Secret Service, Meet KGB

Few things generate overreaction as much as the applied forces of media and political attention during an election year. Although the focus on this situation has now shifted off the front page, there are signs that one institutional reaction to the Secret Service faux pas in Columbia may be setting a bad example for security and management in general.

What form is that reaction taking that is so objectionable? According to one report that apparently raised no public eyebrows, the solution to keeping Secret Service jump teams from distracting themselves indiscreetly with coin-operated consorts when on advance travel in preparation for presidential visits abroad is to commission a new set of government employees to watch them. (Details at http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/02/politics/secret-service/) Secret Service team, meet your new zampolit, a KGB-assigned political officer there to watch and report. (For history on this position, which even pre-dated the KGB when introduced into the Soviet military, see http://www.mvep.org/zampolit.htm )

In other words, rather than address a management problem through proper training and supervision, political panjandrums prefer to saddle Secret Service agents with a hated sentinel whose only ultimate effect will be to carry out painstaking and pain-giving witch hunts over real or embroidered distractions. The hated sentinel only has two achievable alternatives. Either become a permanent, traveling hemorrhoid, or go through the motions and feed the new bureaucracy with satisfying but innocuous reports, thereby ingratiating oneself with the people one is supposed to watch. Regardless of which alternative the watcher ultimately selects, the net result is to create an environment of deception.

If the newly embedded zampolit becomes a conscientious chronicler of Secret Service movements, the watched start hiding even innocuous activities from the watcher – particularly if they have reason to fear being maligned. If, instead, the watcher goes native and merely goes through the motions of reporting, then watcher turns deceiver. Either way, at least some energy that should be focused on protecting the president ultimately gets diverted into pro forma exercises that recall the kind of reports that KGB political officers would routinely turn in on everything from submarine commanders to research scientists that they were assigned to monitor. And for every report, there must also exist an audience, someone to read it, assess it, file it, and make judgments on it that will affect careers. In time, this means that advancement of Secret Service agents will come to depend, in some measure, on image management. Some of this may be appropriate for any position of responsibility. If, however, this criterion becomes dispositive or unduly magnified to an inordinate extent, protective details of the future will be chosen for how innocuous their members appear to the assigned watcher instead of how effective they are at keeping a traveling president alive.

With any luck, the introduction of the KGB zampolit into a traveling Secret Service team will vanish as quietly as it was conceived, escaping notice as media attention turns to another act in the political circus of this election year. Otherwise, a permanently embedded distraction will likely undermine Secret Service jump teams much more than under controlled libidos. As Hippocrates observed long ago, there are some remedies that are worse than the disease.

-- Nick Catrantzos