Why officials decided to smuggle Trump out of Turkey with a catering truck and a secret plane

By Kevin Liptak, Alayna Treene, Holmes Lybrand, CNN

(CNN) — By the time President Donald Trump walked onstage at the end of last month’s NATO summit in Turkey, the plan to spirit him out of the country was already in motion.

Earlier that day, American officials had come to the president with alarming information. The Iranians knew which luxury chain hotel he’d been staying at in Ankara. They were aware of how his motorcade was moving around the Turkish capital. And they remained intent on killing him — potentially by using a shoulder-mounted missile to take down Air Force One, US officials familiar with the matter told CNN.

The level of detail Iran had been able to ascertain about Trump’s arrangements in the Turkish capital alarmed his team, even though some American officials thought it implausible an Iranian plot to kill him could be successful at the highly fortified NATO summit.

The Israeli government had shared the intelligence of the potential Iranian assassination plot with the CIA, one of the officials said. However, the agency, as well as some other Trump officials, viewed the Israeli intelligence skeptically. Some within the CIA had raised questions about the credibility of the intelligence, as well as whether Iran even had such capabilities to carry through such an attack, the official told CNN.

Still, the disclosures led to a dramatically heightened state of alert among American officials, according to US officials and others familiar with what happened at the summit. Iran’s threats on Trump’s life, along with three separate assassination attempts in the United States, have long created an uneasy atmosphere for his team.

And so with a solemn face and clutching a binder in his left hand, Trump emerged two hours late to his press conference to declare the conference a major success. But as he’d been throughout the preceding day, Trump sounded preoccupied with Iran’s desire to see him dead.

“The life of a president is very dangerous,” he offered, flanked by three Cabinet members and some senior staff. “It’s a very dangerous profession.”

Trump left the stage a few minutes later. Four minutes after his motorcade pulled away from the presidential complex, headed toward Ankara’s airport, a white catering truck was pulling into place alongside Air Force One.

An evolving threat assessment

Devising a way for the president to leave the country safely had become the preoccupation of a small group of senior officials, who spent the morning and afternoon in Turkey assessing their options and updating Trump as he moved between meetings with world leaders, the officials said.

Time did not allow for lengthy deliberation. Trump was scheduled to leave Turkey on the evening of July 8, only hours after details of the specific threat came to light.

In small rooms inside the ornate, heavily fortified Beştepe Presidential Complex, Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman who had arrived in Turkey ahead of Trump, marshaled other top officials in coming up with a plan with the Secret Service.

Officials were weighing a number of factors, including the nature of the threat itself. Israel had first alerted the US to a new Iranian plot to assassinate Trump using its proxies, but the information was vague. With the war against Iran then at an inflection point, some officials believed it could be an attempt to influence Trump’s decision-making.

Three US sources familiar with the matter said American intelligence assessments before the trip showed no indication of a new, specific Iranian plot to kill Trump. Instead, officials described a steady drumbeat of chatter about various Iranian actors calling for Trump’s death.

The desire to target Trump was not limited to Iran’s leadership. At the days-long funeral for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, held the weekend before the NATO summit, mourners held signs calling on Iran to kill Trump.

As the summit got underway, more information came to light from US intelligence centered around the potential threat to Air Force One from a missile fired from the ground near the airport, according to a US official.

To some officials, that sounded like a stretch. Security at the NATO summit was extraordinarily tight, even more than is typical for gatherings of world leaders, given the ongoing war with Iran and Turkey’s proximity to the country.

Tens of thousands of Turkish security forces and police officers had descended on Ankara, and temporary cameras were positioned on nearly every street corner. Multiple layers of security surrounded both the summit site and the airport, where leaders from all 32 NATO members were arriving and departing.

It is not clear where precisely the information about the shoulder-fired missile was derived from. US and regional officials said afterward no militants were taken into custody and no evidence of a missile plot was recovered after the president left.

Still, the Secret Service determined in the short timeframe they had that the potential risk — however uncertain — was worthy of taking seriously.

“The threat was serious enough that extreme measures needed to be taken that day,” a US official told CNN. “We wouldn’t have taken those steps otherwise.”

Some security officials believed the best way to safely remove Trump from Turkey was through secretly leaving the country earlier in the day, when the missile threat was first detected, two sources familiar with the matter said.

That idea was dismissed. And Trump maintained his schedule, including meeting with the leaders of Ukraine and Syria before convening his press conference.

It was clear, however, that the threat on his life was creating a measure of mental weight.

“I saw a thing this morning. I’m on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I’ve been a little bit lucky,” Trump said during a morning meeting with the NATO secretary general. “But that maybe doesn’t last very long.”

A catering truck ruse

As officials from the Secret Service, the White House and the military were formulating plans to secret Trump out of the country, a separate effort was untaken by Trump himself to explain why he wasn’t taking the $400 million jumbo jet he’d taken to Turkey back to the United States.

The Qatari-donated Boeing 747 had been a major point of pride for the president, even if some officials were privately wary of flying it overseas to a country neighboring Iran.

The flight from Washington had been successful, and Trump proudly beamed at the new aircraft — painted in a new colorway he’d selected himself — when he met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the airport after he arrived.

The old plane, he told his counterpart on the tarmac, was now just the “back-up.”

Yet security officials determined a day later that neither the new plane nor the older, highly recognizable light blue-and-white model would be ideal for Trump to leave on. That, the president quickly recognized, would lead to some uncomfortable questions about why the jet he had insisted was the finest in the world wasn’t making the return journey.

At 3:42 p.m., just before stepping into a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump posted online that the new, Qatar-donated jet would be flying to an airbase in Britain to give troops there a chance to tour it.

“Everybody is so excited, and we thought that they should be the first,” he wrote, adding he would be taking the older jet “for old time’s sake.”

In fact, he would be taking neither. The plan concocted by his advisers and the Secret Service would rely on a carefully planned deception that has long been in the playbook for presidential safety.

“The U.S. Secret Service continuously analyzes a wide range of information to guide our protective operations in real time and across every location we secure,” Secret Service Communications Chief Anthony Guglielmi said. “In light of recent assassination attempts and a significant increase in threats against the President, we remain unyielding in our mission.”

The scheme required Trump to board the older Air Force One jet and quickly walk from the main doorway to another exit on the opposite side of the plane, where the white catering truck was waiting.

Turkish Airlines is well-known for its gourmet meals; members of cabin crew don chefs’ toques and white jackets to serve an elaborate spread of dips and mezze, all of which arrive to their planes inside the hydraulic trucks.

This time, however, the catering vehicle was empty, a person familiar with the matter said. US officials had worked earlier in the day on commandeering the truck, without specifying exactly why they needed it, the person said.

Inside the container, which had been cleaned out ahead of time, were Trump; his always-present executive assistant Natalie Harp; his onetime “body man” Walt Nauta, who now serves as director of Oval Office operations; and Dan Scavino, who runs the White House personnel office but has worked for Trump for decades. Secret Service agents were also present.

Once the group had been loaded in, a Secret Service agent in a suit rode in the cab next to the driver for the 162-second drive across the tarmac to the smaller C-32A plane.

It’s not clear how, exactly, the manifest for the catering container was devised. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also joined Trump onboard the C-32A for the flight to Mildenhall airbase in Britain.

Left behind on the larger plane were Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with many of Trump’s senior aides: top policy adviser Stephen Miller, communications director Steven Cheung, staff secretary Will Scharf, deputy national security adviser Michael Needham and a deputy chief of staff, Richard Walters.

Other staffers, including in the advance and press offices, also remained on the plane, many unaware Trump was not in his forward cabin and, in fact, wasn’t on board at all. They were told to keep their window shades down.

Former Secret Service agent and CNN contributor Jonathan Wackrow said it is not uncommon for the Secret Service to play a three-card monte-esque game when the president travels. “Decoys happen all the time with the president. If you think about every time he gets on a helicopter in Washington, DC, there are three identical helicopters that shell game constantly,” Wackrow said.

Trump this week insisted to reporters it was actually his plane — and not the decoy — that was most at danger departing Turkey, despite no one knowing he was aboard.

Yet there was at least one indication American officials believed both jets faced potential peril. Fighter jets were mustered to accompany both out of the country.

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