It's funny this topic comes up because I just read Andrew Ross Sorkin's "Too Big to Fail" and there is an early passage where Hank Paulson calls Dick Fuld in the middle of a business trip to India and tells him things are about to hit the fan in the US.

Fuld pledges to hop in his Gulfstream ASAP and asks if Paulson can get him clearance to overfly Russia, making a quicker polar route possible.

Paulson is then said to tell Fuld even he, as Treasury Secretary, can't get that kind of special treatment. Fuld ends up doing the milk run back to the US via IST and OSL.