NEW YORK, August 14. /TASS/. The decision to hold a meeting of the leaders of Russia and the United States in Alaska was a difficult challenge for the American Secret Service, Bloomberg reported citing sources.
The sources compared the preparations to a full-scale sprint, packed into one week. Although holding a meeting on the American territory allows the secret service to move all the necessary resources without restrictions, Alaska’s location has become a real problem - it was necessary to send hundreds of Secret Service agents to Anchorage, provide them with transportation and housing. The car rental market in Anchorage is small, so agents had to transfer vehicles from other parts of the state and even the country to the city.
Along with ensuring security in Alaska, the Secret Service is preparing for a UN General Assembly to be held in New York in September, the agency notes.
Presidents of Russia and the United States, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, will meet in Alaska on August 15. These will be the first face-to-face talks between the two heads of state since June 2021, when Putin met in Geneva with Joe Biden, then head of the Washington administration. Putin will become the first Russian leader to visit Alaska, which was sold to the United States in 1867 for $7.2 million.
The Secret Service, which has been operating under the US Department of Homeland Security in recent years, primarily protects the country's top leadership and foreign leaders stationed on the American territory. Until 2003, this special service, which has the status of a federal law enforcement agency, was part of the US Treasury, because it was founded in 1865 to combat currency counterfeiting, but later its functions expanded significantly.