BOGOTA, Colombia — A woman who says she was the prostitute who triggered the U.S. Secret Service scandal in Colombia said Friday that the agents involved were “idiots” for letting it happen, and declared that if she were a spy and sensitive information was available, she could have easily obtained it.
The woman said she spent five hours in a Cartagena, Colombia, hotel room with an agent, and while she barely got cab fare out of him, she could have gotten information that would have compromised the security of U.S. President Barack Obama if the agent had any. “Totally,” she said.
“The man slept all night,” said the woman, who was identified by her lawyer as Dania Londono Suarez. “If I had wanted to, I could have gone through all his documents, his wallet, his suitcase.”
She said in the 90-minute interview with Colombia’s W Radio conducted in Spain that no U.S. investigator had been in touch with her, although reporters descended on her home a week after the incident when a taxi driver led them to it.
“They could track me anywhere in the world that I go but they haven’t done so,” she said, speaking in Spanish. “If the Secret Service agents were idiots, imagine the investigators.”
That alarmed a U.S. congressman who is monitoring the case.
Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, issued a statement on Friday expressing concern that investigators “have been unable to locate and interview two of the female foreign nationals involved,” including Londono Suarez. “I have asked the Secret Service for an explanation of how they have failed to find this woman when the news media seems to have no trouble doing so.”
Eight Secret Service agents have lost their jobs in the scandal, although there is no evidence any of the 10 women interviewed by U.S. investigators for their roles in it have any connection to terrorist groups, King said earlier this week.
In the interview, Londono Suarez called the Secret Service agents caught up in the scandal “fools for being from Obama’s security and letting all this happen.”
“When I said, ‘I’m going to call the police so they pay me my money,’ and it didn’t bother them, didn’t they see the magnitude of the problem?” she said.
Londono Suarez said the man she slept with never identified himself as a member of Obama’s advance security detail for the April 14-15 Summit of the Americas and said she saw nothing in his room that would have indicated the man’s job other than a brown uniform.
Londono Suarez said the man had agreed to pay her $800, but that she never would have made a public fuss about his failure to pay had she known he was part of Obama’s security detail and realized the repercussions it would have for her.
“My life is practically destroyed,” she said. “My name is in the gutter.”
Her photo has been splashed all over the Internet since a newspaper took it off Facebook a week after the incident, when she said she fled Colombia fearing for her life.
“I was afraid they might retaliate,” she said, saying she feared for herself and her family after looking up Secret Service on the Internet and seeing that some agents were sharpshooters.
