Local Resident At Forefront Of Creating Secret Service Artifacts

By Darrell Mak

As a former United States Secret Service agent, local resident James Le Gett knows history can be life’s best teacher. Three years ago, Le Gett and his partner formed the non-profit organization Sentinels of the Service to collect and record the oral histories of former employees of the Secret Service.

“It’s like a biography,” said Le Gett. “We capture the stories of U.S. Secret Service members for historical purposes.”

The information Le Gett obtains is used to document the experiences of agents or other Secret Service employees, primarily to be preserved by the interviewee or family to formally record the employee’s work history. Additionally, Le Gett said the finished products serve as valuable training materials for new agents.

But the process can be quite time consuming. Le Gett said he volunteers “hours” to each interview, painstakingly transcribing the interviewee’s comments and adding factual information and other explanations to noteworthy events where needed.

“It’s important to uncover and document these historic events,” he said. The process isn’t easy either. “There’s a lot of clean up needed… it’s a back and forth process to obtain the final product,” he described.

Last year, Le Gett successfully fulfilled a personal goal of creating an official repository for each finished document, which today is located at the Secret Service’s Beltsville location. To date, Le Gett has completed 40 interviews and has finished the documentation process on half of those. He continues to work on completing the rest of the documents while pursuing other interviewees.

“It’s a never-ending process,” said Le Gett. “There’s a boatload of folks still to interview.”

The interviews are performed strictly with audio recordings; there is no video involved. The typical interview takes about three to four hours, although Le Gett recalls his longest interview with a high Secret Service official went 12 hours. His oldest interviewee served as a decoder/encoder during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and then became a Secret Service agent for President Truman.

Le Gett himself performs most of the interviewing and relies on his ability to coax details and information from his interviewees. “I try to capture information about the person’s family, heritage, school, college, life going into Service, and life after the Service,” said Le Gett.

He tries to achieve a blend of interviewees, including agents to administrative staff, including both males to females.

Le Gett estimated the cost for preparing each document runs between $400 - $600. “It’s expensive,” he said.

Sentinels of the Service is a non-profit organization primarily funded through donations. It neither receives funding from the Secret Service nor charges interviewees for the effort.

Regarding the type of discussions held during the interviews, Le get quipped, “We’re not looking for secrets, although we do hear them. We are not looking for dirt against politicians either. This is not a mudslinging operation, and we do not intend to write a book.”

The U.S. Secret Service was established in July 1865 by President Abraham Lincoln to initially suppress counterfeiting currency. The Service’s duties have evolved over time, and today its mission is to safeguard the nation’s financial infrastructure and payment systems, and to protect national leaders, visiting heads of state and government, designated sites and National Special Security events.