Secret trip trickled out on Twitter

Washington: It was the secret that bent, but never quite fully broke.

The White House released a fabricated Tuesday schedule for President Barack Obama to conceal the fact that he was secretly flying to Afghanistan. It asserted that the president would be in the Oval Office all day meeting with Vice-President Joe Biden, with Defence Secretary Leon Panetta and with senior advisers. Only a handful of US journalists were made aware of the journey.

First to tweet

But by mid-morning word was filtering out through the warp-speed social medium of Twitter that Obama was already in Kabul. The first to tweet was the Afghanistan news site TOLOnews which reported: "United States President Barack Obama has arrived in Kabul to meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai."

A political reporter for BuzzFeed, a website that combines original reporting with trend spotting on the internet, picked up the report, tweeted it and noted that no other US media was reporting it. Shortly, the New York Post placed the TOLOnews report on its website.