Another TDY Gone Wrong (Deadbeat Secret Service Agents Recalled From Colombia)

Updated at 4 PM: Since I originally posted this, there have been some unattributed statements in the Washington-based news media to the effect that the Secret Service agents had a dispute with the Caribe Hotel over room charges - the hotel expected them to pay extra for having overnight guests - and that it may have been the hotel management, rather than local prostitutes, who complained to local police.

Updated again at 5:45: The New York Times has a bit more detail on how the TDY went south.

A senior United States official who had been briefed on the matter said that investigators were sorting through accounts that more than one member of the Secret Service team may have had women in their rooms — although it was not clear whether others were prostitutes or, if so, whether the agents knew that.

“There are people who willingly went to prostitutes and other people who ended up with prostitutes,” the official said. “Either way, it’s just unacceptable.”

Specifically, the official said, on Wednesday night an agent is believed to have taken a Colombian woman back to his hotel room and had then thrown her out in a dispute over money; investigators are trying to figure out whether the agent knew that she had intended to be paid.

The woman apparently began causing a disturbance in the hallway, eventually bringing other Secret Service agents — as well as a small number of law enforcement and military officials working with them on security and communications matters — out of their rooms and attracting the attention of hotel management and security.

It emerged that others on the team also had women in their rooms. Tempers flared, compounded by the language barrier. At some point Colombian police became involved, and American government officials decided to replace the team.

I'm shaking my head ruefully. Ruefully, I tell you.

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This is an example of why consular officers always have the best stories of anybody in the Foreign Service:

Who could not be entertained as often as appalled by the infinite variety of troubles that visiting gringos can cause?

Ed Henry's tweet from yesterday reinforces what the WaPo's Ronald Kessler said in his interview with CNN today, the bottom line of which is that a prostitute in Cartagena complained to local police that a U.S. Secret Service agent had refused to pay her, leading the police to contact "the State Department" which in turn contacted the Secret Service.

The State Department official in that chain of phone calls was having a much better day than the Secret Service official.

I looked at several Colombian newspapers in search of juicy details, but they had nothing, really, other than the unsurprising news that the Secret Service agents involved had "bebían mucho alcohol" during their stay at the Hotel Caribe in Cartagena.

I think Homer Simpson said it best: "To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."