BAGRAM AIR BASE (Afghanistan), Feb 27: Security fears led US Vice President Dick Cheney to exchange his Air Force Two suite for a high-tech trailer chained to the floor of a cavernous military plane for his visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Strict ground rules were issued to the few travelling media to ensure no details of his schedule leaked out ahead of his arrival, and Cheney himself barely spoke in public.
Travelling reporters were given strict instructions before Cheney arrived first in Pakistan: No saying he was leaving from Oman, no saying he was flying on a C-17 transport aircraft rather than his usual Boeing, no saying when he arrived, no saying in Islamabad that he would fly on to Bagram, and so on.
The journalists were only allowed to discuss the trip with their spouse or significant other and one superior at their news organisation, on penalty of seeing the entire media squad dropped from the visit.
Cheney had flown Sunday to Oman after visiting Japan and Australia.
Air Force Two had not left Australian airspace before an early technical glitch threatened to compromise efforts to shroud the trip in secrecy.
What aides called a simple electrical problem -- a minor inconvenience that had no noticeable impact onboard apart from the absence of hot meals, reading lights and in-flight movies -- hit the news in Sydney. Asked about it, Australian Prime Minister John Howard said Cheney's plane had been diverted to Singapore, forcing Cheney's office to admit it had always been the intended refuelling stop -- aware it would stoke speculation the vice-president was not in fact bound for Washington.
More problems emerged when he arrived in Oman as local news reports citing Omani sources reported he was there -- and the ban on travelling media revealing his location puzzled and frustrated their colleagues in Washington.
Cheney's trip began in earnest on Monday when he climbed into a 40-foot-long trailer -- dubbed “the silver bullet” -- that was anchored to the floor of the C-17 transport with chains and connected to power lines and communications wires.
The cargo aircraft took off with a VIP addition, Deputy CIA Director Steve Kappes, and touched down later at Chaklala Air Base near Islamabad.
From there, Cheney took a 10-minute helicopter flight over the sprawling city to the presidential palace for talks with President Pervez Musharraf, both with top advisers and one-to-one.
Afterwards it was back to the air base and back into the “silver bullet” for the one-hour flight to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
A suicide bomber struck at around 10 am local time the next morning in what the US military called a ‘direct attack’.
With security concerns running high, the vice president left Bagram around two hours later for the short flight to Kabul and his talks with President Hamid Karzai.—AFP
