How The New York Times Reported on Trump’s Air Force One Ruse in Turkey

Last month, President Trump climbed the stairs of Air Force One in Turkey, then turned and waved to journalists before boarding. When the plane landed in Britain hours later, he marched off.

But, as news organizations and the public learned this week, it was a deception. Mr. Trump had been secretly whisked off the plane, into a catering container and put on a military jet. According to two senior U.S. officials, a threat against the president and Air Force One from Iran prompted the subterfuge.

Moving a president for security reasons is not unusual. But hiding the matter after the fact, including from reporters who cover Mr. Trump and those who were unwitting p***engers on the “decoy” plane, raised questions about the public’s right to know the president’s whereabouts and how the administration handled this episode.

We discussed those questions this week with Doug Mills, a Times photographer who was on Air Force One that day, as well as Richard W. Stevenson, The Times’s Washington bureau chief, and Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent. We also dug into how The Times reported on the ruse and pressed the White House on it. These excerpts have been edited and condensed.

What was your initial reaction this week when you learned that President Trump had been secretly transported off — then back on — the old Air Force One plane that day?

RICHARD W. STEVENSON: We had our own reporting going on this, so when The Washington Post published its scoop, a small group of our journalists was able to move quickly to match the story and add to it. But even though it was not a total surprise, it was still stunning to think about. There were some deadly serious issues, including the nature of the threat that led the White House and the Secret Service to engage in this deception, and of course the question of why and how a plane full of mostly unwitting staff members and journalists were used as decoys.

DOUG MILLS: My initial reaction was shock, and then it was disbelief. How did they do this? Why did they do this? How did I not know that this was something that was going on? Clearly they did a great job of disguising it. But there were red flags that, frankly, maybe I missed and I think a lot of other people missed.

What were some of those red flags?

DOUG: First off, leaving Turkey, we were told to put our window shades down. The last time that happened to me was when I traveled with President Obama to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

Once we loaded back up on the Qatari-donated Air Force One in Britain, reporters asked President Trump, Why do you think they made us put the shades down? He was kind of surprised by that question. And then he said, Well, they didn’t ask me to do that. In hindsight, it was because he wasn’t on our plane.

I wish he had just told us on the plane ride to the United States when he came back to brief reporters. I’m disappointed that he didn’t say, Hey guys, there were some serious threats back there. I need to tell you about an operation that took place before it gets out.

PETER BAKER: It was pretty stunning to learn — not just that it happened but that it stayed secret for a full month afterward, even as everyone was reporting pretty aggressively on the swap-out for the Qatari-donated plane. It can be hard to report out secrets, especially in the national security realm, and the White House has tried to make it harder, even trying to subpoena our colleagues for their sources on the earlier plane stories. But this reminds us that there’s sometimes more to the story and we have to keep digging.

What next steps did you take in reporting out the news and trying to get to the bottom of what had happened? What questions were on your mind?

DICK: We focused the reporting on a few key questions: What was the threat to President Trump and how credible was it? How, in detail, did they pull off this deception on an airport tarmac? What did it say about this White House and this president that a plane full of staff members and journalists were in effect used as decoys? And why was it that the White House chose to keep the whole episode secret long after the president was safe?

PETER: I found it astounding that they still sent Air Force One into the skies with the secretary of state, the treasury secretary and top White House staffers. Not to mention the pool of journalists who normally travel with the president. They were effectively made into decoys, or even potential targets. Questions that came quickly to mind included:

1) Who was left on the decoy plane (what some of my colleagues irreverently dubbed the “martyr plane” — oy!)?

2) Were they aware that the president wasn’t on board and that they were on a plane that had been targeted?

3) Did the government do anything extra to protect the decoy plane?

4) Why didn’t they simply ground Air Force One, at least until the president secretly left the danger zone, and then either announce that he was now gone, so that the original plane would no longer be seen as a target, or have the people on board travel home by other means?

We got some answers to No. 1 (Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, Steven Cheung, Stephen Miller), No. 2 (Rubio was said to know) but not to No. 3 or 4.

The public (and the media, including us) were actively misled by this ruse. How much of a right do journalists and the public have to know about a president’s whereabouts, even when there is a security issue? How have we handled similar situations in the past?

DOUG: I think the public has every right to know where the president is.

Now, the trust of what he’s saying and what the staff is telling us in the press pool is always going to be questioned. It is one of those things that will take time to heal. Even when we went to Ohio the other day, one of my questions to one of the staff members was, Is he flying with us today, or is he flying on another plane? We have to ask those questions because there has been a lack of transparency.

DICK: It’s important to separate out some distinct elements. There are legitimate security issues around the travels of any president. We take those seriously, and as Peter and Doug know, we are generally willing to work with any White House in dealing with them. Then there is the safety of the people traveling with the president. We obviously feel strongly about this. A third is ensuring that there are agreed-upon protocols in place to ***ure that the journalists who make up the press pool traveling with the president know where he is and to a reasonable degree have access to what he is doing.

So how do you address all those factors?

DICK: There has to be a balance between security and transparency. You can argue about precisely what that balance should be at any given moment, but clearly in this case, transparency was thrown entirely out the window, replaced by outright deception. That’s a terrible precedent. And the fact that it left journalists and staff members unknowingly exposed to a potential threat made it much, much worse.

PETER: As Dick says, we are very sensitive to not jeopardizing a president’s safety and have worked with administrations of both parties under tough cir***stances to take reasonable measures to not disclose information in real time that would put a president at risk.

There was always a trust between the White House and reporters when it came to the president’s whereabouts in extreme cir***stances. But we consider it supremely important to have journalists with a president anytime he is outside the fortified confines of the White House or Camp David.

Why?

PETER: Two reasons in particular: The J.F.K. scenario. Reporters were with John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 and could report on his ******ination immediately to a nation that needed reliable, independent information. And the 9/11 scenario. Journalists — including Doug — were with George W. Bush on the day of the terrorist attacks when a president’s crisis decision-making and communications were profoundly important.

Did we talk to the White House or other administration officials about the deception and possible dangers that those on the decoy plane faced?

DICK: The White House Correspondents’ Association has already raised these issues with administration officials, and we will be monitoring those discussions closely and weighing in where necessary.

I’ve been involved in covering presidents going back to the Clinton administration, and there has always been a foundation of trust between the press corps and the White House when it comes to matters of security. We have gone along in the past with requirements that we not disclose trips presidents are taking to war zones, for example. But in those cases, journalists traveled with the president and were free to report on the trips as soon as he and they were out of danger. In this case, no reporters were with the president or knew that he was on another plane, and the deception only became public because The Washington Post broke the news.

DOUG: I have talked to probably three or four staffers and asked them, What did you think? They’re all like, Well, we didn’t even know it was happening. There were staff on the plane who didn’t know. There were other staff on the plane who we have been told knew, and they were very coy about it.

PETER: The White House didn’t respond when I sent an email asking about the deception and the possible danger for those still on the decoy plane.

It was interesting talking with veterans of past White Houses. Some said it was outrageous that officials and reporters were made into “human shields,” as one put it. Others said that, Hey, if you travel with the president, you know there are certain risks, which is true enough. Doug has traveled with presidents since Ronald Reagan; Dick covered the White House for years; we had colleagues, including Doug, who were in Butler, Pa., when Trump was shot at. We are all aware that if something happens, journalists can get caught in the crossfire.

What about you?

PETER: I was in the pool with George W. Bush in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2005 when someone threw a grenade at him. We were all incredibly lucky it didn’t go off. What was different here was that Doug and his colleagues who were in the pool with Trump that day didn’t know that they were being flown with a specific target on them.

DOUG: We’re covering a president who’s had a number of ******ination attempts, including the one in Butler, where I was. This is what we signed up for. We are in a new world as far as threats to the president.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that this is not the easiest job; it’s not going to a war zone, but we are not completely protected. Riding on Air Force One, I would always tell my family: I’m on the safest plane in the world. And now I’m not. It’s obvious that I’m no longer on the safest plane in the world because the president has so many threats against him.

The Secret Service’s mission is to protect the president, not us. I’ve always known that. But I do feel like they should have come clean when we got back, or on the way back.

Our bond with readers is based on getting the facts right and publishing new and accurate information as we learn it. It’s also based on correcting things that we get wrong. How did you think about our original reporting in July that said Trump left Turkey on Air Force One? Was it wrong? Outdated? And once we had new information, what decisions did we make about next steps in addressing our July articles?

DICK: One of the first things we did was update our story from last month that reported that Trump had flown out of Turkey on the old Air Force One. We placed language on the top of the story, published on July 8, noting that new information had surfaced and that “Mr. Trump did not fly out of Ankara on the old Air Force One as he said he would do.” We also took another look at the reporting we had done last month about the concerns with the adequacy of the security on the new plane acquired from Qatar and added to the Air Force One fleet after a rush to modify it for Trump’s use.

We feel that the reporting on the risks ***ociated with the new plane holds up in light of what we learned about the deception, even though the plan for getting the president out of Turkey was way more complicated than we knew at the time.

Peter, as you wrote this week, the government has obfuscated over time to safeguard presidents from possible jeopardy. In those cases, what considerations do we make when excavating the truth and deciding to publish a story?

PETER: As Dick said, we’ve always been willing to work with the White House when it came to specific security concerns. We would never knowingly mislead our readers, but we might not report what we know until it’s safe for a president.

Say more about that — in what cir***stances?

PETER: For instance, when Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine in the middle of a war zone, it wasn’t safe to fly so he had to take a nine and a half-hour train to Kyiv. He brought only two journalists with him (a writer from The Wall Street Journal and a photographer from The Associated Press) to report back to the rest of us. That is a long time for a president to be incommunicado. We knew about it at the time, but kept it to ourselves until he was secure. But even in those instances, we expect that we’ll be able to publish once the immediate risk is over. The White House didn’t try to keep it from us in perpetuity.

DOUG: As Peter said, it happened when Biden went to Ukraine; it was a very covert operation. And on 9/11 when I was with Bush. They took the pool from 13 people down to five, and I was one of them. There’s a lot of trust that the White House instills in us.

We embargo photos; we only transmit them when the White House tells us we can transmit them, out of concern for the safety of the president. The pool does everything it can to abide by the rules that the White House states to keep the president safe. When we are in these covert or dangerous situations, photographers are thinking about nothing other than the president’s safety and that of the traveling party.

I have left on these secret trips before and have not told my editor. I’ve landed in Afghanistan with a president, and my editors didn’t even know I had left. I want to make sure I don’t break that trust. We have an allocated seat for a New York Times photographer on Air Force One. Meaghan Looram, our director of photography, is fully aware of that, so she knows that wherever the president goes, there’s a New York Times photographer with them.

As many administrations that I’ve done this with, whether it’s Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, Trump, whoever, there’s this trust, and you can’t break that trust. That was why I was disappointed that they just didn’t come out and say what had happened, after the fact.

What did we learn from this reporting and experience that may inform our work as this story continues to unfold?

DICK: The deception here was quite elaborate. Trump actually climbed the steps and got on the old Air Force One in Turkey, turned and waved, and went through the door. After the plane landed in England, Trump got off it. We had no reason to doubt that he had flown on it. And yet, he hadn’t. The whole escapade was a reminder to be humble about what we know and don’t know, to ask a lot of questions and not to make a lot of ***umptions. It’s probably good for any journalist to be reminded of those lessons now and then, and not just when it comes to presidential travel.

PETER: This has been a good reminder that as we travel with the president we should report only what we know and not take even basic things on faith. In the pool reports that journalists traveling with the president typically file, we sometimes write phrases like “your pooler did not actually see the president get onto the plane” or “get into the limousine” or what have you. We generally ***ume that he did, but are careful not to let ***umptions become reported facts. Now, as a result of this episode, we have to be even more aware that we may be being deceived.

Dick, will we be putting our journalists on Air Force One in the future? What, if any, new steps or precautions will we take?

DICK: Yes, I’m sure that we will continue to travel with the president, and in general to cover him with the same intensity we always have. No single incident, not even one of this nature, is going to deter us from that mission. All of us who have done that job know that there are risks. But as Doug said, we’re in a new world when it comes to threats against the president and those around him. And at least when it comes to this administration, we will need to work with other news organizations to insist on greater communication and transparency from the White House, recognizing that a bond of trust was broken here and needs to be repaired.

Doug, do you worry?

DOUG: I can’t use that line anymore, that I’m on the safest plane in the world. But do I think we should still be doing this? Absolutely. That is our role as journalists. We need to be there.