Work ethic drove him to top in Secret Service

It's doubtful it came up in his most recent job interview, but the new director of the US Secret Service didn't exactly rush off to work when they first hired him 23 years ago.

For Mark J. Sullivan, then just a born-and-raised Arlington boy with hopes of staying near home and dreams of someday running the Boston field office, it was the mildest of protests to a classic good news-bad news phone call.

``They said, `Congratulations, you've got the job, and it's in Detroit,' " he said in a recent interview, amused by his 1983 perception of the city he would come to love as the place where he met his wife, Laurie, had two of his three children, and launched a career.

``I'd been to Detroit playing hockey" in college, ``and it was pretty cold, and we'd never won, and they were not great memories," said Sullivan, who never considered saying no, but also ``didn't go out as quick as they wanted me to."

They asked him to report in two weeks. He asked if they could make it four.

``And my goal," he says, ``was to get home."

Funny things happen, though, when a person's performance outreaches his aspirations. The local boy -- starting as a product of St. Agnes Grammar School, leaving as the clean-but-bruising hockey talent at Arlington Catholic -- saw his wish outpaced by a string of successes that last month landed him in one of the most important law-enforcement jobs on the planet.

Sullivan is the oldest of six children, raised by a mostly stay-at-home mother and a father who was a longtime Arlington Public Works employee who wanted his children to have the college education he couldn't have. The new director's working class roots and strong work ethic are evident as he talks about his career.

Though he has personally protected three presidents, overseen the security of nearly every major political event of the past five years, and is now in charge of the agency that protects this country's leaders and its money, what he seems to enjoy talking about most are those Detroit days in the field.

``I would love to go back to that part of time in my career," he said, sounding downright wistful discussing an era of getting his hands dirty catching bad guys.

``For me, it was all about going and working criminal investigations, making a case against someone who committed a crime, and then convicting them," he said in a telephone interview a few weeks after his swearing-in ceremony in the Oval Office.

``He still refers to himself as an agent, thinks of himself as an agent," said his mother, Clare, who remains in Arlington with his father, Francis, now long-retired from the town Water Department.

``That's Mark; he's a leader, but he's a regular guy," said Mayor Michael J. McGlynn of Medford, an Arlington Catholic graduate, class of 1972, and a hockey teammate of Sullivan's, one year ahead of him.

``Here's a guy sworn in as an agent, and no one handed him the job, and he worked his way up the ladder," McGlynn said. ``That was the Mark I knew in high school."

Sullivan says he was 14 or 15 years old when he made up his mind to go into some type of law enforcement.

``Part of it for me, I'll never forget, was the Kennedy assassination," he said. ``As a young kid in third, fourth grade, watching and seeing the impact it had on the country -- I can't say at that moment I decided I wanted to be a Secret Service agent to make sure it never happens again, but it definitely had an impact on me."

Sullivan describes himself and his five brothers and sisters, all of whom still live in the Boston area, as ``pretty much the same, middle-class kids who had values instilled in them by parents, schools, and teachers."

But Clare Sullivan describes Mark as the quintessential first born and big brother, a little mature for his age, the first to join her shoveling the snow or to run across the street to help the elderly neighbor bring in groceries.

There was also another trait with an obvious benefit to his eventual career. ``He's always been able to keep things to himself," she said. ``He was outgoing, but he was reticent in some ways."

His Arlington Catholic coach, former long time state representative Jack Cusack of Arlington, raves about a tough, bright natural leader.

``It was like E.F. Hutton: When he spoke, everybody listened," Cusack said.

When hockey came to an end, his mother said, it was because he decided, as a college student, to put his future profession first. Unwilling to risk his career by doing more damage to an injured shoulder, she said, he quit hockey his senior year at Saint Anselm College and interned in the Derry, N.H., Police Department.

By the time he got to the Secret Service office in Detroit, after five years as a special agent for the Office of the Inspector General, he was apparently ready to work.

``Occasionally in life you meet people who so stand apart from the pack," said James Huse, Sullivan's first Secret Service boss as the former special agent in charge in Detroit. ``In his case, he was one of the most gifted investigators I've ever worked with."

Their common background meant that Huse's attention was already on Sullivan. ``He's an Irish Catholic from Arlington; I'm an Irish Catholic from Medford, and he went to high school with my sister," Huse said. But it was Sullivan's performance that really kept Huse's attention.

The new guy started a string of ``extraordinary big news cases . . . way beyond the expectation of a rookie agent," Huse said.

There was the complex fraud case against a major Michigan venture capitalist and the undoing of a sophisticated crime ring stealing education grant funds through a well-known trade school. That one, Huse said, had Sullivan on the floor of a warehouse painstakingly sorting through hundreds of thousands of scattered documents to re-create company files.

``Some people succeed in any organization, especially the government, because of political prowess or their backroom skills," Huse said. ``But his good name was always attached to great operational success."

Sullivan's extensive tour through both sides of the agency's two main missions, investigations and protection, is one of the reasons he's so highly thought of by the 3,300 Secret Service agents, said the now-retired Huse, whose son works on President Bush's Secret Service detail.

In turn, Sullivan insists that his experiences help him appreciate them.

``I've worked all kinds of hours, been out in the rain at 2 in the morning . . . in front of somebody's house on protection; on surveillance at 1 in the morning, watching a house," he said. ``I know people are out there working hard every day. Somewhere, sometime, when I'm at home enjoying life, there are a lot of agents working, no matter what time of day it is."

Sullivan's slew of job switches and promotions -- including a pair of stints on perhaps the Service's best known group, the Presidential Protective Division for George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton -- culminated in a 2005 honor that seems to sum it up.

In receiving the Distinguished Presidential Rank Award in 2005, given each year to government executives for ``sustained extraordinary accomplishment," Sullivan was cited for overseeing security for the 2004 presidential campaign, both national conventions, the inauguration, the G-8 Summit, and Ronald Reagan's funeral. The citation says he ``substantially changed the concept of airspace security" for the Secret Service's protection of people and events.

As director, Sullivan is well aware of the enormous responsibility he faces.

``I think about it an awful lot, realizing if we fail what the consequences would be," he said. ``But I have no trouble getting to sleep at night, and the reason is the people we have."

There are roughly 6,500 of them now, he says, and he hopes to hire more.

The Secret Service is protecting more people than ever and has been moved from the Treasury Department to the Department of Homeland Security with expanded duties investigating computer-related crime.

He inherits the Secret Service from W. Ralph Basham, who became commissioner for US Customs and Border Protection, and, like Basham, he faces not just the ramifications rooted in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks but also those flowing from the war in Iraq. That's a reality Sullivan faced almost as soon as he was sworn in, escorting the president on a visit to Iraq.

Trips ``don't come any more high profile," he said.

``I think I need to lead from the front, need to show people in the organization there's nothing I'll ask them to do that I wouldn't do."