While the Secret Service cultivated a reputation as the ramrod-straight, and straitlaced, protectors of the president — the Clint Eastwood look-alikes willing to take a bullet for their country — it was dogged by unwelcome scrutiny of misconduct. Agents were disciplined or prosecuted for sex with under-age women, drunken driving, barroom brawls, drug use and other off-duty problems that called into question their professional fitness.  But over the past decade, there have been fewer salacious headlines about the agency and a sense that its culture had changed, in part because it had more women employed. Now, the Secret Service faces a scandal over allegations of misconduct involving prostitution in Cartagena, Colombia.  “Some of the older agents would say all the time that when they would check into the hotel, they would ask, ‘Where is the bar?’ Now they say the agents today walk in and ask, ‘Where is the gym?’ “ said Daniel Bongino, a Secret Service agent from 1999 to 2011 and a Republican candidate for Senate from Maryland.  He added, “This is a national embarrassment for our government and for the Secret Service.”  On Monday, Representative Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House oversight committee, continued the criticism of the agency that he began over the weekend. In an interview on “CBS This Morning,” he said it was common for agents to have “wheels-up parties” at the end of a presidential trip but that in this case the agents had a “pre-wheels-up party.”  The 11 Secret Service employees involved have had their security clearances revoked, pending the outcome of the investigation, an agency spokesman said.  “It is still a rigorous ongoing investigation, and that is where it stands at this point,” said Max Milien, the spokesman. “This puts them, as we have stated, on administrative leave, and they cannot get onto any Secret Service facilities.”  In a memorandum to Secret Service employees, the director, Mark J. Sullivan, said the agency had “moved in a swift, decisive manner immediately after this incident was brought to our attention,” according to a copy of the memo obtained by The New York Times on Monday.  “The United States Secret Service has a long, respected history of operating with the very highest levels of professional and ethical behavior,” Mr. Sullivan said. “The overwhelming majority of the men and women in the Secret Service live up to these standards every moment of every day.”  Ronald Kessler, who wrote a book on the Secret Service, said he did not think that the type of behavior seen in Colombia was prevalent at the agency. Rather, he said it reflected a “lax attitude” toward discipline that has allowed agents to skirt rules without any serious repercussions.  “There’s a wink and a nod attitude” toward a variety of violations, he said, from problems in agents’ physical fitness tests and firearms proficiency to the Secret Service’s failure to spot gate-crashers, a Virginia couple linked to a TV reality show, at a 2009 state dinner at the White House.  Mr. Kessler said administrators had not backed up agents who tried to flag disciplinary and behavior problems. “What kind of message does that send to the guy at the gate in the White House?” he said.  Part of the problem, officials said, is that members of the Secret Service spend so much of their time traveling in large groups to foreign places.  “After work is done, people like to have a good time, and they are often in very interesting places around the world with a lot of time to kill,” said a former White House official who worked on advance teams with the Secret Service. While most do not cross the line, he said, “you are going to have people who make bad judgments.”  For years, Secret Service officials have cast problems that arose publicly as isolated episodes and attacked outside criticism as unfair and overreaching.  Agency officials were particularly incensed by a 2002 investigative article in U.S. News and World Report. It depicted an agency where partying, heavy drinking, inappropriate sexual liaisons and other off-duty problems were rampant. One agent was found to have had a sexual relationship and shared methamphetamine with a 16-year-old girl, while another agent on President Bill Clinton’s detail was said to have had an affair with a cousin of the president.  As in the case of the 2009 state dinner, the problems sometimes have spilled over into protection issues. During the agency’s security work at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, an agent shopping for souvenirs at a skateboard shop mistakenly left behind a detailed security plan for Vice President Dick Cheney and his family.  In recent years, the Secret Service has made an effort to recruit more women and minorities.  The number of women in the Secret Service “wasn’t a number we were proud of and was something we had to work on,” said W. Ralph Basham Jr., the head of the Secret Service from 2003 to 2006.  During his tenure as the head of the agency, Mr. Basham said, women made up 11 percent to 15 percent of its employees. According to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, about 25 percent of Secret Service employees in the 2010 fiscal year were women.  Mr. Basham, who is now a principal at Command Consulting Group, a security firm, said that the proportion of women in the Secret Service was not much different from other law enforcement agencies but that the amount of travel may have deterred some women.  “It is a tough job to balance the workload and the family life,” he said.  The fallout from the Colombia episode continued to ripple across Washington. The Defense Department, which had said that five service members who had been working with the Secret Service in Colombia were involved, said Monday evening that the number was most likely higher.  At a news conference with Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, said, “We let the boss down because nobody’s talking about what went on in Colombia other than this incident.”
Allegations of misconduct in Colombia have brought renewed scrutiny to an agency that thought it had shed a salacious reputation.