Meet on top of a parking garage. Pack warm. Pack light.
Those were my only instructions as I headed out on a top-secret Thanksgiving trip with the president of the United States.
“Are
you Kristin?” said a man on top of the parking garage who looked like
he was in the Secret Service, but wouldn’t confirm it. Once we were
rolling to Joint Base Andrews, he hit me with the bomb that I knew was
coming. “In a few minutes, I’m going to need to take all of your cell
phones, iWatch, iPad, MiFi -- anything that can transmit a signal.”
I
had prepared for this moment. I’d written down about a dozen phone
numbers in a notebook that I never use. I scribbled out the names of
people and places I might encounter without access to Google for a spell
check. I printed out pages and pages of articles that might be relevant
for wherever we were going. And yet, I still felt like I was giving
away bodily organs as I said goodbye to my three cell phones. “Maybe a
digital detox will be good for me!” I quipped, but didn’t mean it. I was
really thinking about all the content-that-could-have-been for my
Instagram feed.
I was still compulsively checking my pockets for
my ghost phones by the time I boarded an aircraft that I can’t disclose
and shook hands with people that I cannot name (not because I don’t want
to name them, but because most of them wouldn’t tell me their
names). Someone asked me if I’d brought food. No. Someone else asked if I
brought ear protection. Definitely no. Someone else told me that if I
need to use the restroom, use the aircraft’s built-in restroom and not
the moderately fancy port-a-potty that had been brought in for the VIPs
we were picking up. Noted.
After a two-hour flight to an
undisclosed airport in Florida, I was instructed to move up to the
cockpit. “The boss is coming.” The move was meant to give the president
and the handful of senior advisers traveling with him some privacy from
the only member of the press on the plane. But shortly after boarding,
President Trump climbed into the cockpit and said, “Where’s the
press?” We shook hands and he asked if I was going “all the way.” Yes
but, all the way ... where?
Suddenly, there was a pesky dividing
wall between us. The president was taking a seat behind the pilot, while
I was getting strapped into a seat facing the opposite direction with
no way to see or hear the commander-in-chief. I strained my neck as far
as the restraints would let me, to the point one crew member told me,
“Don’t worry, we’ll let you look out the window after takeoff when the
president leaves.” Wait, he’s staying in the cockpit for takeoff? The
crew member nodded like he too couldn’t believe it.
I later
learned that the crew had no idea who they would be transporting that
day until mere hours before the flight. Imagine being that pilot. You
wake up one morning having no idea that a few hours later the president
of the United States will be sitting behind you, watching your every
move as you help him secretly escape from Mar-a-Lago?
When we
landed back at Joint Base Andrews, I learned I wasn’t the only one going
through communication withdrawals. The highly wired West Wing staffers
were too.
Dan Scavino, the White House director of social media,
seemed particularly jittery. As for the tweeter-in-chief, the White
House scheduled pre-planned tweets to be sent from the president’s
Twitter account during the many hours that he was in the dark.
I
scoured the tarmac for the bright lights that usually shine on Air Force
One before departure, but didn’t see any. After a short drive, we
pulled up to a large hangar with Air Force One hidden inside. I’d never
been on the plane before and I was trying to savor the moment, but the
rest of the White House press corps was already on board and they were
peppering me with questions about the secret flight from Florida before I
even found my seat. They’re a feisty bunch and one of the best parts of
every trip is getting to know the other journalists that cover this
beat.
We all had fears that the embargo would be broken before we
were allowed to report on the trip. We all wanted to know when we were
going to get our cell phones back. And most of all, we all wanted to
know where we were going.
A few hours after the plane took off in
total darkness with windows drawn and lights off, White House press
secretary Stephanie Grisham came to the back of the plane to brief
us. “We’re going to Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan.” This would be
President Trump’s second trip to a conflict zone, his first to
Afghanistan. The highly clandestine nature of this trip underscored just
how dangerous the country remains, 18 years after the U.S. war in
Afghanistan began.
After a 13-hour flight, we descended in total
darkness – lights off, windows drawn – and touched down on a pitch-black
tarmac. As I stepped off the plane, I tried to take a second to soak it
in. This is a country I’ve always wanted to come to. When I first met
my future mother-in-law 10 years ago, I told her, much to my future
husband’s horror, that my dream was to be a war correspondent in
Afghanistan. Dreams change, but the desire to visit this country has
not. I’d only be getting about three hours on the ground at night due to
security concerns, but I was thrilled to be here. I spotted two
surveillance blimps in the sky above Air Force One. I smelled the wood
(and garbage) that often burns on base. And then, we were off.
It
was quite possibly the fastest three-and-a-half hours of my life. The 13
reporters and photographers on the trip were raced from place to
place. First, to a dining facility decked out in Thanksgiving
decorations to watch President Trump serve turkey to the troops; then, a
hastily arranged bilateral meeting with the president of Afghanistan,
who had been informed of this trip only a few hours earlier due to, once
again, security concerns. At this point, the trip went from being
mostly a holiday story about turkey and troops, to – in the words of
another reporter - “We’re going to get some real news on this trip!”
With
microphones on and shutters snapping, President Trump said, “The
Taliban wants to make a deal and we are meeting with them, and we are
saying there has to be a cease-fire.” It was another one of those
hard-to-hear, did-he-just-say-that? moments. I followed up by asking him
if this meant that the United States has officially restarted
negotiations with the Taliban after he’d called the peace talks “dead”
in September. The president nodded and said, “We are talking with the
Taliban.”
We were still scrambling to jot down all of the newsiest
bits as we were handed back our cell phones and rushed to our final
stop: a massive hangar filled with hundreds of troops waiting to hear
President Trump deliver a Thanksgiving address. This was also the stop
where the embargo would be lifted and we would be filing our reports to
let the world know what President Trump had really been up
to. Everything I had been writing on my laptop, and all of the video we
had been shooting, hinged on our ability to connect to whatever internet
the White House advance team had set up for us. There have been
problems on past trips, but this time the White House went all out to
establish a full filing center. And yet … when the “Go! Go! The
embargo’s been lifted” moment came, I couldn’t access my email to hit
send. Gmail deemed me to be suspicious and locked me out of my account.
Time
slowed. My pulse quickened. Every expletive in the world was begging to
be shouted. My bosses back in D.C. and I had discussed at length this
very moment. Our plan was to use my personal email because my work email
required a cell phone to connect, and we weren’t supposed to get our
cell phones back until after … Wait! My cell phones! After more than
24 hours without them, I’d almost forgotten that they were back in my
pocket. The ghosts glowed to life and I hit send.
At the same
time, my crew, Craig Savage and Ed Lewis, two of the most experienced
photographers in the business, were beginning to feed their footage and
all the cable networks were taking it live. We were supposed to have a
full 30 minutes to feed, but we’d already been on the ground in
Afghanistan longer than the Secret Service would like. “You’ve got seven
minutes!” deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere shouted to the
press.
Seven minutes?! This was my only window to shoot a standup,
that, 'Hey-look-at-me-I’m-on-the-ground-in-Afghanistan' moment, but we
still had over 30 minutes of video left to feed. The standup was dead.
Deere,
who was spending his birthday dealing with our constant demands for
more time, more access, more internet, had warned us that when he said
go, we had to stop our fingers and feeds and move. Air Force One was not
going to wait for us. I still begged for more time. “How much time do
you need?” asked Deere. As much time as you can give me. “You’ve got two
minutes.”
Two minutes?! We fed as much as we could, promised to feed more as soon as possible, grabbed our gear, and ran to the plane.
We
were still trying to feed as Air Force One took off. I was standing in
the middle of the aisle, shouting over the engines to my desk back in
D.C., and marveling that no one had told me to buckle up. Sweating
through my silk shirt and dusting sawdust from somewhere off my pants, I
took a second to smile at the coolest Thanksgiving Day I’ll ever have.
