Lead image for Unverified Israeli intelligence triggered a secret Trump Air Force One decoy escape.
The US has received several warnings from Israel over the past year that Iran intended to assassinate President Donald Trump, including before a secret Air Force One ruse in Turkey, that US intelligence officials could not independently verify, according to a current US official and two former officials.
The warnings, passed to US intelligence agencies and in some cases relayed directly by Israeli officials to senior White House officials, included possible plots to shoot Trump with a sniper or recruit someone to attack him with a knife at a large public event, the sources said. The tips began in the lead-up to the 12-day war in June 2025 and intensified prior to the US decision to go to war in Iran in February, the sources said.
The most detailed warning came ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara in July, the US official and the other person familiar with the matter said. Israeli officials briefed the White House about intelligence that indicated Iran may try to kill Trump, potentially with a shoulder-launched missile, while he traveled on Air Force One for the summit, the officials said.
The US intelligence community has long assessed that Iran wants to retaliate for Trump’s killing of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020. But the Central Intelligence Agency has not been able to corroborate some of the specific threats against Trump's life shared by Israeli intelligence since early last year, the officials said.
In the case of the NATO episode, a Turkish official said the country's intelligence agencies also did not have any evidence to corroborate the Israeli claim about the threat to Trump's life, an assessment the host country shared with Americans.
Despite the lack of verification, White House officials and the Secret Service have taken steps to mitigate the threats out of an abundance of caution, including an extraordinary deception operation during the Turkey trip that involved moving Trump from Air Force One to a different aircraft for his flight out of the country.
That episode underscores how Israeli intelligence is influencing the Trump administration's decision-making about Iran at a time of heightened tensions with Tehran — and broader disagreement between US and Israeli intelligence assessments on Iran's threat overall.
Earlier this year, American intelligence agencies assessed that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon, even as Israel argued Tehran posed an urgent threat. Despite the reports from the US intelligence community, Trump moved forward with strikes in Iran in February. Trump also took into consideration intelligence shared by Israel that Tehran had tried to assassinate him before launching the military campaign, Reuters previously reported.