President Donald Trump boarded Air Force One in front of television cameras on 8 July as he left the Nato summit in Turkey. By then, according to reports, he was no longer on it.
The president had reportedly been taken out of Ankara in a catering truck and put on a C-32A, a military version of the Boeing 757, which flew him to RAF Mildenhall in the UK. The people left on Air Force One were unwitting decoys. Nobody told them Trump was elsewhere.
The Secret Service has not commented. The White House has neither confirmed nor denied the account, saying only that it uses every tool available to protect the president. The nature of the threat is unclear.
An old playbook
“That’s very common,” said Ronald Kessler, an author who has written extensively on the agency. “There’s a long history of strategies to mislead anybody who might be trying to harm the president.”
Robert McDonald, a former high-ranking Secret Service agent, told the BBC that small deceptions are routine in motorcades. A presidential convoy usually carries two armored limousines known as “Beasts”. One carries the president and the other rides nearby as a decoy, and they swap places along the way. “It’s what we call a shell game,” said McDonald, who drove one of the cars under President George W Bush. Even on the way to Joint Base Andrews, he said, the two limousines would trade positions under a highway overpass, out of sight of onlookers.
Marine One flies in groups of three for the same reason, changing positions so no one on the ground knows which helicopter carries the president.
Switching aircraft is rarer. Paul Eckloff, another former agent, told the BBC World Service’s Newshour that “it does not happen often”, but “it is an option that the Secret Service and others in executive protection always have.” He said that when presidents travel to war zones, tactics are often used to leave an adversary guessing which aircraft or movement is real.
There are precedents. In March 2000, Bill Clinton flew from India to Islamabad in an unmarked executive jet, which landed after a decoy plane in full Air Force One livery. In 2003 the White House said George W Bush would spend Thanksgiving in Texas; he turned up in Baghdad aboard a blacked-out Air Force One. In 2023 Joe Biden was taken secretly to Ukraine with a press pool cut to one reporter and one photographer. In all three cases the reporters on board knew and agreed not to report it as it happened.
How serious was the threat?
McDonald reads the Ankara move as a sign of real danger. “That tells me that the threat level in Turkey was relatively substantial and quite high,” he said. He expects the president’s staff, the Secret Service and the White House Military Office were alerted at once. “Those people likely got together in a room and were presented with this intelligence,” he said.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a 26-year CIA veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, agreed. “The key part of this is the nature of the threat, and what was so severe that the Secret Service would put forth such a deception operation,” he said. He raised a harder question: whether the government had a duty to warn those left on the plane. “If we know ISIS is going to attack a target in Moscow, we warn the Russians,” he said. “Why do we warn the Russians? Because if there’s an American citizen killed in that, we can’t let that happen.”
How much danger the passengers faced, if any, is not known. Journalists on board said they were repeatedly told to keep their window blinds down. McDonald called that “not uncommon” and said it showed steps were still being taken to protect them. A big plane with the shades up and the windows lit, he said, tells a watcher what type of aircraft it is.
The Secret Service is under no legal obligation to disclose threats or describe protective operations, McDonald added. That call belongs to the White House or other agencies. “The Secret Service is not in the business of public relations,” he said. “We’re very good at keeping secrets, as our name says.”
