Instadocs: The Decoy Plane (2026) Movie Script
President Trump leaves for
Turkey tonight for the annual NATO summit.
President Trump will board
the new Qatar-supplied Air Force One,
an unconditional 400-million-dollar gift
from a foreign government.
Mr. Trump unveiled the new jet last month,
calling it, "The world's
most luxurious plane."
My job is to document
the president for the world.
Those pictures
are sent immediately,
because, God forbid
something happens to the president,
that's gonna be the last imagery
that the world sees of him.
The press pool is a group of journalists,
a dozen or 13 people
that follow the president around,
will be on Air Force One.
You're absolutely the eyes and ears
of the public as the press pool.
But in my more than 40-year career,
I've never been put
in the position of being a decoy.
Wild. Just wild.
We are learning of an elaborate ruse
to protect President Trump
from an assassination threat.
This is an extraordinary,
extraordinary story.
He got onto the plane and vanishes.
This is a real shell game of sorts,
moving from place-to-place
without anybody knowing.
You have to think like the bad guy
to do a good job in the Secret Service.
They will do anything
for the safety of the president.
You gotta hear this. This is totally nuts.
Huh?
This is a story that sounds like
it's just completely out of a movie.
They all sound like Hollywood.
This sounds like something
out of a James Bond film.
Were you worried about
a shoulder-fired missile?
I don't worry about anything,
to be honest.
Whatever it is.
You know my attitude? Whatever.
.
The NATO summit
is one of these sort of set pieces.
We know this is going to happen.
The U.S. president has always gone.
We land and immediately go to work.
We're not going to the hotel
to take a nappy poo.
We're working.
He's got a meeting with Zelensky.
He's got a bilateral meeting
with the head of NATO.
And I'm not happy with NATO,
because of the fact
that they didn't wanna help us
with the number one
state sponsor of terror. That's Iran.
There was some saber rattling
between the U.S. and Iran.
And of course, they're dirty players,
so, they go after everyone,
probably including me.
I've been number one
on their list for years.
And they're a bunch of scum.
You wanna know the truth? They're scum.
The underlying issue
in all of this is the Iran war.
For the second straight day,
the U.S. and Iran
traded overnight strikes,
raising concerns about
the possibility of a return
to a full-scale military conflict.
This is a serious escalation.
It's fair to say that
the Iran war has not progressed
as the White House would have liked.
Iran is in a position
to make the president
take very, very extraordinary
security measures
when we're almost six months
into this war.
That's an issue
for the White House. They don't like it.
Turkey being relatively close to Iran,
where we're having difficulties
with that country now,
certainly heightens the situation.
So it's all about preparation.
And we're probably the only agency
that plans and plans and plans and plans
and hopes we never
have to do what we plan to do.
The president's vehicles
get flown to that location.
Secret Service support staff
get flown to that location.
We're gonna know
where our safe spaces are,
what's our route back to the limousine.
If a fire alarm goes off,
what are we gonna do?
If somebody comes
through the door with a weapon,
what are we gonna do?
The Secret Service's primary mission
is for the person it's protecting,
or persons it's protecting
on a particular visit.
We're there to protect our president.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the 45th and 47th president
of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
President Trump,
towards the end of the NATO conference,
says on Truth Social
that he's not going to be flying back
on the Qatari Air Force One.
He's going to be flying back
on the old Air Force One.
Go ahead. Go ahead.
But why aren't you flying
the new plane home?
Say what?
Why aren't you flying
on the new Air Force One home?
It's flying to Europe,
to one of the big bases,
two or three of the big bases,
where we can show it to the people.
At the time,
the main hypothesis was simply
that the White House
had changed the planes
for security issues
because they didn't want to admit
that the new plane
was not up to snuff security-wise.
I mean, the circling helicopter now,
I'm just interested, like, why?
My husband thinks
I'm the weirdest person in the world.
We'll be at a picnic, and I'm like,
"I need to find out
if that's a decoy or the real thing."
The president himself put himself
in greater jeopardy
by insisting on flying
this Qatari gift plane.
As Secret Service sources told me,
the president was incredibly embarrassed
that his Qatari gift jet,
which he'd been bragging about,
was not as safe
as the old and less plush Air Force One.
The old Air Force One
has much more serious abilities
to avoid any kind of missile.
Its ability to defend itself
from that kind of attack is unmatched.
But no president is a bigger target
for assassination than Donald Trump.
Get down, get down, get down, get down.
Shots have apparently been fired.
Donald Trump has been injured.
Investigation underway
after the second assassination attempt
on former president
Gunshots were fired
at the White House Correspondent's Dinner.
We are getting reports now
that several shots were fired
near the White House.
where a man tried to
assassinate him while he played golf.
And Iran has been trying openly
to kill Donald Trump since January, 2020.
Overnight, we learned that
President Trump ordered the drone strike
that killed Iranian general
Qasem Soleimani,
one of the most powerful men
in the region.
Iranians today poured
into the streets of Tehran to honor
their Ayatollah
and Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei,
assassinated by the U.S.
at the start of the war.
Iran has been very clear.
They want to avenge that
by killing Donald Trump.
Not only was he now authorizing
new strikes on Iran during this trip,
but Israel's intelligence agency
is passing along
this really scary information,
suggesting that there's an active plot
to try to hit Air Force One
and bring it down,
or damage it in some way.
It is a perfect storm
for something going horribly wrong.
And the Secret Service,
I'm told by sources, was struggling.
"How do we get this guy home safely?"
As we get on the tarmac,
and move round,
and I look at Air Force One,
I see those catering vehicles
up against the side of Air Force One.
There's one at the front
and one at the back.
And I have never seen that before.
Forty years doing presidents,
never seen that before.
I shot it. I shot the shit out of it.
We get out.
I may be the first
or second person out of the bus.
And the president's already up the stairs.
Trump enters the plane,
we rush in, we sit down.
We get on the plane.
Don't really think anything more of it.
The second unusual thing happens.
We're told by the White House staff
that we should lower our window shades.
I'm like, "Why?"
They said, "Secret Service says to."
I'm like, "Okay."
Close it.
My little spidey sense is up now.
I don't know why this is happening.
And I'm on high alert.
I remember working
in this galley when I first got started.
You'd be amazed
what we could do in these little galleys.
The dishes still look the same.
I served in the United States Air Force
for 28 years
And 20 of those years,
I was an Air Force One flight attendant.
I started flying with President Bush,
"Daddy Bush," we call him, 41.
Then I flew with President Clinton
and President Bush, 43.
I ended with President Obama.
Everyone has a seating card.
You put their name on the seating card
and a menu card, so they know the meals,
and of course,
the fruit bowls and candy dishes.
The flight attendants,
a lot of people don't believe this,
but we go grocery shopping.
We will shop in civilian attire,
so we won't get the attention
that we're here
to shop for the president.
We buy all the groceries
because of our background clearance.
That's part of our safety checklist
to make sure that we handled it.
I didn't receive it from somebody else.
I brought it on board,
so that's a big part of it.
So, it's secure to the max,
you know, maximum security.
Prior to departure,
the flight attendants
will upload the plane.
We have refrigerators
and freezers in the belly.
Well, we could go self-contained
for about 14 days with food.
So there would be no
reason for a catering cart
or anything like that to be near
Air Force One.
Exactly. No catering, no trucks
of any sort should be coming
towards the airplane
as far as delivering food
'cause we should have enough, like I said,
to take us throughout the whole trip.
A total of 24 years.
I would say maybe,
a handful of times during a debrief,
I was told that we had
some type of threat against us.
Could have been something
about the president,
or it could have been about the crew,
or just take the whole plane down.
But that was told after the fact,
and I'm glad.
I didn't know that while I was in the air
that we had an attack on us.
Most of that,
those things are classified.
So, we arrive
at Mildenhall Air Force Base.
It's the evening.
At this point, it's dark.
And the other Air Force One,
the Qatari Air Force One
that we had used to fly
from D.C. to Turkey
was parked several hundred yards
in front of us.
We are taken off the plane,
and we see Trump walk down
from the old Air Force One.
We photograph him coming down the steps.
And he walks between the two aircraft.
It had this kind of cinematic quality.
And that is
that's totally Trump, you know?
He really does think about,
"How is this gonna play?"
"How do I look," you know?
Mr. President, will you
come over and take some questions?
And he stops by the Qatari jet,
and says a few words.
You know, got pictures of him
stopped by the Qatari jet.
He goes up the steps,
then we get back
on the Qatari jet and off we go.
Shortly thereafter,
President Trump does come to the cabin.
It's a long walk to you.
Hi, Mr. President.
It's about three times the walk
we used to take,
but I hope you like it. So
And then we immediately start
spraying him with questions.
What was the security concern
that caused us to change planes?
We just wanted to confirm
that they switched the planes,
because of a security threat.
Do you think
there wasn't a security concern?
No, no. Why would there be?
At that point, he was denying everything,
denying everything.
Do you know why
they had us close our window blinds?
-That was--
-No.
Well, yeah, because you're
you know, probably on a dangerous flight,
because of the sleazebags
that we have to deal with.
Do you think that
Iran was possibly thinking
Well, I mean,
if they asked you to close your windows,
probably they'd feel that way.
They didn't ask me to close mine,
but if they did, I would have done it.
You know, these are sick people.
So, I could see something like that.
I didn't know they did that,
but I could see something like that.
Were you aware of any credible
threat by Iran against Air Force One?
I have a threat all the time.
I'm number one on their list before you.
But if I go, you go, right?
In the past, there have been
several operations with presidents
where there has been some deception,
or non-transparency.
President Clinton had an issue
in Pakistan a number of years ago.
One jet landed at the Air Force base here,
and it appeared it carried the president,
but it turned out it was a decoy.
Mr. Clinton landed moments later
on an unmarked military jet.
-This is wild.
-This is totally wild, man.
President Bush had a situation
where he went to a military theater
on Thanksgiving Day.
I happened to be,
about to have dinner, and my wife said,
"Hey, the president's in Iraq
having Thanksgiving dinner."
I didn't even know.
The agents at
the president's ranch didn't know.
He was surreptitiously taken out
to keep that story hush-hush.
Does this level of deception
or non-transparency happen every day,
that level of it? No.
But a decision was made
to meet the need of the situation
on the ground at the moment.
Now, there are people
that are gonna be asking questions.
That's up to the press now
to go do their job
and ask those hard questions.
I covered national security
for The Washington Post,
covered the military in particular
for almost 18 years.
Access has dwindled
really throughout the entire 18 years,
but dramatically through
this second Trump administration.
They are trying to control message,
so it makes covering
the day-to-day news more challenging.
On the other hand,
a lot of times you can break through
with a story, you know,
even if it's days or weeks old,
nobody knows about it.
So, in July, we got this initial tip.
And I'm going to be vague deliberately
to protect sourcing there.
But the initial tip was that basically
the reporting for days had been wrong.
There have been so many questions
about why the president is not flying home
on his new Air Force One.
He's departing on the previous
Air Force One, the old one.
You know, and basically what
the White House was saying
He wanted to show
the new aircraft to U.S. troops.
And also, what the media was saying.
All of this reporting around
why they took the older plane,
only for it to be neither plane.
And it was the third plane
that made the story very unusual.
Tip comes in that, in Turkey,
the president got onto
the old Air Force One,
and then very quickly and secretly
gets off the plane on the opposite side
and into this airport catering truck
without anybody knowing,
despite numerous television cameras,
numerous reporters.
So, for this tip to be true,
there's a whole lot of people
that had to have missed it in the moment.
It was not a trip I was on,
but there's publicly available video
from the flight line in Turkey.
So, we see video of the president
walking up the steps in Turkey
onto the old Air Force One.
And when you look at the video
through the lens of,
"Hey, let's keep an eye
on that catering truck,"
you can see the catering truck
on the far side of the old Air Force One
plain as day.
You can see the press corps arriving,
walking up to the tail of the plane,
and in the moment,
they also had been asked
to pull down the window shades
on the plane.
No real, solid explanation why.
The blinds, I forgot the blinds.
The shades down on the plane.
So, the shades.
It turns out, almost certainly,
that this was to hide the catering van.
'Cause the catering van
was on the same side
that we were told to close.
And then as the press starts
to make moves to get on the plane,
you see the catering truck pull away.
Holy shit. Those catering trucks.
Holy shit. All those little things add up.
When the catering truck pulled away
from Air Force One on video,
our reporting holds
that he was inside the truck
with a handful of loyal aides.
You can see the catering truck move
to the smaller plane behind the plane.
And that turned out to be the third plane?
And that was the third plane.
It was a C-32,
which was also part of this initial tip.
The C-32 looks relatively nondescript.
It is a smaller plane,
significantly smaller.
It's also blue and white.
It's also got "United States of America"
down the side.
The understanding was that
the defense secretary,
Pete Hegseth,
it was his plane, if you will.
He got on the plane publicly,
took the external stairs,
so you can kind of see him
get on the plane.
With the president getting on,
you know, kind of secretly,
through this other door,
under cover of this truck.
And it's like, okay,
well, your sourcing here.
It appears they know
what they're talking about.
This all holds up,
and we had tracker data
for multiple planes.
The tracker data shows that
the old legacy Air Force One
popped up with the Air Force One call sign
over Istanbul.
And then the other plane didn't appear.
The C-32 with the president aboard
did not appear on tracker data
the way all the other planes did that day.
So, then you're asking,
"Why didn't they turn transponders on?"
It's a deception operation is what
the Pentagon would call it.
And there was actual video
of the plane landing in Britain
because there were plane spotters
on the ground
who had posted all the video on YouTube.
The one that kind of stuck out
was the one that didn't appear
on the tracking data.
But you could see it land in sequence
with the same other planes that took off.
C-32? Well that doesn't make sense
They noted it in the moment.
There were social media posts
in the moment saying,
"Hey, this is unusual."
It landed nine minutes apart
with the one labeled Air Force One.
At that point, it's like, it all tracks.
It all made sense.
And then, you know,
you find the additional sourcing
that can verify it to standard,
multiple sources with,
you know, overlapping details.
And it's like, yeah, we got this.
This is true.
Breaking news. The Washington Post
just crossing some new reporting.
President Trump's secret plane swap.
Well, it's certainly in the running
for scoop of the year.
How many people do you think
were aware of this ruse?
I had my feet up and a beer in my hand.
And I was like, "Oh, no. Here we go."
And I knew that
this was gonna be a big deal.
This is an astonishing story
of secrecy and deception.
He let the press fly as a decoy.
Were they just sitting ducks
for this potential threat?
We were used as decoys.
Wild. Just wild.
What first struck me when I read
The Washington Post story was that
I saw him get off the plane
he wasn't supposed to be on.
That's one variable
that we have not solved for,
despite being able to confirm
the rest of the story.
Somehow, he snuck back onto that plane
just to get off in front of us,
which was pretty advanced choreography.
One thing that caught my attention
in the moment
is the president spoke to the media
and his comment that, "If I go, you go."
But if I go, you go.
Basically, the idea that he's presenting
as the truth, that, like,
they're all together,
and if something happens to him,
something happens to the rest of 'em.
And we know now
that simply isn't the case.
-Thank you. Thank you very much, everyone.
-Thank you, Mr. President.
Part of the story
is they had legitimate fears
for the president's life.
There was no dispute over that from us.
It was more,
you took these very unusual steps.
You hid them.
Please explain why.
They denied nothing.
They responded initially
with a "no comment".
And then the President,
a full day later, addressed it briefly.
President, can you tell us about your ride
on the airport catering truck in Turkey?
Why did you need to do that?
It's totally up to the Secret Service.
I just follow what they'd like to do.
What was the nature of the threat?
There was a threat out there.
I didn't really ask too much about it.
I get a lot of threats.
We didn't have it in the initial story,
but we did have it a day or so later.
Who was on the catering truck?
Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent,
they remained on the legacy Air Force One.
No cabinet officials, no general officers,
but instead, Natalie Harp
and a handful of kind of nondescript aides
that the American public
probably wouldn't really know.
The president did take
his secretary of defense.
Did Secret Service decide
who would accompany the president?
Democrats want answers.
What precautions were taken
to keep the staff
and reporters on that plane safe?
I'm all for getting out of the way
if something's about to pop up.
This Washington Post scoop is crazy.
It's been surreal watching
the aftermath with memes,
late night television.
Just to clarify, he was not
in a actual airport cart, right?
Like, what you would have
the drinks inside,
small, but actually in the truck itself.
Everybody's going crazy over this.
Yeah, you know, and I don't know why.
Nobody cares if a plane full of press
falls out of the sky.
They're just fools.
They don't know how it works.
They don't care how it works.
All they wanna do
is bash Trump all day, every day.
Now, I understand that they feel duped,
but this idea that the Secret Service
was there to protect them,
I think they need to get over themselves.
Come on up. Come on up. It's okay.
That's the White House. Can you see it?
The White House is where the crane is.
That's where the White House is.
What are they building?
He's making a helipad
to land the helicopter.
Hang on. Hang on. I can see him.
He's gonna walk out.
-Who?
-The president.
He's gonna walk out right now.
Yep.
So, see the guy standing right there?
That's the president.
That's the president.
I've done lots of difficult things,
pretty dangerous things
in pursuit of my job
and in pursuit of a really good picture.
Be it embedding with troops
in Afghanistan,
be it wing walking, be it Mount Everest.
But my belief is that
it's nice to know that going in.
That you can say,
sure, I'm willing to take that risk
to show the world what's going on there.
As journalists,
we're used to taking risks.
There's a lot of colleagues that put
their lives on the line for stories.
Had they told me
that this plane was a decoy,
I wouldn't have changed it at all.
One reason that this is more significant
than it even might seem is because
if you're a journalist in D.C.,
it's sort of the latest step
of many aimed at limiting transparency
and information.
So, I think that's one reason
why it ended up hitting a nerve.
You know, if we're not being told
the truth about this,
what else are we not being told
the truth about?
The Secret Service is not in
the public relations business
of making everybody feel good.
The Secret Service's job
was to get the president home
that night from that visit.
And quite frankly,
the bottom line here was
that everybody on those other two planes
got home that night safely too.
So, from a Secret Service standpoint,
that was a very successful day.
Clearly, there are still threats.
Clearly, Iran can still be perceived
as a threat,
or you wouldn't take these steps.
It, I think, has become a bit of a symbol
about the degree to which
this war has gotten to a place
that the White House has not wanted
or did not anticipate.
Being in a catering van
due to threats from Iran
does not project power,
does not project control.
And, you know, they know that.
We don't yet have a full understanding
for what exactly the threat was.
How exactly
that intelligence manifested.
What were the other options on the table
in terms of disclosing or not?
Those are all things that we don't have
a picture at this time.
There's gonna be a lot of unknowns,
and I don't think we're ever
gonna know everything.
I think the rest of it are questions
for the White House to answer.
Turkey tonight for the annual NATO summit.
President Trump will board
the new Qatar-supplied Air Force One,
an unconditional 400-million-dollar gift
from a foreign government.
Mr. Trump unveiled the new jet last month,
calling it, "The world's
most luxurious plane."
My job is to document
the president for the world.
Those pictures
are sent immediately,
because, God forbid
something happens to the president,
that's gonna be the last imagery
that the world sees of him.
The press pool is a group of journalists,
a dozen or 13 people
that follow the president around,
will be on Air Force One.
You're absolutely the eyes and ears
of the public as the press pool.
But in my more than 40-year career,
I've never been put
in the position of being a decoy.
Wild. Just wild.
We are learning of an elaborate ruse
to protect President Trump
from an assassination threat.
This is an extraordinary,
extraordinary story.
He got onto the plane and vanishes.
This is a real shell game of sorts,
moving from place-to-place
without anybody knowing.
You have to think like the bad guy
to do a good job in the Secret Service.
They will do anything
for the safety of the president.
You gotta hear this. This is totally nuts.
Huh?
This is a story that sounds like
it's just completely out of a movie.
They all sound like Hollywood.
This sounds like something
out of a James Bond film.
Were you worried about
a shoulder-fired missile?
I don't worry about anything,
to be honest.
Whatever it is.
You know my attitude? Whatever.
.
The NATO summit
is one of these sort of set pieces.
We know this is going to happen.
The U.S. president has always gone.
We land and immediately go to work.
We're not going to the hotel
to take a nappy poo.
We're working.
He's got a meeting with Zelensky.
He's got a bilateral meeting
with the head of NATO.
And I'm not happy with NATO,
because of the fact
that they didn't wanna help us
with the number one
state sponsor of terror. That's Iran.
There was some saber rattling
between the U.S. and Iran.
And of course, they're dirty players,
so, they go after everyone,
probably including me.
I've been number one
on their list for years.
And they're a bunch of scum.
You wanna know the truth? They're scum.
The underlying issue
in all of this is the Iran war.
For the second straight day,
the U.S. and Iran
traded overnight strikes,
raising concerns about
the possibility of a return
to a full-scale military conflict.
This is a serious escalation.
It's fair to say that
the Iran war has not progressed
as the White House would have liked.
Iran is in a position
to make the president
take very, very extraordinary
security measures
when we're almost six months
into this war.
That's an issue
for the White House. They don't like it.
Turkey being relatively close to Iran,
where we're having difficulties
with that country now,
certainly heightens the situation.
So it's all about preparation.
And we're probably the only agency
that plans and plans and plans and plans
and hopes we never
have to do what we plan to do.
The president's vehicles
get flown to that location.
Secret Service support staff
get flown to that location.
We're gonna know
where our safe spaces are,
what's our route back to the limousine.
If a fire alarm goes off,
what are we gonna do?
If somebody comes
through the door with a weapon,
what are we gonna do?
The Secret Service's primary mission
is for the person it's protecting,
or persons it's protecting
on a particular visit.
We're there to protect our president.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the 45th and 47th president
of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
President Trump,
towards the end of the NATO conference,
says on Truth Social
that he's not going to be flying back
on the Qatari Air Force One.
He's going to be flying back
on the old Air Force One.
Go ahead. Go ahead.
But why aren't you flying
the new plane home?
Say what?
Why aren't you flying
on the new Air Force One home?
It's flying to Europe,
to one of the big bases,
two or three of the big bases,
where we can show it to the people.
At the time,
the main hypothesis was simply
that the White House
had changed the planes
for security issues
because they didn't want to admit
that the new plane
was not up to snuff security-wise.
I mean, the circling helicopter now,
I'm just interested, like, why?
My husband thinks
I'm the weirdest person in the world.
We'll be at a picnic, and I'm like,
"I need to find out
if that's a decoy or the real thing."
The president himself put himself
in greater jeopardy
by insisting on flying
this Qatari gift plane.
As Secret Service sources told me,
the president was incredibly embarrassed
that his Qatari gift jet,
which he'd been bragging about,
was not as safe
as the old and less plush Air Force One.
The old Air Force One
has much more serious abilities
to avoid any kind of missile.
Its ability to defend itself
from that kind of attack is unmatched.
But no president is a bigger target
for assassination than Donald Trump.
Get down, get down, get down, get down.
Shots have apparently been fired.
Donald Trump has been injured.
Investigation underway
after the second assassination attempt
on former president
Gunshots were fired
at the White House Correspondent's Dinner.
We are getting reports now
that several shots were fired
near the White House.
where a man tried to
assassinate him while he played golf.
And Iran has been trying openly
to kill Donald Trump since January, 2020.
Overnight, we learned that
President Trump ordered the drone strike
that killed Iranian general
Qasem Soleimani,
one of the most powerful men
in the region.
Iranians today poured
into the streets of Tehran to honor
their Ayatollah
and Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei,
assassinated by the U.S.
at the start of the war.
Iran has been very clear.
They want to avenge that
by killing Donald Trump.
Not only was he now authorizing
new strikes on Iran during this trip,
but Israel's intelligence agency
is passing along
this really scary information,
suggesting that there's an active plot
to try to hit Air Force One
and bring it down,
or damage it in some way.
It is a perfect storm
for something going horribly wrong.
And the Secret Service,
I'm told by sources, was struggling.
"How do we get this guy home safely?"
As we get on the tarmac,
and move round,
and I look at Air Force One,
I see those catering vehicles
up against the side of Air Force One.
There's one at the front
and one at the back.
And I have never seen that before.
Forty years doing presidents,
never seen that before.
I shot it. I shot the shit out of it.
We get out.
I may be the first
or second person out of the bus.
And the president's already up the stairs.
Trump enters the plane,
we rush in, we sit down.
We get on the plane.
Don't really think anything more of it.
The second unusual thing happens.
We're told by the White House staff
that we should lower our window shades.
I'm like, "Why?"
They said, "Secret Service says to."
I'm like, "Okay."
Close it.
My little spidey sense is up now.
I don't know why this is happening.
And I'm on high alert.
I remember working
in this galley when I first got started.
You'd be amazed
what we could do in these little galleys.
The dishes still look the same.
I served in the United States Air Force
for 28 years
And 20 of those years,
I was an Air Force One flight attendant.
I started flying with President Bush,
"Daddy Bush," we call him, 41.
Then I flew with President Clinton
and President Bush, 43.
I ended with President Obama.
Everyone has a seating card.
You put their name on the seating card
and a menu card, so they know the meals,
and of course,
the fruit bowls and candy dishes.
The flight attendants,
a lot of people don't believe this,
but we go grocery shopping.
We will shop in civilian attire,
so we won't get the attention
that we're here
to shop for the president.
We buy all the groceries
because of our background clearance.
That's part of our safety checklist
to make sure that we handled it.
I didn't receive it from somebody else.
I brought it on board,
so that's a big part of it.
So, it's secure to the max,
you know, maximum security.
Prior to departure,
the flight attendants
will upload the plane.
We have refrigerators
and freezers in the belly.
Well, we could go self-contained
for about 14 days with food.
So there would be no
reason for a catering cart
or anything like that to be near
Air Force One.
Exactly. No catering, no trucks
of any sort should be coming
towards the airplane
as far as delivering food
'cause we should have enough, like I said,
to take us throughout the whole trip.
A total of 24 years.
I would say maybe,
a handful of times during a debrief,
I was told that we had
some type of threat against us.
Could have been something
about the president,
or it could have been about the crew,
or just take the whole plane down.
But that was told after the fact,
and I'm glad.
I didn't know that while I was in the air
that we had an attack on us.
Most of that,
those things are classified.
So, we arrive
at Mildenhall Air Force Base.
It's the evening.
At this point, it's dark.
And the other Air Force One,
the Qatari Air Force One
that we had used to fly
from D.C. to Turkey
was parked several hundred yards
in front of us.
We are taken off the plane,
and we see Trump walk down
from the old Air Force One.
We photograph him coming down the steps.
And he walks between the two aircraft.
It had this kind of cinematic quality.
And that is
that's totally Trump, you know?
He really does think about,
"How is this gonna play?"
"How do I look," you know?
Mr. President, will you
come over and take some questions?
And he stops by the Qatari jet,
and says a few words.
You know, got pictures of him
stopped by the Qatari jet.
He goes up the steps,
then we get back
on the Qatari jet and off we go.
Shortly thereafter,
President Trump does come to the cabin.
It's a long walk to you.
Hi, Mr. President.
It's about three times the walk
we used to take,
but I hope you like it. So
And then we immediately start
spraying him with questions.
What was the security concern
that caused us to change planes?
We just wanted to confirm
that they switched the planes,
because of a security threat.
Do you think
there wasn't a security concern?
No, no. Why would there be?
At that point, he was denying everything,
denying everything.
Do you know why
they had us close our window blinds?
-That was--
-No.
Well, yeah, because you're
you know, probably on a dangerous flight,
because of the sleazebags
that we have to deal with.
Do you think that
Iran was possibly thinking
Well, I mean,
if they asked you to close your windows,
probably they'd feel that way.
They didn't ask me to close mine,
but if they did, I would have done it.
You know, these are sick people.
So, I could see something like that.
I didn't know they did that,
but I could see something like that.
Were you aware of any credible
threat by Iran against Air Force One?
I have a threat all the time.
I'm number one on their list before you.
But if I go, you go, right?
In the past, there have been
several operations with presidents
where there has been some deception,
or non-transparency.
President Clinton had an issue
in Pakistan a number of years ago.
One jet landed at the Air Force base here,
and it appeared it carried the president,
but it turned out it was a decoy.
Mr. Clinton landed moments later
on an unmarked military jet.
-This is wild.
-This is totally wild, man.
President Bush had a situation
where he went to a military theater
on Thanksgiving Day.
I happened to be,
about to have dinner, and my wife said,
"Hey, the president's in Iraq
having Thanksgiving dinner."
I didn't even know.
The agents at
the president's ranch didn't know.
He was surreptitiously taken out
to keep that story hush-hush.
Does this level of deception
or non-transparency happen every day,
that level of it? No.
But a decision was made
to meet the need of the situation
on the ground at the moment.
Now, there are people
that are gonna be asking questions.
That's up to the press now
to go do their job
and ask those hard questions.
I covered national security
for The Washington Post,
covered the military in particular
for almost 18 years.
Access has dwindled
really throughout the entire 18 years,
but dramatically through
this second Trump administration.
They are trying to control message,
so it makes covering
the day-to-day news more challenging.
On the other hand,
a lot of times you can break through
with a story, you know,
even if it's days or weeks old,
nobody knows about it.
So, in July, we got this initial tip.
And I'm going to be vague deliberately
to protect sourcing there.
But the initial tip was that basically
the reporting for days had been wrong.
There have been so many questions
about why the president is not flying home
on his new Air Force One.
He's departing on the previous
Air Force One, the old one.
You know, and basically what
the White House was saying
He wanted to show
the new aircraft to U.S. troops.
And also, what the media was saying.
All of this reporting around
why they took the older plane,
only for it to be neither plane.
And it was the third plane
that made the story very unusual.
Tip comes in that, in Turkey,
the president got onto
the old Air Force One,
and then very quickly and secretly
gets off the plane on the opposite side
and into this airport catering truck
without anybody knowing,
despite numerous television cameras,
numerous reporters.
So, for this tip to be true,
there's a whole lot of people
that had to have missed it in the moment.
It was not a trip I was on,
but there's publicly available video
from the flight line in Turkey.
So, we see video of the president
walking up the steps in Turkey
onto the old Air Force One.
And when you look at the video
through the lens of,
"Hey, let's keep an eye
on that catering truck,"
you can see the catering truck
on the far side of the old Air Force One
plain as day.
You can see the press corps arriving,
walking up to the tail of the plane,
and in the moment,
they also had been asked
to pull down the window shades
on the plane.
No real, solid explanation why.
The blinds, I forgot the blinds.
The shades down on the plane.
So, the shades.
It turns out, almost certainly,
that this was to hide the catering van.
'Cause the catering van
was on the same side
that we were told to close.
And then as the press starts
to make moves to get on the plane,
you see the catering truck pull away.
Holy shit. Those catering trucks.
Holy shit. All those little things add up.
When the catering truck pulled away
from Air Force One on video,
our reporting holds
that he was inside the truck
with a handful of loyal aides.
You can see the catering truck move
to the smaller plane behind the plane.
And that turned out to be the third plane?
And that was the third plane.
It was a C-32,
which was also part of this initial tip.
The C-32 looks relatively nondescript.
It is a smaller plane,
significantly smaller.
It's also blue and white.
It's also got "United States of America"
down the side.
The understanding was that
the defense secretary,
Pete Hegseth,
it was his plane, if you will.
He got on the plane publicly,
took the external stairs,
so you can kind of see him
get on the plane.
With the president getting on,
you know, kind of secretly,
through this other door,
under cover of this truck.
And it's like, okay,
well, your sourcing here.
It appears they know
what they're talking about.
This all holds up,
and we had tracker data
for multiple planes.
The tracker data shows that
the old legacy Air Force One
popped up with the Air Force One call sign
over Istanbul.
And then the other plane didn't appear.
The C-32 with the president aboard
did not appear on tracker data
the way all the other planes did that day.
So, then you're asking,
"Why didn't they turn transponders on?"
It's a deception operation is what
the Pentagon would call it.
And there was actual video
of the plane landing in Britain
because there were plane spotters
on the ground
who had posted all the video on YouTube.
The one that kind of stuck out
was the one that didn't appear
on the tracking data.
But you could see it land in sequence
with the same other planes that took off.
C-32? Well that doesn't make sense
They noted it in the moment.
There were social media posts
in the moment saying,
"Hey, this is unusual."
It landed nine minutes apart
with the one labeled Air Force One.
At that point, it's like, it all tracks.
It all made sense.
And then, you know,
you find the additional sourcing
that can verify it to standard,
multiple sources with,
you know, overlapping details.
And it's like, yeah, we got this.
This is true.
Breaking news. The Washington Post
just crossing some new reporting.
President Trump's secret plane swap.
Well, it's certainly in the running
for scoop of the year.
How many people do you think
were aware of this ruse?
I had my feet up and a beer in my hand.
And I was like, "Oh, no. Here we go."
And I knew that
this was gonna be a big deal.
This is an astonishing story
of secrecy and deception.
He let the press fly as a decoy.
Were they just sitting ducks
for this potential threat?
We were used as decoys.
Wild. Just wild.
What first struck me when I read
The Washington Post story was that
I saw him get off the plane
he wasn't supposed to be on.
That's one variable
that we have not solved for,
despite being able to confirm
the rest of the story.
Somehow, he snuck back onto that plane
just to get off in front of us,
which was pretty advanced choreography.
One thing that caught my attention
in the moment
is the president spoke to the media
and his comment that, "If I go, you go."
But if I go, you go.
Basically, the idea that he's presenting
as the truth, that, like,
they're all together,
and if something happens to him,
something happens to the rest of 'em.
And we know now
that simply isn't the case.
-Thank you. Thank you very much, everyone.
-Thank you, Mr. President.
Part of the story
is they had legitimate fears
for the president's life.
There was no dispute over that from us.
It was more,
you took these very unusual steps.
You hid them.
Please explain why.
They denied nothing.
They responded initially
with a "no comment".
And then the President,
a full day later, addressed it briefly.
President, can you tell us about your ride
on the airport catering truck in Turkey?
Why did you need to do that?
It's totally up to the Secret Service.
I just follow what they'd like to do.
What was the nature of the threat?
There was a threat out there.
I didn't really ask too much about it.
I get a lot of threats.
We didn't have it in the initial story,
but we did have it a day or so later.
Who was on the catering truck?
Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent,
they remained on the legacy Air Force One.
No cabinet officials, no general officers,
but instead, Natalie Harp
and a handful of kind of nondescript aides
that the American public
probably wouldn't really know.
The president did take
his secretary of defense.
Did Secret Service decide
who would accompany the president?
Democrats want answers.
What precautions were taken
to keep the staff
and reporters on that plane safe?
I'm all for getting out of the way
if something's about to pop up.
This Washington Post scoop is crazy.
It's been surreal watching
the aftermath with memes,
late night television.
Just to clarify, he was not
in a actual airport cart, right?
Like, what you would have
the drinks inside,
small, but actually in the truck itself.
Everybody's going crazy over this.
Yeah, you know, and I don't know why.
Nobody cares if a plane full of press
falls out of the sky.
They're just fools.
They don't know how it works.
They don't care how it works.
All they wanna do
is bash Trump all day, every day.
Now, I understand that they feel duped,
but this idea that the Secret Service
was there to protect them,
I think they need to get over themselves.
Come on up. Come on up. It's okay.
That's the White House. Can you see it?
The White House is where the crane is.
That's where the White House is.
What are they building?
He's making a helipad
to land the helicopter.
Hang on. Hang on. I can see him.
He's gonna walk out.
-Who?
-The president.
He's gonna walk out right now.
Yep.
So, see the guy standing right there?
That's the president.
That's the president.
I've done lots of difficult things,
pretty dangerous things
in pursuit of my job
and in pursuit of a really good picture.
Be it embedding with troops
in Afghanistan,
be it wing walking, be it Mount Everest.
But my belief is that
it's nice to know that going in.
That you can say,
sure, I'm willing to take that risk
to show the world what's going on there.
As journalists,
we're used to taking risks.
There's a lot of colleagues that put
their lives on the line for stories.
Had they told me
that this plane was a decoy,
I wouldn't have changed it at all.
One reason that this is more significant
than it even might seem is because
if you're a journalist in D.C.,
it's sort of the latest step
of many aimed at limiting transparency
and information.
So, I think that's one reason
why it ended up hitting a nerve.
You know, if we're not being told
the truth about this,
what else are we not being told
the truth about?
The Secret Service is not in
the public relations business
of making everybody feel good.
The Secret Service's job
was to get the president home
that night from that visit.
And quite frankly,
the bottom line here was
that everybody on those other two planes
got home that night safely too.
So, from a Secret Service standpoint,
that was a very successful day.
Clearly, there are still threats.
Clearly, Iran can still be perceived
as a threat,
or you wouldn't take these steps.
It, I think, has become a bit of a symbol
about the degree to which
this war has gotten to a place
that the White House has not wanted
or did not anticipate.
Being in a catering van
due to threats from Iran
does not project power,
does not project control.
And, you know, they know that.
We don't yet have a full understanding
for what exactly the threat was.
How exactly
that intelligence manifested.
What were the other options on the table
in terms of disclosing or not?
Those are all things that we don't have
a picture at this time.
There's gonna be a lot of unknowns,
and I don't think we're ever
gonna know everything.
I think the rest of it are questions
for the White House to answer.