Think about golfers who track through fresh fertilizer from the golf course and walk into the clubhouse. The dog doing a sweep for a protectee visit may or may not go into full alert mode. It depends on many factors, including the concentration of ammonium nitrate (a chemical compound that can be used to make improvised explosive devices) in the fertilizer and the amount of time that has gone by.
If the dog alerts on the rug of the golf clubhouse and nothing is found—this happened during the George W. Bush administration—it might appear to onlookers that the dog is embarrassingly wrong.
But don’t call this a false alert. It’s not false if a dog smells something that she’s been trained on. Of course, no one knows what a dog is really alerting to in a case like this. The Secret Service calls these, appropriately enough, “unknown alerts.”
This is where it would come in handy if dogs could talk. Many handlers whose dogs have had an unknown alert have wanted their dog to be able to tell all.
“I have wished Rex could say, ‘Well, I think I smell X, but I’m not entirely sure,’ or ‘Yes, this is definitely the scent of X, Jon,’” says his handler.
Rex would be polite like that if he could speak. Some of the other Mals with more attitude (like Turbo, aka Snoop Dogg) might be inclined to say something like, “Hey, all you people looking at my handler like you doubt our abilities. Just because you can’t smell it with your terrible sense of smell doesn’t mean the odor I have been trained for years to find is not here in a big way! A little trust, please?”
It can be awkward for handlers whose dogs alert and cause streets or checkpoints or the White House itself to be on lockdown, only to have nothing found. But there’s no way around it.
During their long career together, Lewis and his Dutch shepherd, Marco, did tens of thousands of searches—from vehicle searches at checkpoints to protectee sweeps. The dog alerted only four or five times. Nothing was found during any of the searches.
“You don’t like to hear people complain about a dog shutting down Seventeenth Street or the White House and thinking a dog made a mistake,” Lewis says. “I didn’t want anyone trying to do harm. But the few times Marco sat, I have to admit I really hoped something was there.
“It wasn’t for the glory. I wanted people to know how valuable these dogs are, and how much good they’re capable of doing.”
—
An older red Cadillac pulled up to a White House complex checkpoint. The driver, a pass holder, was admitted through the first security gate. He drove ahead and stopped for the next check.
No stranger to the routine, he popped his trunk and waited.
Jon and Rex approached the car and Rex began his inspection. On average a Secret Service EDT dog will perform more than seven thousand vehicle searches per year. Handlers know exactly what to expect their dog to do on a typical search. Dogs usually hold to their own established pattern, starting in one particular area and ending in another.
Rex had a timeworn favorite way of searching, and it didn’t involve starting at the trunk. Until this day.
When the dog got close to the car, he beelined straight for the trunk, which was open a few inches after the driver had popped it. Rex leaped up and stood with his front paws on the bumper—something he rarely did.
He shoved open the trunk with his head. This was definitely not in Rex’s normal script. Rex is not a dog who opens anything with his head. If he’s at home and wants to go into the bedroom, but the door is open only wide enough for him to stick his head through, he’ll sit there until someone opens the door enough to fit his whole body.
Jon let his dog continue his inspection. Rex reached into the trunk with his nose and put his front paws inside the trunk. Jon hadn’t ever seen Rex act like this.
The next moment, Rex pulled his front end from the trunk. Before his front paws were on the ground, his hindquarters hit the pavement.
It was a very big, emphatic sit.
EDT dog language for, “Hey, Dad, found something!”
Jon felt a surge of adrenaline. The hair stood up on the back of his neck.
“Good boy, Rex,” he said, and gave his dog a quick scratch on the head. He set to work searching the trunk. It was empty except for a large, eight-disk CD changer. He found only some dry cleaning in the passenger area of the car.
By now, several Uniformed Division officers were on the scene. They shut down the checkpoint and cleared the area of cars and people. The other checkpoint would now take on the burden of the traffic, which would mean longer waits for people trying to get in and more congestion on the streets near the White House if it backed up enough.
But what’s a little traffic and some people being late for work when it comes to a possible explosive device near the White House?
They had the driver get out of his car. Jon and his sergeant asked him a series of questions. The driver, a regular there, was surprised and baffled at how his morning had taken such a sharp turn from normal. Officers from MPD arrived with bomb technicians and checked the vehicle thoroughly.
In the end, MPD found nothing. Jon figured it was probably residual odors of something perfectly legit that was no longer there. Rex’s definitive alert left little doubt in his mind that the dog had smelled one of the many explosive substances he was trained to detect.
The driver was eventually allowed to proceed with his business, the checkpoint was reopened, and everything went back to normal.
Everything, that is, except Rex. He worked with even more spring in his step than usual for the rest of the day. He had received an unexpected paycheck, a bonus of sorts. He didn’t get his Kong; that part of the paycheck is reserved for training. You don’t throw a Kong in a situation where there could be a real explosive. But even better, Rex had been praised by his best friend for doing his job so well.
“Rex may be a dog, but Rex can count,” Bill G., the canine program manager, says from his end of a conference table at Rowley Training Center.
Rex is lying at Jon’s feet. His ears twitch when he hears his name. He gets up, trots to the other end of the table, and stands there wagging and looking at Bill until he pets him.
Bill continues explaining something common to humans and the dogs they work with. It has to do with expectations.
Let’s say you’re a dog handler training at a football stadium. You know you’re there to find odors of explosives with your dog. You’re fully expecting your dog to find something. You check all the seats in your quadrant. You search near the concession stands. You have your dog check the trash cans. You open doors to storage areas and try to find something.
This is training. There’s got to be something.
But this is Secret Service training. There may not be anything.
Having a “find” every so often isn’t what happens in the real world. Dog teams on the job often have to search for long periods. They do a high volume of searches. The Service doesn’t want the dogs to lose interest. So they often train them with “blanks”—no odors of explosives.
Handlers don’t know if there’s going to be anything, so they can’t unintentionally cue their dogs.
If a dog comes to expect an odor every ten minutes, or at every third trash can, the dog will start figuring out the math and will play the game, sitting at regular intervals or at every third trash can. No smell? It doesn’t matter. The dog contends that if it worked before, it should work again.
Bill explains that blanks are a critical element in training Secret Service dogs. These dogs aren’t like their brethren in the military, who may find IEDs all too frequently when on deployment. Secret Service detection dogs need to know there will be days and weeks when even in training, they’re not going to find a thing.
When they do detect an odor they’re trained to find, it will be that much more exciting to them.
“I don’t like it so much. It’s not fun for me,
because you want to find something,” Jon says. “Of course Rex wants to find something. Winning to me is when we find something. Same for Rex.”
Rex hears his name and trots back to Jon’s end of the conference table. He puts his paws on his handler’s lap and leans into his chest, wagging.
Jon puts his arms around his dog while he explains that he appreciates the logic behind blanks. He gets a regular paycheck, which is inspiration enough to keep searching every day, day in and day out, with the great possibility of not finding anything outside a training venue. But Rex gets paid only when he finds something.
He doesn’t want his dog to be used to frequently finding odors in training and expect that in real life. But what’s a dog to do when he can go his whole career and alert maybe a handful of times in real life? How does he keep inspired? Those on-the-job paychecks may come only every couple of years, if that. A dog may as well be self-employed.
The answer to this problem is something called motivational training.
The Secret Service declines to say much about it. But what happened to Rex with the red Cadillac—and the subsequent bounce in his step—is something canine trainers can re-create themselves, wherever a dog may be working. It can happen any time. The White House, however, will not be shut down.
“Let’s just say we make sure the dogs know the game is always being played,” says Bill.
—
In the early days of the canine program, dogs searched not only every vehicle that drove into the White House complex but most items that were delivered, according to former handler Henry Sergent, who is now chief of the TSA National Explosives Detection Canine Team Program.
“The dogs went through everything from paper goods to donuts,” he says.
Ah, the donuts . . .
He remembers that in the late 1980s, the Old Executive Office Building was home to what was known as the “blind stand” because it was operated by people who were legally blind. Each morning at least two dozen donuts came in with them for resale to staff. It fell upon the Secret Service dogs to inspect them with their Uniformed Division officers.
“Yes, it’s true, basically police and dogs inspecting donuts,” he says.
Donut duty always seemed to put a little extra pep into his Malinois, Rudy. If a dog could sign up for a gig at the Secret Service, you’d have to imagine there would be a lot of paw marks on the list for the job that entails sniffing donuts.
The dogs were trained to find explosives hidden among food items. Secret Service dogs who were presented with a bag of hamburgers in training had to be able to focus enough to alert if the odor of an explosive was also in the bag. Their desire for their reward needed to be stronger than the aroma of cooked beef.
To the dogs, detection was and is all a fun game. They don’t know the danger of what they’re seeking. They just know that when they find what they’re supposed to, at least in training, their handlers get happy and give them praise in high-pitched voices, and throw them Kongs. With the right kind of training, a dog will stay on course no matter what kind of tempting morsels may be around.
Donut duty was a good gig. It was a great gig.
Then one day, a dog ate a donut.
And the gig, like the donut, was gone. Just like that.
It was decided an officer without a dog could probably be just as effective with a visual inspection alone. If the other dogs gave dirty looks to their colleague with donut breath, it would be understandable.
—
The White House hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. Thousands of people from all over the world tour the “People’s House” every day it’s open to the public. The majority of those who make it onto the tour have had to go through a lengthy process to be here, and there’s also an element of luck.
Most would-be visitors have to request the tour, which is self-guided, through their congressional representative’s office. This is usually done via an online form. Citizens of other countries need to go through their embassy in Washington, D.C. Requests must be made at least six weeks ahead of time (three weeks is stated as the minimum on some sites, but it’s almost unheard of to get ticketed that quickly these days) but no more than six months out.
There is no such thing as a same-day ticket. Rarely is there even a same-month ticket. This fact disappoints many Washington, D.C., visitors who haven’t done their homework. After asking around for the ticket office (nonexistent), they often end up at the nearby White House Visitor Center. It’s the next best thing to a tour of the president’s house. And it has something the White House doesn’t: restrooms for the public.
White House tour applicants older than thirteen will undergo a background check. With all the tour applications, this can take a few to several weeks. But passing the check doesn’t guarantee entry. There’s a first-come, first-served policy, and spaces fill up quickly, depending on the time of year.
The people in line to enter the White House on any given day have put in some real effort to be here. The items they’ve had to leave in their hotel rooms or cars include purses, backpacks, strollers, makeup, video recorders, laptops, tablets, food, beverages, tripods, and selfie sticks. The list of permitted items is far shorter: wallets, keys, cell phones, compact cameras, necessary medical items, and umbrellas without metal tips.
Having large pockets is a big plus on a White House tour.
Once at the entry point on Fifteenth Street NW just south of the Treasury Building, ticket documents are checked and visitors queue up near the south side of the White House.
It’s fairly standard for it to take more than an hour from arrival to walking into the White House, but visitors who have come this far are usually in a good mood. Some of the more observant may notice the comings and goings of a dog or two from a modular-type building.
“I wonder what they’re doing,” a woman in line in early December for the White House’s special holiday tour says to her companion.
“Probably drug dogs. They don’t allow drugs here, obviously. Do you think they’re shepherds?”
“Probably.”
As they wend their way closer to the small outbuilding, the same woman who spotted the dogs sees a sign with a picture of a Belgian Malinois.
“Look! Canines working to keep you safe,” she says as she reads it aloud. “Please do not attempt to touch or pet these animals while they are working.”
“It doesn’t look like a German shepherd,” her companion says, using her chin to point to the photo, despite the lack of anything in her arms.
They move along and then up several steps into a room that seems fairly empty except for a couple of Secret Service Uniformed Division officers. Each visitor is asked to step in, one at a time, and place her feet on yellow outlines of shoes. The first woman stands where she is asked and moves on when given the OK. The second does the same. They’re both in and out of the room in under thirty seconds. If they’re like most people, they probably didn’t notice much except a couple of officers in a relatively empty room.
But if you have keen situational awareness, you’ll notice a great deal more. There’s a slight breeze coming from somewhere overhead. You look up and see fans. That might strike you as odd, since it’s a chilly day with no need for fans.
You look to your left and see a third Secret Service officer. This one is standing behind a louvre screen with just his head and shoulders above it. Listen and you might hear a click-click-click-click on the floor near the officer. If you glance over and look through the screen slats at the right angle, you might spot the source of the clicks. It’s a dog, toenails tapping the floor as she walks about doing her job. On this shift, the dog is a Personnel Screening Canine (PSC) named Brenda.
You’re given the nod, and as you walk into the next room, which has a magnetometer and a couple of screeners, you wonder what that was all about.
The room you were jus
t in is called the White House Visitors Entrance Canine Checkpoint. The fans keep the airflow going toward the dog rather than out the door or anywhere else. The dog’s handler gives the dog a command and the dog sniffs for explosives odors from behind the screen. (Keeping the dogs out of plain sight helps visitors who might have a fear of dogs and makes the process go more quickly for other visitors who might want to pet the dogs or talk to the officers about them.) If the dog doesn’t have a change of behavior or an alert, the handler signals one of the other officers and you’re good to go.
But what if Brenda or one of her PSC pals detects an odor she’s been trained to alert? If she sits, you don’t want to be behind that person. Once a dog alerts, everyone else behind that person gets pushed back out, often all the way to the park they entered.
The person the dog alerted to is escorted to another room for further screening and questioning. Once all tests come back negative and the information checks out, the person is cleared and tours resume. This could take as little as twenty minutes or more than an hour. It all depends on how well the person cooperates and how quickly Technical Security Division personnel are able to get to the bottom of the situation.
A chemical engineer and a landscaper are among some of the people dogs here have alerted to. Everything checked out fine.
Maybe under the “additional information” section of the White House ticket document, where a bullet-point list includes advice about dressing for the weather and making sure visitors eat and hydrate before arrival, there should be this helpful tip:
• Wear laundered clothes, clean shoes, and take a really good shower.
—
After the tour, you exit out the north side of the White House. If you’re very lucky, you might see an ERT dog and handler while they’re taking a brief walk. The handlers are unmistakable with their athletic physiques, their weapons, and their badass black uniforms. Their dogs also exude confidence and strength.
If it’s your unbelievably lucky day, you might even spot Dale Haney, the superintendent of the White House grounds, walking a genuine presidential dog. The horticulturalist has worked here since 1972. The New York Times credits him with tending to every First Dog since Richard Nixon’s Irish setter, King Timahoe.
Secret Service Dogs Page 10
