CIA Called the Iran Threat ‘Low Confidence’ — But the Secret Service Theater Played On

Funny how this works. The CIA, our own intelligence agency, looked at the Israeli intel about an Iranian assassination plot against the president and basically said “yeah, we’re not buying it.” Their words were “not compelling enough.” “Low confidence.” “Israel-derived, not US-generated.” And yet somehow, the entire U.S. security apparatus went into full James Bond mode anyway.

Trump switched planes three times in Turkey on July 8. Three. He started on the Qatar-gifted Boeing 747-8, moved to an older Air Force One, and then got shuttled to a C-32A military jet. In a catering cart. The president of the United States rode an airport food truck so nobody would know which plane he was on. F-16s escorted the little jet to Britain. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent, the two most senior Cabinet members, sat on what was effectively a decoy flight. Rubio knew. Bessent was “likely aware.” Ask yourself: if the threat was real enough to hide the president in a catering cart, why were the secretary of state and treasury secretary left sitting on the bait plane? Their constitutional succession rank didn’t buy them a catering cart ride.

Shealeah Craighead (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s where it gets interesting. The Washington Post, citing former officials, reports the threat was “real” — but the CIA, the agency whose entire job is assessing threats, called it low confidence. So which is it? Real, or not compelling enough? You can’t have both. Unless the point was never about the threat.

Israel relayed the intel. Israel called for the president to secretly switch planes. The CIA didn’t trust it. But the Secret Service, which has had what one official called “three near misses” with this president, wasn’t taking chances. Fair enough on the surface. The man has been shot at, and the people paid to take bullets for him don’t want to be the ones who shrugged off a tip. But follow the logic. An ally hands us thin intel. Our own agency waves it off. And the response is a three-plane shell game that left two Cabinet members as decoy bait, fooled the traveling press corps, and had F-16s scrambling over the Mediterranean.

Matti Blume (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Who benefits from a security apparatus that ignores its own analysts and runs on foreign-sourced urgency? The intelligence community gets to look indispensable regardless of whether the threat was solid. Israel gets to set the tempo of U.S. presidential security on its own say-so. And the rest of us get told to trust the experts, the same experts who couldn’t agree on whether the danger was real fifteen minutes before they stuffed the president into a food cart.

Trump himself said it plainly: “I just follow what they’d like to do.” He didn’t specify the threat. He didn’t vouch for the intel. He deferred. That’s either a president wisely listening to his protection detail, or a man being moved around like a chess piece by an apparatus that doesn’t need to prove anything to anybody.

Ashutosh Anand / Pexels

The establishment wants you to focus on the catering cart and the F-16s and the drama. The real story is that the CIA said “we don’t buy this,” and nobody cared. The machine rolled on anyway. When your own intelligence agency calls the threat low confidence and the response is a three-plane decoy operation, the question isn’t whether Iran was plotting. The question is who’s really driving the car.