Blogs

Camp David Surprise

By Hillary Profita

June 13, 2006 / 3:55 PM EDT / CBS News

(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

This morning, Associate Producer Josh Gross was among the reporters gathered into a gymnasium-like press facility about 5-10 minutes from the Camp David. They were sitting at their computers waiting for the president's scheduled teleconference from Camp David with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad. At around 9 a.m., a one-line Reuters report came across the wires saying that Iraq television was reporting that President Bush had arrived in Baghdad. One reporter read the report aloud, asking if anyone else had seen it. "We all turned to our wire reports … and we were all looking at each other in befuddlement," said Gross. "We didn't know if we should believe it or not." Some thought there was a mix-up in the translation from Iraqi television. With that everyone got on the phones, trying to confirm it themselves, said Gross. "I started calling everyone on the White House staff, they didn't know anything." No luck at the press office either.

Eventually, said Gross, "it started to trickle out that [the president] had snuck out last night, and nobody knew," including, as it turns out, several cabinet members gathered at Camp David. "We all sat around in disbelief, trading stories and parsing everything that had been said yesterday." Gross noted that President Bush had mentioned yesterday he was looking forward to today's teleconference, "I guess he just didn't indicate where he would be during it," he joked.

It isn't rare for reporters to be called to cover an event with initial secrecy, said Gross, but his own similar experience offered a bit more advance information. In 2004, Gross was recruited to cover Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's surprise trip to Iraq to visit troops over the Christmas holiday. The CBS Washington bureau got a call on Monday night that the network should send a reporter and a crew to Andrews Air Force Base on Wednesday. They were provided with indications of what the weather would be like so they would know what to pack, and that was about it, said Gross. "So we knew there was a trip coming and people were of course speculating about it." Once the plane landed on the ground in Iraq, "They said, 'we're here, you can tell people where we are,'" said Gross. "But we weren't allowed to say where we were headed next. Once we landed in the next city, we were able to report what had already happened." Gross guesses that those reporters currently traveling with the president are experiencing the same thing, "They probably know what's happening next … they just have information that they can't reveal yet."