Secret Service, military personnel brought as many as 21 prostitutes to Colombia hotel, investigators say
Video: A scandal involving prostitutes and Secret Service agents widened Saturday when the U.S. military confirmed five service members staying at the same hotel in Colombia may have been involved in misconduct as well.
Investigators now suspect that as many as 21 prostitutes were brought by U.S. Secret Service and military personnel to the Hotel Caribe in Cartagena, Colombia, last week during a night of carousing, a dramatic increase in the number of women previously disclosed by government officials.
Officials said that 11 Secret Service and nine military personnel are suspected of the misconduct that took place in advance of President Obama’s trip to the country for an international economic summit. Initially reports suggested that the military personnel, some of whom were confined to their rooms after the scandal broke, had merely violated curfew, while the Secret Service members had engaged with prostitutes.
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President Obama, making his first remarks about allegations that Secret Service agents hired prostitutes, said he'll be angry if they are proven true by an investigation. The agency sent 11 agents home, placing them on leave for misconduct.
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But Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said Tuesday that Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan told her that 20 to 21 women were brought to the hotel by agents and military personnel last Wednesday night. She added that Sullivan agreed to provide her and other lawmakers with regular updates on the agency’s investigation.
Two of the Secret Service personnel are senior agents paid at the top levels of the federal government’s pay scale, according to a congressional official with knowledge of the investigation. The two agents, who the official referred to as “GS-14s,” are at the top of the General Schedule, the system used to compensate federal employees. Depending on where the agents are based and other factors, they earn as much as $110,000 annually, if not more.
At his daily briefing, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Obama has “confidence” in Sullivan and will await the results of an internal investigation before weighing in further on the future of the agency.
“Sullivan acted quickly in response to this incident and he’s overseeing an investigation as we speak,” Carney said. “This incident needs to be investigated, and it is being investigated. We need to see what the investigation reveals. We’re not going to speculate about the conclusions it might reach.”
Collins, ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Sullivan told her “the most important quality for a Secret Service officer is character. If the facts prove to be as reported on this, this is an incredible lack of character and breach of security and potentially extremely serious.”
The accusations are triggering scrutiny of the culture of the Secret Service — where married agents have been heard to joke during aircraft takeoff that their motto is “wheels up, rings off” — and raising new questions at both the agency and the Pentagon about institutional oversight at the highest levels of the president’s security apparatus.
“We are embarrassed,” Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in a briefing at the Pentagon on Monday. “We let the boss down, because nobody is talking about what went down in Colombia other than this incident.”
At the same time, details emerged about the night of partying Wednesday that led to the scandal. People in Cartagena familiar with the matter said that some of the Secret Service agents paid $60 apiece to owners of the Pleyclub, a strip club in an industrial section of Cartagena, to bring at least two of the women back to the Hotel Caribe, where Obama’s advance team was staying.
The following morning, one of the women demanded an additional payment of $170, setting off a dispute with an agent that drew the attention of the hotel, the Cartagena sources said.
According to the Pleyclub’s registry at the local chamber of commerce, one of the club’s owners is named Michael Adam Hardy, whom chamber officials described as either American or Canadian.
On Monday, the Secret Service moved to revoke the top-secret security clearances of all 11 men from the agency who are under investigation, spokesman Edwin Donovan said.
The revocation of such clearances is not uncommon, he emphasized, and security clearances can be reinstated after internal investigations are complete, depending on the findings.
All of the Secret Service personnel recalled from Colombia flew commercial flights back to Miami before being sent to Washington for interviews with agency officials on Saturday, according to congressional officials familiar with the investigation. At least one additional Secret Service official was interrogated in Colombia in the hours after the incident, but it was determined this official was not involved and he was permitted to stay in the country, said the congressional officials said, who were not authorized to speak publicly on details of the investigation.
In a letter to all agency employees, Sullivan, the director, stressed that it is “imperative . . . to always act both personally and professionally in a manner that recognizes the seriousness and consequence of our mission.”
