Secret Service Dogs

by Maria Goodavage

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  Considering all the people who have jumped the fence since the Tactical Canine Unit started, it’s quite remarkable that ERT dogs didn’t need to physically apprehend anyone for more than a decade.

  Dogs have been involved in stopping fence jumpers in other ways. The canine teams are trained to deploy out of their vans in an extraordinarily short amount of time. (The Secret Service asks that the number of seconds not be revealed.) They bolt to where the handler deems he and his dog would be most effective and set to work to “convince” the suspect that he or she needs to freeze and then lie down prone.

  It’s a team effort, with the handler yelling to the intruder that he will release his dog if the suspect doesn’t cooperate, and the dog barking at the end of the leash and looking like he would dearly love to pitch in with his teeth.

  On September 20, 2011, Jim sat in his van on the White House’s north grounds in the middle of the day, watching the crowds at the fence line for anything suspicious. His Malinois, Spike, lay in the back, relaxing but ready for anything if called upon.

  Jim and Spike had been together since 2005 and in 2010 had taken first place in the patrol competition at Vohne Liche’s K-9 Olympics. But Spike was getting older and would be retiring in the next few months. Jim didn’t want to think about what life would be like not having Spike at his side at work every day.

  They’d had some exciting times together keeping presidents safe. He wondered if Spike would ever see any action again. He knew that Spike wouldn’t mind one last exciting protective detail before hanging up his leash.

  A couple of hours into their shift, Jim saw trouble. A man had swiftly scrambled over the wrought iron fence and was in a dead sprint toward the White House, dashing straight in the direction of their van.

  Jim felt like he was moving in slow motion as he and Spike deployed from the van and ran toward the man. The first time he had headed off a fence jumper, without a canine, it felt like it took him an hour, instead of seconds. It’s not an uncommon sensation in this kind of work.

  As the man ran toward the White House, and toward him and Spike, Jim shouted for him to stop and get on the ground or he’d release his dog. The man didn’t comply. No other ERT officers had arrived yet.

  He wanted the guy to give up without Spike having to bite him. But the fence jumper showed no sign of relenting. Spike barked steadily and pulled at the leash, anxious to move in.

  Jim made his warning announcement again and let a few feet of line out of his hands, allowing Spike to run closer. He was going to play it by fractions of a second. He could stop the dog any time. The guy didn’t know this. But when he saw the reality of this dog and those teeth, he gave up and knelt down in the grass.

  Jim didn’t need a leash to stop Spike. All it took was a word and the dog halted. Other ERT officers had arrived, weapons drawn in case the man decided to pull a fast one.

  Spike continued to bark, front end down, hind end up, ready to help again any time he was needed.

  Marshall, who was on ERT but not yet in canine, moved in to handcuff the intruder. He took extra time because as he was patting him down, he felt hard objects up and down the man’s chest. He needed to assess whether these were explosives, part of a suicide vest, or something else. Fortunately they were rocks, loads of them, lining the front of his baggy jacket.

  Marshall glanced over at the dog barking to his right—this dog who was so passionate about his work and had just stopped this guy in his tracks—and it hit him. He wanted to be holding the leash of a dog like Spike one day. He decided right there on the green grass of the White House that he was going to do whatever it took to become an ERT dog handler.

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  Spike retired a few months later. That deployment would turn out to be his last. Years later, well after Spike passed away, Jim still has a link immediately available on his cell phone. Click it and you’ll see the video of the last part of the action that day, captured by a far-off news crew. It shows his partner barking with a passion and fully immersed in doing what he most loved to do.

  Jim has watched it dozens of times, and it still makes him smile.

  “I’m going to keep this forever,” he says.

  —

  The White House perimeter fence is seven feet six inches tall with a horizontal railing running under decorative spear points, called finials, at the top. As the dozens who have breached it could attest, the fence is not all that hard to climb.

  It’s an issue multiple agencies would dearly love to remedy.

  In the summer of 2015, the Secret Service and U.S. Park Police installed a removable anticlimb feature consisting of small, sharp spikes that fit between the finials. The spikes are temporary until there’s a better way of deterring would-be jumpers, or at least slowing down anyone determined to get closer to the Executive Mansion and its occupants.

  An independent panel convened by the Department of Homeland Security recommended the fence be made four or five feet taller. The rationale was given in an executive summary of the report:

  A better fence can provide time, and time is crucial to the protective mission. Every additional second of response time provided by a fence that is more difficult to climb makes a material difference in ensuring the President’s safety and protecting the symbol that is the White House. Additionally, the ease with which “pranksters” and the mentally ill can climb the current fence puts Secret Service personnel in a precarious position: When someone jumps the fence, they must decide, in a split-second, whether to use lethal force on a person who may not actually pose a viable threat to the President or the White House. By deterring these more frivolous threats, a more effective fence can minimize the instances when such difficult decision making is required.

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  Other ideas have already been rejected. Barbed wire, a water-filled moat, and an electrified fence aren’t going to cut it at the White House. Neither is a giant solid wall. The panel noted that it had confidence that adjustments “can be made without diminishing the aesthetic beauty or historic character of the White House grounds.”

  A Washington Post editorial in January 2015 noted that “the security of the president and his family must be paramount. But it’s not clear that security depends on or is enhanced by all of the incremental militarization near the White House.”

  Many in the Secret Service believe that a beefed-up ERT canine presence could go a long way toward making the White House more secure without making it look militaristic. To that end, the Tactical Canine Unit has been tapped to increase its presence at the White House.

  Whatever happens to the fence, there will probably still be those who succeed in scaling it. An enlarged welcoming committee of tactical canines will help do what no fence can do.

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  It wasn’t until March 30, 2014, that an ERT canine put the bite on a fence jumper. It was a misty, rainy day, and the press area outside the White House was empty. The event would go largely unreported, garnering three paragraphs in an AP story that didn’t note that a dog was involved.

  Subsequent one-paragraph stories did mention a dog, but only with a line from a Secret Service press release, which stated that after “failing to comply with lawful orders, the subject was subdued by a U.S. Secret Service Uniformed Division K-9 unit.”

  After the man jumped the fence, he ran around erratically on the north grounds, evading capture and not listening to commands to stop, an ERT member would later describe. When he started running once more for the White House, the handler gave another command to halt, and when it went unheeded, he let the dog settle the situation. The dog sped toward the man, grabbed him by the forearm, and took him down.

  As soon as the man was under the control of the ERT, the handler asked the dog to release his wrist.

  The man was arrested and taken to a hospital for treatment of minor injuries.

  The f
irst real-life apprehension by an ERT canine happened with no fanfare. And that was fine with the ERT guys. “We’re not in it for the glory,” says a handler. “We just want to get the job done.”

  —

  When standing among tourists admiring the White House, it’s fairly common to hear comments like one from a man from Massachusetts talking with his wife.

  “I think that’s where that man got into the White House. I can’t believe the Secret Service couldn’t stop him. How could that happen?”

  The Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security have spent a long time trying to figure out the answer to that question.

  Mention “the September event” to those in the Secret Service, and chances are they’ll know exactly what you’re talking about and wish it had never come close to happening. It’s a painful embarrassment, and some take it deeply to heart.

  On the evening of September 19, 2014, Omar Gonzalez, an Iraq war veteran battling PTSD, jumped over the White House fence, sprinted across the north grounds, overpowered an officer guarding an unlocked front door to the White House, and ran past a stairway that leads to where the First Family lives. (The president and his daughters had left for Camp David by helicopter from the South Lawn about ten minutes before Gonzalez breached the fence.)

  He kept going and dashed into the East Room, where he was tackled by a counterassault agent. Some reports say he got as far as the doorway to the Green Room.

  It was a security failure of almost the worst kind. It would have been far worse if he had been armed with something more than the Spyderco VG-10 folding knife he carried in a pocket in his pants.

  “If he has [an explosive] device on him and he gets in, he controls the White House. He could have anything on him,” a former high-ranking Secret Service official, speaking anonymously, told the Washington Post.

  Gonzalez had come to the attention of the Secret Service twice that year. In July, Virginia law enforcement had found several rifles, shotguns, and handguns in his vehicle during a traffic stop, in addition to a map with a line that pointed to the White House. The Secret Service interviewed him but didn’t find him to be a threat.

  In August, Secret Service officers stopped Gonzalez and spoke with him after they spotted him walking near the fence on the south side of the White House with a hatchet in his waistband. They weren’t aware of the earlier incident and let him go on his way after searching his car and finding nothing threatening.

  Less than a month later, Gonzalez would somehow make it through several rings of protection that are set up to prevent anything like this from happening.

  One of those rings included an ERT dog and handler.

  Every moment of the fiasco was examined in a detailed DHS report on the incursion. The executive summary alone is several pages.

  “It was one Murphy moment after another,” says a member of the Tactical Canine Unit who spoke under condition of anonymity. “I didn’t sleep for days after the incident.

  “It hit us so hard. We were all sick to our stomach about the entire incident. It was a failure on all parts, we failed, everyone failed. It’s not ever going to happen again.”

  Almost immediately, the ERT Tactical Canine Unit instituted a significant change in the way dogs are used. Before “the September event,” there had been only one dog team stationed on each side of the White House. After, teams would never be solo again.

  The program is also working on outfitting a new kind of vehicle that will make deployment times even faster than they already are, with a front-deploying system specially designed for dogs. Turning around to get a dog out of a minivan can take the focus off the suspect. The new design would not only shave a little time off deployment, but should make it easier for a handler to remain engaged with the subject.

  “Good always comes from bad,” says Bill. “It wasn’t our finest moment, but we learned some valuable lessons.”

  CHAPTER 11

  DRIVE

  The Secret Service goes shopping for dogs in Denver, Indiana, population 471. It’s an eleven-hour drive from RTC when pulling a ten-dog trailer. That’s with just one quick stop and no traffic, and doesn’t include getting stuck behind a horse and carriage.

  A couple of the smaller roads that lead to Denver go through Northern Indiana Amish country. Scenic, yes, but to have to slow to five miles an hour when the canine selection team is so close to its destination can be painful. It’s even worse when heading back to D.C. with a trailer full of barking dogs at the beginning of the trip.

  “It may be for only two miles, but two miles behind a horse is forever,” says Secret Service canine program instructor Steve M., who makes the trip every few months.

  Denver is home to Vohne Liche Kennels, which has provided most of the Secret Service canines since the year 2000. Kenneth (Kenny) Licklider, who started Vohne Liche in 1993 after retiring from the Air Force, says the kennel has trained and/or provided dogs for more than five thousand agencies, including U.S. Army Special Forces and U.S. Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC).

  During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the kennels were often at near capacity. With almost six hundred dogs in the seven kennel buildings, Denver had more dogs than people for a while, and some months it still comes close.

  Denver is just a couple of miles away from the larger town of Mexico. But Peru, about five miles south, is the place where most of the Secret Service instructors who select dogs go to eat and spend the night.

  Peru, with a population of about 11,200, is the biggest city in Miami County. If you’re a local of a certain age, you may still be pronouncing it pee-roo. It’s no metropolis but it has a past more storied than many cities several times its size.

  Depression-era gangster John Dillinger and his gang plundered weapons from a police arsenal in Peru in 1933. The deputies watched dumbstruck as the men ransacked their gun cabinets and made away with a variety of powerful weapons they’d soon use in deadly bank robberies.

  In 1972 the ransom from an American Airlines hijacking was found by a farmer tending a soybean field. Another farmer, this one in a corn field, found a submachine gun used in the hijacking.

  If that’s not colorful enough, Peru is also the self-proclaimed “Circus Capital of the World.”

  “Children in Peru learn circus skills the way other kids learn soccer,” notes an article in USA Today, which also informs that Peru is “where human cannonball is a prestigious occupation.”

  From the late 1890s until the 1940s, a half-dozen professional circuses, including Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, chose Peru as a place to spend winters because of its relatively central location and proximity to railroads. When they eventually pulled up stakes for good, they left behind a circus-oriented population.

  Today Peru is home to the International Circus Hall of Fame Museum, the Circus City Festival and Parade, a youth circus, and the Peru Amateur Circus.

  The city is the backdrop for the 2006 film Little Big Top, about an aging drunk whose passion for clowning is reawakened when he moves back to Peru, his hometown. One scene features the real-life Mr. Weenie, a drive-in that’s hard to miss because of its logo: a giant smiling hot dog wearing a bow tie and a hat. A big yellow arrow under the happy hot dog points the hungry to the eatery, where they can get a large selection of wieners and burgers. (On Mondays customers can buy two corn dogs for $1.50.)

  The Secret Service canine crews here for “buy trips” are so focused on finding quality canines that they don’t know much about Peru’s circus lore. But there’s a reminder of it every time they come into Peru from a certain direction: a sign with PERU painted in blue, with a painted red circus tent outline and colorful flags over it. Under that, CIRCUS CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.

  Beneath it all: HOME OF COLE PORTER. Who knew?

  The hotel where they often stay is about as close as they come to the city’s big-top re
putation. The Best Western Circus City Inn features circus-themed lobby decor, including large clowns etched in glass panels that separate the lobby from the pool. Every so often a young child who is raring to go swimming sees the giant clown faces and runs away, crying.

  The town is not an ideal destination for the coulrophobic.

  (Vohne Liche also runs its own hotel—a former barracks—down the road at Grissom Air Reserve Base. The refurbished lodging features two-room suites, convenient for handlers who come from across the country to train with dogs. Across the street is the Red Rocket Bar & Grill. The name has a double meaning to those in the dog world, but to most visitors, a red rocket is just a red rocket.)

  The Best Western is a dog-friendly hotel. A sign at the front door proclaims, WE LOVE DOGS—BRING FIDO. The Secret Service takes the hotel up on this offer on a regular basis.

  During the Service’s weeklong buy trips, other hotel guests are likely to see a variety of Belgian Malinois parading in and out of the lobby, past the stuffed toy lion lounging in his wooden cage topped by big toy gorillas.

  The testing of the dogs is mostly done at VLK, but some of the Secret Service dog buyers find it helpful to see how the dogs react in an environment like a hotel.

  “I will typically bring the dogs back to the hotel room so I can socialize with them,” says Brian. “I don’t just want to see them in their working environment but their social environment. It’s important because these dogs are going to be living in someone’s home for eight or ten or more years.”

  He also watches out for telltale signs of fear, shyness, or unwarranted aggression. Wanting to nosh on a pillow is one thing. (He doesn’t let them and rarely turns his back for more than a few seconds.) Wanting to nosh his arm when he reaches for a water glass on the bedside table is quite another.

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  The demand for high-end law-enforcement and military canines greatly increased after 9/11. A declaration by the Pentagon years later that dogs are the best defense against improvised bombs sent the demand through the roof.