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Rice's Iraq visit 'top secret'
15/05/2005 15:33 - (SA)
Arbil - Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's lightning trip to Iraq on Sunday was so shrouded in secrecy that just a handful of staff knew she was going and the Iraqis were told only the day before, US officials said.
Other US luminaries have made unannounced trips to the violence-wracked country in recent weeks, including defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Rice's deputy Robert Zoellick.
But an extra measure of caution was laid on for this mission.
Rice is the most visible face of the US government after President George W Bush. And senior adviser Jim Wilkinson said she was "extremely unhappy" when word leaked of a planned visit to Iraq in March that had to be cancelled.
So preparations for the journey were made in strict secrecy surpassed only by the blackout imposed on Bush's famous Thanksgiving Day 2003 visit that went unreported until he was out of the country.
When the chief US diplomat made the decision on Sunday's foray several weeks ago, only Wilkinson, Rice's chief of staff Brian Gunderson, Iraq charges d'affaires Jim Jeffrey and Lieutenant General Ray Odierno were told.
By the time she had taken off, barely a dozen state department staff were in the loop. The small clutch of aides accompanying her drove to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in private vehicles to avoid attracting notice, Wilkinson said.
"We went to every length possible to keep it from as many people as possible," he told the three reporters invited to tag along. "If you didn't need to know, you didn't know."
The state department operations centre was kept in the dark until she was wheels up for the US central command base in Qatar in a comfortably fitted C-40 plane lent by Centcom commander John Abizaid.
Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari was informed on Friday, the day before Rice took off, Wilkinson said, while other Iraqis were told while she was en route.
Rice saw no special meaning in the fact that one of the most powerful officials in the US government had to take such elaborate security precautions to get into Iraq two years after the Americans say they liberated it.
"I have wanted to go to Iraq at the right time. And the right time is when we had a new government," she said. "I wanted to get there and this is the way to get there."
- AFP
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