Trump confirms secret service took him off Air Force One in Turkey

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump on Tuesday confirmed that he secretly swapped planes as he left a NATO summit in Turkey last month due to a possible security threat.

"I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go in a different flight, different plane," Trump told reporters. "I just have to do what they say."

The revelation comes after reports that Trump boarded Air Force One on 8 July in view of television cameras, before hiding in a catering truck to be transported to a military aircraft.

The last-minute switch has raised questions about whether those left on the decoy plane were in danger, but Trump said on Tuesday the jet he boarded instead could have been at "greater risk... because that would be the plane, I think, that they would be more likely to go for."

His comments confirmed a report that first appeared in The Washington Post saying that Trump, following the NATO summit, was spirited onto a different plane because of a credible threat from Iran. The action was kept secret for weeks, until the newspaper’s story.

Trump downplayed the extraordinary nature of the subterfuge involved in his flight, which, according to the report, saw him stow away in an airport catering container to sneak onto another plane while Air Force One was sent into the sky, essentially as a decoy.

“They wanted me to go on a different flight, a different plane,” Trump told reporters after returning from an event in Ohio, saying he had little choice in the matter.

“I guess there was a threat out there. I didn’t really ask too much about it,” he said. “I get a lot of threats.”

But he said the incident did not scare him.

“I don’t worry about anything, to be honest,” Trump said. “Whatever it is. You know my attitude? Whatever!”

The New York Times reported that US intelligence had information of a person near the NATO summit who had been seen with a shoulder-fired missile.

Journalists and some White House staff on board did not know the US president had been smuggled out as part of an elaborate ruse in response to a possible Iranian threat.

Trump's flight out of Turkey made headlines at the time because he had arrived aboard a luxury jet gifted by Qatar, which was not equipped with some of the same missile detection and countermeasure systems found on older presidential jets.

But reports now confirm he was made to hide in the catering vehicle and travel on a smaller government aircraft from Turkey to the United Kingdom, only to sneak back aboard the Qatari-gifted presidential plane undetected.

Trump later scoffed at the speculation when asked about potential danger, telling reporters at the time, “If I go, you go. Right?” — gliding past the fact that if the plane had been shot down, the president wouldn’t have been aboard.

Now, schedules and logistics for overseas travel have sometimes been kept secret by commanders-in-chief due to security concerns. However, it is thought to be unprecedented that Trump's location was kept a secret both at the time and for weeks following.

Presidents have regularly tested the confines of their office, pushing their security advisers to visit war zones as a show of American presence and their own leadership. Usually, this happens in the form of trips that aren’t announced until the president is deemed to be out of harm’s way.

What's different this time is that Trump was secretly separated from the rest of his travelers, including the press pool that was supposed to cover the president and his actions independently. The White House hasn't fully disclosed what happened once the risk had passed, instead of telling the public.