Trump’s Air Force One Deception: Necessary Security or Dangerous Decoy?

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**Michael Smerconish** (1:02)
Welcome to The Smerconish Podcast for Independent Minds.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:06)
Annie Jacobson was my guest a couple of days ago here talking about her bestseller called Biological War, a Scenario, a follow up to another bestseller of hers which was called Nuclear War, a Scenario. And I really enjoyed, I mean, the subject matter is dismal, but I've learned so much from reading her work because she blends together fact and a scenario that yes is fictitious but could happen. And so in the new book Biological War within the span of six days of a lab leak which takes place in Siberia, there is chaos in the United States. And when there's chaos in the United States, it ends with a process called devolution, which I'd never heard of, but that's the bare bones of government maintaining some level of function by hiding the president of the United States. And in the book there was just a tiny nugget, but it jumped out at me so much that, you know, in questioning her about her 400-page book, this one short graph caught my eye and I made sure to ask her about it. It said this, moving the president to a classified devolution site means hiding him in plain site. But the best way to ensure no one but a small group knows where this plain site location is, is to put him in the motorcade and then into a cargo plane and move him into a different state. Keywords now. This is similar to how on the morning of 9-11, President George W. Bush spent some time riding in the back of a laundry truck. An anecdote shared with us by CIA spy pilot, Colonel Ken Collins, the veracity of which remains unknown.
And when Annie was on the program, I said to her, hey, by the way, you know, did that really happen? Was W in a laundry truck as they were seeking to hide him? She said, I don't know. I only know and I identified the source from which I got that information. But I just found that very intriguing. And obviously, I find very intriguing that the President of the United States, when he was exiting from Turkey, was moved in a catering cargo hold into a different aircraft, leaving staff and the press to fly on what was then Air Force One. Air Force One is whatever the President is flying on, except in this case. And it was the old Air Force One, not the Qatari Air Force One, because there was an Iranian threat at the time. It is an unbelievable story. It is also the subject of the poll question today. I knew that I wanted to ask something about it, and I thought, OK, well, where wherein lies any dispute in our thought process? The Washington Post has the story today. The short version is that they reported last night that President Trump did not leave last month's NATO summit in Turkey aboard Air Force One despite the White House saying that he did. According to the Post, a credible Iranian assassination threat set what one US official called a deception operation in motion. On July 8, Trump boarded the legacy blue and white Air Force One in Ankara in full view of television cameras waving as he climbed the stairs. Minutes later, he and several aides stepped into an airport catering truck, the kind used to load meals, which was lowered, driven across the tarmac, and raised again at an Air Force C-32A. That's a modified Boeing 757 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth boarded the plane separately by the stairs to make it look routine. Trump then flew to Britain on the C-32A under the nondescript call sign REACH 18 with tracking systems switched off. The legacy Air Force One carrying White House staff and members of the press who believed the president was with them took the Air Force One call sign mid-flight, landed in Britain roughly nine minutes later. Staff had instructed journalists to close their window shades before takeoff.