- Joined
- Mar 3, 2021
At 8.28 pm on July 8, the White House travel pool filed note number 24 from Ankara. The header read Boarding AF1. Four words inside it read "No eyes on POTUS."That note sat in public for 33 days and was read as confirmation of the opposite.
On Monday the Washington Post reported that an Iranian assassination threat prompted a deception operation that night. Trump boarded the legacy 747 in front of the cameras, then left through a door on the far side into an airport catering truck raised on hydraulics, which carried him to a C-32A parked nearby. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth boarded it separately. Journalists and some White House staff flew on without him, and were told to close their window shades.The tracking data tells the rest.
Trump's aircraft flew as Reach 18, and the Post reported it could find no flight tracking data for it at all. The decoy appeared on radar near Istanbul with no call sign listed, adopted the AF1 identifier midflight, and landed at Mildenhall at 10.29 pm, nine minutes after the president's plane had already touched down. The Qatari 747-8 had gone ahead hours earlier as SAM 33.The press pool did not fail and did not lie. It recorded precisely what it observed and precisely what it did not observe, in writing, in real time.
