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- [00:00]
A
Hey, there. This is Michael Weiss and Mark Polymeropoulos taking over the bulwark takes again for the second time, and hopefully not the last. We were invited on today to discuss the old Air Force One bait and switch. Donald Trump snuck out of the old Air Force One, not the new Qatari jet that he was gifted by the royal family in Doha, but the old one. He was supposed to fly out of Ankara for the NATO summit last month. And it turns out he was smuggled out deceptively in front of the full view of the press, the traveling press corps, in a catering cargo container and then put on board a US Military aircraft, which then flew to Britain. And all of this was done, according to the Washington Post, which broke the story, to evade a possible Iranian assassination threat. And so I'm joined by my esteemed colleague and friend and sometimes source, Mark Balamiropoulos. Mark, this is. This is a bonkers story. And the first thing that crossed my mind was how the hell did Donald Trump keep his mouth shut about this for a month? It's wild. I mean, and also, I love the idea of Trump, of all people, having to travel in a shipping container.
- [01:12]
B
Food cart. Food's in the food cart.
- [01:14]
A
It's almost like ice. Should have been there to arrest him. What's he doing?
- [01:18]
B
Big Macs in Ankara? I know. I've actually eaten burger. I've eaten Burger King in Turkey. How do you like that? And Jabrakar Turkey, that's a different story. But. But, Michael, I love this story. I'm fired up today to do this. You know, when the Washington Post broke this, like, this is heaven for intel geeks, and present company included, both of us. I mean, this is intel porn. Are you kidding me? The James Bond deception from the Secret Service, that's wild stuff. I mean, having worked with them for many years, this is very unusual. There's kind of one celebrated case in the past, I think, I believe it was Bill Clinton's trip to Pakistan when they did something like this. But this is really unusual. But. So you have the James Bond shit from the Secret Service, then you throw what else on top of that? The threat itself. Like, what in the world spooked the Secret Service? Was it drones? I mean, what the Iranians? What were the capabilities? We don't know that. And you throw on top of that crazy legal issues in terms of duty to warn, as in, like, hey, let's sacrifice the entire White House staff and press corps for the safety of the President. There's so much to unpack here. A wild story. And I think my phone blew up this morning. So I'm excited to be on with you today.
- [02:27]
A
Yeah. And I mean, I'm trying to think back now. In the last month, we've had these serial threats of escalation in Iran. Donald Trump taking to truth Social in the middle of the night and talking about possibly bombing energy infrastructure and bridges and not quite at the level of civilizational erasure, which he did several months ago. He's going to wipe Iran or Persia off the map. But you've got to wonder what's going through his head now that he's not only being seriously inconvenienced, but having to essentially hide from his public, which he doesn't really like to do. Right. I mean, he's, he's, he's being smuggled out like, like there's an active shooter kind of situation on the tarmac in Ankara. And this is all because the Iranians have been gunning for him. And they've been gunning for him not so since the war six months ago started Operation Epic Fury. But since he took out Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, in January of 2020, bombing him in Baghdad International Airport. And ever since then there's been this kind of off again on again IRGC assassination plot against him. Apparently he was warned during the campaign trail in 2024 that he had to take certain precautions then. So the Iranians have been on this guy's tail for a long time. And in Turkey, I guess, I mean, we've both been there. Turkey has been the home or, or has played host to innumerable ISIS terrorist plots. The Russians used to hire Chechen gangsters, organized crime members to off dissidents there. I mean, it's a playground, an old Cold War playground for, I mean, every kind of international ruffian and spy service. So it actually seems to me quite plausible that the Iranians might have been able to penetrate his security detail there. But I mean, yeah, it's just a wild story.
- [04:18]
B
I think the best way to do this is to unpack. Well, first of all, you're right. I mean, so, so the Iranians have been gunning for Trump and the Trump administration officials from Trump 1.0 for a long time. I remember I was in an airport maybe a couple years ago and I saw some secret service. I could tell, I mean, I have experience with this. So there's, you know, a bunch of obviously protective detail folks with earpieces and John Bolton was on the aircraft. That was after John Bolton had left the White House as National Security Advisor. So he had Secret Service protection, of course, until President Trump removed it from him. But there's been that threat. But I think you bring up the locale in Turkey, and I'm not saying this. Cause my last name is Polymoropoulos, I've worked with the Turks. I'm not gonna go off on a Turkish diatribe now. That's for another episode and we'll laugh about that.
- [05:03]
A
Mark gets very Hellenic army when we talk about the Middle east. And Turke comes up.
- [05:08]
B
So just thinking, but, no, but. But Turkey has been a place, as you said, in which there has been not only, you know, terrorist threats in the past, but also counterintelligence threats. And the Turks have a relationship with the Iranian services is too. So. So maybe. Maybe it's a good time to unpack. What do we think this actual threat was? I mean, and you have been really good in reporting on this is a little bit different, but in terms of the drone threat in Europe, what the Russian secret services are doing. So with the ever evolving changes in warfare, I mean, what would have spooked the Secret Service to such an extent to go through this deception op, I mean, was, you know, and we don't know actually what the threat reporting was, but it seemed to be sufficient to really cause a pretty dramatic change in modus operandi. And so let's kind of go over that. Would it. Do you think it could have been drones? Could it have been cells that were already established there in Turkey? Could it have been? Of course, what we see a lot of groups doing, state sponsors of terrorism, but also terrorist groups. Did they outsource it perhaps to criminal groups? But what in the world could they have done to spook the U.S. secret Service, the greatest protective outfit in the world that caused this?
- [06:19]
A
I mean, drones was the first thing that came to mind, I'm sure. Coincidentally, a week ago or even less, there was this drone incident in Leipzig, Germany, which has been sourced now, according to US Intelligence, to the Russians. In fact, the DNA that was discovered as part of this plot was linked to Lithuania, which has prompted a lot of German media to speculate that it was related to the DHL cargo plane bombing, which I reported on at the Insider with colleagues at V Square. That happened in, I think, 2024. This is a wild story where basically the GRU, Russian military intelligence, hired a bunch of, you know, in one case, it was a former Soviet submarine commander, members of his family and his old, like, Navy network. From the Soviet Navy to Curry, or actually first Assemble an incendiary device and then ferry it around, I think five different NATO, EU countries to put it aboard a DHL cargo plane to set it all off right midair. And then the thing kind of went off prematurely and. But anyway, it's been this kind of, you know, counterintelligence law enforcement dragnet to piece together this audacious and potentially very lethal GRU plot. And then also remember, Zielinski was in Ireland, was it, and there was a threat, a drone threat against his aircraft. He was doing a state visit to Dublin and I think he had to be diverted or I don't know what had happened there. So drones was the first thing that came to mind. But then again, you have this situation where they didn't decide to not let the plane take off. I mean, as you mentioned, you had journalists on board, you had crew. It's just it was the plane taking off absent the president. So it was it about just protecting him as a person or trying to prevent some kind of, you know, detonation midair or something like that? I don't know, maybe it was, maybe, maybe it was something far more specific and sort of human based, as it were.
- [08:15]
B
Well, let's say one thing I think is important to note. Let's shout out to the Secret Service, and I mean this seriously. You know, they've been under the gun, terrible pun right there. But you know, for some of the assassination attempts against China, Trump, some of which the Secret Service, I think was faulted correctly for some of their procedures. But there's nothing wrong with the Secret Service taking drastic measures to protect the President of the United States. And I'll say everybody should kind of react in a nonpartisan manner. We want the President to be protected. Period. End of story. And so this was a pretty audacious deception operation. And if you kind of step back and I spent the morning talking to a whole bunch of former individuals involved in the Protective Service world, former Secret Service, former State Department, diplomatic security, and all of them were like, hey, you know, the Secret Service clearly was spooked. They probably did the right thing here. And so let's give them a little credit for that. Now that's. So let's kind of bookmark that. That's important to note. But you just raised a really interesting point, because what they then did was allow the Air Force One, the old Air Force One with all the countermeasures, by the way, not that the cuttery little fancy vanity project doesn't have one, has countermeasures. They let that fly with Members of the White House staff and the press pool. And so there is something in my old world called a duty to warn issue. And it's a regulation. It's kind of written in stone within the State Department, within the IC world. And that's the idea when you receive credible information of an impending threat, and there's really kind of a lot of legal language there, you have to warn the intended victims. You can't keep it from them. And so how they got the legal justification, if you believe the administration does those things, not to not tell the press corps is pretty remarkable. And I was on the. I had a couple calls from members of the press corps, not the press pool, but press corps today, who are really not that happy. Now, as a journalist, Michael, what would you be thinking if you woke up this morning and said, oh, shit, I was on that plane. Nobody told us. What the hell. Honestly, what are your thoughts on that as a journalist? Would you be pissed right now? And, you know, sometimes.
- [10:22]
A
Sometimes you got to take one for the team, you know, like it's collateral damage. I mean, hey, Donald Trump's okay, but I got blown to hamburger bits aboard Air Force One. Look, I don't know. I mean, again, we're speculating. We don't know what the actual threat was. We don't know how serious it was. We're now learning about this, what, a month in the rearview mirror? I think it is interesting, as I mentioned earlier, half jokingly, Trump hasn't said a word about this. And I think he's actually quite unnerved by the reporting now because he doesn't want to seem weak and vulnerable. You know, that the idea that the Iranians could get him coming back from a NATO summit of all places, that's. That. That for him is that that wasn't part of the script of going to war with these guys. Right? This war has gone horribly for the United States. He's very angry about the reporting about our. I mean, it seems even worse than was initially thought that the shortage of critical munitions, everything we burned through, from Patriot interceptors to Thaad missiles, prisms, which are the souped up version of attackers, all of that stuff that we just threw at Iran, and now there's this critical shortage that we can't even supply the Ukrainians with. Patriot. He hates this news, right? Everything about Iran is pissing him off lately. So here you have this thing that's pieced together that. Oh, by the way, he also had to be smuggled out like the help in a sort of deceptive op In a catering container of all things. I mean, this is not very Donald Trumpy kind of optics, so there's a lot we don't know. But yeah, you're right. I mean, why was it that only he was somehow protected and ferried to safety? Shouldn't they have just kept the plane on the tarmac or said, we're going to not take off and do all these things? There's more here, I think that meets the eye. There's going to be some follow on reporting. It's not going to look good, I think.
- [12:16]
B
I mean, when you, when you think about this, you know, my first inclination was like, wow, I got to call my old lawyer friends in the intelligence community. A great guy, Jim Petrilla, and he writes a lot.
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A
Oh yeah, I know Jim.
- [12:27]
B
Jim's a great guy. So I called Jim up. Jim was actually my lawyer in the counterterrorism center. So he was next to me when we did a lot of crazy stuff. And so Jim is as aggressive and forward leaning, yet also adheres to the law. So you know, he's going to pretty much take the side ordinarily of hey, you know, sometimes like you got to do some stuff. He immediately said, wait a second, something really smells here. In terms of duty to warrant something, there seems to be a violation. And then of course you kind of joke around like, I'm not sure anybody in the administration cares about adhering to the law. But I think that that's the, aside from the threat itself and we definitely need some more reporting on the threat because that's going to color a lot of what we're talking about here. I mean, you know, if it was just nebulous and the Secret Service overreacted a little, then maybe the press corps shouldn't freak out all that much. If it's really serious, that's a little bit of different story. But on the legal aspects and you know, this is where the intel geeks and us come through, that's a really big deal that they didn't inform. Because when you take a look and I think, and correct me if I'm wrong or others, the listeners and viewers will correct us. I think there's 12 or 13 members of the press who go on the press pool, I think so on the plane it might be more than that. But generally they're actually trusted. And so they're actually traveling as members of the presidential party there. And so to kind of separate them in terms of who's under threat and who's not under threat when the threat by the way, it's not against the president. It's against the airplane, presumably. And so that to me, really, there's a lot that I think the lawyers have to answer for now.
- [13:56]
A
But also, you have White House staff
- [13:58]
B
and the staff, whatever, you know. Yeah. Sorry. When you go in, I mean, maybe
- [14:04]
A
this is just Donald Trump's way of firing people, you know, instead of giving them a pink slip. Sorry.
- [14:08]
B
It's very cult leaderist like, it's very monarchy like, okay, you know, save the king no matter what. But I think that, you know, we covered, you know, okay, the Secret Service are badasses in this. I'm good with that. There's legal issues around this. There's the threat itself. But you just raised something before that I think is spot on. And it's this is.