A Secret Side to the Secret Service

Secret service officers learning to protect the president spend hours inside "shoot houses" on the agency's training grounds in Beltsville, Md. On the outside, the buildings are made up to look like embassies or government offices. Inside, they resemble movie soundstages—big, empty spaces with changeable scenery where trainees, armed with paintball guns, simulate harrowing situations they may face guarding the commander in chief and other VIPs.

About midday on April 16, a Secret Service trainer unlocked a shoot house to set it up for a drill session. Officers are trained to be ready for anything when they walk inside that building. But the sergeant, who is African-American, wasn't prepared for what he saw: a noose, hanging from the railing of an overhead staircase. "It was a solid rope … about eight feet long, and the noose fell at about neck level," says a witness who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the case.

The Secret Service's response to this incident was, to say the least, cautious. The agency called in its internal-affairs unit to investigate. A white instructor at the facility admitted he'd hung the rope, and was put on paid leave. But instead of making an example of the officer to signal that racial bigotry won't be tolerated, the agency quibbled over whether it was a noose at all. It "didn't resemble a traditional noose," says Renee Triplett, the agent in charge of the training center. She allows that it "could be perceived as a noose; it was certainly seen that way by my senior staff." Triplett, who is African-American, says the agency is taking the incident seriously: "Look at me, this can't be something I can condone." Yet the officer responsible, who hasn't been named by the agency, insisted he didn't mean any offense, and his superiors seem to believe him. "At this time, there is no clear indication that he had intended a racial message," says Service spokesman Eric Zahren.

The agency has been similarly defensive about racist e-mails among senior Service officials that emerged last month. One allegedly sent in 2003 was titled "Harlem Spelling Bee," which contained a list of "black" definitions of words. Another e-mail included a joke about a lynching. Service officials call the e-mails "deplorable," and the agency's director sent out a stern memo telling employees that messages sent from work e-mail accounts "must not reflect poorly" on the Service. But Deputy Assistant Director James E. Mackin says the e-mails—two dozen or so out of 20 million received and sent over 16 years—don't point to a larger problem. "Do these 10 or so e-mails represent our agency fairly? I don't think so," he says. The e-mails, officials insist, are unfortunate, isolated incidents.

But the agency has a credibility problem, in part because the e-mails emerged only after years of haggling in court. Since 2000, the Service has been battling a lawsuit brought by 10 named current and former African-American agents. Their testimony states that white superiors routinely passed them over for promotion, while less-qualified whites rose more quickly to senior positions. Some who complained, they say, found their careers stalled. The agents are seeking a maximum of $300,000 per officer in damages, but say they are mostly interested in forcing the agency to change its ways.

The Service has shown little interest in doing that. The FBI, which faced a similar discrimination lawsuit from black employees in the early 1990s, settled the case and put in place new hiring and promotion rules to avoid any appearance of racial bias. But the Secret Service has refused even to acknowledge a problem. Since 2000, the agency has strung the case along, at times allegedly resisting orders by a federal magistrate to turn over evidence in the case. Only last month did the Service at last release the racist e-mails, a few weeks after it turned over thousands of pages of records and internal memos.