Donald Trump secretly flies from Turkey amid Iranian assassination threat

President Donald Trump was quietly shuffled off a decoy aircraft and onto a military jet during his departure from Turkey last month, after US intelligence identified a credible Iranian assassination threat targeting him at the NATO summit in Ankara. The Washington Post reported on August 10 that the covert operation took place on July 8, following the conclusion of the summit. Trump was publicly seen boarding an older model of Air Force One, a bit of stagecraft designed to draw attention while he was secretly transferred to an Air Force C-32A, a smaller military transport jet with robust defensive capabilities. The decoy operation US officials assessed that Iranian proxy forces posed a significant and credible risk to the president during his time in Turkey, a country that shares a border with Iran and sits squarely in the middle of a region where Tehran’s militant network operates with considerable reach. The security calculus was complicated by Trump’s arrival aircraft. He had flown into Ankara aboard a new Boeing 747-8 that was donated by Qatar, a plane that reportedly lacked the fully operational defensive systems found on the legacy Air Force One. That meant the standard pres...