Iran Wants Trump Dead

Back in 1995 world leaders gathered for the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin in Jerusalem. He had been assassinated by a far-right settler trying, tragically all too successfully, to derail the peace process.

I was there covering it for Newsnight as dozens of leaders’ motorcades sped towards Mount Herzl cemetery. Knowing the event itself would be covered by Israeli TV we sought our own shots, finding a place on the central reservation of a dual carriageway where the armoured limos shot by within touching distance.

President Hosni Mubarak passed with GMCs full of commandos in assault rig. One could understand the precautions, Anwar Sadat, his predecessor having also been murdered, another martyr in the search for peace.

Naturally, we perked up when we saw President Bill Clinton’s motorcade bearing down upon us. There were at least half a dozen vehicles, including The Beast, that enormous, armoured limo, flying the presidential flag and Old Glory from its front wings.

But as it passed us, with the occupants just a few feet away I could see that the man in the back was not Clinton. The suit and tie were identical to those we’d seen POTUS wearing in a photo call, but this was a Secret Service agent doubling for him.

A second limousine of the same design passed almost immediately behind the first. It made sense to have two available to confuse would be attackers, but the president wasn’t in there either.

So where was the big guy? My curiosity was answered within seconds as a GMC, a big unarmoured SUV followed, flashing by with five men inside. The pair in the front had the predictable Secret Service buzz cuts and shades. The president, clearly recognisable, was sitting between two more of them in the back.

Anyone who has watched the comings and goings of US presidents during the past fifty years will have picked up on some of the precautions his bodyguards use – from tented entry points at certain events, so you can’t see which car he’s come out of or got into – to arrivals on military transport planes, doubles, and all the rest. Evidently that day in Jerusalem was regarded as quite high risk, worth taking the chance of putting Clinton in an unarmoured SUV rather than in one of the obvious target vehicles.

Now the Washington Post has broken the story about how Donald Trump boarded Air Force One (the big, modified Boeing 747) when leaving the Nato summit last month in Turkey but was almost immediately spirited off the plane’s other side in an airport catering truck. It shuttled him to a different US Air Force VIP jet, a C-32A for you plane spotting types, that flew to Mildenhall in England, ahead of the scheduled presidential jet, with even some officials and the press corps on board unaware that the switch had been made.

It was already obvious that the Boeing 747 gifted to him by Qatar and resprayed in US Air Force colours had not made the Turkey trip because, it was reported, it didn’t have the same standard of defensive aids fitted to the regular Air Force One. But even those are inferior to the protections on the C-32A.

So, there was evidently intelligence of a significant threat on this trip that an attempt might be made on his life, perhaps using an anti-aircraft missile or drone. My former Crisis Room podcast co-host, ex-CIA counter-terrorism Ops boss Marc Polymeropoulos commented, “the Iranian threat [was] far more serious than reported (need more on that)- also begs question of why POTUS travel Turkey to begin with during the war, given longstanding [counterintelligence/counter-terrorism] issues there”.

Trump being Trump there was uproar. The press corps were riled that they weren’t in on the switch, complaining that they’d been used as bait. Then the geopolitical takes followed, from claims that the intelligence of an imminent plot was Israel manipulating Trump, to loyalists praising his courage in going through with the Nato summit.

This, as we’ve seen countless times in this presidency, is how everyone from social media grifters to big name White House correspondents, remain relevant. But surely this security operation in Turkey was one of the more justified episodes in the dizzying news vortex surrounding Trump?

We know people have tried to kill him. And we’ve also read before about Iranian plots to strike being uncovered.

In Tehran there are billboards depicting Trump in a coffin or being throttled in revenge for the war he unleashed on that country. They are literally promising to kill him.

The more you think about it, the task of running his security detail, trying to maintain some kind of openness and normality in the face of everyone from lone whack jobs to state-sponsored special operators with missiles at their disposal, is just mind-boggling.

To quote Marc P again, on almost any other day of the week, a trenchant critic of this presidency “[the] Secret Service does everything possible to protect POTUS. This diversion tactic clearly was effective and worked. Do not criticize them for pulling this off”.

But of course, this is Trump so people are determined to. CNN’s Jake Tapper posted, “obviously the life of the president is paramount, and previous White Houses have used deception to protect the president’s life. But no officials I’ve spoken to have ever before heard of using an AF1 full of WH staff and journalists as a decoy during an imminent threat”. As Jon Snow once said, “everything before the word ‘but’ is bullshit”.

Decoys or not, I think you have to get used to the idea that if you’re around the president, you might be in the line of fire. That will make for a tremendous scoop if you’re the first eyewitness on air, or maybe… it’s the one you never get to file.

I have another personal anecdote on this. In 2007, when Benazir Bhutto flew home to lead the opposition in her native Pakistan. It was widely predicted she would be attacked, and indeed that evening, as she was driven through the streets of Karachi, a truck bomb detonated nearby, killing 149 people.

I, along with dozens of other journalists was on the flight from Dubai with Benazir earlier that day. There was some discussion before we boarded about the possibility of a bomb on the plane, but off we went anyway.

Several years later I was talking to a senior US military officer about secrecy and his view that the line between intelligence and journalism is sacrosanct. He had only crossed it once, he said. Back in 2007 he had phoned a journalist friend of his, telling her to stay off Benazir’s flight home. This officer had been briefed on specific, well sourced, intelligence that it would be blown up.

Those of us on her plane understood at some level that we were taking a risk – we just didn’t know how much of one! And of course, the bomb didn’t take us out of the sky, it came later in Karachi when there were also many journalists around her.

Morals of the story? In this case and the Trump one there was significant intelligence but in the event neither jet was attacked.

The US Secret Service or any other leader’s retinue have to take these threats seriously. And if we as journalists are travelling with them, we need to understand that we do so at our own risk.