Carl Shawver
10-28-2009, 06:49 PM
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In The President’s Secret Service by Ronald Kessler contains a mixture of historical retrospective of the agency, description of current agency responsibilities and activities, pointed criticism of agency management and outright gossip of the most detestable sort on the part of former and currently employed agents who should know better and should adhere to higher ethical standards than they demonstrated in contributing to this book.
Absent certain salacious disclosures and gossipy personal information about people protected by the Service, made primarily but not exclusively by unidentified agents, this book would probably experience minimal sales and most copies would quickly find their way to the remaindered tables in book stores. That explains author Kessler’s motivation for including the material. How certain agents could justify their participation in the production of this book is probably more nuanced.
Although some of the attributed stories were relatively innocuous, it was clear that many anecdotes were told for the specific purpose of embarrassing and getting even with someone who had inconvenienced or offended the agent who was recounting the event. Arguably such offenses might be considered justification for telling tales in other circumstances, but in the context of the relationship between Secret Service agents and those who they protect this is not only unprofessional, it is despicable!
A friend asked me if Secret Service agents were required to sign some document pledging not to disclose information such as that which appears in this book. My response was that in the past such pledges were not considered necessary. Personal integrity alone was considered sufficient. It appears that is no longer the case.
There are criticisms of Secret Service management sprinkled throughout the book, with particularly pointed attacks in the closing chapters. Using material directly from interviews he conducted with the Director and other headquarters officials, Kessler heartily condemns failures of leadership in the areas of adequate funding, proper personnel management, neglected refresher training, falsified training reports, exaggerated arrest statistics and inadequate protective measures.
Unattributed quotes from currently employed agents are used to document inadequate weaponry, insufficient staffing levels of protective details and serious lapses in perimeter security, particularly with regard to abandoning the use of magnetometer screening at the behest of the staff members of persons being protected.
When asked about these issues, neither the Director nor other headquarters spokesmen provided responses which Kessler considered adequate. In some cases he did not even get a response.
Although Kessler attributes many of the leadership problems of the Service to having been placed under the Department of Homeland Security, he closes out the book with a call for selecting the director of the Service from outside the agency. He says that until this is done its “culture of denial (regarding agency shortcomings) will remain intact.” He summarizes that “Agents who are concerned that the Secret Service is on the brink of a disaster say that only a director appointed from the outside can make the wholesale changes that are needed in the agency’s management and culture.”
In closing his book, Kessler casts himself as a patriot who has made public these serious shortcomings of the Secret Service as a public service in order to generate “reforms that could avert a calamity.”
The one shortcoming that he blithely overlooks, and in fact which he promotes, is the inexcusable breach of confidentiality that has taken place with the publication of information about the personal lives of the people protected by the Service which has been provided to him by those who are or once were certified to be “worthy of trust and confidence.”
Carl Shawver
.
.
.
In The President’s Secret Service by Ronald Kessler contains a mixture of historical retrospective of the agency, description of current agency responsibilities and activities, pointed criticism of agency management and outright gossip of the most detestable sort on the part of former and currently employed agents who should know better and should adhere to higher ethical standards than they demonstrated in contributing to this book.
Absent certain salacious disclosures and gossipy personal information about people protected by the Service, made primarily but not exclusively by unidentified agents, this book would probably experience minimal sales and most copies would quickly find their way to the remaindered tables in book stores. That explains author Kessler’s motivation for including the material. How certain agents could justify their participation in the production of this book is probably more nuanced.
Although some of the attributed stories were relatively innocuous, it was clear that many anecdotes were told for the specific purpose of embarrassing and getting even with someone who had inconvenienced or offended the agent who was recounting the event. Arguably such offenses might be considered justification for telling tales in other circumstances, but in the context of the relationship between Secret Service agents and those who they protect this is not only unprofessional, it is despicable!
A friend asked me if Secret Service agents were required to sign some document pledging not to disclose information such as that which appears in this book. My response was that in the past such pledges were not considered necessary. Personal integrity alone was considered sufficient. It appears that is no longer the case.
There are criticisms of Secret Service management sprinkled throughout the book, with particularly pointed attacks in the closing chapters. Using material directly from interviews he conducted with the Director and other headquarters officials, Kessler heartily condemns failures of leadership in the areas of adequate funding, proper personnel management, neglected refresher training, falsified training reports, exaggerated arrest statistics and inadequate protective measures.
Unattributed quotes from currently employed agents are used to document inadequate weaponry, insufficient staffing levels of protective details and serious lapses in perimeter security, particularly with regard to abandoning the use of magnetometer screening at the behest of the staff members of persons being protected.
When asked about these issues, neither the Director nor other headquarters spokesmen provided responses which Kessler considered adequate. In some cases he did not even get a response.
Although Kessler attributes many of the leadership problems of the Service to having been placed under the Department of Homeland Security, he closes out the book with a call for selecting the director of the Service from outside the agency. He says that until this is done its “culture of denial (regarding agency shortcomings) will remain intact.” He summarizes that “Agents who are concerned that the Secret Service is on the brink of a disaster say that only a director appointed from the outside can make the wholesale changes that are needed in the agency’s management and culture.”
In closing his book, Kessler casts himself as a patriot who has made public these serious shortcomings of the Secret Service as a public service in order to generate “reforms that could avert a calamity.”
The one shortcoming that he blithely overlooks, and in fact which he promotes, is the inexcusable breach of confidentiality that has taken place with the publication of information about the personal lives of the people protected by the Service which has been provided to him by those who are or once were certified to be “worthy of trust and confidence.”
Carl Shawver
.
.