Türkiye's Intelligence Service Confirmed Iranian Missile Threat to Air Force One But Also Doubts the Israeli Version of the Plot

A month after President Donald Trump was secretly moved between aircraft during his departure from the NATO summit in Ankara, competing accounts have emerged over what Turkish intelligence actually knew, and believed, about an alleged Iranian plot to shoot down Air Force One. The episode, now confirmed by multiple US outlets, has evolved from a straightforward security scare into a dispute over whose intelligence should be trusted, with Türkiye's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) at the centre of both versions.

What Happened in Ankara
President Trump flew into the July 7–8 NATO summit aboard the newly retrofitted Boeing 747 donated by Qatar, with the older, decades-old Air Force One serving as a backup aircraft on the tarmac. Ahead of his July 8 departure, the National Security Agency, the CIA, and Türkiye's MIT picked up intelligence streams pointing to a credible plot by Iran to fire a surface-to-air missile at the presidential jet, according to two US law enforcement officials and a US official who spoke to CBS News.

US officials also said there were reports of a team inside Türkiye tasked with carrying out the strike, though subsequent searches failed to locate it.
In response, the National Security Council, the White House Military Office, and the Secret Service arranged for Trump to be quietly switched to a US Air Force C-32A jet via a catering truck, while the aircraft publicly identified as Air Force One, carrying Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and members of the press corps, few of whom knew the president was not aboard, flew the same route as a decoy. Trump later told reporters he was moved because "the plane that I flew on was at greater risk," and described himself as "number one on the kill list for Iran".

Two Competing Accounts of the Intelligence
The Washington Post has reported that it was Israel that supplied the CIA with the intelligence behind the plane swap, though the agency reportedly held only "low confidence" in the information. An Israeli Embassy spokesperson declined to confirm the specific report but said allied states routinely "share intelligence with one another about a wide range of threats and at various levels of confidence".
Turkish officials, however, have pushed back hard on that framing.

Middle East Eye reported that Turkish officials suspect the Israeli intelligence report was a deliberate ruse, designed to derail budding US-Iran diplomacy and to undercut what Ankara sees as a warming relationship between Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

A source described as familiar with the matter told the outlet that while Turkish authorities took the report seriously and assisted their American counterparts, "it was very clear to us that there was no way this report was true".

According to that account, the Israeli warning specifically alleged that Iranian operatives could strike Air Force One with shoulder-fired MANPADS missiles from within one kilometer of the airport.

Turkish suspicion of the Israeli report is reportedly tied to the diplomatic backdrop of the summit itself. During his meeting with Erdoğan the day before the alleged plot was reported, Trump signalled he was open to lifting sanctions imposed on Türkiye over its 2019 purchase of the Russian S-400 missile system, and to approving F-35 fighter jet sales to Ankara, a prospect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has strongly opposed on the grounds it would erode Israel's regional military edge.

A Genuinely Disputed Picture
The two threads of reporting are not necessarily contradictory so much as reflective of the murkiness inherent to fast-moving intelligence assessments: CBS News' sourcing indicates that MIT, alongside the NSA and CIA, independently picked up its own signals of a credible plot, separate from whatever Israel later shared. Middle East Eye's Turkish sources, by contrast, appear to be responding specifically to the more detailed Israeli warning of a MANPADS team on the ground, which Turkish security services reportedly searched for and could not verify. Iran, for its part, has denied any plan to target Trump or other American officials.

What is not in dispute is that the alleged threat was taken seriously enough to trigger an elaborate decoy operation involving senior US officials, and that the episode has become entangled in the wider politics of the US-Iran conflict, Israeli-Turkish tensions, and the question of Ankara's access to F-35 jets. As of this writing, no independent verification of either the existence or the fabrication of the plot has been publicly established.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.
International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP
[email protected]
+233-555-275-880

References
CBS News, "Trump's secret plane switch took place within a day of credible Iranian missile threat" https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-secret-air-force-one-switch-iran-missile-threat/

Middle East Eye, "Turkey suspects Israel fabricated Trump Air Force One assassination plot to derail US-Iran deal" https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/turkey-suspects-israel-fabricated-trump-air-force-one-assassination-plot-derail-us-iran-deal

ABC News, "Trump's decoy flight sparked by fears of Iranian cell with shoulder-fired missile: Official" https://abcnews.com/Politics/official-iranians-shoulder-launched-missile-turkey-caused-trumps/story?id=135593076