Alleged Columbian prostitute calls U.S. Secret Service agents ‘fools’

BOGOTA, Colombia — A woman who said she was the prostitute who triggered the U.S. Secret Service scandal in Colombia said Friday 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 replied when asked.

“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.

“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. “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 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 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.