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President Donald Trump’s cloak-and-dagger departure from Ankara, Turkey, last month — secretly slipping off the plane he was seen boarding — was an extraordinary security maneuver, but the playbook for disguising his movements aboard Air Force One dates back years.
Trump himself has long talked about the brilliance of the bait-and-switching during his first term.
Trump’s Dec. 26, 2018, surprise Christmas trip to U.S. troops in Iraq featured a darkened Air Force One, closed window shades and an unusual military call sign intended to obscure the presidential jet’s movement. That operation was ultimately pierced by a British plane spotter, however, prompting the White House to go considerably further the following year by leaving one presidential 747 parked conspicuously in Florida while Trump secretly flew another to Afghanistan.
The history gives fresh context to reports this week detailing an even more elaborate deception July 8, when Trump left a NATO summit in Ankara amid what U.S. officials described as a credible Iranian threat against the president or his aircraft.
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Trump publicly boarded the legacy blue-and-white Air Force One before secretly exiting through another door into an airport catering truck and transferring to an Air Force C-32A, a modified Boeing 757, according to reports.
The larger presidential jet then departed with journalists and some White House staff aboard, with the assumption that Trump was traveling with them.
“Well, it’s only up to the Secret Service; I just follow what they’d like to do,” Trump told reporters Tuesday night after traveling to Geneva, Ohio, for the Freedom 250 Patriot Games. “So I go by the Secret Service and the military.
“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.”
While the call sign Air Force One (AF1) changes to wherever the president is purportedly traveling, the decoy operations are a shell game to keep U.S. enemies in the dark.
The July 8 legacy 747 used the “AF1” call sign in flight despite Trump actually traveling aboard the C-32A under the comparatively nondescript “RCH18” designation, according to reported flight-tracking data.
Reporters were instructed to keep their window shades closed – a detail that harkens back to Trump’s regaling campaign rally crowds about the Christmas night 2018 Iraq trip and another November 2019 surprise trek to have Thanksgiving dinner with troops in Afghanistan.
Those trips have a common destination: travel through foreign and potentially hostile airspace.
Trump himself helped set the cover story last month.
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Before leaving Ankara, he announced that he would use the “former Air Force One” for part of the trip home “for old time’s sake,” while the newer Boeing 747-8 provided by Qatar would fly ahead to RAF Mildenhall in Britain so U.S. service members could see it.
Television cameras then captured Trump climbing the stairs of the older jet and waving before disappearing inside.
Minutes later, according to reports, a hydraulically raised catering truck pulled up to a door on the opposite side of the aircraft. Trump and several aides entered the truck out of sight of most of the traveling party and were driven across the tarmac to the C-32A. War Secretary Pete Hegseth boarded the smaller plane separately, helping make its presence appear routine.
“I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk,” Trump told reporters on the tarmac Tuesday night after the news of the switch was leaked. “I think it was at greater risk because that would be the plane I think that they would be more likely to go for.”
Trump flew aboard the C-32A to RAF Mildenhall. The smaller plane arrived shortly before the legacy Air Force One, and Trump apparently transferred back to the larger aircraft out of view before descending its stairs in front of cameras — preserving the appearance that he had been on it all along.
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He later boarded the newer, Qatari-provided 747 for the final leg back to Washington.
The White House has not directly confirmed the details of the shell game maneuvers, but communications director Steven Cheung said the administration uses all available means to confront threats against the president, while the Secret Service declined to discuss the operation to multiple outlets.
The elaborate ruse was set in motion after intelligence pointed to a specific danger involving Iran, which Trump acknowledged in the subsequent Air Force One press gaggle, hinting at the danger after reaching Britain.
Asked aboard the flight home about the threat, he told reporters, “I have a threat all the time. I’m No. 1 on their list.”
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“But if I go, you go,” Trump added in homage to the dangers of all their jobs amid the ongoing war in the Middle East.
The tactic was unusually elaborate. But keeping a presidential war-zone flight hidden — right down to manipulating what observers can see, hear and track — was familiar territory for Trump and his security team.
On Christmas night in 2018, Trump and first lady Melania Trump quietly left Washington aboard one of the two Boeing VC-25 aircraft normally used as Air Force One for an unannounced visit to Al Asad Air Base in Iraq. The flight was conducted under tight secrecy as Trump made his first trip as president to troops in a combat zone.
The aircraft did not advertise itself in the usual way, according to reports. Aviation enthusiasts identified the blue-and-white VC-25 flying over Britain under the call sign RCH358 rather than the familiar Air Force One designation. British aviation enthusiast Alan Meloy photographed the aircraft over South Yorkshire, and online aircraft trackers began piecing together its route from Joint Base Andrews toward the Middle East.
The attempt at secrecy began to unravel hours before the White House publicly disclosed Trump’s whereabouts.
Meloy’s photograph showed the unmistakable presidential 747, while aviation trackers followed the aircraft into Europe. One tracking account noted periods when the plane could no longer be readily followed and speculated that its identifying code had been changed or its transponder switched off.
The aircraft nevertheless had become conspicuous enough to fuel public speculation that Trump was making a previously undisclosed overseas trip.
Inside the plane, the precautions became even more stark as it approached Iraq. Shades were pulled down and the lights were shut off for much of the flight, according to a reporter traveling aboard the aircraft. Trump later said the security measures were unlike anything he had experienced.
The president returned to the episode repeatedly.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference, on March 2, 2019, Trump dramatically recreated the approach into Iraq, telling the crowd that crew members informed him about an hour before landing that the aircraft’s lights had to be extinguished. He described the shades being lowered and recalled going toward the cockpit as Air Force One descended toward a runway he said he could barely make out.
Trump said the experience struck him as a symbol of the costs and dangers of America’s long involvement in the region.
“Think of this: We spent $7 trillion in the Middle East and we can’t land with the lights on — 20 years later,” Trump told the CPAC crowd. “How bad is it? No, seriously, how bad is it?”
“Seven trillion dollars and we have to fly in with no lights.”
The detail describing the aircraft as darkened with its window shades closed on a trip conducted in near-total darkness were strikingly similar.
But the 2018 flight also exposed a weakness in that kind of secrecy. A highly recognizable Boeing 747 painted in presidential colors is difficult to hide in broad daylight from aviation enthusiasts holding personal cameras and handy with public flight-tracking tools.
Eleven months later on Thanksgiving Day 2019, when Trump made another secret war-zone trip — this time to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan — the White House built its operation around avoiding a repeat.
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Officials took reporters’ cellphones and other transmitting devices, arranged for Thanksgiving messages from Trump’s social-media account to appear while he was in transit and directed the small press pool to meet on the top floor of a Maryland parking garage before black vans carried them to Joint Base Andrews.
The biggest piece of misdirection was sitting in “plane” sight in Florida.
Trump had traveled to Palm Beach aboard one of the familiar blue-and-white VC-25s, and that aircraft remained parked at Palm Beach International Airport, creating the impression that the president was still spending Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago. Trump instead secretly left Florida aboard a smaller aircraft and returned to Joint Base Andrews.
There, a second nearly identical presidential 747 was concealed inside a hangar.
Trump boarded it at about 9:45 p.m. ET, according to contemporaneous reporting, before the aircraft departed for Afghanistan under darkness with its cabin lights dimmed and shades drawn. Reporters aboard did not initially know their destination.
That operation amounted to a true aircraft decoy: Anyone watching the presidential 747 in Palm Beach could reasonably conclude Trump was still nearby while another VC-25 was already carrying him halfway around the world.
The White House’s precautions can be linked at the time to what had happened in 2018. Contemporary reports said officials were determined not to repeat the Iraq trip, when the supposedly secret Air Force One flight had been spotted over Britain and dissected in real time by aviation watchers.
The newly disclosed Ankara operation appears to have taken that concept to another level.
Instead of merely leaving one presidential aircraft behind while Trump departed secretly on another, officials reportedly had Trump climb aboard the apparent presidential flight in public, slip away unseen and send the conspicuous jet onward with reporters and staff still believing he was aboard. The C-32A carrying Trump was made harder to follow electronically.
There is precedent beyond Trump as well. The Washington Post reported that President Bill Clinton used a decoy during a high-risk 2000 trip to Pakistan, sending a recognizable presidential aircraft ahead while Clinton arrived on an unmarked jet.
Unlike the Ankara operation, however, at least one representative of the traveling press corps had been briefed privately in advance about the deception and the risks surrounding the flight.
The distinction has become part of the controversy surrounding Trump’s July flight. Journalists aboard the legacy Air Force One did not know it was serving as the decoy or that the president had already moved to another aircraft. A senior administration official stressed to Fox News’ Peter Doocy that U.S. fighter jets escorted the “decoy” plane, and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent remained on that aircraft.
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The White House’s own public messaging continued to indicate Trump had traveled to Britain aboard the older presidential jet.
What looked at the time like a simple Air Force One swap was a swap inside a swap — the latest version of a presidential sleight of hand that Trump’s team had been refining since plane spotters spoiled the secret over England nearly eight years earlier.
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