleblowers who put their jobs on the line to speak out about a hobbled agency that’s in desperate need of reform. “I will be forever grateful to them for risking their careers,” she writes, “not because they wanted to share tantalizing gossip about presidents and their families, but because they know that the Service is broken and needs fixing. By telling their story, they hope to revive the Service they love.” About Carol Leonnig Carol Leonnig is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and veteran investigative reporter at the Washington Post. She is the author of "A Very Stable Genius", a jaw-dropping insiders' account of Donald Trump's presidency, with her co-author Philip Rucker, to be published Jan. 21, 2020. In her work as a journalist, Leonnig has uncovered politicians' misconduct, revealed striking examples of government corruption, abuse and incompetence, and covered four presidential administrations. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, she lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and two daughters.

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It's free if they got that Prime thing with that Jeff Bezos guy. Anyway, guys, speaking of Jeff Bezos, we have a award-winning, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post author on the show. Interesting how I did that segue. Is that cool, Carol?

Yeah, any way you can get Bezos into the sentence. Good job. Do we both get a bonus for that? I don't know. I don't work for you. Anyway, I'm sorry, Carol. I digress. So go to youtube.com for this, Chris Voss. See the video version of this. Go to csngoodreads.com for this, Chris Voss. See the video version of this. Go to see us on goodreads.com for this. Chris Voss, the group's on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and all that good stuff. And now we'll be getting to Carol Lennig. Of course, she's written this extraordinary new book that everyone's talking about. It's on all the news wires, and it's just got the buzz of Washington. She's uncovered lots of different issues with the Secret Service. The book is called Zero Fail, The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service by Carol Lennig.

And May 18th, this baby just came right out onto print. So you'll be able to order it up and everything else. And you'll be able to get that book wherever fine bookstores are sold selling books, as it were. Carol is a national investigative reporter at the Washington Post, where she has worked since 2000. She's a three-time, count them all, Pulitzer Prize winner and co-author of the New York Times number one bestseller, A Very Stable Genius. She is also an on-air contributor to NBC News and MSNBC. Welcome to the show, Carol. How are you? I'm doing great, Chris. I'm excited for

this conversation. I'm excited to have you. Thank you. It's an honor. Congratulations on the book. And I don't know whether I should apologize or hopefully you enjoyed the crazy front end that we just improv there. So any excitement level that you have for the book or for your audience is a good thing. You're not going to get that kind of intro on MSNBC. I'm just saying. But Rachel Mano is probably a little more professional than I am. So welcome to the show.

Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. I'm just Carol Lennig on Twitter. So it runs all together, Carol Lennig, L-E-N-I-G. And that's the most common way to find me. Some people find me on facebook too i have a facebook page with my name and i even have instagram mostly because my kids talked me into it books do well on instagram we have three accounts over there yeah yeah people yeah books and bikinis evidently i and i've told them not look good in one so they won't let me post to those to

do the thing anymore. So what motivated you? You've written a lot of great books. In fact, we were reaching out to you guys trying to get you and your co-author on A Very Stable Genius. What made you decide to write this particular book? It's funny. It's a funny story because I actually wrote this book before Phil and I embarked on writing about Donald Trump and that presidency. I wrote most of it. Let me put it that way. In 2012, I like accidentally fell into the business of covering the Secret Service. It was

total, like, that's not a beat people cover in DC. And Washington White House reporters, they know the Secret Service agents as basically like the either really funny or the really angry guys. If you don't bring your bags to the plane on time when you're traveling with the president. They don't cover the agency, but they had this sort of humiliating once-in-a-century scandal, which was that a bunch of agents were in Cartagena for a presidential visit there to South America, and they got caught getting hammered while this presidential trip. They're supposed to be getting the town ready for the president getting his security plans laid out but instead they were partying hard

hiring prostitutes bringing them back to their hotel rooms and when they got busted i was asked by my editors to try to piece together what in the world happened. And if this happened, did it happen before? It was such a big deal. So anyway, I started working on that. But then I found out there was something far more horrifying, which was that a lot of the agents I got to know and respect who were sources on that Cartagena story, they were worried about something much bigger, which was that they thought the president would be killed on their watch. They thought the agency was slipping. They thought the chinks in the armor were getting bigger and bigger. And correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the part of that story,

they didn't want to pay the hookers, so the government had to step in or something? The mess really hit the fan when one of the agents seemed to be surprised at the price tag that the woman wanted when they woke up in the morning. I think he has told his friends he didn't realize she was a prostitute because he had drunk a lot of vodka the night before. He thought she was just coming with him to his room, but she had reminded him several times that she needed a gift and she had told him the number, the dollar figure, but I think something was lost in translation and he didn't realize that she wanted this much money and basically pushed her out the door. And when he did that morning, hustle her out and refused to pay

her, you know, sex work is a legal registered business and she had rights and her rights included going to the police and complaining. And that, that triggered a whole new mess of problems. That was an extraordinary story. Just the level of dumbness that anyway, there's just the, but it, like you say, it covered like a kind of an iceberg thing. I think it was for you in realizing there was a whole lot more problems beneath the surface. Absolutely. And I, even though there have been these really embarrassing scandals that I ended up mostly breaking and writing because I got to know so many people on the beat, I met some people that were really breathtakingly dedicated.

Just like the kind of work they do, the sacrifices they make, they're a serious level of patriot. And I would crumple trying to deliver what they deliver. Their zero fail mission is backbreaking. It's mind numbing the things they have to prevent from happening. And they so far successfully have. Yeah, I think, wasn't Obama still like the most threatened president for assassinations of any president, I think, during his term? That's absolutely correct. Even before he was inaugurated, the threats, the death threats against him, and they were really violent, were four times what they had experienced for a previous president. Yeah, and they're asking people to step in front of a bullet. And we've seen different things

as you document your book. So it's a huge tome. It's 500 plus pages. I think if you count the back index and the notes and stuff. So tell us how you start the book out and let's lay a timeline. Could you go through a timeline timeline the history of the agency yes forgive the noise in the backyard of our house i think the most important arc about the secret service is this one some of us were alive at this time i wasn't which is cool to say i wasn't alive but uh that's one thing i wasn't alive for john f kenn Kennedy when he was killed like it was such a trauma for the nation and I've come to appreciate that from other people that are a little older than me and from my parents and everybody that I've interviewed just a trauma but it was a gut punch like nothing else for the secret service the guilt the shame it led to alcoholism suicides

in the agency because they really even though it wasn't entirely their fault, definitely believed it was their fault. And they felt they carried that weight. But the director and his deputies absolutely dug in and devoted their lives to making sure this never happened again. The next big moment for the Secret Service is when they are vindicated by this incredible rigorous training and rebuilding of the agency. Somebody tries to kill two people, try to kill Gerald Ford. One person tries to kill candidate George Wallace and succeeds in shooting him, but not killing him. That same person tried to kill Richard Nixon, did not succeed. A man tried to kill John Hinckley, trying to become famous and win the love of an actress named Jodie Foster, tried to kill Ronald Reagan and came very close to killing him.

And each of these incidents, even though there was this episodic assassination attempts, serial assassination attempts, the Secret Services methods, while imperfect, ultimately protected those lives. Ronald Reagan probably is the most dramatic example because the services, the agents' hair-trigger responses, which they now, by this time, have been trained to instantly react instead of looking over their shoulder at the sound of gunshot, which is what they did in Daly Plaza in Dallas, Texas, in 1963 with Kennedy. Instead of that, no, the sound, the crack of gunfire from John Hinckley's weapon, they are instantly Tim McCarthy hurling his body upwards, throwing his chest in between the president who's behind him and Hinckley and the incoming bullets. Literally takes a bullet and spins around and falls on the ground for President Reagan. The minute that crack of gunfire is heard,

has his hand on the president's shoulder and shoves him so hard into the back of the limousine floor that Reagan thinks his ribs have been broken. And also, I think, hurts his jaw. But that's another story. The third most important moment in the Secret Service's history is 9-11, because some things went really well and were heroic on the part of the Secret Service. And some things were just failure of imagination, mistakes, failure to see how to protect the president and the White House in the case of that attack. You could say everyone in the country is guilty of having failed to envision that attack. But it's an important moment because the Secret Service after that, it should have gotten all these incredible tools and technology and more people to, again, boost its defenses

for the White House and the president. It gets less. And all these other big agencies in the Department of Homeland Security that protect our airlines, our skies, our borders. They get billions of dollars, but the Secret Service just begins this slow slide of getting less and less, and its mission only gets bigger, and eventually it's just treading water and can barely do the job. One of the things that sent a chill down my spine

was when you talked about how the Secret Service driver for John F. Kennedy actually braked, giving John Wilkes Booth more time to fire two more shots off. That was extraordinary. It is extraordinary. And it is amazing because he knows that he's contributed to the death of the president. It doesn't mean that Kennedy wouldn't have been successfully fatally shot by

Hinkley, forgive me, by Oswald that day. It's just that the break gives the shooter more chance, increases their chance of success. And cover and evacuate is the way the Secret Service operates now. Again, first sign of threat, they move so quickly to get the president the heck out of there. And Jackie Kennedy actually fixated on the point you just raised, Chris, because she tells someone privately, a friend of hers, that she does hold that agent, that driver, responsible. Yeah, most definitely. That was chilling to just read.

The whole failure breakdown of that, printing them. Here's where he's going to be going. Here's the buildings that will be good to see very well. It's like, what the hell? And then I guess they were partying the night before, the Secret Service agents. They were. And that was something that also caused them a lot of guilt and shame because it was a much harder drinking era the 1960s i vaguely remember my back period and adults in my world definitely drank a lot more than people do now but these guys were basically working so hard they were just trying to blow off some steam they went to this beatnik place called the cellar and who served them didn't have a lot of clothes and the alcohol was spiked with grain alcohol the cocktails was basically juice and 190 proof and um they were looking for food but instead this is what they got and they stayed out pretty late the warren commission that investigated kennedy's

death asked a lot of questions about that that out of drinking, saying, how can a man be in his best shape to react if it's been out late, drinking or not been out late? And the director at the time defended his agents and said he didn't believe that. The difference, the life or death difference. Wow. You look at a lot of these different things and there's so much of a breakdown. It's almost like every time a president's been assassinated or close to an attempt, it's been a failure on a lot of different levels of things. And that's really all it takes is a catastrophic failure where everything goes wrong at the wrong moment.

So true. I think that's what really propelled me forward in writing the longer history, is because agents were, in today's world, describing to me these sort of red flags. Okay, we had a jumper get in 2014. We had a jumper get into the White House in 2017, because some sensors and alarms weren't working. And we couldn't find him for 17 minutes. Really? An 18-acre compound that's supposed to be the most secure in the world, and you couldn't find a guy who jumped over the fence for 17 minutes and ended up jiggling the east door of the mansion

and walking around to the south side where there's a million doors to get into the residence. These serial failures of security reminded them of the kind of serial problems and stretch-toothed thin quality that the service experienced before Kennedy was killed. And so that comparison of, like, red flags before one assassination made them tell this story to say,

are we going to wait for a catastrophe before we do something? Are we going to just keep watching these red flags flare? Are we just going to keep seeing these security failures until we, until something terrible happens? It's quite extraordinary. I hope your book maybe prevents some things from happening in the future. So you started the book, you talk, you start out, you have the secret services birth, you go through several different administrations from Kennedy to Nixon, Ford to Clinton. There was some interesting stories you told about between John Kennedy and Bill Clinton and their

philandering in the White House and the Secret Service having to deal with them. And I think there was a story I heard you tell about Hillary Clinton and how I guess someone leaked something or other and she wasn't too happy about it. And they're an extraordinary relationship. Each of these presidents has with the Secret Service, sometimes love and sometimes hate. Oh, I like the way you put that. It's true that there are love affairs and affection between the Secret Service. And I didn't mean that as a pun. There are actual love affairs between agents and presidents in the sense of the agency loved the Bushes. That really felt respected by them. because he had a lifetime in public service and because he was you know essentially an american royal dynasty that he was used to having essentially help and he was used to treating them like

family and experts and there's a famous line where a group is meeting with george hw bush in the white house and he says i I'm sorry, I'm going to have to cut short our meeting. The Secret Service is calling me. They call, I come. He does what they say. And that's a nice feeling if you're a person giving and sacrificing the amount that you are of your own life to protect a president's life. There have been a lot of tensions between presidents and the Secret Service. The Clintons, it was particularly tense because in those early days, the Clintons were distrustful of the Secret Service detail they were assigned and believed that group, they rightly believed, that group was very fond

of the departing Bushes and concerned that they weren't so careful with the private moments of the Clintons. A story eventually leaks that Mrs. Clinton has thrown a lamp at her husband during an argument in the White House. I don't know if she did throw a lamp or not. I know the story was reported and she believed that it came from the White House and banished them to the second floor, forgive me, to the first floor, further away from the residents to maintain more privacy. Problem is, agents believe if you're being pushed away from the principal, they're more in danger because it's going to take you longer to cover and evacuate them in an emergency.

Yeah, and I think they knew about the Monica Lewinsky thing, didn't they? Some of them definitely knew that a very pretty Bucks intern was spending a lot of time coming to the White House, especially oddly on Saturdays. And oftentimes the president's secretary was letting her in and coming out to the gate to avoid logging in the White House official records that this person was entering the building. And that was curious to them. And remember, Secret Service officers and agents who protect the president in the White House, they have some time to gossip on their downtime.

When the president's in the Oval Office, they have some time to gossip on their downtime. When the president's in the Oval Office, they have a little bit of time. And it was a topic of discussion among them. Ultimately, a huge Supreme Court battle over this. Some Secret Service officers and agents were forced to testify about what they saw and to provide information that proved that Clinton had lied when he said he'd never spent any time alone with Mrs. Lewinsky. Ms. Lewinsky. Yeah. I think the same is true of Trump and Melania.

They never spent any time together in the White House. Anyway, that piece of me is funny. So this is really cool. You go through the whole history of all the presidents. You cover the Obama years, the Trump years, and the Bush years in your chapters. And you're really thorough in what goes into it and everything else. What were some other stories that stuck out in you in the book that you think readers really like?

Just sticking on Clinton for one moment. One thing that's new that I learned in my book, I think this is salacious, but for the agents, it was really a security issue. When he was a candidate and the nominee for president and on his way to winning the election, the polls showed that he was way ahead of President Bush, who was suffering in a bad economy at the time. He was the presidential nominee, he was still governor of Arkansas, and agents were responsible for protecting him. They arrive, a new detail arrives to protect him at the YMCA in Little Rock, which is where he would jog pretty regularly in the mornings, and then he would be said to be working out and getting a shower, and then he'd go to

McDonald's, and then go get driven back to the governor's mansion and do some work. But the agents found that when they got there, they were told not to go into the room where he was, into the building. They were surprised. Agents are used to either screening the people that are with them, or physically being with the president, and in this case, the the candidate and they asked their bosses what's going on and the supervisor said give it a rest but it turned out supervisor said look if you're not going to let it go i'm just going to tell you he's in there with a woman and this really bothered the agents because they weren't really making a decision about whether Clinton should or shouldn't be meeting with women in a YMCA or having a relationship outside his marriage, which he obviously had been having.

What they were upset about was they were responsible professionally for what was going on the other side of that door. They're supposed to protect a guy who's about to become president, and they can't do that from this side of that door. They're supposed to protect a guy who's about to become president, and they can't do that from this side of the door. Yeah, that's quite extraordinary. And they have the same problem with John F. Kennedy, people coming by, just wandering by. I remember what was the famous pool scene, the film where he's in the pool with all these women,

and you're just like, yeah, something's up there. I don't know what's going on. Yeah. You know, another story something's up there. I don't know what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. You know that another story that's a little more, whoops, a little more current is. I just want to give like a heroic story, which is from nine 11. The agency doesn't have a lot of women agents,

but there was one I learned something about. Women are a little bit hazed in the Secret Service. It's act like one of the guys to get along. There are many women, there are not very many women supervisors. And this one woman who had become the number two on the president's detail, this was when George W. Bush was president on 9-11. She learns that belatedly unfortunately the message got delayed but she learns as does the director the white house that two planes are inbound for washington minutes after the second tower has been hit that morning and those two planes are not talking to the FAA. And the FAA liaison to the Secret Service is essentially saying, they're coming towards Washington, we have to presume

they're hijacked, and their missiles intent on hitting something in downtown Washington. So of course, the White House is presumed to be a target. So is the Capitol. She gets that message, and the head of the detail, who happens to be in the seat that day and all the other deputies agree that they are going to need to go to the presidential bunker underground under the White House to meet with the vice president and continue to run the government essentially underground on a terrible day, a frightening day when many people are wondering what's next. She knows that she can't go to the basement. She can't go to the bunker underground because the communications nerve center for the secret service is on a roof at the old executive office building looming over the white house. It's, it didn't occur to me until later as I read more about her story her story, Becky Edinger, she was going on a death mission.

If a plane was going to come and hit the White House command center, she was going to be devastated and blown through. But she went there because she knew that was where she had to go to communicate with all the rest of the Secret Service officers and agents and make sure they were briefed on what was happening. Make sure that nerve center was operational. About five minutes before a plane ultimately hits the Pentagon, a plane is seen coming over the treetops in downtown Washington. She gets an alert at the command center. They're all the people with her in that center. And she tells them, no judgment. If any of you want to leave, now's the time.

Wow. Do, you know, go. We understand. Everybody's got families. No judgment. Nobody leaves. Wow. And they brace for impact.

Wow. And a group of officers scurry up to the rooftop of the White House, also a place that's a death mission if the plane's for them. But they go there to help see what's happening. And they see the, in a few seconds more, they see the flames and the smoke coming from across the Potomac because the plane has actually come back, doubled back and hit the Pentagon. Wow. And that was flight 93, United? I think that's right. I unfortunately confuse the flight sometimes, but yeah, it's the one that hits the Pentagon.

Yeah. Oh, there you go. I think 93 crashed in Pennsylvania. Yeah, that's right. That was in Pennsylvania. Yeah, there you go. I think 93 crashed in Pennsylvania. Yeah, that's right. That was in Pennsylvania. Yeah, what an extraordinary thing. I think they have an anti-aircraft gun up there now, don't they? On top of the White House? I think that's classified.

Sorry, my bad. No, it's quite interesting, all the different stories you mapped this out. What do we need to do with the Secret Service to get the funding it does and the amount of stuff? I was really surprised, too. You cover how much they do. Like, they're covering NFL games and stuff. It seems like maybe their purview should just be the asset, if you will. Yeah, yeah.

A lot of people agree with you there. And you've discerned an important part of the book. I wrote it because all these agents are worried about what's going to happen if they keep treading water like this, if they keep having a larger and larger mission without the souped up technology and special tools they need. They're stuck in the 1900s, not the 21st century, if they keep having additional missions. Everybody that you and I are talking to right now, most of them think that the Secret Service protects the president, the vice president, and their family. No, the Secret Service protects 42 people. It's presidential grandchildren and stepchildren, presidential grandchildren. It protects cabinet members. It protects national security officials you don't know the names of. They protect Super Bowls and Olympics because they

were put in charge of events that would likely be the targets of terror where people gather. Of course, they're in charge of protecting inaugurations and other special events like that, but that makes sense. They're also in charge of their legacy mission, which was the reason they were created in the 1860s in the first place, which was to root out counterfeit money. And now they investigate cyber crimes and hacking. They were the first agency to realize that Russia, Russian intelligence agents, had hacked the White House non-classified email system. So their mission is huge and nothing about their tools or their budget has kept pace with that. official I interviewed said they were just pleading for somebody to reduce the size of their mission, but give them what they need to do that mission. Because as they said,

right now they cannot do what they're assigned to do. One other surprising aspect of your book that I hadn't heard about is that they really, they really took a shine to Donald Trump and his, and the whole masculine and the whole law thing and law and order thing. And, and actually we're signaling and sometimes talking about support for this president and pushing through that barrier of maybe where they should have stayed at arm's length is, do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

So the service, the secret service has also prided itself on being above politics. The line that the agents use is the people elect them, we just protect them. And it's got a nice sing-songy way about it, but it's really serious. And the seriousness is they're not rooting for any particular party. They're not rooting for any particular president. What they're trying to do is make sure the democracy is stable and sure by protecting the office and there have been times when they've edged a little towards being for a president as they did when

they loved george hw bush as they did when they some group of them were working for nixon a law and order president by the way but they really crossed a line that shocked many of the alumni and Secret Service supervisors and formers that I interviewed when Donald Trump came along, because they let the agency be used as a political tool, a tool at campaign rallies while COVID was spiking around the country, which put a lot of officers and agents out of commission. Either they contracted COVID or they had to quarantine because they were exposed. It also was deployed to remove, forcibly remove, peaceful protesters from outside the White House who were protesting the killing of George Floyd in June of 2020. And the Secret Service is extremely well versed in the rights of protesters and their First Amendment rights to assemble,

because that's what they deal with on the White House front steps every day. So this shocked them to have to beat these people with rubber bullets and shields and tear gas or the chemical version of tear gas. The service also, the Presidential Protection Division got very close to Donald Trump, liked his message, liked his conservative agenda, which is not shocking. Most law enforcement agencies trend a little conservative, but this went a little too far, even by that sort of law enforcement standard. Agents on the protective detail and supervisors in the agency, both on social media to promote the conspiracy theory that the election was rigged, to suggest that Donald Trump had been denied his rightful second term, and to question whether Biden was legitimately

elected. One Secret Service supervisor even said, even called the rioters on January 6th patriots and cheered. That was a little chilling to their colleagues who shared that information with me and to their former alumni network who wondered what was going on. You can't protect democracy if you're questioning whether the current president-elect is a legitimate elected president. Yeah, that's how we end up in a whole sort of coup situation, too. If you get either the military to rally around them or the Secret Service to protect them, and you're like, we were all sitting around going, I don't know, they're either going to drag them out of the office,

or they're going to camp out and call it a regime holdout or something, and be like, no, we're not leaving the Secret Service here and you'll have to take us too if you want us. I was starting to really wonder there at those last days how that was going to go down. Rosa Brooks wrote in the Washington Post about the frat boy culture of the Secret Service. She entitled the thing. Is that one of the issues that maybe needs to be addressed in the Secret Service? Do they need more women, less of the frat boy culture? Maybe there'll be less hookers not getting paid or something. I think from our conversation that I think that most of the agents and officers are incredibly

dedicated, responsible people. But there is a subset of the Secret Service that parties hard, they work hard, and so they decide that they need to party hard. And there's been a long tradition that, you know, Director Mark Sullivan tried to deny in his congressional testimony after the whole Cartagena scandal. But it's been going on for years of agents thinking they could live a double life on the road. being a handsome, trim presidential detail agent was that you were going to have a lot of women in different courts and you were going to get to party when the president's planes wheels went up. When he's not here, we're going to have some downtime and some fun. The set of the Secret Service has used the secrecy and the lack of transparency of the agency to abuse that cover and to take advantage. And we have to do something about that because if you're bringing prostitutes back to your room and you can't remember their names the next day then as the mission the zero fail mission to protect the president who's arriving that afternoon

yeah these guys are exemplary heroes in what they do and the mission they have to stand in front of those bullets as planes are coming in. Yet the one thing that I thought of, though, when you had been telling the story of the hookers during the Obama administration, was that was the only time they were caught. That's right. Now, my book, I could steer you to the correct pages, but my book goes into a lot of detail about all the times they weren't caught. Yeah. All the times that something nearly identical or worse had been going on. And one thing that's funny is the director tells people that he's shocked that gambling is going on in the casino. But just weeks earlier, the service had been alerted to a member

of the president's detail who'd been using presidential trips to hook up with couples that were strangers. That was his thing. Just here before Cartagena, an agent on a trip with Obama through Asia, several country tour, got so drunk in a brothel and didn't emerge for so long that they had to leave him behind and they had to go to great extent, a great effort to replace him. He had a special skill set for the trip and they had to leave a supervisor behind because they found it dangerous to leave an agent behind in a you know random asian country for all of this there is a series of trips that that that agent that we talked about who refused to pay the prostitute he later admitted under questioning he had done this in italy he had done this in russia he had done this in Ireland. So not exactly a one-off.

As soon as I heard the story, I'm like, yeah, this has happened before. This is just the time they got caught. So with January 6th, was that under their security purview of the Secret Service and should it have been? It wasn't. It was the Capitol Police's show, if you will, because it was their property, their complex, their security protocols. The Secret Service did have a role there that day, however, because they were responsible for Vice President Pence. which we report a little bit in the pages of the Washington Post, and which I also mentioned in Zero Fail in the ending of the epilogue. But those agents were also pretty heroic because they scurry and get Pence off the Senate floor, just as rioters are charging through a window on the west side of the building. And nobody thought the windows and doors could be crushed through, but they were. And the agents scurry, get Pence, his wife,

his daughter, his brother, and two of his staffers into a hideaway office seconds before rioters come up to the second floor landing where they crossed in front of the Senate chamber to get out. And the detail leader for Vice President Pence is pretty concerned about the safety, even when they're in that locked highway. And he basically comes to Pence three times and says, we got to get out of here. I got to get you out of here. Pence turns him down two times. And the third time says, there's no, the detail leader says, I'm not giving you a choice. We are going.

It's not safe. Wow. So they have a job that day. It's quite extraordinary. These guys, I do feel baffled. They should be able to blow off some steam. What is interesting, though, is we worry about who sleeps with the president or who sleeps with politicians, or maybe might be having affairs if they're not sleeping with them, because we're concerned about being compromised and compromise, as Russians like to say, our former president Putin used to

like to say. There's concern for that, but yet these guys have access to the principle, the asset, whatever you call it, and yet they're running around with compromised security, maybe, possibly? That's a concern, isn't it? It absolutely is a concern. And to your earlier point, Chris, about, oh, I wonder if this must have happened before, Secret Service agents, almost all of them have a top-secret security clearance. So like an intelligence officer, right?

They're handling some of the most secure things you can deal with. How we prevent a nuclear attack on the president, what we do in the case of a nuclear attack, where the president goes, where we store the president in case of an anthrax, a release, all these things are so secret and so important that they be kept secret because we don't want our enemies knowing how to get the president or what our plans are for protecting him. But in the case of the nature that I describe in the book, after Cartagena blows up in the Secret Service's face, there is a top supervisor on President Obama's detail who has been living a double life. And that double life has meant that he's been lying

on national security clearance interviews. In those interviews, you're supposed to tell immediately if you had any contact with any foreign nationals for exactly the reason you mentioned, compromise. A foreign government could use any kind of tool, including a woman, to try to get access to the president or presidential security information. So you're supposed to at least notify your employer about this kind of contact. This agent had not done it for years, as many as 15 years. Holy crap. Had not been honest on, you know, a pretty important security form. When he was found out, he was so upset and so despondent.

He killed himself. Wow. Because being a Secret Service agent was he killed himself. Wow. Because being a Secret Service agent was everything to him. Yeah. The secret that he kept was too off his face. Wow. It's chilling.

It's heartbreaking. And hopefully your book sets forth. More people in Congress will look at it and give them better funding, maybe a narrow purview. We think, I think most Americans think of the Secret Service as a bunch of heroes. They're vaulted in movies and everything. Clint Eastwood, I think, still works for them. I don't know. From that famous movie. But anything more we should, you want to plug out on the book before we go?

I would just say, I hope President Biden listens to the agents who've risked their careers. Some of them lost their jobs for talking to me. I hope he listens to their sort of call, their alarm. They're trying to ring through me, the chinks in the armor of the Secret Service. There's always been this tension between presidents and the Secret Service that protects them. And the tension is the president doesn't really want to look like he needs protection. And the president doesn't really want to spend money on that because it looks like it's all for him. It looks indulgent. It looks wasteful. And presidents need to realize that these are public servants who've given so much at the office

to deliver on this mission. Let them do it properly. Don't think about it as something that is potentially politically embarrassing to you. Think of it as an agency that serves a public mission for our democracy and needs the tools to do the job. Yeah. And the last thing we need is the horror of another John F. Kennedy or something like that, where the nation mourns and I think we're still healing from 9-11 and being open for that extraordinary event and stuff. Wonderful book, huge tome. Congratulations, Carol, on that. Give us your plugs so people can order the book up and learn where to find you better on the internet. I'm Carol Lennig, which, on that. Give us your plug so people can order the book up and learn where to find you better on the internet.

I'm Carol Lennig, which is on Twitter, Carol Lennig, all one word. I am at the Washington Post. If you type in my name into Google, you'll quickly find my stories at the post. And Zero Fail is published by Random House. I've loved working with them. And you can buy it on any of your independent bookstores. You can buy it on Amazon,

your choice. I think it's a pretty good father's day book. I've heard from a couple of fathers that they are enjoying it. If you're a buff, a history buff, you'll enjoy this. It's a history book. It's also a little bit of a thriller.

It's got a little bit of R rated. Keep that in mind. Salacious stories from the secret service who do you see is uh you see anybody in the movie for this i don't know christian bale i'm thinking christian bale somewhere so no clint eastwood this time around i i think he did it he's done it already mr eastwood is 90 or something i was reading 1995 or something god bless him reading 90, 95 or something. God bless him. So there you go.

Thank you very much for coming on the show, Carol. We certainly appreciate it. Thanks for spending the time and sharing your insight in this brilliant book that you've written. Thank you. Chris, thanks for the great questions. It was really fun to talk to you. Thank you very much.

Check it out, guys. Zero Fail, The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service. Just set on hardcover and you can get it in audiobook and Kindle, too, if you want. May 18th, 2021 just came out. You want to be the first one to pick it up. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss. See all the videos we have there.

Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss. All the groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those different places you can see us. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. Be good to each other. And we'll see you guys next time.