Top White House and administration officials engaged in an elaborate ruse to spirit President Trump out of Turkey during the NATO summit there last month, transporting him in a catering cart to a military jet because of a credible threat against him and Air Force One from Iran, a senior U.S. official said Monday.
Mr. Trump had traveled to Turkey aboard a 747-8 donated by Qatar, which is far more luxurious than the older Boeing jets used for Air Force One, and which the U.S. government worked quickly to retrofit for presidential travel. Mr. Trump announced he would not take that plane, and instead would fly one of the older planes out of Turkey, for “old time’s sake.”
The Qatari jet traveled ahead of the older plane to a U.S. military base in the United Kingdom. Mr. Trump boarded the older plane as cameras rolled at the airport in Ankara.
But instead of flying out aboard that older, powder-blue-painted jet, Mr. Trump was taken by a food cart that had been fitted to the belly of the plane. He was then taken by car to a third plane, which he traveled aboard in secret to the United Kingdom, the official with knowledge of the matter said.
The furtive operation was reported earlier by the Washington Post, which identified the third plane carrying the president as a C-32A, a military variant of a Boeing 757. A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Defense Department referred all questions to the White House.
Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, had suggested that subterfuge was involved in Mr. Trump’s departure from the country after The New York Times reported on security vulnerabilities of the Qatari-donated jet.
“As the president has said recently, there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him, and we use every tool at our disposal — including distraction and misdirection — to address those threats,” he said at the time.
The extraordinary lengths that the government took to get the president out of Turkey in secret suggested that officials viewed the Iranian threat as credible. And it led the White House to purposely mislead reporters assigned to cover Mr. Trump, allowing the press to report that he was traveling on board a plane that was being used as a decoy.
The threat was not specific to the Qatari-donated jet. Instead, Mr. Trump was being targeted on whatever airplane he was traveling on, as The Times has previously reported.
“The new Air Force One is a state-of-the-art aircraft that has been fitted with high-level security protocols that ensure the safety of the president and his staff,” Mr. Cheung said in the statement to reporters that he gave the day after Mr. Trump left the NATO summit.
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