World

American and Turkish agencies could not corroborate the Iranian threat behind the Ankara aircraft switch, officials say

By Staff Writer  |  14 August 2026

Israel passed Washington a series of warnings that Iran meant to kill the American president, including one before last month's summit in Ankara. Serving and former officials say the Central Intelligence Agency could not verify them, and a Turkish official says Turkey's own agencies could not either.

The deception that took the American president off his own aircraft in Ankara last month rested on intelligence that the United States could not confirm, according to one serving American official and two former officials.

Those officials say Washington has received several warnings from Israel over the past year that Iran intended to assassinate Donald Trump, some of them passed to American intelligence agencies and some relayed directly by Israeli officials to senior figures in the White House. The warnings described possible plots to shoot the president with a sniper, or to recruit someone to attack him with a knife at a large public event. American intelligence officials could not independently verify them.

The most detailed of the warnings came before the summit in Ankara in July. Israeli officials briefed the White House on intelligence indicating that Iran might try to kill the president with a shoulder-launched missile while he was travelling on Air Force One.

A Turkish official says Turkey's intelligence agencies had no evidence corroborating the Israeli claim either, and that Turkey shared that assessment with the Americans. The Central Intelligence Agency has not been able to corroborate some of the specific threats to the president's life shared by Israeli intelligence since early last year, the officials say, and in several instances over the two American military operations against Iran it recorded low confidence in that material. The White House, the agency and the National Security Agency have all declined to comment. A spokesman for the Israeli embassy disputed the suggestion that Israel was using intelligence to influence American policy on Iran.

What the president has said about it

The switch itself was not disclosed at the time. The White House said the president was flying from Turkey to Britain aboard Air Force One; he boarded that aircraft, left it through another door into an airport catering truck, and flew out on a smaller military jet, while the larger aeroplane carried staff and reporters who believed he was with them. It became public through American press reporting on 10 August.

Speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Tuesday 11 August, the president confirmed the switch and put the risk the other way round.

I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk. I think it was at greater risk because that would be the plane I think that they would be more likely to go for

Donald Trump, President of the United States

He said the decision had not been his. It was only up to the Secret Service, he said, and he followed what they would like to do, going by the Secret Service and the military. He added that he had not asked for much detail about the threat, and that he receives a great many of them.

Why the operation went ahead regardless

On the officials' account the mitigation was ordered despite the lack of verification, out of caution rather than out of confirmed intelligence. That is a defensible way to protect a head of state and it is also the part with consequences, because the same episode left the aides and journalists on the decoy aircraft flying under a threat that had been thought serious enough to move the president.

American assessments have held for years that Iran wants to retaliate for the killing of the Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020, so a warning of that kind does not arrive as a surprise and is not lightly dismissed. The officials describe warnings that began before the twelve day war of June 2025 and grew more frequent before the American decision to strike Iran in February.

None of this has been confirmed by any government. The White House has said nothing about the intelligence, Iran has not been quoted on the specific allegation, and the material at the centre of it remains unverified by the agency that was asked to check it. What is on the record is that a president was moved, that two intelligence services could not stand up the reason, and that the operation was run anyway.