WASHINGTON—As President Trump’s motorcade rushed through Turkey’s capital to the airport, his security team had an urgent decision to make.
U.S. and Israeli intelligence in July had uncovered a threat by Iranian proxies to launch a lightweight, shoulder-fired missile at Trump’s plane as he departed Ankara, according to U.S. and Middle East officials. In a worst-case scenario, a militant would evade tight security at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit, stand about a half-mile away from the airport, and use a man-portable air-defense system, or Manpad, to strike the jet, said officials who have seen or been briefed on the intelligence.
While the plane would later be accompanied by jet fighters in the air, according to White House aides, the aircraft would have been vulnerable as it took off under such a scenario.
Some U.S. officials thought the alleged plot was impractical, implausible, even impossible. Turkish officials would later tell regional counterparts that they found no evidence Trump was ever in danger of a Manpad attack, Middle East officials said.
But with little time to confirm incoming details and the U.S. in the middle of a war with Iran, the Secret Service took no risks and devised a plan that seemed ripped from the pages of a political thriller.
After exiting his limousine, Trump could be seen boarding a legacy version of Air Force One before cramming into a catering truck bound for another plane—without reporters or some senior White House officials aware of his movements. A few top aides, including his personal assistant Natalie Harp, joined him.
Trump would ride the smaller aircraft with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to a military base in the U.K. before secretly transferring back to the original plane and walking down the stairs as though he had been onboard all along. For the final leg to the U.S., Trump flew aboard a third plane, his preferred Qatari-gifted jet, for a more luxurious ride home.
Images of Air Force One parked at the Turkish airport show vehicles labeled with the logo of a catering company called Turkish DO & CO. When contacted for comment, the company said, “Due to confidentiality requirements, we do not comment on our clients—particularly regarding any specific state flight.”
The subterfuge has earned Trump praise, mostly from political allies, for outsmarting an adversary that has placed a $10 million bounty on his head. Yet critics have posted AI-generated pictures online of Trump cowering in the catering truck, cutting against his promoted image of a wartime leader who has survived three shooting attempts.
The president said he had no choice but to obey his security team. “It’s really just up to Secret Service,” Trump told reporters Tuesday night. “I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go in a different flight, a different plane, for safety.”
The White House didn’t plan to disclose the feint, officials said, until the Washington Post revealed it and sparked a media frenzy. An angry press is demanding answers on why reporters weren’t told of Trump’s plane transfer or whether their presence aboard the supposed Air Force One—alongside senior officials Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—put them at serious risk.
Trump’s team scrambled jet fighters to accompany the plane the president left behind, officials said.
A U.S. official defended the response, noting the daily dangers Trump faces and said the threat revealed by the intelligence was serious enough for the Secret Service to greenlight the decoy plan and send the warplanes.
There are also growing fears about what the maneuver reveals: an administration genuinely concerned that Iran-linked assassins could, even in a friendly nation, endanger Trump.
“It’s quite extraordinary that the president had to be smuggled onto a different plane after a NATO summit in a NATO country,” said Holly Dagres, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank. “While the Trump administration touts the weakness of the Islamic Republic, its reach remains extensive enough to allegedly try and kill the most heavily protected leader in the world.”
The CIA declined to comment. A spokesman for the Turkish foreign ministry said he had no information on the matter. The Israeli prime minister’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
No room for error
Troubling information reached the upper tier of Trump’s team on July 7, the penultimate day of the NATO summit, U.S. officials said.
Some of the president’s aides had worried about flying into Turkey in advance of the trip, particularly on the Qatari-gifted jet, which has fewer defensive capabilities. Trump didn’t share those concerns and wanted to fly the plane overseas, a senior administration official said.
Israel collected intelligence of Iranian proxies discussing killing Trump while he was in Turkey. The information shared with the U.S. was vague, administration officials said, and not deemed entirely credible by many members of the president’s staff. Some suspected that Israel, which routinely shares intelligence with the U.S., was trying to spur Trump into escalating the monthslong war with Iran.
Hours later, the U.S. gathered its own intelligence about the Iranian missile threat, U.S. officials said. American officials had doubts about the alleged scheme, as there was no evidence the militants had the required missile or firing system in Ankara, people familiar with the intelligence said. It would be hard to penetrate the heavy security perimeter around the summit and Trump, the U.S. officials assessed, especially with such a conspicuous weapon.
But a constant stream of threats against the president, a tense war with Iran and a troubling intelligence picture left no margin for error on a short timeline, U.S. officials said.
“This particular case, the Israeli Mossad was one of the reasons that they knew that the plot was real,” U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told Newsmax on Tuesday.
The Secret Service dug into its playbook of tricks to protect Trump during his vulnerable final minutes in Turkey.
In 2000, then-President Bill Clinton flew to India from Pakistan in an unmarked plane, landing shortly after the traditional Air Force One jet landed. Two years later, Vice President Dick Cheney boarded Air Force Two in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, during a swing through the Middle East to build support for President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy. But Cheney stealthily switched to a C-17 transport plane, which then traveled to Bahrain.
In each case, the Secret Service determined the elected leaders faced significant threats in transit.
John Kirby, a senior White House, Pentagon and State Department spokesman in the Obama and Biden administrations, said Trump’s staff was right to take all necessary measures to protect him, though they could have informed the press about the ploy and embargoed any reporting until the president was out of harm’s way.
“The press would have obliged the ground rules. The last thing they would ever want to do is put anyone’s lives at risk, and in this case even their own. They also deserved—as did the unwitting staffers on the plane—the opportunity to make alternative travel plans,” said Kirby. “It is unconscionable that aircrew and passengers were allowed to fly in that aircraft at that particular moment, ignorant of the danger they were in.”
Heightened tensions
Trump has raged in recent weeks at coverage of the floundering Iran war, personally ordering the subpoenas of journalists at the New York Times for reporting that his Qatari-gifted plane didn’t have certain countermeasures against possible aerial threats, according to administration officials. He has inaccurately told aides that all of his predecessors had journalists thrown in jail for not revealing their sources and that his team should be more aggressive. The Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas last month.
Trump and his staff have learned to take special precautions because of threats from Iran for years.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump’s circle dealt with cyberattacks and serious threats to their physical safety and Trump’s plane. The Iranian government ordered an operative to assassinate Trump before the election, and former officials at the time described serious warnings from the Secret Service about drones following them or the risk of poisoning.
In recent weeks, the Iranians have sought to disrupt the administration by hacking cellphones of top aides, according to one of the officials.
Beyond the president, current and former senior Trump administration officials have also been notified of specific threats against them and have taken extra safety precautions.
Those concerns dovetailed with a yearslong effort to better protect the president during his flights.
In 2023, during the Biden administration, the Air Force started removing the tail numbers from some of its planes to make them more difficult to track. But these planes often electronically transmit their information, which can be seen by other aircraft and flight-tracking websites.
Trump’s jet out of Turkey—a smaller and militarized Boeing 757 sometimes used to transport the vice president or defense secretary—didn’t use the famous call sign “Air Force One” to indicate the president’s presence onboard. It also didn’t transmit its position, according to flight trackers, secrecy that would have afforded the president some protection.
Another bonus of flying Trump in the smaller two-engine plane would have been a lower heat signature than the larger Boeing 747 jets, in theory making it less vulnerable to certain surface-to-air missiles, like Manpads.
Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com, Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com, Anat Peled at anat.peled@wsj.com and Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com