Window Seat on the World

by Glen Johnson

  Quite often, we’d build an itinerary calling for us to take off in the morning and fly east, letting us land in Europe or elsewhere as night fell. The theory was we could get some sleep and start our meetings fresh the next day.

  Quite often, though, Secretary Kerry would nix this while reviewing the final proposed schedule. He’d ask that we depart at night and arrive in time to work in the morning.

  “We’ll sleep on the plane,” would say the only person aboard with a bed. The groans would go up from everyone else who’d be required to nap in a chair.

  Many times we’d work Monday through Friday in Washington and then depart for Andrews on Friday evening, while everybody else in the capital was heading out for happy hour or home to watch Netflix. We’d take an overnight flight to Europe and upon landing, work Saturday and Sunday. Then we’d roll straight into the next workweek wherever we were in the world.

  This cycle could sometimes go for two or nearly three weeks, meaning we not only worked every day, but we also missed the weekends when people in the civilian world recharged.

  And all this came while moving back and forth across multiple time zones.

  The stress and jet lag strained everyone involved, from DS agents who had to leapfrog from city to city to the pilots who flew us, from staffers who started work a couple hours before Secretary Kerry awoke to those of us who didn’t finish until after he went to bed.

  I gained about thirty pounds, lost muscle tone, and ended up with a kidney stone. The doctor attributed it to dehydration from our constant flying. My eyes also were perpetually bloodshot from the dryness. The staffer who traveled second-most to me developed a bad back from all the sitting on our airplane. He needed physical therapy for months after finishing his job.

  At regular intervals, Kerry would vow a more humane schedule, but the pace never subsided. Toward the end of our four years, he lamented the toll on all of us and on his family.

  “While I wish I could come and stay for longer, the press of the current conflicts and the business that we have makes it extremely difficult to stay anywhere very long,” he said on August 2016 during a visit to the Edward M. Kennedy Center in Dhaka, Bangladesh. “Just ask my kids and my wife.”91

  He expanded on the theme in another of his exit interviews, this one in September 2016 with CBS News: “It is tough on my family, and I am very grateful to my family for putting up with this,” he said, using words that rang especially true to me. “They’ve given me a gift of being able to do this job and try to do it well. And they realize it’s for a finite period of time, and you go at it. It’s a privilege.”92

  _________

  EACH OF OUR TRIPS started with “bag call”: a deadline for depositing luggage in an office on the 7th Floor at Main State. That was often eight or more hours before wheels up. This buffer gave the Grand Master of the State Department, Senior Support Specialist George Rowland, enough time to deliver the bags to the airport, have them swept for explosives, and place them in the belly of our plane.

  Two hours before departing on an outbound flight from Washington, we’d assemble on C Street in front of the Truman Building and board a caravan of black vans for the ride to Andrews. We’d drive past groups of unknowing tourists and teams playing flag football or softball on the National Mall. Depending on traffic, the trip could take twenty minutes or an hour.

  A security guard at the Main Gate of Joint Base Andrews, the official name for Andrews Air Force Base, would check IDs before waving us onto the grounds. The vans would park, and we’d get out at a terminal used by armed service members catching rides on military planes. It also housed the Distinguished Visitors Lounge.

  The lounge represents the military’s best effort at a VIP staging area. Its chairs, couches, and conference rooms could be occupied at any time by members of Congress, generals heading off on a trip, or staff like us awaiting the arrival of a cabinet member for a Special Air Mission flight.

  The lounge is run by Air Force Protocol Officers who are unfailingly polite and work to ease the downtime. They provide an urn of coffee (requested donation: $1 per cup), a vat of ice water, and Otis Spunkmeyer cookies for sale.

  Their desk sits beneath a radar screen showing either the inbound or outbound flights for Andrews. Across the room, a television displays cable news. The walls are lined with photos of various presidents coming and going from the airport.

  A favorite of mine was a shot of President George W. Bush waving directly at the camera from the top of the front stairs to Air Force One. It was snapped from the top of the rear stairs by Eric Draper, a former colleague of mine at the Associated Press who went on to serve as the chief White House photographer during Bush’s presidency. The picture captured a mischievous smile by a person I’d come to know well while covering his 2000 presidential campaign.

  Another wall is lined with photos of the Andrews Protocol Staff; and one more has a cluster of portraits seen in all military facilities: the president, the secretary of Defense, and the local base commander.

  A sliding door leads from the lounge to a sidewalk. That path leads to a black iron gate. Beyond that is the concrete tarmac and a waiting plane. Or make that planes.

  The 89th Air Wing’s primary client is the president, and it prides itself on a 100 percent service record for him. There would be huge repercussions if they had to cancel a flight on Air Force One because of a mechanical failure.

  To ensure the president or a Distinguished Visitor, known as a “DV,” is never stranded, the 89th always has a primary and backup plane ready for departure. That includes a second set of pilots sitting at the ready in the spare plane.

  If the primary plane has a problem, everyone can transfer to the backup and takeoff. Shifting over all the luggage and food takes about ninety minutes, which happened to us once when a ground crew member banged the door while backing away the boarding stairs.

  The flight crew wasn’t completely confident in the door seal and didn’t want a pressurization problem in flight, so they opted to fly on the backup. We passengers endorsed the move, despite the delay.

  If an identical plane wasn’t available to serve as the backup, the 89th would at least have a smaller aircraft at the ready. If we had to fly on that plane, a senior staffer would slash the passenger manifest on the spot, a cold calculation leaving some would-be travelers behind.

  The backup plane doesn’t travel in tandem with the secretary of State, even though the spare to Air Force One follows the president on all his foreign trips to prevent him from being stranded overseas.

  For all the miles we flew and impromptu or improvised trips we took, the 89th Air Wing provided stellar service to Secretary Kerry. We suffered few flight delays and our plane broke down only twice, once in Vienna and another time in Honolulu. Each time, the secretary was able to get home on a commercial airliner.

  Kerry’s most common complaints were about the age of and communications faults with our aircraft. He said they inhibited him from speaking with the White House or his counterparts as we flew around the world, and the dated amenities kept his staff from getting proper rest.

  He’d get especially agitated when we landed in cities hosting major conferences and our nearly twenty-year-old aircraft pulled up next to the brand-new planes used by many of his fellow foreign ministers.

  Most of those planes were wide-body aircraft with intercontinental range and sleeper seats for the staff. Ours was a single-aisle plane originally designed for domestic flights and outfitted with chairs that no more than reclined.

  After one trip in March 2014, which had been interrupted by numerous dropped calls, we landed back at Andrews and found the Air Force officer in charge of the 89th Air Wing waiting for the secretary at the bottom of the airplane steps.

  Kerry descended and said to him, “Colonel, we still had comms problems.”

  The colonel nodded and replied, “Yes, sir, I heard. I can assure you, you have the attention of everyone on the base.”93

  The secre
tary reached over and grabbed his elbow, as if to reassure him.

  As a civilian, it was a graphic example of a military leader taking responsibility for his command. But it also showed two government officials working out a problem professionally.

  Despite his technological grievances, Kerry always made sure to laud our different flight crews—giving members his commemorative Challenge Coin, buying them other souvenirs, celebrating their birthdays and military promotions and retirements, and once posing for photos with a pilot and his family after he completed his final flight in the Air Force.

  The secretary held a valid multiengine pilot’s license until his work at the State Department prevented him from renewing it, and the airplane junkie would often sit in a cockpit jump seat for special takeoffs and landings.

  The crew reciprocated his generosity, asking leaders of the 89th Air Wing for permission to remove the secretary of State seal from our plane after his final flight in January 2017.

  They presented it to Secretary Kerry as he took a parting photo with the group.

  _________

  WE FLEW PRIMARILY ON one of four identical airplanes, all Boeing 757s known in the Air Force as the C-32.

  The planes were outfitted the same, with only their call sign changing depending on the DV aboard. When it was the vice president, the plane was known as “Air Force Two.” When it was the first lady, it was “Brightstar.” When it was a cabinet member, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or attendees on a CODEL (or congressional delegation trip), the plane was known to air traffic controllers as “SAM,” short for “Special Air Mission.”

  DS preferred their special “Ferris Wheel” moniker for the secretary’s specific plane.

  While the planes had the same exterior, number of engines, and paint jobs, we could tell them apart by their unique numbers. That number was on the tail, just below the American flag painted where an airline name or logo usually appeared on a commercial jetliner.

  The sight of a particular tail number could produce sighs of relief or groans of anxiety. While each of the planes offered the same amenities, some were better than others at Internet speed or phone reliability. The Air Force was addressing this as Secretary Kerry finished his term, installing new communications equipment in each plane.

  Kerry’s hope for their swift replacement never materialized, though. The Joint Chiefs representative traveling with us once inquired about how long the C-32s were slated to remain in service.

  The answer was 2031.94

  Each plane has a capacity of seventy-two people. Commercial models of the same aircraft, the 757-200, seat about two hundred, depending on configuration. The rough allocation of space on the C-32s is twenty-six passengers for the Air Force and forty-six for the traveling party, with slight fluctuations depending on the needs of each.

  The Air Force allotment always includes four pilots. That’s two sets of captains and first officers who fly in rotating pairs, taking mandatory rest when it’s not their turn at the controls. The redundancy and rest allows the pilots to fly a DV for up to twenty-four hours.

  The remainder of the crew includes flight attendants, security guards, communications operators, and a pair of aircraft mechanics.

  The rest of the space on the plane is reserved for the DV and his traveling party. In our case, that included a press corps whose size fluctuated depending on our destination and the attendant media interest. We sometimes traveled with as few as three reporters and several times with as many as nineteen.

  Two places we never told our families we were visiting in advance were Baghdad and Kabul.

  Secretary Kerry rides in an Embassy Air Chinook helicopter while flying from Kabul International Airport to ISAF headquarters in Afghanistan on April 9, 2016.

  (Top) Arriving in Baghdad, Iraq. (Middle) Flying over Saddam’s parade ground. (Bottom) An escort at ISAF Headquarters in Kabul.

  Because of the threat of an attack on a high-profile official like Secretary Kerry, the reporters who traveled with us also couldn’t reveal our destination until we were wheels down.

  When we flew to Iraq, the Air Force didn’t want to use our blue-and-white C-32 with “United States of America” on the side, fearing it might be targeted with a shoulder-fired missile or high-caliber rifle shot.

  Instead, we’d fly in aboard a plain gray C-17, indistinguishable from the other military cargo planes servicing Baghdad International Airport. The planes can also take evasive maneuvers on takeoff or landing, if necessary.

  After landing in Baghdad, we’d board a group of helicopters for the flight downtown to Embassy Baghdad. The choppers were known as “Embassy Air” and were flown by State Department contractors, almost all of them former military.

  We’d fly over the former Camp Liberty, a large home to US forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and along the infamous “Route Irish,” a seven-and-a-half-mile gauntlet between the airport and the Green Zone.

  We could also see pockmarked palaces once used by President Saddam Hussein.

  I’d sit knee to knee with John Kerry so I could take photos of him as he surveyed the scene from an open door.

  There was nothing between us and the ground—several thousand feet below—except for a mesh seat and a lone seat belt strap buckled across our waist.

  We’d eventually descend over the Tigris River before landing at the embassy heliport. On the flight out, we’d get a view of Saddam’s former parade ground just outside the compound. I immediately recognized the crossed swords next to his reviewing stand.

  Afghanistan was considered as dangerous as Iraq, but we were able to take our regular plane into Kabul International Airport because of the large military presence supplied by the International Security Assistance Force.

  We’d land and taxi over to a tarmac where another group of helicopters would be waiting. While ISAF Headquarters was only three miles away via Airport Road, traveling by motorcade was considered too dangerous.

  Instead, we flew.

  Our first visit, our helicopters belonged to the US Army, complete with a door gunner. Amid an ensuing troop drawdown, though, we’d board private helos again flown by Embassy Air contractors.

  We’d travel in a line like a string of Christmas lights and land in pairs. Passengers on the first two would disembark before their helos made way for the next group of helicopters.

  As we flew in or out of Kabul, I was often struck by the juxtaposition: we sat inside a modern aluminum cylinder, cradled in leather seats with fresh food cooking in the galley and a flight attendant walking by, asking if we wanted a drink.

  Meanwhile, outside my window were forbidding snow capped peaks and endless dusty expanses.

  As we got closer and closer to Kabul, we’d see small mud villages—a group of homes and a pen filled with livestock.

  They were only a few thousand feet away, but we were worlds apart.

  Addressing US troops in Afghanistan.

  Typically, our travel party included the secretary’s senior staff; the trip director; members of The Line to arrange calls, process paperwork, and produce the daily schedule; the Joint Chiefs representative and his aide; subject-matter and regional experts; Diplomatic Security agents; and, finally, a representative from the White House, almost always a member of the National Security Council staff.

  This person walked a tenuous line, traveling with the secretary and being privy to his thoughts, while also reporting directly back to the White House to ensure he stayed on message—or got back on it. The military aide was in the same position, spending a lot of time with the secretary but responsible for writing reports solely for the benefit of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

  Secretary Kerry could be remarkably blunt with the NSC and Pentagon representatives about issues and personnel, sometimes to the chagrin of his own staff. After all, these people traveled with us not primarily for him but their own bosses.

  It was one team, but people had different loyalties.

  Senior staffers and spec
ial guests boarded the airplane through a door just in front of the left wing. More junior staffers and the media used stairs and a door at the tail. This differentiation stemmed not only from protocol hierarchy but practicality.

  The entire plane is known as a “SCIF,” or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. The most sensitive, Top Secret material can be discussed and stored on the aircraft, which remains under twenty-four-hour armed guard wherever it travels. It’s a flying State Department 7th Floor or White House Situation Room.

  Because such classified information is handled in the staff section of the plane, the media isn’t allowed to walk through it. That prevents inadvertent disclosure, either by a reporter seeing a paper or overhearing a conversation.

  The general rule on the planes is that people can’t walk forward of their own cabin but are free to walk back as far as they want. This had the effect of restraining the press corps, since the only thing behind their seats was the rear galley.

  The Air Force occupies the front of the plane, everything from the staff boarding door in front of the wing up to the cockpit at the nose.

  Immediately to the rear of that boarding door is the DV cabin, a private space with a couch that folds into a queen bed, a desk with a pair of swiveling captain’s chairs facing forward and backward, and a private bathroom and changing area. The dignitary can select a movie or travel map that plays only on the television in their cabin.

  Immediately aft of the DV cabin is an eight-seat conference area. There’s a table on each side of the aisle, and two first-class-sized seats facing forward at each table and a pair facing backward.

  Next is the senior staff cabin. It has twelve first-class-sized seats, six on each side of the aisle, arranged in three rows of two. There’s a pair of lavatories after the seats, as well as an alcove containing a computer printer.

  The rest of the plane has a passenger compartment and a galley in the tail. About half the seats are first-class-sized while the remainder are regular, three-abreast coach chairs.