2009, The Washington Post WASHINGTON -- The Secret Service said Thursday that its procedures to ensure a tight bubble of security around the White House and the political leaders under the agency's care were not followed when an uninvited Virginia couple attended Tuesday night's state dinner. Officials are not providing any details about how the couple breached what is often considered the most secure facility in the world. 'We're being intentionally vague on that,' Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan said Thursday morning. 'All we are saying is that procedures we have in place weren't followed.' Asked whether there is any early indication that new procedures should be put in place to secure the White House and protect the president, Donovan said the Secret Service believes the procedures are adequate --or would have been had they been followed. But he said that the review underway right now of the incident could offer new suggestions. 'If adjustments need to be made,' they will be, Donovan said, fielding a flood of calls from media organizations on Thanksgiving Day. Donovan said that the couple entered with other guests on the Southeast side of the White House, a typical location for parties and other celebrations. Guests to the White House Fourth of July picnic, for example, typically enter at the same location. Aides to President Obama said the White House has requested a through review of what went wrong. But Donovan said that the Secret Service needed no such order, moving quickly to investigate as soon as it learned that the uninvited guests had gotten through. 'This is our top priority,' he said. 'The moment we found out about this, we began a comprehensive investigation.' Security at the White House is the stuff of legend, though some of the imaginations of Hollywood go beyond the reality. An episode of Fox's '24' last season showed a White House visitor placing her thumb on a fingerprint scanner, a type of screening that is not typically used. Still, it usually takes quite a bit to get inside the iron gate that surrounds the house and grounds at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Reporters and people with appointments in the West Wing enter through the Northwest gate, along Pennsylvania Avenue. Journalists with permanent credentials, called 'hard passes,' must present those passes to enter the outer gate. They then are required to swipe the cards and enter a pin-code before passing through a magnetometer. People without hard passes must have someone at the White House enter their names into a computer system called WAVES. When they approach the Northwest gate, they must present identification. But they are denied entry if their names do not pop up on the WAVES system. Security is usually somewhat different for big parties, however. Guest IDs are often checked against a printed list of names. People who are cleared through that checkpoint are then passed through a magnetometer. Donovan would not describe the system in place Tuesday night, saying the investigation is 'ongoing. I don't want to get in to any of it.' The Secret Service was founded after the assassination of president William McKinley in 1901, according to its Web site. Its dual mission is: 'to safeguard the nation's financial infrastructure and payment systems to preserve the integrity of the economy, and to protect national leaders, visiting heads of state and government, designated sites and National Special Security Events.' The organization is now part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In the Service's strategic plan for 2008 to 2013, one of the key 'strategic objectives' is to safeguard the White House complex and other high-profile sites. Michael Shear, a Post reporter, contributes to the '44' blog on washingtonpost.com, from which this is adapted. 