Trump Left Turkey Inside a Catering Truck. Intelligence Had Picked Up an Iranian Plot to Shoot Down His Plane.

When President Donald Trump left Turkey after last month's NATO summit, he did not leave on the plane the world watched him board. U.S. intelligence had detected what officials described as a credible Iranian plot to fire a missile at his aircraft as it departed Ankara, and the Secret Service responded by moving the president off Air Force One and onto a separate Air Force C-32A using an airport catering truck.

The deception was built in public view. On July 8, Trump told reporters he would fly home aboard the older of the two presidential aircraft "for old time's sake," a line that sounded like nostalgia and was in fact a security recommendation from his protective detail. Video from the tarmac shows him walking up the stairs and into the plane. He then disappears from view. Minutes later, a catering truck pulled away from the aircraft and drove to a different government jet parked elsewhere on the field.

Members of the traveling press and some White House staff spent the flight believing the president was somewhere forward of them on the same plane. He was not. Crew ordered the window shades in the press cabin closed for the duration, a detail that struck several reporters as unusual at the time and that now reads differently. Trump himself later alluded to the episode with reporters, telling them they had been "probably on a dangerous flight because of the sleazebags that we have to deal with."

The president had been unusually blunt about his exposure during the summit itself, describing himself as Iran's number one target. After a refueling stop in the United Kingdom, he transferred again, this time onto the newer Air Force One, the jet donated by Qatar, for the flight across the Atlantic. The three-aircraft sequence meant that no single plane carried him for the whole trip and that the aircraft drawing public attention was never the one he was on.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said the newer aircraft is equipped with high-level security protocols and that the administration uses every tool at its disposal to address threats against the president. He did not dispute the account of the switch.

What has generated the sharpest reaction inside the administration is not the maneuver but its disclosure. Multiple Trump administration officials spent Monday night expressing frustration that classified protective procedures had reached the press, arguing that publishing the mechanics of a presidential decoy operation degrades the value of that tactic the next time it is needed. The episode also lands in the middle of a long-running fight over presidential air security, coming after earlier reporting that the Secret Service had raised concerns about the Qatari jet's defenses and after the Justice Department subpoenaed reporters over Air Force One security coverage last year.