Military experts believe a plan to assassinate Donald Trump was credible and realistic after further details emerged about the president's trip to the US from the NATO summit. Reports earlier this week revealed that the US president had secretly exited Air Force One after boarding it in front of journalists, as he left Turkey following the alliance's meeting.
After entering up the stairs as normal, Trump is understood to have exited via a catering truck on the other side of the plane after US intelligence warned that it had evidence of a potential assassination attempt on the president's life. The threat, which is believed to have come from Iran, comes following months of war between the two countries, which has seen the US assassination of the Islamic Republic's Supreme Leader.
Expert: Iran has been planning since 2018
Jonathan Hackett, a retired US Marine Corps interrogator, counterintelligence agent and special operations capabilities specialist, told the Daily Mail: "The Islamic Republic has been working on plans reaching varying levels of development to assassinate Trump since 2018 in Trump's first presidency. So this establishes that it is indeed possible.
"Now the question is really: is it probable? The gap between possible and probable can be quite wide, but perhaps not as wide in this case as others. A successful operation would require a permissive environment and perhaps collaboration from the inside."
Turkey seen as 'permissive environment'
The decision to remove the president and fly him to a US Air Force base at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk was made by the Secret Service despite scepticism from the CIA. According to Hackett, Turkey could be one of the most "permissive environments" the US leader is likely to attend for an assassination attempt.
He added: "This has only become more so now that Hakan Fidan, the former director of Turkey's National Intelligence Organisation, is now foreign minister. Fidan has had a close relationship with the IRGC since the early 1990s. Now that relationship can operate in the open, since he is foreign minister, instead of in the shadows when he was formerly in the intelligence community.
"So the environment is permissive and there are people at high levels in Turkish government who would at the very least be sympathetic to such an operation."
Decoy plane and official response
Two senior members of Donald Trump's cabinet, secretary of state Marco Rubio and treasury secretary Scott Bessent, remained on the effective decoy plane, a senior official confirmed. The official said Mr Rubio was aware of the switch and details of the threat behind it but could or would not say why he had stayed on the plane. The official said Mr Bessent was probably aware but did not know for sure.
The New York Times and CBS News had reported last month that intelligence officials had raised concerns about a potential attack on the president or his jet, triggering additional precautions and the decision not to use the newly inaugurated aircraft given to Mr Trump by Qatar for the first leg of his trip home from Ankara.
Mr Trump acknowledged the transfer on Tuesday. "It's only up to the Secret Service. I just follow what they'd like to do, so I go by Secret Service and the military," the president told reporters at Joint Base Andrews. "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."
An official told the Washington Post that the decision came after "three near misses with this president," meaning that they were not prepared to "take any chances".
