The United States received several warnings from Israel over the past year that Iran was preparing an assassination attempt on US President Donald Trump, including before the secret change of plane before his departure after the NATO summit in Turkey, which US intelligence officials, however, could not independently verify, one current and two former US administration officials, quoted by Reuters, reported, BTA reported.
The warnings, passed to US intelligence agencies, and in some cases made directly by Israeli officials to senior White House officials, included possible plots to assassinate Trump with a sniper or hire an assassin to attack him with a knife during a major public event, the sources said. The signals began to come in the run-up to the 12-day war with Iran last June and intensified before the US decision to go to war with Tehran in February, the sources said.
The most detailed warning came before a NATO summit in Ankara last month, the US official and another source familiar with the matter said. Israeli officials have briefed the White House on intelligence that Iran could try to assassinate Trump, possibly with a missile fired from a man-portable anti-aircraft missile system, during his trip on Air Force One to the summit in Ankara, the officials said.
The US intelligence community has long concluded that Iran wants to avenge Trump for the killing of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020. But the CIA could not confirm some of the specific warnings about a threat to Trump's life shared by Israeli intelligence since early last year, the officials said.
In the case of the NATO summit in Ankara, a Turkish official said the country's intelligence services also had no evidence to support Israeli warnings about a threat to the US president's life - something the Turkish hosts had shared with the Americans.
Despite the lack of confirmation, White House and Secret Service officials took steps to mitigate the risk for security reasons, including a covert operation to divert Trump's plane on its return from Turkey.
The case shows the extent to which Israeli intelligence has influenced the Trump administration's decision-making on Iran at a time of rising tensions with Tehran, Reuters notes.