CIA Assessment of Israeli Intel on Alleged Iranian Threat Against Trump: “Low Confidence”
Yet again, it appears that Israeli intelligence fed bogus intelligence to the United States, this time about the supposed Iranian threat to assassinate President Donald Trump by targeting Air Force One with a missile.
The supposed threat led to an elaborate scheme to let Trump board the jet, then hustle him off in a catering truck to a waiting Air Force plane, as The Washington Post disclosed on August 10.
But now the Post has reported that the CIA didn’t regard the intelligence as credible. The agency labeled the Israeli report “low confidence.”
The CIA’s designation means the Israelis might well have fed Trump a bogus yarn a second time, in this case to scare him and keep him focused on Iran. In April, The New York Times revealed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Trump in early February that regime change in Iran would be quite easily accomplished. U.S. intelligence analysts called that claim “farcical.”
Trump Hides in a Catering Truck
The Post’s first report detailed Trump’s secret flight from Ankara, Turkey, to London after last month’s NATO Summit.
“The clandestine mission … was carried out unbeknownst to journalists and some White House staff members who believed they were on the same plane as the president, according to material reviewed by The Post, a U.S. official familiar with the operation and another person with knowledge of the president’s travel,” the newspaper reported.
That plane was the new Air Force One, a Boeing 747-8 that Qatar donated to the United States. But Trump reported on Truth Social he would use the old Air Force One for “old time’s sake.”
“In Ankara, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras,” the Post reported:
He was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane — an Air Force C-32A — via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, according to the U.S. official and corroborating material reviewed by The Post. That made Air Force One a “decoy” with media and some White House staff aboard, the official said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top officials traveled with the president on the Air Force transport. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with journalists, stayed on Air Force One.
The military and Secret Service ordered Trump’s covert movement because of a report from Israeli intelligence.
CIA Doubtful of Threat
The CIA was doubtful, the Post has revealed.
“U.S. intelligence officials were skeptical of an Iranian assassination threat against President Donald Trump that was relayed by Israel and prompted an extraordinary clandestine maneuver that saw him secretly fly out of Turkey in an alternate military aircraft, current and former U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence said,” the newspaper reported late Wednesday:
The assassination threat was relayed by the Israeli government to the CIA, where analysts did not view the intelligence as compelling and conveyed that skepticism to Trump administration officials, one of the officials said.
Another official called the reports of threats against Trump’s life “Israeli-derived, not U.S.-generated, and viewed as low confidence.”
As the Post noted, The Wall Street Journal reported in July that the Israelis were pushing intelligence that the Iranians were threatening to assassinate the president.
“Israel shared new intelligence with the U.S. that it said indicated a fresh Iranian plan to kill President Trump, people familiar with the matter said, a finding that would mark an escalation in the war between Washington and Iran,” the Journal reported on July 9:
Iran for years has vowed openly to retaliate against Trump for the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, who was a top general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in the president’s first term.
The CIA’s “low confidence” assessment of the Israeli intelligence suggests that Israel is worried that Trump is tiring of the war. And furious at that prospect are Israel’s supporters in the United States. Regime change has not occurred despite the ferocious U.S. assault on Iran that has required the Army to squander “virtually all” of its surface-to-surface missiles.
More Israeli Fakery?
But just as the war against Iraq would be a cakewalk, so also would regime change in Iran. Or so said Netanyahu to Trump on February 11 in the Situation Room.
“Netanyahu made a hard sell, suggesting that Iran was ripe for regime change and expressing the belief that a joint U.S.-Israeli mission could finally bring an end to the Islamic Republic,” The New York Times reported:
At one point, the Israelis played for Mr. Trump a brief video that included a montage of potential new leaders who could take over the country if the hard-line government fell. Among those featured was Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, now a Washington-based dissident who had tried to position himself as a secular leader who could shepherd Iran toward a post-theocratic government.
Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.
Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion — an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime.
Said Trump, “Sounds good to me.” Trump’s advisors knew Netanyahu had hornswoggled the “stable genius.”
And U.S. intelligence officials said Netanhayu had sold Trump a bill of goods.
Their study of his plan didn’t take long. They broke their presentation into four parts and briefed senior officials before Trump joined them in the Situation Room.
“First was decapitation — killing the ayatollah,” the Times reported:
Second was crippling Iran’s capacity to project power and threaten its neighbors. Third was a popular uprising inside Iran. And fourth was regime change, with a secular leader installed to govern the country.
The U.S. officials assessed that the first two objectives were achievable with American intelligence and military power. They assessed that the third and fourth parts of Mr. Netanyahu’s pitch, which included the possibility of the Kurds mounting a ground invasion of Iran, were detached from reality.
When Mr. Trump joined the meeting, [CIA Director John] Ratcliffe briefed him on the assessment. The C.I.A. director used one word to describe the Israeli prime minister’s regime change scenarios: “farcical.”
At that point, Mr. Rubio cut in. “In other words, it’s bullsh*t,” he said.
Mr. Ratcliffe added that given the unpredictability of events in any conflict, regime change could happen, but it should not be considered an achievable objective.
Several others jumped in, including [Vice President JD] Vance, just back from Azerbaijan, who also expressed strong skepticism about the prospect of regime change.
General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that the Israelis “oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.”
Trump dismissed the first two parts of the intelligence analysis. But he was hot for the second two, the Times reported, “killing the ayatollah and Iran’s top leaders and dismantling the Iranian military.”
Caine gave Trump and the others an “alarming military assessment that a major campaign against Iran would drastically deplete stockpiles of American weaponry, including missile interceptors, whose supply had been strained after years of support for Ukraine and Israel,” the Times continued. He “saw no clear path to quickly replenishing these stockpiles.”
Caine also warned that taking the Strait of Hormuz was a major obstacle.
The question now is: Did the Israelis bamboozle the gullible Trump again?
