By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
The cameras caught what they were meant to catch. President Donald Trump climbed the stairs of the old Air Force One in Ankara last month, in full view of the press pool, at the close of a NATO summit. Then, according to reporting from the Washington Post and the New York Times, he came back down — out of sight — and was driven across the tarmac in an airport catering truck to a smaller, unmarked jet.
The official story, repeated by the White House at the time, was that the president flew home aboard Air Force One. He did not. The jumbo jet that taxied out with television cameras trained on it functioned, in effect, as a decoy. Trump's actual route out of Turkey was arranged after officials received word of an assassination threat linked to Iran, a U.S. official told the Post.
The switch has not been confirmed by the White House on the record, and the full operational details — who ordered it, what intelligence triggered it, how many staff even knew — remain with the two newspapers that broke it. That matters: a claim this dramatic, about the sitting president dodging what officials describe as an Iranian plot, is still resting on unnamed sourcing. Readers should hold that loosely until more names attach to it.
What is not in dispute is the backdrop. Washington and Tehran have spent months trading threats and, this summer, blows, after strikes tied to Iran's nuclear and military infrastructure. Tehran has denied plotting against American officials before. It has also, this week, been locked in tense negotiations with Washington over reopening the Strait of Hormuz — talks that suggest the hostility hasn't cooled, whatever happened on that tarmac in Ankara.
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— Compiled from reporting by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Fox News, the Washington Examiner and Al Jazeera.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."