I serve as a print reporter with the White House travel pool, which means that my office is on Air Force One. Last Tuesday, while I was in that office, I stayed for four hours acting as a body double for a Boeing 747 and wrote a 600-word account of the event, dating it 'aboard Air Force One', the most desirable byline in American journalism, and on that particular journey, the piece was entirely fictional. After the NATO summit we boarded in Ankara, as is usual. There is a clear hierarchy when it comes to the seats. The AP is given the better one, the wires receive the ones after that, and I ended up with the seat next to the galley, something which I minded for the first 40 minutes of my life as a decoy, until I realised that the galley was empty and that its emptiness was going to become the one most interesting fact of my career. We were asked by the crew to draw the window blinds down for the takeoff, and they described it as a simple task. So we did it. A reporter is professionally unable to turn down a polite request from a man in uniform while at the same time thinking that he is speaking to those in power. I prepared the summary of the summit before we reached our cruising altitude. The President arrives at 11:04 with a cheerful mood, though I created that mood. You always have to invent the mood. That is the only creative freedom the pool allows us, and it was the first time I had entirely made up the President's mood. He wasn't on the plane. As we were finding our seats and discussing quietly about the armrest, the president had gone into an airport catering truck, driven it down to the tarmac just as if it were a very important room-service request, and got on to a smaller jet, a C-32A, taking him silently to Britain. Our 747 took off behind him as a decoy. Since there was a serious threat from Iran regarding the president's aircraft, the government kindly supplied one. It was fully fueled, fully staffed and fully press-pooled. I was inside it, pointing it at the sky like a duck at a shooting gallery, keeping track of my word count. It was a superb move. Having covered this administration for three years, I can say that the catering-truck exfiltration is the most skilled operation I have ever seen it carry out. It was flawless, straight out of a film, with not a single leak apart from the one you are now reading, and I only made that leak because I was the one who had the leftovers. The point that I can't accept is that the president got onto the catering truck. That therefore means the catering went with the president. We were flown for four hours as a live missile target with only ice and one lemon left in the galley, since our snacks had already been dropped in Ankara and had gone to Britain by first class before we did. The most important decoy in the Western alliance, and I was unable to get a second bag of pretzels because the pretzels ranked above me. The pretzels had somewhere else to be. I would like to make a formal complaint regarding the pretzels. I know that this is not the proper kind of complaint; the appropriate complaint is that I was used as bait. However, you can't take a photograph of bait, but you can take a photograph of an empty snack basket, and so a reporter goes with the picture he has. The term 'decoy' wasn't mentioned, since it wasn't necessary. An empty plane doesn't deceive anybody; but a plane carrying reporters who are giving real-time accounts of the president's fine mood can fool a satellite. We didn't cover the president that afternoon. We played a trick on him—off-Broadway, at 40,000 feet—before an audience of a single Iranian targeting officer, whom I imagine watched our transponder with great satisfaction, prepared and sent up his own confident report along his own chain of command, and who is now being asked this morning by his own editor why the target held a press conference in Britain. We refer to it as seat access. Access should imply that I am close enough to be able to see him. For four hours it meant that I was close enough to be mistaken for him by a warhead, a level of access which the AP has never achieved and which I intend entirely to improve in my performance review. I haven't altered the dateline because my desk prevents me from doing so. The value of the aircraft known as Air Force One exceeds that of my house, and I earned it on the one flight during which the only real words in the whole document were the timestamp and the spelling of my name. He safely arrived in Britain. We safely reached the story. The Iranians, I suppose, are going over the tape and are pretending that they intended to. The pool rotates Thursday. I have already asked for the seat back. It is still the best seat in American journalism. From it you can see absolutely everything the plane has been cleared to show you, and, if the timing is right, the snacks.