US president Barack Obama has called the secret service agents caught in a prostitution scandal during a presidential visit to Colombia two weeks ago "a couple of knuckleheads" who did not reflect the overall professionalism of the agency.
"The secret service, these guys are incredible," Mr Obama said at a taping of Jimmy Fallon's late-night show on NBC on the campus of the University of North Carolina, last night.
"They protect me, they protect our girls. A couple of knuckleheads shouldn't detract from what they do. What they were thinking, I don't know. That's why they're not there anymore."
As the secret service pursues an inquiry involving interviews with hotel maids, the women involved and the roughly 200 agents and officers assigned to Mr Obama's trip to Colombia, the investigators have pieced together a more nuanced story, complicating how the senior agency managers addressed the fates of their employees, according to two officials briefed on the findings.
The misconduct in Cartagena, Colombia, ranges from personnel - including at least one veteran supervisor - who knowingly took prostitutes to their hotel rooms to at least two employees who had encounters with women who investigators now believe were not prostitutes, one official said.
One officer, who is single, met a woman who investigators concluded was not a prostitute in a chance encounter at a bar before taking her to his room, according to the official. Another, who was cleared of serious misconduct but will face disciplinary action, had taken a woman to his hotel unaware that she was a prostitute until she demanded money, the official said.
The man refused to pay and told her to leave, the official said.
Yesterday, the secret service announced that two employees under scrutiny would remain with the agency, two had resigned and proceedings to dismiss another had begun. Of the dozen originally implicated, a total of three will remain; six have resigned; two have been dismissed; and one has retired.
The agency's investigation, which also included polygraph tests of the employees, has been conducted amid intense attention from the news media and Capitol Hill. The secret service also is looking into whether there has been a pattern of misconduct on presidential trips to foreign countries.
Some former officials questioned the rigour of the investigation into the activities of those on the Colombia trip, who included men from dog-handling, sniper and counterassault units. Glenn A Fine, the inspector general for the Department of Justice from 2000 to 2011 and now a defence lawyer in Washington, said that the fact that the investigation was conducted by the secret service - and not an inspector general - raised questions about the credibility of the findings.
"An inspector general's office, unlike the Secret Service, doesn't have an interest in the outcome," Mr Fine said. "The secret service wanted to move quickly on this to show that they were taking care of it."
The investigation was complicated by the secret service's rules of conduct that do not appear to clearly address the issue of whether their employees - most of them are male - can spend the night with a woman in a foreign country.
In forcing out some of the personnel, the agency made the case that some of the employees had jeopardised their national security clearance by their interactions with the women, according to the official. Without clearance, they could not perform their jobs.
The secret service has found no evidence that the women who spent the night with the personnel were foreign agents or that the women had access to classified information, according to government officials.
The US military has said that 11 enlisted personnel on the Colombia trip are also under investigation, and at least half of them had violated curfew. But there are no accusations of involvement with prostitutes.
In an echo of the Colombia situation, defense secretary Leon E Panetta said yesterday that three marines acting as security guards and one embassy staff member at the US embassy in Brazil had been disciplined and sent home around Christmas 2011 after they became embroiled in a dispute with a prostitute at a Brasilia nightclub.
According to an US defence department official who asked for anonymity because he was discussing sensitive information, the marines got into a car with the woman and then disagreed over her payment. In the process the marines pushed the woman out of the car, breaking her collarbone, the official said.
After a Navy investigation, all the marines were disciplined, with two being reduced in rank. The case has been well covered in the Brazilian news media, and Mr Panetta, who was in Brazil on a week-long visit to the region, was asked about it by a Brazilian reporter at the news conference.
"This incident was fully investigated and those that were involved have been punished and held accountable," Mr Panetta responded. "They are no longer in this country, they were reduced in rank and they were severely punished for that behavior. I have no tolerance for that kind of conduct."
The defence official said that the US Embassy paid the Brazilian woman's medical expenses. But the woman decided to sue the embassy after the incident in Cartagena.
NYT