How to hide a president in plain sight: Trump’s catering caper had a Clinton precedent
Trump’s secret Turkey exit echoes a 26-year-old Clinton decoy operation in Pakistan. TOI correspondent from Washington The catering caper may have been new. The presidential
Trump’s secret Turkey exit echoes a 26-year-old Clinton decoy operation in Pakistan. 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.
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