Close personal aides joined President Donald Trump aboard a smaller aircraft flying out of Turkey last month after he snuck out of a larger plane, according to a person familiar with the arrangements, while several Cabinet members remained on the legacy Air Force One that flew without him.
The aides with Trump on that smaller plane included Natalie Harp, an executive assistant who regularly accompanies Trump when he travels; Dan Scavino, a deputy White House chief of staff; and Walt Nauta, the director of Oval Office operations who also frequently travels with the president.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also traveled with the president on the smaller C-32A that took off from Ankara, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller stayed on the larger plane.
The scramble to devise the furtive plan to sneak Trump out of the country on an alternate jet was prompted by a specific threat to Air Force One by a shoulder-fired missile, according to the person familiar with the matter. The threat emerged on the final day of last month’s NATO summit in Turkey.
The threat was specific enough that officials feared Trump’s life would be at enormous risk if he flew out of the country on either the legacy Air Force One plane or the Qatar-donated jet that he used to fly to the summit.
The person declined to say where information about the threat originated, but said it was believed to be serious in part because of how specifically the Iranians seemed to know details of Trump’s arrangements in Turkey. Trump spent one night in Ankara, the Turkish capital, at a luxury chain hotel downtown, and traveled several times between the hotel and the summit venues.
Officials, including from the military and Secret Service, put together the plan to move Trump to another plane by way of a catering truck to fly out of the country within hours. Trump had been accompanied to Turkey by several senior officials, including Rubio, Bessent, Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine. But not all would join the president when he left.
A video analysis by CNN showed officials at the Ankara Airport began positioning the catering truck at the side of Air Force One before his motorcade arrived to the tarmac.
After Trump boarded the plane, the catering truck’s container was lowered and it drove away from the bigger plane and pulling up to the smaller C-32A.
The larger plane, now without the president on board, took off at roughly 8:44 p.m. local time, passing right past the smaller plane with Trump inside. The smaller plane taxied away a minute later.
When it came time to switch planes, both Rubio and Bessent remained behind on the blue and white Boeing 747 along with other White House staffers, military personnel and members of the press, according to US officials.
Most of the passengers on the plane were unaware that Trump was not aboard.
After all the planes had landed at a military airbase in Britain, Hegseth, Nauta and Harp are all seen on video alongside Trump as he walked from the old Air Force One jet to the new Qatari plane for the flight home to Washington.
Trump downplays elaborate scheme
On Tuesday, Trump confirmed the broad contours of the scheme but downplayed the nature of the ruse.
“I just follow what they’d like to do. So I go by Secret Service. And the military. They wanted me to go on a different flight, a different plane, equal safety, but they wanted me to do it, so I do it. I do what they say,” Trump told reporters as he landed at Joint Base Andrews from Ohio on Tuesday.
Trump said he was not given many details about what necessitated the clandestine maneuvering and professed to be unbothered about the possibility of a shoulder-fired missile attack during his departure from Turkey.
“I don’t worry about anything, to be honest,” he said. “Whatever it is, you know my attitude? Whatever.”
Trump had appeared preoccupied with Iranian threats on his life over the course of his final day at the NATO summit, raising the issue repeatedly with reporters. The US government has long warned that Iran may try to kill Trump in retaliation for the 2020 drone strike he ordered which killed a top Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani.
In the days before Trump’s visit to Turkey, crowds of Iranians called for Trump’s death during funeral proceedings for the slain Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed at the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran.
Hamid Rasaei, a conservative cleric and member of Iran’s parliament, wrote when Trump was in Turkey that the US president should be targeted while in the region: “My suggestion is this: Now that the bastard Trump is within our reach and has come to Turkey for the NATO summit, we should officially and without hesitation target the location where Trump and several other criminals are staying in Turkey with a missile.”
CNN reported in the days following the summit that Israel had shared intelligence with the United States that Iran had recently devised a new plan to assassinate Trump.
But some officials at the time cast skepticism on the Israeli intelligence, suggesting the report was viewed — in part — as piece of a broader Israeli effort to influence Trump’s decision making on Iran.
This headline and story have been updated.
The-CNN-Wire
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