The catering truck transfer was the covert movement of President Donald Trump off Air Force One at the close of a NATO summit in Turkey, disclosed only weeks afterwards in reporting by The Washington Post. American officials, according to that reporting, were worried about what they called a credible Iranian threat against Trump or against his aircraft. Rather than simply change planes, they used an airport catering truck to shuffle him onto a smaller jet after he had boarded Air Force One in view of the television cameras.[1]
Until then the only public account had been Trump’s own: leaving the summit for the United Kingdom, he announced that he would not fly on the 747 gifted by Qatar but would switch back to the older Air Force One, he said, for old time’s sake. Nobody believed the explanation, and because the switch happened in the middle of the war with Iran it was widely assumed to be a precaution against some unspecified threat. Reporters who pointed out that the Qatari aircraft did not yet have the defensive and communications equipment of the older plane were attacked from the podium: the White House communications director called the reporter who wrote it a liar and the article complete fake news.[2][3]
How it worked
Air Force One is serviced on the ground by a catering truck, which drives to an elevator on the far side of the aircraft so that meals can be lifted into the body of the plane. On this occasion the president was inside the truck. It carried him to the smaller jet parked between the new and the old aircraft and loaded him aboard; the travelling press boarded the aircraft that was supposedly the one under Iranian threat; and everyone flew to Britain. On arrival Trump left the smaller jet, secretly rejoined Air Force One, and flew home to Andrews Air Force Base.[4][5][6] He then took questions from journalists aboard the aircraft for fifteen minutes without acknowledging that any of it had happened.[7]
The press left behind
John Kiriakou’s objection is not to the deception but to who was left inside it. The reporters, he says, were sitting ducks: they were not told that the president had gone, not told that a second aircraft was taking off, not offered the excuse of engine or communications trouble and a commercial flight home, and not told that they might be taking part in a presidential security operation at all.[8][9] The single sign that something was happening was an order from the Secret Service for everyone aboard to close their window shades. A photographer who opened his was quickly instructed to close it again, and when the pool asked why, a wrangler said only that it was a request from the Secret Service.[10][11]
Asked afterwards whether there had been a credible Iranian threat against Air Force One, Trump answered: “I have a threat all the time. I’m number one on their list before you. But if I go, you go.” Kiriakou calls the remark cold-hearted and mean-spirited, says it confirmed that the reporters had been left as decoys, and reports that it was the talk of the Washington press corps the day he recorded.[7][11][12]
The intelligence
The warning came from Israel.[8] Kiriakou’s objection is that nobody else produced it — not the CIA, not the National Security Agency, not MI6 or GCHQ, not the Australians, the French, the Saudis or the Emiratis. Either the Israelis got very lucky, he says, or they beat every other intelligence service in the world and single-handedly saved the president’s life.[13][14] He sets it beside the Israeli claim, made immediately after the bombing of Iran began, that Iranian terrorist cells were operating in every major American city — after which not one Iranian terrorist was arrested anywhere in the United States.[15][16]
Turkish officials reached the same conclusion. As reported in Middle East Eye, they believe the Israeli intelligence report was probably a ruse by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to portray itself as protecting Trump, to derail the negotiations with Tehran, and to undermine Trump’s apparently close relationship with the Turkish president — who had heard Trump say repeatedly during their meeting that the war with Iran was over.[17][18] Kiriakou thinks that is probably true: “I do not believe that there was a credible threat on the president’s life. The Israelis do things like this to us all the time. It’s a manipulation tactic.”[18][19]
Precedents
The episode sent him looking for others. He points to the Baltimore plot against Abraham Lincoln in 1861; to King Charles II, who hid inside an oak tree for a day after losing the Battle of Worcester in 1651 and then spent six weeks on the run; to Fidel Castro, who survived decades of attempts; and to Bill Clinton’s own plane switch in 2000, which he calls the closest historical comparison — with one difference, that the Clinton White House told the journalists what was happening while it was happening.[20][21][22][23]
As a piece of tradecraft he rates it at the top of the scale: “If I were to rate this escape on a scale of 1 to 10, it’s got to be a 10. It worked. Nobody had any idea. It only came out later when somebody finally started talking.”[18]