The U.S. Secret Service is a unit of the Department of the Treasury that is responsible for ensuring the safety of the President and Vice President and their families, the President-elect and Vice President-elect and their families, major Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates and their families, and former Presidents and their families. The Secret Service also protects visiting heads of foreign states or governments and other foreign visitors to the United States when designated to do so by the President.
The director of the Secret Service is chosen by the secretary of the Treasury from the ranks of service personnel. The 1,800 special enforcement agents are trained in hand-to-hand combat, firearms, emergency medicine, safe and evasive driving, surveillance, and field investigation at the Federal Law Enforcement Facility in Brunswick, Georgia, and the service's school in Beltsville, Maryland.
The Secret Service Office of Investigations has jurisdiction over federal crimes involving currency, counterfeiting, fraudulent electronic transfers of funds, and other financial crimes.
The Secret Service's Office of Protective Operations provides security at the White House and other Presidential offices, at the offcial residence of the Vice President in the District of Columbia, and at foreign diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C., and throughout the United States.
The White House Detail is assigned to the President. It protects the President in the Oval Office (a button enables him to summon agents at any time) and on trips within the United States and abroad. It arranges for all security and coordinates efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local law enforcement agencies in the area a President visits, making sure that all areas are safe and secure. It ensures that no surveillance devices are in use in the White House or any place the President visits.
The Office of Protective Research conducts background checks on individuals who have made threats against the President or other people protected by the Secret Service. It keeps tabs on more than 50,000 individuals who are viewed as potential threats to the President. Some 400 people on the “watch list” are placed under surveillance when the President is in their vicinity.
The White House is guarded by 500 Uniformed Division officers of the Secret Service, who patrol the outer and middle perimeters. The inner perimeter and the mansion itself are secured by more than 100 agents in civilian clothes from the Presidential Protective Detail. The Technical Security Division guards against surveillance and bugging of the White House, and agents screen all visitors to the White House for weapons. All packages entering the White House are examined. Each year about 250 mentally disturbed people and 400 visitors carrying guns are apprehended as they enter the White House on guided tours.
The Secret Service was established during the Civil War, when the Union Army organized a group of agents under the command of Colonel L. C. Baker for counterintelligence (finding Confederate spies) and detection of counterfeit currency. Some of the agents were transferred to the Treasury Department in July 1865. In the 1870s the Secret Service investigated crimes against blacks in the South committed by the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group. In 1898 President William McKinley ordered it to gather military and foreign intelligence during the Spanish-American War, and it also did such work during World War I. After the war its intelligence roles were taken over by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and military intelligence agencies.
In 1901, after the assassination of President McKinley, his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, ordered the Secret Service to protect the President. Beginning with two agents, the protective detail expanded to 40 agents by 1940. Congress authorized the Secret Service to protect the President in 1906, the President-elect in 1908, and the Vice President in 1962. Retired Presidents, widows of Presidents, and their minor children came under protection in 1965. (Widows lose protection if they remarry.) In 1971 foreign heads of state and other individuals designated by the President, such as Presidential candidates, and in 1976 candidates' wives, were included. The Uniformed Division was transferred from the District of Columbia Police by President Warren Harding in 1922 and was made a part of the Secret Service in 1930.
See also Assassinations, Presidential
Sources
- Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, American Espionage: From Secret Service to CIA (New York: Free Press, 1977).
- Gregory Matusky and John P. Hayes, U.S. Secret Service (New York: Chelsea House, 1988).
- Dennis V. N. McCarthy, Protecting the President: The Inside Story of a Secret Service Agent (New York: Morrow, 1985).
- Philip Melanson, The Politics of Protection: The U.S. Secret Service in the Terrorist Age (New York: Praeger, 1984)
