WASHINGTON – The Secret Service on Wednesday announced the departure of three employees connected to a prostitution scandal last week involving members of President Obama’s security detail who were in Cartagena, Colombia.

As the agency tried to manage the fallout from the embarrassing episode, it said in a statement that one agent is expected to resign and another, a supervisor, intends to retire. A third, also a supervisor, has been recommended for firing but will have an opportunity to appeal, officials said.

In all, 11 Secret Service employees — either agents or staff members of the agency’s uniformed division — and 10 military personnel are suspected of being involved in a night of carousing that included heavy drinking, visits to strip clubs and prostitutes on April 11, two nights before Obama was to arrive in the town of Cartagena for an international summit.

The agency and the Defense Department are each investigating the alleged misconduct, and whether any classified information was compromised, two U.S. officials told Bloomberg News.

Authorities are checking identities of the women and whether they may have been recruited by a foreign intelligence service or a group with hostile intentions, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the inquiry is confidential.

Investigators haven’t discovered that any of the women had ties to any hostile groups or governments, said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King, R-N.Y., in an interview. King said he was briefed by the Secret Service on the probe.

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Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told reporters she will ask Mark Sullivan, director of the Secret Service, whether such incidents had occurred previously. She told Bloomberg News she wants the committee to hold a hearing on the episode.

“I find this to be so appalling,” Collins said. “I can’t help but think: What if the women involved had been spies? What if they’d been members of the drug cartel? What if they’d planted equipment or eavesdropping devices?”

The remaining eight Secret Service personnel are on administrative leave, and their top-secret security clearances are suspended. The military has returned its service members to their home bases.

“We demand that all of our employees adhere to the highest professional and ethical standards and are committed to a full review of this matter,” the Secret Service said in a statement.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on homeland security, called the men’s alleged misbehavior a “gross violation of public trust.”

The allegations — and negative publicity — have deeply angered rank-and-file members of the Secret Service, severely lowering morale at an agency already struggling to overcome deep budget cuts in recent years.

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In interviews, current and former agents said they are particularly outraged by the alleged involvement of the two senior supervisors, both of whom have two decades of experience and were sent on the trip to oversee less-experienced team members.

“I was really disappointed. I’ve learned a lot from both of these guys,” said one agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters. “I was surprised they were involved.”

Those familiar with details of the investigation said that the two supervisors were sent to Cartagena as leaders of Secret Service “jump teams,” squads made up of several dozen special agents and uniformed officers that are deployed to a site in the days before the president arrives.

Several of the agents reportedly were part of the elite counterassault team, which reports to the special operations division, not the presidential protective detail. The rest were uniformed officers who work with bomb-sniffing dogs or magnetometers.

When members of the group arrived in Cartagena, they joined an advance team that had been on the ground for two weeks.

But for the Secret Service agents and officers on the car planes, who were among the last to arrive, there wasn’t a lot to do before Obama showed up, according to people familiar with the trip. The advance team had developed a plan, and it would be up to the car-plane guys to implement it once Air Force One touched down.

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“That may be one reason these guys felt they were not on duty until the president arrived,” said a retired agent who has been heavily involved in Secret Service training over the years. “They just didn’t have anything to do.”

On the night of April 11, at least some of the men spent time at the Pleyclub, a strip club where they paid for the services of at least two women, according to people in Cartagena who are familiar with details of the evening. They took the women back to the Hotel Caribe, where the advance team was staying. All 21 Secret Service and military personnel are suspected of having had women in their rooms that night. Prostitution is legal in Colombia but agency rules prohibit employees from engaging in immoral conduct.

The following morning, however, one of the agents got into a dispute with one of the women over payment, drawing the attention of the hotel staff and Colombian police, who reported the incident to the U.S. Embassy.

The Secret Service has a $1.5 billion budget, 3,500 agents and 1,400 uniformed officers.

 


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