Secret Service sex scandal: Could it lead to blackmail?

Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, voiced such concerns in the wake of the alleged prostitute incident in Colombia, which led to the recall of 11 Secret Service agents.

|
Jonathan Ernst/REUTERS
A Secret Service agent stands guard as U.S. President Barack Obama departs on the Marine One helicopter for travel to Colombia for the Summit of Americas, from the White House in Washington April 13.

If Secret Service agents did indeed cavort with prostitutes in Colombia prior to the Summit of the Americas, could their actions have led to blackmail in future years?

That’s what Rep. Darrell Issa (R) of California worried about on Monday morning in the wake of revelations about the incident, which led to the recall of 11 Secret Service agents prior to the summit’s start.

“Well, what we’re concerned about is that failure today can lead to blackmail five, 10, 20 years from now.... If you look at how you get somebody to do something wrong, you do it incrementally – something small, something bigger, something bigger,” said Representative Issa in a Monday morning appearance on "CBS This Morning.”

Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said that he’d been told the prostitution scandal was part of a pattern of behavior that included raucus “wheels-up” parties for advance personnel on foreign assignments after the departure of principal officials.

Issa’s panel “will look over the shoulder of the inspector general” as he investigates the scandal, the congressman said.

Could the agents’ actions really have left them open to blackmail? It’s true that the incident was serious one: According to news reports, it involved a “pre-wheels-down” party among advance Secret Service personnel so raucous that employees of the Hotel Caribe had to ask for quiet more than once.

It is not yet clear how many of the 11 recalled agents were involved with prostitutes or how many were married. News reports depict at least one woman who was angered about not being paid and created a disturbance in the hotel in the morning.

It is true that sexual peccadilloes have long been a means by which espionage agencies attempt to embarrass officials from target nations, forcing them into providing sensitive information.

It’s called the “honey trap” in the trade, and it may remain alive and well. The British MI5 counter-intelligence agency several years ago distributed a warning to British banks and other financial institutions that China is engaging in a wide-ranging effort to blackmail Western business people via sexual relationships, according to author Phillip Knightley.

In a 2010 article in Foreign Policy magazine, Mr. Knightley outlined the history of the honey trap, noting among other things that the notorious East German spymaster Markus Wolf had a special division of male “Romeo spies” whose jobs were to try to build relationships with lonely West German female government workers.

But is all that really applicable today? Besides the MI5 warning, the latest incident recounted by Knightley dates from 1986, when Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu was lured out of hiding in London by a female Mossad agent, leading to a 15-year prison sentence in Israel.

In today’s relatively permissive society, it may be hard to believe that a limited peccadillo could lead to treason decades hence. Perhaps Issa’s committee should focus instead on Secret Service competence in general.

On NBC's “Today" show Monday morning, author and Secret Service expert Ronald Kessler said he believed that the agency has been cutting corners for years, doing everything from letting people into White House events without requiring them to walk through metal detectors (remember the Salahis?) to ignoring guidelines for agent physical fitness.

“The agents themselves are generally brave and dedicated, but that’s not the issue.... This is the worst scandal in the history of the Secret Service,” said Mr. Kessler, referring to the Colombia incident.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Secret Service sex scandal: Could it lead to blackmail?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2012/0416/Secret-Service-sex-scandal-Could-it-lead-to-blackmail
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe