Trump's reported covert flight spotlights deceptive acts to protect POTUS: ANALYSIS

Trump's reported secret flight out of Ankara is not as surprising as many think.

President Donald Trump departed Ankara, Turkey, after a NATO summit last month on what he initially said was the legacy plane used as Air Force One rather than the new jet gifted to him by Qatar.

But according to the Washington Post , he wasn't on either plane but rather another aircraft, having been whisked away from the old Air Force One in a catering truck amid threats against him from Iran.

ABC News has not confirmed the details of the report and the lengths that were taken to protect the president.

Protection of the president has often required deft and deceptive tactics by the Secret Service. Those tactics have been employed for decades to maximize the "unknown" for the protection of the president, making it more difficult for an adversary to conduct an attack. The tactics used are as unconventional and daring as those in spy novels.

In World War II, deception was often used to move President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in and out of theaters of war. In 1943, when Roosevelt had to travel to Tehran for the "Big Three" conference, he was last seen boarding the presidential yacht, the USS Potomac, in Washington. However, the yacht was used to move him down to the mouth of the Potomac River, where he then transferred to the battleship USS Iowa for the transatlantic crossing.

In modern times, as threats have evolved, deception with moving the president has been an integral part of the Secret Service protective methodologies.

President George W. Bush in 2003 made a clandestine Thanksgiving Day movement to Iraq to visit the troops. Bush and his senior staff were flown from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, via Air Force One to Joint Base Andrews.

Once there, Bush transitioned to an Air Force VC-25A (the 747s that carry the president) for the trip to Baghdad. The plan was to file a flight plan that would mask the fact that the aircraft would be call-signed Air Force One (when the president is on board). In Baghdad, the only thing the U.S. military was told was of an impending arrival of a VIP.

President Barack Obama followed suit with a surprise visit to the troops in Afghanistan in 2010. On that trip, Obama was covertly smuggled out of Camp David through a nondescript motorcade and flown to Kabul with few individuals knowing that he had left the United States.

More recently, when President Joe Biden visited war-torn Ukraine in 2023, he flew to Poland with a schedule that had a few large gaps, during which he took a 10-hour clandestine train ride to Kyiv to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

While these visits are often conducted, to the chagrin of many, in secret, it is to keep the president -- the nation's commander in chief -- safe in any threat environment.

This is why the reported movement of Trump out of Turkey via a secret movement is not as surprising as many think. Deception and the use of unconventional tactics is one of the many intriguing ways the Secret Service continues to use to keep the president safe.

Donald J. Mihalek is an ABC News contributor, retired senior Secret Service agent and regional field training instructor who served on the president's detail and presidential transitions.

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