Exclusive: German tourists breached White House security in 2008

He did not mention and may not have known about another security breach that occurred in the summer of 2008 but has now come to light.

Two German tourists managed to enter the White House grounds by entering an exit gate on the North Lawn while tourists were departing.

As with the party crashers, the incident was more embarrassing than dangerous, but it raises questions about security procedures at the White House as well as the ability of the Secret Service to thoroughly investigate its own failings.

Recent revelations about a fence-jumper who made it past the front door, another days earlier involving a man with a gun in an elevator with President Obama, and the agency’s handling of a prostitution scandal have critics saying its problems are systemic and go back years.

Two German tourists, a woman and a man toting cameras the White House tour website says are prohibited in the building and on the grounds, managed to circumvent any electronic screening and walk into an open White House gate where tourists completing their tour were exiting.

A Secret Service officer and a sergeant in the uniformed division pulled the two German tourists aside after noticing that they were taking photos under the North Portico with a prohibited camera, two sources said. Cell phone cameras are allowed, but more complex cameras and video recorders are not, the website states.

Another source said an officer stopped them before they made it to the North Portico steps.

Agents in the Washington field office questioned the man and woman and determined that they did not pose a threat, according to two sources familiar with the incident.

A supervisor for the Presidential Protective Division, which is charged with safeguarding the president and his immediate family, alerted headquarters of the breach.

Officials in the Protective Intelligence and Threat Assessment Division, which supports the protective operations and analyzes and evaluates information from the intelligence community and military, state, local and federal enforcement agencies, were then notified.

Alarmed by the breach, the next day Secret Service officers installed a serpentine bike rack to make it more difficult to enter the White House grounds in this way, the sources said.

It is unclear whether Sullivan was ever told of the incident, and a Secret Service spokesman did not immediately comment on the matter. Efforts to reach Sullivan for comment were unsuccessful.

Several months later, Tareq and Michaele Salahi crashed President Obama’s first state dinner with the prime minister of India, leading to congressional hearings on how the couple had slipped past security.

Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee Dec. 3, 2009, Sullivan said he took full responsibility for the security failure but stressed that the breach was a one-time, isolated incident.

“This past year we processed more than 1.2 million visitors into the White House without incident,” he told the panel. “In our profession there is no margin for error.”

“I realize many people share our disappointment in this incident,” he continued. “As an agency, we will continue to remain our harshest critic and take the necessary actions to remedy this issue and continue to successfully carry out our missions.”

When preparing for Congressional testimony, top aides at an agency normally develop talking points for the official to use and include figures and statistics they can cite. Sources say agency officials may have decided not to include the German tourist incident because they considered it more of a minor incident, it occurred in 2008, and officers successfully detained the couple and determined that they didn’t pose a threat.

In 2008 Don White was the top official in charge of the Presidential Protective Division, and Joseph Clancy, a nearly three-decade veteran of the agency who left in 2011 to serve as director of corporate security for Comcast, was White’s deputy. Clancy was later promoted to lead the division in 2009.

Homeland Security Department Secretary Jeh Johnson recently appointed Clancy to serve as acting director of the Secret Service the same day former Director Julia Pierson resigned. White House officials said Johnson and Obama had lost confidence in her ability to lead the agency after an embarrassing fence-jumping incident Sept. 19 and revelations of another breach that occurred three days prior when Obama was visiting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to receive a briefing on the Ebola threat and deliver public remarks.

Clancy led an internal town hall-style question-and-answer sessions at headquarters on Friday morning, an attempt to air some of the private grievances agency employees have and take questions from rank-and-file personnel, a source said.

Another is scheduled to occur between top headquarters officials and employees in the agency’s 136 U.S. and international field offices at 4 p.m.

There were only two questions asked during the morning Q&A session at headquarters, one raising concerns about the agency’s budget constraints and another asking whether the agency was trying to address attrition issues, a knowledgeable source said.

Clancy said he was encouraged by DHS officials’ recent offers to help on budget issues and said he was aware of the problem with too many agency employees leaving for other federal government jobs and was working on a solution, the source said.

Clancy also tried to give the employees a bit of a pep talk, thanking them for remaining vigilant and committed to the job and praising top officials, including Pierson and A.T. Smith, the deputy director, by name. But the praise for Pierson and other top officials left some scratching their heads considering the recent spate of security breaches that led to her resignation.

During the late 2009 Homeland Security Committee hearing after the Salahi incident, Sullivan testified that the party-crashing couple managed to get into the White House because of human error but never posed a threat because they went through a screening process that would have discovered if they were carrying weapons of any kind.

Some in the Secret Service who knew that the German tourists had entered the White House without being screened just a year prior considered the testimony incomplete.

Recently, after a string of incidents involving security breaches and a botched DHS inspector general investigation into the Secret Service Colombia prostitute scandal, the DHS inspector general’s office sent an email to all Secret Service employees asking for any information they may have regarding known security breaches.

The email informed agency employees that the office is conducting an independent review of the Sept. 19 fence-jumping incident and the Sept. 16 screening breach at the CDC in Atlanta.

“If you have information that would be relevant to this, we would appreciate hearing from you,” the email said.

Two sources familiar with details of the breach said that Secret Service managers, including top leaders at the White House Presidential Protective Division and Secret Service headquarters, were notified about the German tourists breach in 2009.

After reviewing the incident, Uniformed Division inspectors determined that two Secret Service officers who were supposed to be watching the departure gate were talking and didn’t notice the tourists entering the exit gate while a group of tourists were departing, the sources said.

The sources said the Secret Service was lucky that the German tourists posed no threat but argued that the way senior managers reacted to it was part of a pattern of quickly covering up errors without investigating the true cause of incidents.

“The lasting and long-term effect is that everyone at the small agency is aware of the cover-up and lack of accountability in the leadership,” one knowledgeable source told the Washington Examiner.

The source said fatigue and limited resources may have contributed to the security lapse because many officers and agents are often forced to work days they were originally scheduled to have off, come in earlier for shifts than scheduled and work holidays.

The German tourist incident also troubled some in the agency because the couple came close to the White House front door and were not caught until they were seen using unauthorized cameras.

Afterward, the sources said, the entire White House compound should have been investigated and cleared to make sure no one else had breached security, but officials quickly decided the tourists posed no danger and didn’t re-screen and questions others signed up for White House tours that day.

The two officers who overlooked the German tourists were disciplined over the incident but not fired, the sources said. Details of their punishment are unclear.