So Here’s the Thing…: Notes on Growing Up, Getting Older, and Trusting Your Gut(17)

That night, Reggie Love invited us to a (casualwear) dinner at POTUS’s villa. It was a huge relief after the stressful day, and I thought I’d be able to let my guard down, by which I mean complain relentlessly. As soon as I walked in I started spouting off about how insane Saudi Arabia was. “Do they think we weren’t going to notice that the grass is fake!”

I wasn’t greeted by the uproarious laughter and agreement I’d expected. Everyone looked gravely concerned. “ALYSSA!” someone hissed at me, as the others made exaggerated cut-it-out motions.

I didn’t get it. I was just unwinding/ranting after a long day at work! Then someone pointed at the ceiling and I got it: They were probably listening to us.

As VJ and I were walking back to our villas, we got confirmation when we saw the doors open and Saudis emerge from both. VJ was incensed. “Excuse me! What’s going on?” They ignored us and kept walking.1

In my room I tried to figure out what they’d touched, to no avail. After that, we couldn’t sleep, and we were emailing each other until I found an Ally McBeal marathon on TV—not dubbed in Arabic, weirdly—and decided to watch it separately. I was still awake for the call to prayer at 4:00 AM, which became surreal, beautiful background music to the dancing baby.

Later that year, we went to China. At the hotel in Beijing, Secretary Clinton, Huma Abedin, VJ, and I were the only women on the top floor with POTUS. I was in my room for about twenty minutes before I got a knock on the door from Secret Service: Secretary Clinton had taken a shower and noticed that the mirror was covered in steam except for one spot in the middle. They couldn’t be certain, but they thought it was a camera, so they wanted me to be aware. This being a new hotel, which the Chinese had encouraged us to stay in, we already had a “security understanding” that it was probably bugged. But it was still a jolt to see what seemed like evidence of it. I showered in total darkness because I didn’t want the Chinese government to see my naked body. I almost broke my teeth getting out of the shower.

What the Chinese government would do with a video of me showering is not immediately obvious. Maybe blackmail. (Luckily I don’t think the leak of such a video would do my reputation irreparable harm—the impulse to share TMI can also be self-protective. Though it’s possible that I shower in a really weird way that would be humiliating for the public to find out about. I have no idea. I’m not a bad singer!) But the point is that I was taking a lot of things for granted. Part of this was my American bravado and ignorance—we thought we didn’t spy on people, but of course we do—and part of it was that being actively spied on (as opposed to merely having your every move tracked on your iPhone) is a strange experience. Of course, few people are being monitored to the extent that high-level government officials are. (Not that the current administration seems to heed this truism at all.) But more generally, it drove home for me how random things you do without thinking in a foreign country could change the course of your trip.

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It’s not just officials who are tracking your every move, either; whenever you’re a representative of the US government, the public is desperate for you to do something deliciously bad that they can be righteously outraged about. Does that mean you should do something deliciously bad? No. But people do.

The trip to the Summit of the Americas in Colombia in April 2012 coincided with the middle of my gradual descent into total exhaustion. (This would eventually lead to my leaving the White House in 2014.) Since April was far enough away from the moment the campaign reached peak intensity, I was able to skip Cartagena in order to take a two-day vacation to Palm Beach with DK (now my husband). What could go wrong?

We were about to dig into our key lime pie at Morton’s Steakhouse when I got a call from Clark Stevens, who handled crises. I knew immediately that I couldn’t ignore it—the fact that he was calling me meant we had at least a potential crisis going on—so I went outside, sat on the curb, and called him back. I came to understand that several members of the Secret Service had hired sex workers, whom they brought to their hotel, where they were required to sign them in as guests, despite this being a blatant violation not only of agency protocol but also of common sense. Later the officers involved claimed that they didn’t realize they were bringing prostitutes to their rooms, but the fact that the women were sex workers is not particularly relevant: The president was about to arrive for the summit, and bringing any stranger who might be potentially hostile to the US, with some ulterior motive, was an obviously dangerous thing to do. As Susan Collins put it during the investigation: “Who were these women? Could they have been members of groups hostile to the United States? Could they have planted bugs, disabled weapons, or in any other [way] jeopardized the security of the president or our country?” Yes, some of the agents were married. But more importantly, they all had guns in their rooms. Which the American people were soon to point out.

DK and I left Palm Beach the next day. A lot of us forget Obama’s scandals because of what Trump gets away with every day, but at the time this was an explosive story that we dealt with for months, working with lawyers, the head of the Secret Service, and our detail leader to figure out how this could possibly happen and how to make it up to the American people so they could trust us again.

The only thing we found was that these Secret Service agents weren’t thinking. At all. When you travel for work you should be on your best behavior, assuming you’re being monitored at all times. Though the prospect of a free vacation is exciting, you need to remember it’s not actually a vacation, and you can’t let your guard down too much. But if that’s too hard to remember, try this simpler version: Don’t hire sex workers on business trips!