Security is heightened around the White House following Friday’s breach. Omar Jose Gonzalez, 42, appeared before a judge on one charge of unlawfully entering a restricted building or grounds while carrying a deadly or dangerous weapon. 
 
 Sept. 22, 2014 Security is heightened around the White House following Friday’s breach. Omar Jose Gonzalez, 42, appeared before a judge on one charge of unlawfully entering a restricted building or grounds while carrying a deadly or dangerous weapon. Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post 
 
 The Secret Service is under scrutiny after a man scaled the White House fence and made it all the way into the East Room. 
 
 The Secret Service is under scrutiny after a man scaled the White House fence and made it all the way into the East Room. 
 
 The Secret Service is under scrutiny after a man scaled the White House fence and made it all the way into the East Room. 
 
 Layer after layer of security measures that were supposed to block an intruder from getting into the White House all failed in stunning succession on the evening of Sept. 19, according to an internal review of a fence jumper’s breach. 
 
 There were nearly a dozen failures in the Secret Service’s rings of security that helped Omar Jose Gonzalez, 42, get inside the White House and deep into the East Room, according to a Department of Homeland Security review, a summary of which was obtained Thursday by The Washington Post. 
 
 In one example, a canine handler who was supposed to help chase down and tackle anyone who breached the White House compound was in a van on a personal cellphone call at the time and did not hear any radio traffic about a fence jumper. By the time he and his well-trained attack dog arrived, Gonzalez was already entering the White House front door, the review found. 
 
 In another failure, a crisis command center officer who thought he was alerting everyone to an intruder that Friday night didn’t realize his radio wasn’t working properly — meaning his alert was not being broadcast to officers stationed at the White House. Some alarms were also muted. 
 
 The end result: Many Secret Service officers were slow to realize that a person had jumped the fence, and then weren’t sure where he was. Construction on the north grounds obscured many officers’ views, further hampering their ability to spot trouble and respond. 
 
 An officer on the North Portico guarding the front gate also did not realize for some time that there was a fence jumper because of “unintelligible traffic over the radio,” the report said. With his gun drawn as he watched Gonzalez run up the steps, the officer let the intruder walk past him because he assumed the front door was locked; it was not. 
 
 Lawmakers said Thursday that they were shocked by the depth of the communication and protocol failures exposed by the report. 
 
 The review “reads as a comedy of errors by the U.S. Secret Service and confirms that fundamental reform is needed,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which will hold a Secret Service oversight hearing Wednesday. 
 
 Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said the agency has already put in place or is in the process of implementing changes to fix the problems highlighted in the report.” 
 
 “The entire Secret Service workforce is dedicated to ensuring that we provide the highest level of protection to the people and facilities we protect,” Donovan said. “We must take this opportunity to make any necessary changes and improvements related to carrying out our protective mission to regain the trust of the American people.” 
 
 As outlined by the summary, things went badly that night from the very beginning. 
 
 President Obama and his daughters were flying to Camp David and had just lifted off in the president’s helicopter a few minutes before the breach. 
 
 A bystander captured video of a man allegedly jumping the fence at the White House and sparking a security alert. Omar J. Gonzalez allegedly got inside the front door of the White House before getting caught. (Alan Pawlinski via YouTube) 
 
 The section of the fence that Gonzalez scaled lacked an ornamental spike — called a trident — that would have made it harder for him to get over, the report found. 
 
 Two emergency response team members responded to the commotion quickly with rifles pointed at Gonzalez but determined he was not a lethal risk because he appeared unarmed. The one who got closest to tackling him was surprised when Gonzalez barreled through a line of bushes at the base of the North Portico steps. He and several fellow officers had assumed the dense bush line was impassable. 
 
 The review, which was first reported by the New York Times, also found striking communications failures. The canine handler and his dog, for example, were stationed in a van partly to avoid giving the impression of a militarized zone to White House visitors. But it was not equipped with monitors or speakers to alert him to a breach. 
 
 An officer in the service’s Joint Operations Command Center saw alarm panels indicating that someone had breached the fence line and sent out an alert over the radio. But he didn’t know the command center radio system lacked the capability to override standard radio traffic, so his transmission was not broadcast. He avoided making additional transmissions because he wanted to keep the line clear for other radio reports. 
 
 The officer stationed directly inside the front door had no idea there was an intruder, as the alarm at her station had been muted at the White House staff’s request. Gonzalez knocked her over as she tried too late to lock the front door. She reached for her baton to subdue him, but grabbed her flashlight by mistake. 
 
 Gonzalez had been questioned once by the Secret Service on the White House perimeter in August, and a Secret Service field office in Roanoke had been warned about him by Virginia state police. Authorities had arrested him and discovered he had a map of the White House and multiple weapons and ammunition. But the field office did not notify Secret Service headquarters of this — a failing the review attributed to a lack of clear directives from headquarters. 
 
 Lawmakers said Thursday the review lays bare the pressing need for an overhaul of the Secret Service. The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), introduced legislation Thursday authorizing a “top-to-bottom” review of the agency. 
 
 Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.), the committee’s ranking Democrat, said the review shows that the response to Gonzalez was hampered “because of critical and major failures in communications, confusion about operational protocols, and gaps in staffing and training. While some of these problems can be attributed to a lack of resources, others are systemic and indicative of Secret Service culture.” ||||| WASHINGTON — An intruder was able to climb a fence and enter the White House in September because of a succession of “performance, organizational, technical” and other failures by the Secret Service, according to a damning review of the incident by the Department of Homeland Security. 
 
 The review found that the Secret Service’s alarm systems and radios failed to function properly, and that many of the responding officers did not see the intruder as he climbed over the fence, delaying their response. 
 
 Omar Gonzalez, the man charged in the incident, could have been stopped by a Secret Service officer who was stationed on the North Lawn with an attack dog, the review said. But the officer did not realize that an intruder had made it over the fence because he was sitting in his van talking on his personal cellphone. 
 
 The officer did not have his radio earpiece in, and had left the second radio he was supposed to have in his locker. It was only after he saw another officer running toward Mr. Gonzalez that he was alerted to the security breach. At that point, the officer gave the dog the command to attack, but the dog had not had a chance to “lock onto” the intruder “and may not have seen” him at all, according to the review. Mr. Gonzalez continued into the White House. 
 
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 The review has not been made public, but members of Congress were briefed on it Thursday. An executive summary was obtained by The New York Times.The review of the Sept. 19 breach is part of a much broader investigation of the Secret Service being conducted by the deputy secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. That investigation is focused on other incidents in which the White House fence was scaled and how security at the White House could be improved. Julia Pierson, the director of the Secret Service, resigned after the September incident as well as other security lapses by the agency. 
 
 In addition to faulting the Secret Service for its handling of the security breach, the review also found that the agency mishandled its investigation of Mr. Gonzalez in the months before he succeeded in entering the White House. He first came to the attention of the authorities in July when he was arrested on gun charges in Virginia. A month later, he was stopped outside the White House carrying a hatchet but was not arrested. 
 
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 The report also said that because of staffing shortages, the uniformed Secret Service officers who were responsible for protecting the White House did not receive adequate training. But the bulk of the report focuses on what happened on the evening of Sept. 19, from the time officers recognized Mr. Gonzalez outside the White House. 
 
 Mr. Gonzalez did not appear to show any odd behavior, so the officers did not talk to him or alert their supervisors. An hour later, at 7:19 p.m., officers on Pennsylvania Avenue spotted him climbing over the fence at a point where one of the ornamental spikes was missing. The officers ran toward him and told him to stop, but he continued over the fence onto the North Lawn. 
 
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 One officer called over his radio that someone had gone over the fence, and an alarm was sounded. Two officers approached Mr. Gonzalez with their firearms pointed at him and told him to stop. He continued running, and the officers decided not to use lethal force because they did not believe he was armed. 
 
 One of the officers followed Mr. Gonzalez into the bushes in front of the North Portico but lost sight of him. 
 
 The summary said that the officers “were surprised that Gonzalez was able to get through the bushes” because “prior to that evening, the officers believed the bushes” were too thick to pass through. 
 
 It was at that time that the officer with the dog joined the pursuit. 
 
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 An officer stationed nearby was unable to see what was occurring because his view was obstructed by trees and bushes. That officer “was unable to hear any comprehensible radio communications about alarm breaks or Gonzalez” until he had gotten close to the North Portico entrance. 
 
 “By the time the officer exited his vehicle and began yelling commands at Gonzalez, Gonzalez had nearly arrived at the bushes,” according to the summary. “The officer was unable to reach Gonzalez before he entered the bushes and, as a result, went around the bushes toward the North Portico only to find that Gonzalez had already entered the White House.” 
 
 An officer stationed at the North Portico door could not hear on the radio what was occurring and had an obstructed view. Instead of remaining at the door, the officer took out his weapon and took cover behind a pillar. The officer put his finger on the trigger of his gun, pointed it at Mr. Gonzalez as he came up the stairs, and told him to stop. But, Mr. Gonzalez continued running and the officer did not shoot because he did not believe Mr. Gonzalez was armed. It was later discovered that Mr. Gonzalez had a knife. 
 
 The wooden doors at the North Portico were closed and the officer assumed they were locked. “Believing that Gonzalez was trapped, and concerned that the canine might erroneously lock onto him, the officer chose to remain in place and out of the way” of the other officers who were chasing after him. 
 
 But the doors were not locked, and Mr. Gonzalez entered the White House. The emergency communication system by the entrance had been muted. As the officer stationed there tried to lock the doors, Mr. Gonzalez “barged through them and knocked her backward.” She told him to stop but he continued on to the East Room. 
 
 “After attempting twice to physically take Gonzalez down but failing to do so because of the size disparity between the two, the officer then attempted to draw her baton but accidentally grabbed her flashlight instead,” the report said. “The officer threw down her flashlight, drew her firearm, and continued to give Gonzalez commands that he ignored.” 
 
 Mr. Gonzalez entered the East Room, but then exited, heading down the hallway. Two officers stationed in the White House, assisted by two plainclothes agents who had just finished their shifts, tackled him. 
 
 Outside the White House several officers, who said they did not know the layout of the building, were lining up in a tactical formation. “By the time they entered,” the report said, “Gonzalez had already been subdued,” it said. 
 
 A copy of the findings was given to the acting Secret Service director, Joseph Clancy, at the end of last month so he “could immediately begin to take any additional security measures that the findings warranted in order to better ensure the White House complex is secure,” according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security. But no Secret Service agents or officers have been disciplined in connection with the incident.
– Homeland Security has wrapped up a review of the incident in which a man armed with a knife scaled a fence and got inside the White House, and one detail as relayed by the New York Times stands out above all others: The intruder "could have been stopped by a Secret Service officer who was stationed on the North Lawn with an attack dog. But the officer did not realize that an intruder had made it over the fence because he was sitting in his van talking on his personal cellphone." A close second is probably the officer stationed outside the North Portico doors who initially couldn't figure out what was going on because of garbled radio chatter, reports the Washington Post. When he eventually saw the intruder running toward the White House, the officer drew his weapon, took cover behind a pillar ... and then let the man proceed to the doors because he assumed they were locked. They were not. The officer also thought that if he emerged from the pillar, the attack dog might have mistakenly gone after him.