TOI correspondent from Washington: The catering caper may have been new. The presidential decoy was not.Some 26 years before US President Donald Trump was secretly spirited out of Turkey aboard a smaller military aircraft while an Air Force One filled with reporters and White House personnel flew on as a decoy, Bill Clinton pulled off an almost eerily similar deception in Pakistan.On March 25, 2000, Clinton arrived in Islamabad behind a decoy aircraft. A Gulfstream C-20 executive jet with US Presidential markings landed first, and a Secret Service agent who resembled Clinton stepped out before the plane taxied away. Ten minutes later, an unmarked C-20, painted off-white and silver, landed from another direction carrying the real president. Clinton emerged behind a black limousine and was whisked into another elaborate deception involving multiple identical cars.The maneuver was not prompted by a single specific assassination warning, officials said at the time, but by an exceptionally dangerous security environment and fears that terrorists might try to attack the president. The precautions had been rehearsed for weeks. In fact, Clinton flew to India on Air Force One but dispensed with it for the brief stopover in Pakistan on his way back to the US because it was seen as a very conspicuous target.Clinton’s Pakistan stopover was the final, and most perilous-looking episode of a landmark sub-continental presidential trip after Jimmy Carter’s 1978 visit to India. He had arrived in the region on March 18, 2000, in what the White House billed as a trip to Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. His rousing India itinerary, designed in large part to reset US-India relations after decades of Cold War estrangement, took him from New Delhi and Agra to Jaipur, Hyderabad and Mumbai.Indeed, Bangladesh, Clinton’s first stop, itself provided a security alarm. The Secret Service canceled Clinton’s planned trip to the village of Joypura after officials received what they called a “credible” threat – fears of terrorists shooting a shoulder-fired missile at the helicopter he was scheduled to go there in. Rather than fly to the village, Clinton stayed in Dhaka and villagers were brought to him.Pakistan was hardly an easier proposition. General Pervez Musharraf had seized power in a military coup only five months earlier, overthrowing Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif after the disastrous Kargil war. Washington was reluctant to legitimize the junta but equally reluctant to disengage from a nuclear-armed country that was constantly putting a gun to its own head, and as it turned out later, was a stomping and training ground for the 9/11 terrorists.Clinton spent roughly six hours in Islamabad, meeting Musharraf and President Muhammad Rafiq Tarar. He pressed for restoration of civilian democracy, restraint in the nuclear and missile competition, an end to terrorism and a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute. Ignoring resentment from the Pakistani military, he also delivered a stern televised address directly to Pakistani people, telling them that the US wanted to be a friend while warning that confrontation with India was consuming resources that Islamabad needed for economic development.The spectacle of the arrival inevitably became part of the story. Pakistan’s central Islamabad was effectively emptied for Clinton’s movements; roads were heavily guarded and people were kept away from the route. The precautions reflected fears of Islamist violence and concern that militants might attempt to attack the presidential aircraft.That was not Clinton’s first close encounter with the limits of presidential travel. In November 1996, while flying into Manila for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, his Secret Service detail received intelligence that a bomb had been planted along the route of his motorcade. Agents switched to a backup route moments before the convoy departed. Filipino security forces subsequently found a powerful explosive on a bridge along the original route and an SUV containing AK-47 rifles. Retired agents later said the operation was an al-Qaida plot against Clinton. Mind you, all this was before Osama bin Laden launched the 9/11 attack on America.The lesson from such episodes is that presidential travel is less a journey than a mobile military-security operation. Routes are changed, aircraft are repositioned, motorcades contain duplicate vehicles, schedules are deliberately blurred, and information is compartmentalized. Abroad, the US president must be protected from threats that may include missiles, bombs, hostile intelligence services and terrorist groups. Even domestically, every airport arrival, motorcade route, public appearance and unscheduled stop presents a new security puzzle.
