Original subtitles

President Trump leaves for Turkey tonight for the annual NATO summit.

President Trump will board the new Qatar-supplied Air Force One, an

unconditional $400 million gift from a foreign government. Mr. Trump unveiled

the new jet last month, calling it the world's most luxurious plane.

My job is to document the president for the world.

Those pictures were sent immediately because...

God forbid something happens to the president, that's going to be the last

imagery that the world sees of him.

The press pool is a group of journalists, a dozen or 13 people that

follow the president around, will be on Air Force One.

You're absolutely the eyes and ears of the public as the press pool.

But in my more than 40-year career, I never...

and put in the position of being a decoy.

Wild. Just wild.

We are learning of an elaborate ruse to protect President Trump from an

assassination threat. This is an extraordinary, extraordinary story. He

got onto the plane and vanishes.

This surreal shell game of sorts, moving from place to place.

without anybody knowing.

You have to think like the bad guy to do a good job in the Secret Service.

They will do anything for the safety of the president. You gotta hear this, this

is totally nuts.

Huh? This is a story that sounds like it's just completely out of a movie.

They all sound like Hollywood.

This sounds like something out of a James Bond film.

Were you worried about a shoulder-fired missile?

I don't worry about anything, to be honest. Whatever it is, you know my

attitude? Whatever.

The NATO summit is one of these sort of set pieces.

We know this is going to happen.

The U.S. president has always gone.

We land and immediately go to work.

We're not going to the hotel to take a nappy poo.

We're working.

He's got a meeting with Zelensky.

He's got a bilateral meeting with the head of NATO.

And I'm not happy with NATO because of the fact that they didn't want to help

us with the number one.

State sponsor of terror, that's Iran.

There was some saber-rattling between the U.S. and Iran.

And, of course, they're dirty players, so they go after everyone, probably

including me. I've been number one on their list for years.

And they're a bunch of scum, you want to know the truth. They're scum. The

underlying issue in all of this is the Iran war.

For the second straight day, the U.S. and Iran traded overnight strikes,

raising concerns about the possibility of a return to a full-scale military

conflict. This is a serious escalation.

It's fair to say that the Iran war has not progressed as the White House would

have liked.

Iran is in a position to make the president take very, very extraordinary

security measures when we're almost six months into this war.

That's an issue for the White House. They don't like it.

Turkey.

Being relatively close to Iran where we're having difficulties with that

country now certainly heightens the situation.

So it's all about preparation.

And we're probably the only agency that plans and plans and plans and plans and

hopes we never have to do what we plan to do.

The president's vehicles get flown to that location.

Secret Service support staff get flown to that location.

We're going to know where our safe spaces are. What's our route back to the

limousine? If a fire alarm goes off, what are we going to do? If somebody

comes through the door with a weapon, what are we going to do?

So the Secret Service's primary mission is for the person it's protecting or

persons it's protecting on a particular visit.

We're there to protect our president.

Ladies and gentlemen, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, Donald

J. Trump.

President Trump, towards the end of the NATO conference, says on True Social

that he's not going to be flying back on the Qatari Air Force One. He's going to

be flying back on the old Air Force One.

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

But why aren't you flying the new plane home?

Say what? Why aren't you flying on the new Air Force One? It's flying to Europe

to one of the big bases, two or three of the big bases, where we can show it to

the people.

At the time, the main hypothesis was simply the White House had changed the

planes for security issues because they didn't want to admit that the new plane

was not up to snuff security-wise.

I mean, the circling helicopter now, I'm just interested, like, why?

My husband thinks I'm the weirdest person in the world. We'll be like at a

picnic, and I'm like, oh, I need to find out if that's a decoy or the real thing.

The president himself put himself in greater jeopardy by insisting on flying

this Qatari gift plane.

As Secret Service sources told me, the president was incredibly embarrassed

that his Qatari gift jet which he'd been bragging about, was not as safe

as the old and less plush Air Force One.

The old Air Force One has much more serious abilities to avoid

any kind of missile.

Its ability to defend itself from that kind of attack is unmatched.

But no president

is a bigger target for assassination than Donald Trump.

Shots have apparently been fired. Donald Trump has been... Investigation underway

after the second assassination attempt on former President... Gunshots were

fired at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. We are getting reports now that

several shots were fired near the White House...

And Iran has been trying openly to kill Donald Trump since January 2020.

Overnight, we learned that President Trump ordered the drone strike that

killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, one of the most powerful men in the

region.

Iranians today poured into the streets of Tehran to honor their Ayatollah and

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, assassinated by the U.S. and at the

start of the war. Iran has been very clear they want to avenge that by

killing Donald Trump.

Not only was he now authorizing new strikes on Iran during this trip.

But Israel's intelligence agency is passing along this really scary

information, suggesting that there's an active plot to try to hit Air Force One

and bring it down or damage it in some way.

It is a perfect storm for something going horribly wrong.

And the Secret Service, I'm told by sources, was struggling.

How do we get this guy home safely?

As we get on the tarmac and we round and I look at Air Force One, I see those

catering vehicles up against the side of Air Force One. There's one at the front

and one at the back.

And I have never seen that before.

40 years doing presence, never seen that before.

I shot it.

I shot the shit out of it.

We get out. I may be the first or second person out of the bus.

The president's already up the stairs.

Trump enters the plane.

We rush in. We sit down. Then we get on the plane. Don't really think anything

more of it.

The second unusual thing happens.

We're told by the White House staff that we should lower our window shades.

I'm like, why?

They said, Secret Service says to.

I'm like, okay.

Close it.

My little spidey sense is up now.

I don't know why this is happening.

And I'm on high alert.

I remember working in this galley when I first got started.

You'd be amazed what we could do in these little galleys.

The dishes, they'll look the same.

I served in the United States Air Force for 28 years. In 20 of those years, I

was the Air Force One flight attendant.

I started flying with President Bush, Daddy Bush, we call him 41.

Then I flew with President Clinton and President Bush 43.

I ended with President Obama.

Everyone has a seating card. You put their name on the seating card and a

menu card.

so they know the meals, and of course the fruit bowls and candy dishes.

The flight attendants, a lot of people don't believe this, but we go grocery

shopping.

We were shopping civilian attire, so we want to get the attention that we're

here to shop for the president.

We buy all the groceries because of our background clearance.

That's part of our safety checklist to make sure that we handled it.

I didn't receive it from somebody else. I brought it on board, so that's a big

part of it. So it's secure to the max, you know, maximum security.

Prior to departure, the flight attendants will upload the plane.

We have refrigerators and freezers in the belly.

We could go self-contained for about 14 days with food. So there would be no

reason for... a catering cart or anything like that to be near Air Force

One. Exactly. No catering, no trucks of any sort should be coming towards the

airplane as far as delivering food, because we should have enough, like I

said, to take us throughout the whole trip.

Total of 24 years. I would say maybe a handful of times during a debrief.

I was told that we had some type of threat against us.

Could have been something about the president, or it could have been about

the crew, or just take the whole plane down. But that was told after the fact,

and I'm glad.

I didn't know that while I was in the air that we had an attack on us.

Most of that, those things are classified.

So...

We arrive at Mildenhall Air Force Base.

It's the evening.

At this point, it's dark.

And the other Air Force One, the Qatari Air Force One, that we had used to fly

from D.C. to Turkey, was parked several hundred yards in front of us.

We are taken off the plane, and we see Trump walk down from the old Air Force

One.

We photograph him coming down the steps.

And he walks between the two aircraft.

It had this kind of cinematic quality.

And that is, that's totally Trump, you know. He really does think about, how is

this going to play?

How do I look, you know?

And he stops by the Qatari jet and says a few words. And I've got pictures of

him stopped by the Qatari jet.

And he goes up the steps.

Then we get back on the Qatari jet, and off we go.

Shortly thereafter, President Trump does come to the cabin.

And then we immediately

start spraying him with questions.

We just wanted to confirm that they switched the planes.

because of a security threat.

At that point, he was denying everything, denying everything.

No, these are sick people.

So I could see something like that. I didn't know they did that, but I could

see something like that. Were you aware of any credible threat by Iran against

her? Well, I haven't read all the time.

I'm number one on their list before you.

But if I go, you go, right?

In the past, there have been several operations with presidents.

where there has been some deception or non-transparency. President Clinton had

an issue in Pakistan a number of years ago. One jet landed at the Air Force

base here and it appeared it carried the president, but it turned out it was a

decoy. Mr. Clinton landed moments later on an unmarked military jet.

President Bush had a situation where he went to a military theater on

Thanksgiving Day. I happened to be about to have dinner, and my wife said, hey,

the president's in Iraq having Thanksgiving dinner.

I didn't even know. The agents at the president's ranch didn't know. He was

surreptitiously taken out to keep that story hush-hush.

this level of deception or non-transparency happen every day that

level of it no but a decision was made to meet the need of the situation

on the ground at the moment now there are people that are going to be asking

questions that's up to the press now to go do their job and ask those hard

questions

i cover

national security for the washington post covered the military in particular

for almost 18 years.

Access has dwindled really throughout the entire 18 years, but dramatically

through this second Trump administration.

They are trying to control message, so it makes covering the day-to-day news

more challenging.

On the other hand, a lot of times you can break through with a story, you

know, even if it's days or weeks old, nobody knows about it.

So in July, we got this initial tip.

And I'm going to be vague deliberately to protect sourcing there.

But the initial tip was that basically the reporting for days had been wrong.

There have been so many questions about why the president is not flying home on

his new Air Force One. He's departing on the previous Air Force One, the old one.

You know, and basically what the White House was saying. He wanted to show the

new aircraft.

Also what the media was saying, all of this reporting around why they took the

older plane, only for it to be neither plane.

and it was the third plane that made the story very unusual tip comes in that in

turkey the president got onto the old air force one and then very quickly and

secretly gets off the plane on the opposite side and into this airport

catering truck without anybody knowing despite numerous television cameras

numerous reporters so for this tip to be true there's a whole lot of people

They had to have missed it in the moment.

It was not a trip I was on, but there's publicly available video from the flight

line in Turkey.

So we see video of the president walking up the steps in Turkey onto the old Air

Force One.

And when you look at the video through the lens of, hey, let's keep an eye on

that catering truck...

You can see the catering truck on the far side of the old Air Force One. Plane

is day.

You can see the press corps arriving, walking up to the tail of the plane.

And in the moment, they also had been asked to pull down the window shades on

the plane.

No real solid explanation why.

The blinds. I forgot the blinds. The shades down on the plane.

So the shades. It turns out, almost certainly...

that this was to hide the catering van because the catering van was on the same

side that we were told to close and then as the press starts to make moves to get

on the plane you see the catering truck pull away holy those

catering trucks holy all those little things add up when the catering truck

pulled away from air force one on video Our reporting holds that he was inside

the truck with a handful of loyal aides.

You can see the catering truck move to the smaller plane behind the plane.

And that turned out to be the third plane. And that was the third plane.

It was a C-32, which was also part of this initial tip. The C-32 looks

relatively nondescript.

It is a smaller plane, significantly smaller. It's also blue and white. It's

also got United States of America down the side.

The understanding was that the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, it was his

plane, if you will.

He got on the plane publicly, took the external stairs so you can kind of see

him get on the plane with the president getting on, you know, kind of secretly

through this other door, under cover of this truck.

And it's like, okay, well, you're sourcing here.

It appears they know what they're talking about.

This all holds up.

And we had tracker data for multiple planes.

The tracker data shows that the old legacy Air Force One popped up with the

Air Force One call sign over Istanbul.

And then the other plane didn't appear.

The C-32 with the president aboard did not appear on tracker data the way all

the other planes did that day.

So then you're asking, why didn't they turn transponders on?

It's a deception operation is what the Pentagon would call it.

And there was actual video of the plane landing in Britain

because there were plane spotters on the ground who had posted all the video on

YouTube.

The one that kind of stuck out was the one that didn't appear on the tracking

data.

But you could see it land in sequence with the same other planes that took

off.

They noted it in the moment. There were social media posts in the moment saying,

hey, this is unusual.

It landed nine minutes apart with the one labeled Air Force One.

At that point, it's like, it all tracks.

It all made sense.

And then, you know, you find the additional sourcing that can verify it

to standard multiple sources with, you know, overlapping details.

And it's like, yeah, we got this. This is true.

Breaking news. The Washington Post just crossing some new reporting. President

Trump's secret plane swap. Well, it's certainly in the running for scoop of

the year. How many people do you think were aware of this ruse?

I had my feet up in a beer in my hand.

And I was like, oh, no.

Here we go.

And I knew that this was going to be a big deal.

This is an astonishing story of secrecy and deception.

He let the press fly as a decoy. Were they just sitting ducks for this

potential threat? We were used as decoys.

Wild. Just wild.

What first struck me when I read the Washington Post story was that I saw him

get off the plane he wasn't supposed to be on.

That's one variable that we have not solved for, despite being able to

confirm the rest of the story. Somehow he snuck back onto that plane just to

get off in front of us, which was pretty advanced choreography.

One thing that caught my attention in the moment is the president spoke to the

media and his comment that, if I go, you go. But if I go, you go.

Basically the idea that he's presenting as the truth, that, like... they're all

together and if something happens to him something happens to the rest of them

and we know now that simply isn't the case thank you thank you very much

everybody part of the story is they have legitimate

fears for the president's life there was no dispute over that from us it was more

you took these very unusual steps you hid them please

explain why

They denied nothing.

They responded initially with a no comment. And then the president, a full

day later, addressed it briefly.

President, can you tell us about your ride on the airport catering truck in

Turkey? Why did you need to do that? They brought me up for Secret Service. I

just follow what they'd like to do.

What was the nature of the threat?

There was a threat out there. I didn't really ask too much about it. I get a

lot of threats.

We didn't have it in the initial story, but we did have it a day or so later.

Who was on the catering truck?

Marco Rubio and Scott Besant, they remained on the legacy Air Force One.

No cabinet officials, no general officers, but instead Natalie Harp and a

handful of kind of nondescript aides that the American public probably

wouldn't really know.

the president did take his secretary of defense did secret service decide who

would accompany democrats want answers what precautions were taken to keep the

staff and reporters on that plane safe i'm all for getting out the way if

something about to pop out this washington post scoop is crazy it's been

surreal watching the aftermath with memes late night television

just to clarify he was not in a actual

airport cart, right? Like what you would have the drinks inside, small, but

actually in the truck itself.

Everybody's going crazy over this. Yeah, you know, and I don't know why.

Nobody cares if a plane full of press falls out of the sky.

They're just fools.

They don't know how it works. They don't care how it works.

All they want to do is bash Trump all day, every day.

Now, I understand that they feel duped, but this idea that the Secret Service

was there to protect them, I think they need to get over themselves.

Come on up. Come on up.

It's okay.

That's the White House. Can you see it?

The White House is where the crane is. That's where the White House is.

He's making a helipad to land the helicopter.

Hang on. Hang on. I can see him.

He's going to walk out the president.

He's going to walk out right now.

Yep.

So see the guy standing right there?

That's the president.

That's the president.

I've done lots of difficult things, pretty dangerous things, in pursuit of

my job and in pursuit of a really good picture, be it embedding with troops in

Afghanistan, be it wing walking, be it Mount Everest.

But my belief is that it's nice to know that going in, that you can say,

sure, I'm willing to take that risk.

to show the world what's going on there.

As journalists, we're used to taking risks.

There's a lot of colleagues that put their lives on the line for stories.

Had they told me that this plane was a decoy, I wouldn't have changed it at

all. One reason that this is more significant than it even might seem is

because if you're a journalist in D.C., it's sort of the latest step of many

aimed at limiting transparency and information. So I think that's one

reason why it ended up hitting a nerve.

You know...

If we're not being told the truth about this, what else are we not being told

the truth about?

The Secret Service is not in the public relations business of making everybody

feel good. The Secret Service's job was to get the president home that night

from that visit.

And quite frankly, the bottom line here was that everybody on those other two

planes got home that night safely too. So from a Secret Service standpoint,

that was a very successful day.

Clearly, there are still threats.

Clearly, Iran can still be perceived as a threat, or you wouldn't take these

steps.

It, I think, has become a bit of a symbol about the degree to which this

war has gotten to a place that the White House has not wanted or did not

anticipate.

Being in a catering van due to threats from Iran does not project power.

does not project control.

And, you know, they know that.

We don't yet have a full understanding for what exactly the threat was.

How exactly that intelligence manifested.

What were the other options on the table in terms of disclosing or not?

Those are all things that we don't have a picture of at this time.

There's going to be a lot of unknowns.

And I don't think we're ever going to know everything.

I think the rest of it are questions for the White House to answer.