Ex-Chief of Obama Security Works to Boost Scarred Secret Service

Washington: On his way to work every morning, Joseph P. Clancy passes his new obsession and likely legacy: the 7 1/2-foot fence that surrounds the White House.

Clancy got his job as the interim director of the Secret Service partly because of the vulnerable, black iron barrier. In a highly publicized security breach in September, an intruder scaled the fence and made his way into the White House. The incident set off widespread criticism of the agency and ultimately led to the resignation of the previous director, Julia Pierson.

Now Clancy spends part of each day dreaming up ways to enhance the fence, even as he tries to convince everyone - including the first family - that the White House is impregnable.

Should the fence be higher, like the 10-foot model at the vice president's residence? Should it be curved outward, like those at prisons? Should the agency go back to the practice of having a gymnast test it to see how hard it is to surmount?

And, there is always the last resort floated by a Democratic congressman at a recent hearing: build a moat.

"A lot of people wonder, 'Well, what can an acting director do in three or four months?'" Clancy said in his first interview since President Barack Obama asked him to return to the agency where he spent 27 years, until he finds a permanent head. "I said, after an incident like the one we had, this is the most critical time. This is a time you've got to really sprint and get yourself back up on your feet."

As he walks down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Secret Service's headquarters from his temporary housing near the White House, Clancy stops to chat with the uniformed officers standing in front of the fence, hoping that some quick praise from the boss will lift the spirits of demoralized personnel. At times, he can catch a glimpse of his son, a young officer stationed at the White House.

Clancy, 58, had been the head of Obama's security detail, a senior position at the Secret Service, before leaving to become a Comcast executive in 2011. In his new job, he is thinking like both an architect and a therapist as he tries to buck up an agency scarred by a series of embarrassing incidents, particularly the one in September, in which Omar J. Gonzalez, an Army veteran from Texas who was carrying a knife, got far into the White House before he was finally caught. Coming two years after a dozen agents were caught with prostitutes during a presidential trip to Colombia, the breach fed a narrative that the agency was out of control and dangerously lax.

Making people feel good comes naturally to the square-jawed Clancy, who wears boxy suits and button-down shirts. As the head of Obama's security detail, he was known more for being a nice guy than a disciplinarian. And he had his own brush with controversy, when on his watch in 2009 a couple made their way through security and attended a state dinner even though they were not on the guest list.

But Clancy was a favorite of Rahm Emanuel, Obama's first chief of staff, and the president trusted Clancy enough to bring him back Oct. 1 as interim director. Although Clancy had shown little interest in the director's job when the administration was looking for a new one in 2013, he jumped at the chance to rehabilitate the tattered image of an agency he considers his "family."

Like the agent he once was, Clancy is most comfortable away from the spotlight. In a half-hour interview in his office - surrounded by briefing books, rather than family photos and mementos - he earnestly rebutted the many critics who think the Secret Service is deeply flawed. While acknowledging that there have been mistakes, he said that a big part of his job is to raise the morale of an agency that, even before the fence jumper incident, ranked 226 out of 300 on the list of "The Best Places to Work in the federal government."

The once prestigious Secret Service barely beat out the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response.

"Agents and officers, they really want a couple of things," Clancy said. "They want to be heard, and they want to be told they're doing a good job."

He said he was well aware that the glamour gap between Secret Service agents and the agency's uniformed division officers - who received nearly all the blame when the fence was scaled - may contribute to lower morale.

"To be honest with you," said Clancy, who often sounds like a football coach, "there has always been a difference in the roles - the agents, who travel on Air Force One, they get a lot of the attention - and the uniformed division officers. They're more like the offensive linemen. They don't get a lot of notoriety. They work very hard; they have a very difficult position. But it's the agents who get more publicity. They make movies out of agents. Clint Eastwood plays them."

Clancy said that one of his first initiatives was to address members of the two divisions together, rather than separately. But perhaps the single biggest morale boost on Clancy's watch occurred last month when another intruder jumped over the White House fence but this time was quickly apprehended.

Unlike the previous breach, when the Secret Service K-9 squad assigned to the White House kept its dogs on their leashes, two Belgian Malinois named Jordan and Hurricane were quickly deployed and did their jobs, stopping the 23-year-old intruder despite taking some punches and kicks. The Secret Service released photos of Jordan and Hurricane on Twitter and got an overwhelming response.

Clancy admits he has always kept his distance from dogs.

"I'm not too good with dogs," he said. "My family will tell you that. I've never been a dog person, but I love them now."

While Clancy has been credited with raising morale, he has baffled many current and former Secret Service officials by repeatedly refusing to contest members of Congress for cutting the service's budget. Because of years of underfunding and then automatic, across-the-board spending cuts, known as sequestration, the agency is significantly understaffed.

With fewer agents and officers, the agency has not had the resources to provide additional training. A damning report released by the Department of Homeland Security this month on the fence-jumper incident said that a lack of training "likely contributed" to the jumper's "ability to breach the White House interior."

But when Clancy testified at a House hearing last week, he did not mention sequestration. In the interview, he claimed it had nothing to do with the agency's missteps but then went on to describe how it hurt hiring.

"I wouldn't say sequestration did" have anything to do with the agency's problems, Clancy said. "The way it was explained to me is, we didn't know what was going to happen, so we didn't want to step too far out to start hiring people and then find out we couldn't pay them."

Obama is likely to name a permanent Secret Service director within the next few months.

Clancy said that in the years he was away from the agency, he thought that it might benefit from having an outsider in charge. But now that he is back on the inside, he said he realized that the learning curve might be too steep for someone who did not have a long history with the agency.

Could he be the person to take the reins?

"What I want is the best person for this agency; I really do," he said. "I'm not lobbying for any position. I really want what's best for the men and women of agency; that's what they deserve."