On July 8, after the NATO summit in Ankara (Turkey) ended, Donald Trump announced to the world that he was going to board his “old Air Force One,” instead of the one Qatar gifted him this year, the Boeing 747-8 he had been using and had brought on the outbound trip. The president boarded the presidential plane, a scene captured by television cameras, but minutes later he was secretly transferred to a third, smaller plane, the Air Force C-32. The Secret Service made this extraordinary and unprecedented decision after detecting a credible assassination threat from Iran, as exclusively revealed tonight by The Washington Post and confirmed by other U.S. media.
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The president changed planes hidden inside a catering container at the airport, which is normally used to load meals and other supplies before flights, and had been adapted to access the underside of the aircraft. He was then driven to the plane, on which he secretly traveled to the United Kingdom.
The operation was carried out in absolute secrecy, so much so that journalists and some White House staff members on board the old Air Force One believed the magnate was on the same plane as them. The president’s protection agency used the plane as a decoy, compromising the safety of those inside, to save Trump’s life in the face of a possible attack.
The Republican attended the second and final day of the NATO leaders’ summit that day, to which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was also invited. The meeting coincided with the resumption of U.S. bombings against Iran, following the failure of negotiations to restore the ceasefire both countries had signed in June.
Journalists and White House team members on board Air Force One were not informed of the secret operation
Since Turkey is a country bordering Iran, the threat of an attack against the president’s plane became realistic. Neither the Post nor the Trump Administration have so far provided details of the type of threat detected by the Secret Service that prompted the president’s evacuation. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung then hinted at the Secret Service’s deception operation: “There are many enemies of the United States who have him in their sights, and we use all the tools at our disposal to counter those threats.”
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Those statements were a response to a The New York Times report in which the newspaper revealed that the luxurious plane gifted by Qatar, valued at $400 million, had security vulnerabilities and was not adapted to transport the president like the old Air Force One.
The day after the operation, Cheung stated that “the new Air Force One is a state-of-the-art plane equipped with high-level security protocols that guarantee the safety of the president and his person.” However, that day it was initially decided that he would travel on the old plane and, after learning of the threat, he finally flew discreetly on a third plane.
This evacuation is unprecedented in U.S. history, where it is uncommon for a president to travel without media on the plane, even if they have traveled to war zones. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration also concealed the president’s location and only said he had been moved to an “undisclosed location.” However, they did not say, as last month, that the president was in a place where he actually was not.
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