NATO Summit Planners Deal in Details

Workers assemble grandstands on Constitution Avenue NW for NATO's anniversary celebration. (By Robert A. Reeder – The Washington Post) Related Links Map: Street, Office Closings

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 18, 1999; Page A1
The NATO alliance is coming to town, and Bill Bunting is worried about a parking meter.

Thousands of foreign dignitaries and their media shadows will converge on Washington this week for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit. As planners gird for a three-day event when motorcades will roar and glasses will clink, Bunting's horizons stretch no farther than a set of bleachers.

Bunting's company is building seats along Constitution Avenue for Friday's commemoration of NATO's 50th anniversary. His carefully designed structure would be straight and true, he discovered last week, if one particular two-headed meter did not stand taller than its mates.

A work-stalling decision. Should he knife into the aluminum bleachers or seek a meter decapitation from the District government? Such are the Lilliputian dilemmas faced each day by planners of the summit, the largest gathering ever of foreign leaders in Washington, and certainly the most complex.

Presidents and prime ministers from more than 40 countries will be in Washington from April 23 to 25 for three days of high-profile opining and dining. Not only must the sedans be fueled and the silver polished but also magnetometers must be deployed, fax machines installed and satellite uplinks readied for round-the-clock transmission.

Sobriety has overtaken festivity as the summit's designated tone since the war began in Yugoslavia. Yet while bombs may fall in the Balkans and protesters may unfurl their banners in Lafayette Square, the show will go on. From Andrews Air Force Base to the White House south lawn, there will be pomp to match the circumstance.

After a months-long countdown, zero hour is approaching. The demand for decisions is intensifying. If summit organizers had an official sport, it would be the sit-down meeting. As White House aide Richard Socarides put it, "There are so many people involved that you could spend all day meeting with them." Some days, they do.

Details are ever changing. One official counseled his colleagues during a planning session yesterday, "Let's all remember the F-word. Flexibility. Someone says . . . 'We need you to do 10 cartwheels.' Try to do 10 cartwheels."

Hassles for ordinary folk are expected to be plentiful, compounding traffic congestion and generally complicating the downtown karma during the busy tourist season. Many streets and offices will be closed, and some transit routes will be altered. Hotels will be booked up. Limos and police outriders will be plying the roadways.

"Everybody," Socarides said, "gets a motorcade."

What follows is a look at the some of the countless little things required to make a success of one very big thing, the summit, in all its splendiferous glory.

An elite team gathers in a small room at Andrews Air Force Base. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. They are all represented as Lt. Joel Hill briefs them on their vital mission: making sure NATO summit delegates get their luggage.

By military reckoning, foreign diplomats will be hauling upward of 7,500 pieces of luggage when they arrive at Andrews and the region's three commercial airports. Hill and his troops must deliver the baggage to its owners.

Forty-four foreign embassies, 47 Army truck drivers, dozens of motorcade officers and the U.S. Secret Service are taking part in an operation four months in the planning. Air Force reservists will load and unload the cargo at Andrews.

"We're not going to lose any luggage," declares Hill, 37, a physician's assistant from McClellan Air Force Base near Sacramento. "It's not going to happen."

Hill goes through the drill one more time for the officers. Reconnaissance trips to each hotel to ensure the trucks fit under each awning. Special luggage tags marked with the NATO emblem and the delegate's national flag and hotel. Color maps charting the best routes for the drivers.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Air Force Capt. Dan Hintz studies the flight chart for Thursday. Andrews has never accommodated so many high-level arrivals in such a short time. Nearly 30 flights will land at the base during a 24-hour period.

Each jet will be directed to one of two red carpets, where U.S. officials and a color guard will receive them. "Very minimal ceremonies. No speeches," Hintz says. "We want to get them in, into their motorcades and get them out of the way."

The planes then will taxi to designated parking spots, all worked out in advance by officers who factored in the size of each aircraft. Baggage will be unloaded under watchful guards.

"We've got a good plan, but it's going to be changed a million times before things go through," said Lt. Col. Jim Brydon, the Andrews summit coordinator. His nightmare? Bad weather that prevents planes from landing and causes an international traffic jam.

Hill ends the baggage briefing with one final item. Don't worry about tipping the hotel porters, he tells the officers. The military has arranged for gratuities to be added to the dignitaries' bills.

Sarah Russell, party planner, is painting a landscape with words. In her vision, guests ascend the Library of Congress steps to tunes played by a fife, drum and bugle corps in Colonial costume. The lighting is perfect. Inside, there awaits "the gorgeous atmosphere of the library itself."

The 300 invited guests are guided by volunteers to a receiving line. Waiters pass trays of buckwheat blini, endive topped with Roquefort and nectarines filled with blue cheese. A string quintet plays softly as the guests are seated for a meal of crab and cucumber charlotte and roasted lamb with proper American wines.

That's the picture postcard stuff. Making it happen is a bit more difficult. Take the arrival, for instance. Only the motorcades of the 25 or so invited foreign delegations will be permitted to cross police lines.

Everyone else -- U.S. senators, business leaders, local notables -- will be directed to valet parking. Each guest needs a special pass. For security reasons, the pass cannot be delivered until the guest formally accepts the invitation.

To make sure that no president sits fuming in his limousine out of earshot of the fifes and drums, each motorcade will be assigned a priority. Timing is critical, which means coordination among people talking into radios across town.

"We've asked that a protocol be assigned. Every minute, you have an arrival," Russell explains, adding that motorcade length varies. "It depends on who's being carried, if it's a secure package or a highly secure package."

The package is a motorcade, and inside the package is a person. Maybe Bulgaria's head of government or the leaders of Azerbaijan or Ukraine or Latvia. The dinner, sponsored by the summit host committee and the Committee to Expand NATO, is being held in honor of the Partnership for Peace countries, all aspiring alliance members.

Russell, a private consultant hired to coordinate the event, thinks about signs. She works with florists to make sure no dinner conversation is impeded by a misplaced tulip. She arranges fax machines for emergencies and sees that the interpreters are fed.

"I love the details," Russell says. "I wouldn't go into the Library of Congress and choose a red tablecloth. It has salmon walls and tiling."

The tablecloths will be khaki.

D.C. police Cmdr. Michael Radzilowski is in a hurry, and he is waiting for maps. This is the fifth set of drafts, and he knows there will be more revisions before the summit begins.

Capt. Charles Moore hurries over and says: "Red is your road closings outside of your cordon. This is the Jersey barrier. This is magnetometers. Orange is where the gates are."

Radzilowski, chief of special operations, is on his way across town to brief his superiors on the District's share of summit policing. D.C. authorities are accustomed to rallies, inaugurations and protests, but escorting NATO leaders and patrolling sites with a war underway are definitely new twists.

There are security plans, route plans and escort plans, Radzilowski explains. There are plans in case of mass demonstrations and mass arrests. Plans in case of a motorcade attack, a bomb discovery or a release of poison gas. Plans to prevent a waterborne assault from the Potomac River.

"If there is a terrorist attack," Radzilowski says, "the FBI becomes the lead agency. We do our part, which is directing traffic and getting people out of the area."

Radzilowski goes on, "It's a plan in constant motion. It's a constant battle to get things done before you have to get up and go to another meeting where you get new information."

The horde of important visitors means lots of talking, which means lots of telephones, in this case mobile phones. So many that the current antenna network in downtown Washington cannot handle all the radio waves.

Workers from McLean-based Nextel Communications Inc. are stringing wires and antennas inside and outside dozens of downtown buildings to channel the conversational torrents. They connect them to small base radios, which are then linked to Nextel's switching center via Bell Atlantic cables.

Washington's historic buildings may impress tourists, but for cable-layers, they are a dingy obstacle course. Installers in the old U.S. Customs building tied cable to their pant legs and climbed into the dirty rafters. "There's years of dust up there," Nextel's Troy Suddith said.

Technicians crawled 300 to 400 feet on each of five floors, laboring in shafts two feet wide and three feet deep. On the outside, workers took pains to blend the antennas into their surroundings, in some cases painting wires the same color as the buildings.

To tap into the network, Motorola will supply as many as 2,000 cellular telephones to the anticipated 1,700 foreign dignitaries and other participants. Each device triples as cellular phone, pager and walkie-talkie. Training is offered, but will prime ministers try to learn?

Beyond the polished corridors of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center sits a Hobart mixer with an 80-quart bowl and rotating whisks the size of bird cages. Such is the gastronomic scale of the care and feeding of more than 3,000 journalists expected to work there for three days.

The kitchens will operate around the clock in 12-hour shifts to feed the hungry and succor the stressed. G. Giles Beeker III, vice president of the International Trade Center, is working with a budget of $250,000 to $300,000 for three days of meals, including a Thursday night media party.

"This is sustenance, not elegance," Beeker said. "Everyone can find something that can keep them going."

He's talking antipasto and salads, continental breakfasts, a variety of main courses, fruit and 1,000 pounds of coffee from M.E. Swing. Everything is free except alcohol.

The Reagan Building's production schedule runs 37 pages. One press briefing room will require, among other things, two clocks, 52 chairs, a water station, an easel, a set of flags, a wireless microphone, a mult box for audio hookups and two 600-watt lamps.

In all, the Reagan Building staff will deploy 140 clocks. They will all be ticking. The pressure is on.

"No sleep. Dealing with large amounts of security. Never knowing where you can and can't go," said sous-chef Craig McMullen, listing potential pitfalls. "Logistics are going to be a nightmare."

"Two, three and he he he he he he he. Not bad. Me me me me me me. Two and three and pa pa pa pa pa pa. Now, hold this note. Aaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaaaa."

That would be Rickey Payton Sr. directing the Urban Nation Voices of Youth H.I.P. H.O.P. Choir one recent evening at the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church. He took about 50 young singers through their mellifluous paces as they rehearsed for their Saturday night summit performance.

"Keep that real full there," Payton is saying. " 'Good and awesome God.' You've got to interpret this. C'mon. Sit up! Breathe!"

The African American singers, ages 12 to 21, will do a 20-minute set at a National Building Museum party for 1,900 people hosted by Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D). They will perform "songs of inspiration," Payton said. But setting the right tone at the summit for the gospel and hip-hop choir is a challenge.

"It's an incredible time," Payton said, referring to the war in Yugoslavia. "How do you celebrate when people are being murdered? But we can still have a moment of hope and a message of peace."

Each choir member was required to find a news article about NATO and the war to better understand the audience and the issues. Only a few said they knew what NATO was. Now they know more.

"We want our songs to make people think about the consequences of what they're doing," said Shaba Lightfoot, 16, of Sidwell Friends School. Said Octavia Bizzell, also 16, of Largo High School: "We want [Serbians] to leave [ethnic Albanians] alone so we can stop bombing them."

Bill Bunting, the bleacher boss, faced a task requiring delicacy and strength as he began to assemble 3,200 seats for Friday's Constitution Avenue ceremony. He needed to build a sturdy lattice over a fragile fountain outside the National Museum of Natural History.

For the job, he requisitioned a 60-ton crane to maneuver huge I-beams over the fountain. Summit organizers got Pepco to remove two tall light poles because they soured the camera angle, but Bunting was still left with the parking meter that stood a tad higher than all the others.

The answer: trim the aluminum undercarriage of the bleacher structure. Easier, Bunting figured, than arranging with the District to lop the meter's two gray heads off. Now everything fits. "But," he added, "there are always a lot of last-minute things that change."

Word arrived yesterday, in fact, that NATO leaders are considering holding an extra Friday morning work session on the Kosovo conflict. The outdoor portion of treaty commemoration might be canceled, said a Clinton administration spokesman, who explained that Bill Bunting's bleachers might never be used.

Staff writers Philip P. Pan and Valerie Strauss contributed to this report.