Marko sat calmly at McMillon’s left side. The president approached and stuck out his hand to shake McMillon’s. As McMillon reached out to the president, he saw something horrifying from the corner of his eye.
Marko was staring right up at the president, and baring his teeth.
McMillon didn’t want anything to go down the leash to Marko and make him think Reagan was dangerous. Any wrong move on his part—even unconsciously tightening up because of his dog’s reaction—could cue his dog that this guy reaching out to him was a foe, not a friend.
“I could see Marko was saying, ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’” he says.
Pulling the dog tight when he was like this could have prepped him for fight mode. He did the only thing he could do.
He relaxed.
Then he told Marko, “Stay,” and dropped his hand to his side, making the leash loose. He was confident of Marko’s obedience and knew he would listen. Marko stayed, still staring up at the president as Reagan and McMillon shook hands.
If you look carefully at the photo capturing the moment, behind the president you’ll see the face of another dog handler. He’s looking down at Marko. He doesn’t look as confident as McMillon about the situation.
“He’s got that ‘OMG!! Fred, watch your dog!’ expression going on,” McMillon says with a laugh as he looks at the photo decades later.
“I think a lot about what could have happened. Without the trust Marko and I had in each other from all the training and time we put in, this could have had a very different ending.”
—
The top of the Secret Service Explosive Detection Team ply their trade at some of the best homes in the world. Before the president or vice president attends a fund-raiser or other function at someone’s residence, an explosives dog team or two will have done a thorough sweep of the home first.
No matter how rich or famous, the homes’ owners (or more likely, someone who works for them) must open their bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, pantries, and sometimes dresser drawers to dogs and their handlers.
Most have no problem giving dogs access to even the most private areas of their houses. They know it’s something everyone who has hosted the president has done. Friends in these circles communicate to other friends what to expect.
“They are extremely professional, a well-oiled machine,” says a key staff member of the home of a West Coast couple that has hosted presidents and vice presidents several times. “The handlers are considerate, quick, and thorough, and the dogs are beautiful to watch.”
When friends ask about her experiences with the Secret Service, she lets them know that the agency comes out about a week before an event and sets up phone lines, looks for windows and other areas that may need to be blocked, and performs other preparatory security work.
A few hours before the event, the dog team arrives. Hectic as it can be before a presidential fund-raising dinner, the staff has to leave. The cooking staff plans for this, so there won’t be any culinary disasters during their absence. In this couple’s case, the canine team’s sweep of their five-story house—from wine cellar to upstairs specialty kitchen, plus the gardens—takes well under an hour.
This staff member and the couple are usually in the house during the sweep. Two of their own security staff accompany the dog team and the EOD techs who go along. The couple stays in a bedroom, and she stays in her office.
“It’s very interesting watching the dogs. They’re hyper in a good way, so energetic. You can tell they love what they do,” she says.
When the sweep is done, the house and property are considered secured, and everyone coming back in is screened by Secret Service personnel and magnetometers.
“The dogs are the highlight of the process. We’d have them back in a heartbeat,” she says.
—
Barbra Streisand might not feel the same way. According to a memoir by former Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe, in the late 1990s Streisand was to host a brunch for the Clinton Library at her Malibu Hills home.
When she learned on the morning of the brunch that Secret Service dogs needed to do a sweep of her property, she refused. “Barbra did not like dogs,” McAuliffe writes in What a Party!
“Let me make it simple: No dogs, no Bill Clinton,” I said. “Please, Barbra. This is important to the president for his library and his legacy . . .”
She kept arguing, talking about how the dogs were going to get into her shrubs, which she meticulously maintained herself.
McAuliffe managed to convince her by telling her he would personally walk around with the dogs. He did, but they worked swiftly, and he couldn’t keep up with them.
Later, I was in the big tent we’d set up, checking on some things, when I heard Barbra screaming my name. I walked out into her beautiful garden to see what the commotion was all about.
“Look what I stepped in!” she said.
When Brian M. learned about this story more than fifteen years later, he shook his head and looked down at the floor of his shared office at RTC.
“That’s mortifying. That would never happen today. That should never have happened then.”
A Secret Service dog handler who overheard the story chuckled and chimed in.
“Shit happens,” he said. “You just have to clean it up, always.”
—
Former Secret Service dog handler Cliff Cusick recalls the time he and his dog Devil went to Mississippi for President Jimmy Carter in 1977. One of his jobs was to have Devil search the home of a couple who would be hosting the president.
“Well, the lady finds out that the dog’s name is Devil, and she was a very strict Southern Baptist and she would not allow it,” he says.
“She said, ‘You are not coming in my home with the devil.’ She was serious as a heart attack. She was adamant that the dog was not allowed.”
He tried not to be put off that someone wouldn’t want his dog to check out the house just because of his name.
“It’s OK, Devil, don’t take it personally. Some people just have trust issues,” he told his dog as they moved along to search the outside grounds instead.
—
Barney was not a bad dog. It’s just that sometimes he wasn’t a very good dog. George W. Bush’s Scottish terrier was known for his dislike of strangers. At a place like the White House, there’s no shortage of those.
“Barney guarded the South Lawn entrance of the White House as if he were a Secret Service agent,” Bush said in a statement after Barney died in 2013.
Not quite. Secret Service agents don’t bite people to protect presidential interests. Barney did. Within the space of two months in 2008, he bit the public relations director of the Boston Celtics on the wrist and drew blood, and he bit the hand of a Reuters White House reporter who tried to pet him.
Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of the former president, didn’t wax sentimental about the family’s dog in a 2013 Today show segment.
“Barney was a real jerk,” she said matter-of-factly, temporarily stunning the hosts into near silence except for a couple of shocked “wows.”
Barney was far from being a Cujo. He had friends around the White House, held on-screen appeal via his eleven “Barney Cam” short films, and greeted heads of state.
But Secret Service dog handlers say Barney wasn’t fond of their dogs. Handlers are always vigilant about the locations of the pets of the First Family while on the White House grounds. Radio communications between handlers and White House staff prevent any surprises while a First Dog is taking a walk or running out for a bathroom break, or when an EDT dog is doing a sweep inside the White House after tours.
“Be advised the family pets are on the south grounds,” a White House staffer might say.
“Copy that,” a handler will reply.
It’s a fairly foolproof system, but Barney,
apparently, was no fool. On a few occasions, he charged unexpectedly in the direction of some ERT dogs on the White House grounds.
“We’d have to pick our dogs up on our shoulders,” says Stew. “Barney was dog aggressive. Our ERT dogs are not dog aggressive.”
ERT handlers have exquisite control over their Malinois, but they couldn’t take any chances. They’re entrusted with keeping the First Family safe, and in this situation, that also meant keeping Barney out of harm’s way. Barney blasting out of nowhere and surprising a Malinois with a bite was an event that had to be avoided.
ERT canine handlers routinely lift their dogs on their shoulders in case they have to use the maneuver in real life. Avoiding Scottish terriers wasn’t one of the situations they practiced for, but any port in a storm.
Barney never sank his teeth into an ERT dog. But he did manage to put the bite on an EDT canine once. The dog, Oscar, didn’t care much for other dogs. While sweeping the White House for anything that shouldn’t be there after the day’s tours were completed, Oscar’s handler heard the distant sound of something troubling: Barney. And by the sound of his barking, Barney was closing in quickly.
The handler wasn’t sure how Barney had come to be in the same place he and Oscar were working, but it didn’t matter. He had to act quickly to protect the president’s dog. He crouched down and scooped Oscar into the crook of his arms, then stood up, lifting Oscar high off the floor.
But not high enough. The stampeding Barney jumped up and grabbed hold of Oscar’s tail. This surprised Oscar, who was already somewhat discomfited by being held aloft so suddenly in his place of work. The Malinois wriggled and writhed and tried to escape from his handler, who had to summon his strength to keep the dog from tearing after Barney.
Luckily for Barney, other officers almost immediately arrived on the scene and were able to grab the First Dog before all hell broke loose.
Secret Service EDT assistant trainer Leth O. recalls another near miss with Barney. An EDT dog was doing a sweep in the White House, and Barney ran up to the dog. “He wanted to fight,” Leth says.
The handler didn’t pick up his own dog. Instead, he picked up Barney—a brave move for anyone not in Barney’s inner circle.
According to Leth, when the president heard about the incident, he called the handler to his office. Was he in trouble? Should he not have touched the First Dog?
The handler’s concerns were allayed when the president thanked him for what he had done and presented him with a special presidential coin. It bears the presidential seal on one side and, on the flip side, says “George W. Bush Commander in Chief” around an image of the White House.
“This handler helped win the president’s trust and admiration, and it was a boost for us all in a way,” says Leth. “It’s not every day a president shows his appreciation so directly to dog handlers.”
—
He was Jesus Christ. Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy were his parents. He was about to announce his run for president. And he planned to kidnap one of the Obama family’s Portuguese water dogs.
Scott Stockert made these bizarre claims when he was apprehended by Secret Service agents in a Washington, D.C., hotel in January 2016.
The last claim did not surprise them.
They’d received a tip from the Minnesota Secret Service field office that the North Dakota man was headed to the White House to kidnap Bo or Sunny. When they searched his Dodge Ram 1500, they found a 12-gauge pump shotgun, a bolt-action rifle, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a machete with a twelve-inch blade, an eighteen-inch billy club, and a few other related items not found on the typical visitor to the nation’s capital.
He was arrested on gun-related charges and will be on the Secret Service’s radar for a long time.
While dogs of presidents are not on the list of Secret Service protectees, they are part of what some call “the First Family bubble.” If anyone tries to harm the dogs when they’re anywhere near the First Family, the Secret Service would be on it.
If someone tries to mess with the president’s dogs at the White House, there’s a good chance that at least one of their canine cousins who work on the Emergency Response Team would be called upon to help apprehend the perpetrator.
There’s nothing like having a relative on the police force to make you confident that someone’s got your back.
CHAPTER 7
SHUTTING DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE
It’s a strange fact of life if you’re a Secret Service bomb-dog handler. You, and you alone, may have to make a decision that could prevent the president of the United States from leaving or reentering the White House. Or you may cause the president to have to immediately move to another area in the White House.
Your decision could interrupt meetings with heads of state or cabinet members. It could delay sensitive negotiations. It could keep the president from attending important functions.
If your dog sits while sweeping an area, or has a change of behavior associated with finding an explosive, you don’t call the boss and say, “Hey, here’s what happened . . .” and figure it out together. It’s completely up to you. This is your dog, and you should know your dog well enough to know if this is something that needs to be acted on.
While dog handlers don’t decide what the course of action within the White House will be, once they make the call that a dog may be “on odor,” the effect could be profound.
“It’s a really big responsibility,” says Hector H., deputy special agent in charge at Rowley Training Center. “Within five minutes of a dog alerting, the whole side of the White House near a potential blast area could be closed down.”
The Secret Service won’t say the extent to which a handler’s call has ever changed anything inside the White House. It’s safe to say that most of what is often referred to as “shutting down the White House” takes place on a much smaller scale, primarily outside the White House fence.
Sometimes a dog alerting to an odor closes off Pennsylvania Avenue on the north side of the White House for a while, or E Street NW along the south. Or the alert may shut down one of the vehicle checkpoints along Fifteenth or Seventeenth Street NW.
At the very least, some or a lot of people are going to be inconvenienced. Tourists may not be able to enjoy the coveted view of the White House they may have traveled halfway around the world to see. And staff who park at the White House complex may be late to work.
All because a dog plants his rear on the ground, or responds to an odor in a “Hey, this may be of interest to you” manner.
This is where trust comes in. The “trust your dog” mantra of the canine program isn’t just a homey three-word catchphrase. If a dog or handler doesn’t test well during the monthly verifications that look at different aspects of their skill sets, they won’t report to their assigned job. Instead, they’ll train on whatever the deficit is, sometimes working one-on-one with a Secret Service canine program instructor who helps both the dog and the handler.
Until recently this was called remedial training. But the name wasn’t a hit with some around the training center. They changed the name to “personalized training.” The dogs didn’t care either way.
Teams will do as much personalized training as needed. It can take a day or a few weeks. Only when the dog or handler or both are back up to standard will they be able to head out to the real world on the job again.
Since the dogs who are at the White House, on the streets, and traveling around the world have been deemed good to go, and since handlers know their dogs’ foibles (if Jake, for instance, always whips his head around and stares if he smells pizza), most feel confident in making the call. They try not to think of the ramifications.
“You have to go with what your dog is telling you,” says Barry Lewis, former Secret Service dog handler, instructor, and unit commander. “Don’t ever think, ‘What’s going to happen?’ or ‘How
will this look if it’s nothing?’
“What would you rather have? Some people inconvenienced or something happen you don’t even want to think about?”
—
It’s rare for Secret Service dogs to alert. Luckily, the places the dogs have searched throughout the canine program’s history have been almost entirely free of explosive devices.
That’s not to say dogs haven’t found them. Some former handlers who have spoken about this off the record indicate otherwise. The Secret Service confirms that there have been finds but won’t go into detail, citing operational security.
The Secret Service invests time and money in the explosives detection program because there is no technology yet that can beat a dog’s nose. As David Petraeus once famously said, “The capability they bring to the fight cannot be replicated by man or machine.”
Figures vary widely on how much better a dog’s sense of smell is than a human’s. The general consensus is somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 times better.
It’s hard to imagine what this would be like. The research of Stanley Coren, a neuropsychology researcher and psychology professor well known for his books on the intelligence and capabilities of dogs, is a useful guide.
Let’s say you have a gram of a component of human sweat known as butyric acid. Humans are quite adept at smelling this, and if you let it evaporate in the space of a ten-story building, many of us would still be able to detect a faint scent upon entering the building. Not bad, for a human nose. But consider this: If you put the 135-square-mile city of Philadelphia under a three-hundred-foot-high enclosure, evaporate the gram of butyric acid, and let a dog in, the average dog would still be able to detect the odor.
This kind of olfactory sensitivity is necessary for the job of sniffing out explosives, but it also occasionally leads to alerting that seems to amount to nothing. What dogs may actually be reacting to in these cases is residual odor—the ghost of a substance that had once been present. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was part of an explosive device. It could be a harmless related substance.
Secret Service Dogs Page 9
