On the evening of Sept. 17, 2016, a bomb detonated in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, launching a dumpster 120 feet, shattering nearby windows, and injuring 30 people. It was one of nine explosive devices planted by a man named Ahmad Rahimi in the region before the police arrested him. To prove he did it, the FBI turned to a special new recruit for help: a black Labrador named Iris, the bureau’s first dog trained to smell technological devices.
The FBI obtained a search warrant for Rahimi’s home and called in Iris and her human partner, Special Agent Jeff Calandra, to see if the dog, just one year old at the time, could find any evidence.
Iris sniffed around, then rushed into the closet. She refused to come when Calandra called, so he walked over to find her in a secret compartment containing a hidden laptop. She later found a thumb drive in a jar of pennies, of all places, and a detonated cellphone motherboard buried in the backyard. The motherboard was presented at trial as key evidence of one of Rahimi’s explosive experiments. A federal jury gave him a life sentence.
“From that point on, people were like, ‘Oh wow, this can work. Can we use the dog?’” Calandra recalls. “It spiraled from there.”
The Secret Scent of Electronics: How FBI Dogs Find Hidden Devices | Tech Today
We met Iris and Calandra on a rare visit to the FBI’s Newark, New Jersey, headquarters. In his first interview since Iris retired, Calandra told us the full story of her 11-year career and how it changed the way the bureau investigates crimes. The Chelsea Market Bombing case, as it came to be known, was Iris’s first big break, though she went on to fly around the world taking on “nearly every big case you see on TV,” Calandra says.
The duo conducted 2,000 searches and discovered nearly 20,000 hidden thumb drives, microSD cards, laptops, cell phones, and the like. Along the way, Iris was electrocuted on a case Calandra cannot get into, and he had to administer Narcan to her twice when she was exposed to fentanyl.
FBI Special Agent Jeff Calandra and Special Agent Iris play on the roof of the FBI’s Newark, New Jersey, headquarters (Credit: Zooey Liao/PCMag/FBI)
Iris’s epic run ended in March 2025, when she was diagnosed with bone cancer and had to have her left front leg amputated. As a pioneer in the field of electronic-detection dogs, she inspired the FBI to establish a formal training program for tech-sniffing dogs. It’s the validation Calandra worked tirelessly to achieve, but now that it’s happened, he’s found himself at a crossroads. The bureau is training a puppy to replace Iris, another black Lab named Nyx, and when I meet Calandra in person, he is still deciding whether to take her on.
“It’s just hard while Iris is still alive,” he says, his words hesitant. “Walking through the airport with another dog feels like cheating, as weird as that sounds.” These days, when Calandra leaves for work in the morning, Iris looks longingly at him from their couch in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. “You can’t come anymore,” he tells her with a pang in his heart.
We Get a Rare Peek Inside the FBI
In January, our videographer, Numi Prasarn, and I travel to the FBI’s imposing downtown Newark office building, located along the Passaic River. “We don’t usually have visitors,” the security guard says as we feed our bags through an X-ray scanner, like at the airport. (We were not allowed to bring in our smartphones or any Wi-Fi or Bluetooth-connected microphones or cameras.)
We meet Calandra and Iris in a modest room with fluorescent lighting on the 12th floor. Calandra, 46, wears a sweatshirt bearing an “FBI Iris K9” logo he designed himself. Iris has a credential badge around her neck—she’s an official special agent, too—and a 3D-printed prosthetic where her front left leg once was.
Iris begins to prance around the room, barking and barging into my lap for some pets like she’d known me for years. Eventually, Calandra removes her prosthetic, and Iris settles down at my feet for a nap.
“In the beginning, I didn’t know anything about dog training,” Calandra admits. “My wife and I had one dog, a Yorkie. I was winging it, to be honest with you.”
Iris and Calandra spent more than a decade flying around the world (Credit: Zooey Liao/PCMag/FBI)
An Analog Way of Fighting Crimes
The idea of a dog that could sniff technology was new when Calandra first proposed it to his supervisors in 2014. At the time, he was working on cases involving sex crimes against children and realized that investigations often missed crucial evidence, such as photos and videos, stored on thumb drives and other devices. Calandra wondered whether a dog could help locate them, so he put together a proposal for his supervisors. To his surprise, he got approval and a $20,000 budget—big for Calandra, but a modest sum for the FBI.
“It was an analog way of fighting crimes, which is why I liked it,” says Richard Frankel, the now-retired special agent in charge of the Newark FBI branch who approved Iris’s funding. “I could’ve gotten in trouble, just because it was new, but I love using old-school law enforcement techniques to go after new-fangled things.” Frankel says he warned Calandra that if the experiment wasn’t working within a reasonable timeframe, he would pull the plug.
Calandra got in touch with chemists at the FBI’s headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, to research materials in tech devices that a dog could smell. They referred him to the Connecticut State Police, which trained the first electronics detection pup, Selma, a black Lab who entered the field in 2013. By then, the Connecticut State Police were training and selling dogs to other law enforcement agencies. That’s where Calandra got Iris, then a tiny puppy, in 2015.
Labradors like Selma and Iris have a high food drive—they essentially work for treats—and tend to collaborate well with humans. With an estimated 150 to 300 million scent receptors in their noses (we humans have just five million), they can detect chemicals used in electronics. The main one is triphenylphosphine oxide (TPPO). However, in practice, it’s not one compound the dogs smell; rather, it’s a combination they recognize and grow familiar with over time, says John Naples, the program coordinator for electronic storage device detection canines at the Connecticut State Police.
(Credit: Zooey Liao/PCMag/Getty Images)
When the dogs get a whiff of the chemicals, they “signal,” which for Iris means sitting down and staying put. Their human then comes over to check the area, and if there’s a device, the dog gets a snack. Early on, if a piece of electronics was too obvious—like a wall-mounted television—Iris might have signaled, but Calandra wouldn’t feed her. Over time, Iris learned which devices and locations produced kibble, so she optimized for that.
When Calandra returned home, he trained Iris to detect a different chemical commonly used in circuit boards. He says he used his technical background—he has a master’s in computer forensics and spent three years as an engineer before joining the FBI—to develop his novel approach, the specifics of which he would not disclose.
The chemists in the Connecticut program didn’t sign off on that method, but Calandra was undeterred. “What I can tell you is some of the chemical compounds that he was looking at were a little bit too common in my opinion,” Naples says. “But I think he always intended to go out on his own, and if no one has unique ideas, the field doesn’t progress.”
Iris Faces a Major Test
Iris faced a major test in 2016, when another government agency, the name of which Calandra asks us not to disclose, reached out with some “concerns” about the dog’s capabilities. The unnamed agency sent a private jet to bring Iris and Calandra to a large airport hangar lined with GoPro cameras, where over the next two weeks, she was put through a series of tests. “I knew she knew what she was doing, but this [agency] was at such a high level that I was like, ‘Please don’t fail,’” Calandra says, recalling that he was “swearing profusely.”
(Jeff Calandra)
One of Iris’s last tests was to sniff a pile of wooden pallets, which Calandra believed contained no electronic devices. “I start arguing with the guy, like, ‘I can see there’s nothing there,’” Calandra recalls. “Just search it,” the tester instructed. So, Iris went over and started circling the palette, and then, to Calandra’s surprise, pushed the entire thing across the hangar. She sat down, and the tester silently recorded the result.
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At the end of the two weeks, Calandra apologized for wasting the testing team’s time, assuming—based on a lack of positive feedback along the way—that Iris had failed. “You don’t understand,” they told him. “She found every single item listed. Every single one, out of 56.”
“That’s when I realized I’m the weak link of the team,” Calandra says. “She’s the expert.”
The Science Behind How Dogs Smell
(Credit: Zooey Liao/PCMag/Getty Images)
He’s right: Iris’s sense of smell far exceeds his own, or any human’s. Dogs have roughly 40 times more olfactory receptors, with up to 30% of their brain devoted to processing scent, compared with about 5% in humans. They can breathe in and out simultaneously, especially when sniffing, and their nostrils work independently, with each side providing slightly different scent information.
“I always tell people, if you’re on a walk, let your dog sniff as much as they want,” says Dr. Clara Wilson, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s PennVet Working Dog Center. She works with canines that smell diseases in humans, including cancer. “It’s so enriching for them. It’s their version of reading a magazine or watching a TV show.”
To harness Iris’s vast olfactory powers and keep her motivated, Calandra always kept her just a touch hungry while she worked. However, Wilson notes, this may not be necessary. “We find that a lot of the dogs are still very motivated to keep searching, whether or not they’ve had breakfast, because they’re Labradors,” she says. “It’s just one of those practices that has been knocking around as a tradition, but as we see the field progress, that might begin to change.”
Selling Iris to the Higher-Ups
Within Iris’s first year on the job, she and Calandra were traveling the globe, usually squished together into one economy plane seat. Calandra put pressure on himself to take every call from local police agencies and other FBI branches, which he saw as necessary to convince the bureau’s higher-ups to formalize the program.
In one famous 2018 case, Iris helped catch Kevin Mallory, a CIA agent who was illegally funneling secrets out of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He was putting classified documents on microSD cards, removing them from the building, and selling the information to China. Iris found the devices and helped put Mallory in jail for 20 years.
“I was almost like a traveling salesman,” Calandra says. “Over the years, the hurdle was getting the federal government to realize the value that she brings in the items that she’s finding.”
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(Credit: Zooey Liao/PCMag/Getty Images)
He also had to sell the program within his own household. “When are you coming home?” Calandra’s wife would often ask him over the phone. One time, she pressed a little harder: “Is there something you want to tell me? Is there another girl?”
“I’d send my wife pictures to prove I’m really in Seattle,” he says with a laugh. His spouse and kids also love Iris, but there are sacrifices: The family has had limited vacations for 11 years because they would interrupt Iris’s training. Calandra would often extend his work trips unexpectedly, and one time, he left a family trip to Disney World early to take a job.
After numerous petitions, the FBI finally formalized a program to train and deploy electronics detection dogs in 2023. The formalization process continues today, as a new federal board, run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), works to codify the capabilities of electronics detection dogs.
How Iris’s Career Was Cut Short
In March 2025, right after Iris and Calandra had finished searching “one of the most disgusting hoarder houses” he had ever seen, Calandra saw that she was limping. He took her home to rest. The next day, she could barely walk, so he took her to the veterinarian.
“Can we not record this?” Calandra asks our videographer, his voice breaking as tears begin to well up. He recalls the veterinarians calling him to a back room and informing him that they had found Osteosarcoma, or bone cancer. “It’s really bad,” the lead veterinarian, who was crying, told Calandra.
The vet recommended that Iris immediately stop working and see an oncologist. So on March 28, 2025, Iris officially retired. (To commemorate the occasion, Calandra gave the dog her first slice of pizza from a local joint. She wolfed it down, only to get diarrhea, he remembers with a smile.) Iris’s leg was amputated shortly thereafter. Had she not had it removed, the oncologist said, she would have only lived another month.
“I don’t know how she goes from working one day to being almost dead the next,” Calandra says, struggling to get words out. “I wouldn’t wish this on anybody.”
Iris’s Replacement Steps In
Since Iris’s retirement, Calandra’s FBI career has been in limbo. At the bureau’s request, he has been assisting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in an unspecified role.
Nyx, meanwhile, has been in training at Quantico to replace Iris. Calandra has been keeping up with Nyx’s progress and receives texts from her trainer, Craig Schultz from the Department of Justice, throughout our interview. (There are two other canines in training, a Springer Spaniel-Cocker Spaniel mix in Los Angeles and a yellow Lab in Illinois.) Calandra is trying to shake his habit of calling Nyx “it” (as in “It’s in training now”), which has been his way of maintaining distance given his loyalty to Iris.
Iris’s replacement, Nyx (Credit: Zooey Liao/PCMag/FBI)
Despite his initial hesitation—the feeling that he would be “cheating” on Iris—by the end of our interview, Calandra has made a decision. “Since we already have this new dog, I’m definitely going to take it. I have to,” he says. While he can’t help but compare Nyx and Iris, he eventually admits that Nyx is “a good dog.” He’ll take her on as a partner (and housemate) in March, exactly one year after Iris’s retirement.
As we step out of the interview room and into the hallway, Iris starts barking, drawing FBI employees to their office doorways. “Is that the famous Iris?” someone calls. “She’s so cute.” Iris jumps up on the water fountain, resting her remaining front leg on the machine’s ledge while Calandra holds the button so she can get a drink. Afterward, he crouches to hand-feed her a few pieces of kibble.
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