How the president does his ‘secret squirrel’ trips

 KABUL – President Obama’s unannounced visit to Afghanistan was the third secret presidential stop in a war zone that I’ve covered. Once before I was on the receiving end–in Baghdad when President George W. Bush had Thanksgiving dinner with troops in 2003 — and I was the television representative with Bush when he visited a U.S. air base in al Anbar province on Labor Day 2008.

These “secret squirrel” trips, as I call them, are carried out with strict operational security, which is sometimes hard to accomplish given the fishbowl a president operates in. Mr. Obama slipped away from Camp David in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, a relatively easy maneuver since it’s out of the public eye.

For his 2008 trip, Bush was driven from the White House to Andrews Air Force Base through holiday weekend traffic in broad daylight. The man who engineered that, then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, has promised to tell me how that was pulled off — someday.
The small group of reporters accompanying the president — the “pool” representing their colleagues who travel in a pre-determined rotation — are given a few days’ advance notice. When I went, we were summoned one-by-one to be told what was up. We could tell only our bosses and — if absolutely necessary — one family member. And those conversations had to be in person and alone, never by telephone.

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