A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who carried the nuclear "football" for former President Bill Clinton says the extraordinary Air Force One shell game departing Ankara, Turkey last month to protect President Donald Trump from a potential attack was hardly unprecedented.
"It was brilliant," retired Lt. Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson told Fox News Digital. "I wish I had been a part of it. That's how well done it was."
But Patterson is warning that exposing the vital national security secrets behind such operations could put presidents, military personnel and the White House press corps in danger for years to come.
Patterson served as Clinton's senior military aide for a period of two years and was responsible for the president’s emergency satchel, and in a 20-minute interview Wednesday, he explained how presidential decoys, aircraft swaps and other acts of deception are longstanding tools used to protect the commander in chief, his senior officials and the "privileged" Air Force One press corps.
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What alarms him, Patterson said, is not that Trump’s security team used the tactic – including the catering truck sleight of hand he was intimately a part of during the Clinton administration – but that details of how it was done are now spilling into public view.
"I hope that they prosecute this to the fullest," Patterson said. "Whoever leaked that, in my opinion, and having been involved in this, was highly placed in that process."
"There’s only a few people who actually know exactly what’s going down, and that’s by design," he added. "So if somebody leaked it, it was somebody involved in the process, and that scares the hell out of me."
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His warning comes as Fox News reported Wednesday that the legacy presidential 747 used as a decoy after Trump secretly switched planes in Ankara, Turkey, last month was not sent into the sky unprotected.
A senior Trump administration official told Fox News that U.S. fighter jets protected the aircraft on its flight to the United Kingdom. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent were also aboard with members of the traveling press corps, according to the official. Reporters had been instructed to keep their window shades closed.
Patterson said the fighter escort was exactly the sort of protection he would expect in a high-threat environment.
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"Yes, especially into war zones," Patterson said, when asked whether presidential aircraft are customarily escorted by fighter jets in such circumstances.
"We damn sure always do when we’re going to a theater of high threat," he said. "We did it with President Clinton in ’97. And we did it with Trump just a couple weeks ago, and we’ll do it with whoever the next president is."
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Trump’s July 8 departure from the NATO summit in Ankara involved a carefully staged deception.
Trump publicly boarded the familiar blue-and-white presidential 747 before being moved out of sight in an airport catering vehicle and transferred to a smaller Air Force C-32A. The legacy 747 then departed for Britain while Trump traveled separately. He later reunited with the presidential aircraft in the United Kingdom before continuing his journey aboard the newer, Qatari-donated 747.
Trump said Tuesday that he was following the direction of the Secret Service and military.
Patterson said the broader concept of confusing potential attackers about the president’s movements is routine.
"We use decoys all the time," he said. "We use decoy in the motorcade routes."
"You'll sometimes see the two beasts will switch out under bridges and overpasses. We do the same thing with airplanes, especially in international trips. There's always two Air Force ones that go. Obviously one's a decoy and it's also a spare for spare parts in case something happens to the primary.
"So we've been doing it for years.
"It works," he added, "and for people to want to have visibility into actually how it works would be particularly troubling and it would cause reverberations in our American system for years."
That is why, he argued, demands to expose the mechanics of the latest operation risk doing more damage than the public scrutiny is worth.
Patterson said the protections are intended not merely for Trump, Clinton or any individual president, but to ensure continuity of the presidency itself.
"President Trump's only got two more years," he said. "These programs are going to be in place for the foreseeable future, and they've been in place in our past for quite a while. So it's not just about Trump. These programs exist to protect no matter who the president is and the team around him."
Patterson, who is a conservative and outspoken New York Times bestselling author highly critical of the man he carried the nuclear football for, warned divisive politics against Trump is dangerous for U.S. national security.
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"Like I was with President Clinton – I wasn't a huge President Clinton fan but they hired me into that position, the White House did – and I swore an oath to the office of the presidency, and I did it," Patterson said. "And I think that the people that are working for President Trump right now, whether they like him or don't like him, or agree with his politics or don't agree with this politics, they have to understand that we're there – the Secret Service guys, the apparatus is there – to protect the human being and the office."
Patterson also revealed that Trump was not the first president he knew of to use an airport catering vehicle as part of a clandestine movement: "As far as I know, President Clinton was the first one to do it."
Decades before Trump was moved between aircraft in Ankara, Patterson said a catering truck was used to discreetly move Clinton aboard a presidential aircraft during an episode that was never publicly reported at the time.
"I won't go into a lot of detail, but, President Clinton was incapable of going up the front steps," he said. "So we used a catering truck to get them onto the back of the airplane, unbeknownst to anybody else that was there except for a few of us. And we never told anybody and nobody ever reported it."
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"And we flew back to DC kind of unannounced. And we've done it before. I was on with President Clinton in 1997 when we did the surprise visit to Bosnia. So he went to Bosnia on Christmas Eve to surprise the troops. So we didn't tell anybody then. I was all on that trip the entire way, 36 hours nonstop that day. And we didn't tell anybody, and the press didn't know, and they never complained about it.
"And it was important. We wanted to get President Clinton into a war zone without anybody else knowing about it. And that's kind of what was happening to Trump. They wanted to him out of a potential war zone, without anybody knowing about it.
"We do it all the time. It's safe, it's reliable, and the public does not need to know."
Past presidents have repeatedly used secrecy and deception for travel into dangerous areas. Clinton used decoy aircraft during a 2000 trip to Pakistan, while subsequent presidents have made covert or tightly held trips to Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine. The precise circumstances and level of knowledge afforded to traveling reporters have differed between administrations.
Patterson pushed back against criticism that Trump’s operation improperly endangered the reporters and officials who continued aboard the legacy presidential aircraft.
He noted that the aircraft was carrying not only journalists but an Air Force crew and senior government officials — and, as Fox News has now reported, was protected by fighter aircraft.
"We’re not going to put those people at risk either," Patterson said flatly of the Air Force personnel.
He argued that some of the media criticism has lost sight of the wider security apparatus involved in presidential travel.
"A lot of what is being spouted on social media and in our mainstream media is factually incorrect," Patterson said, "and it’s actually troubling because it’s going to endanger not only President Trump, but future presidents to come."
Patterson called efforts to expose the procedures "incredibly dangerous" and "irresponsible."
The danger, he said, extends beyond the president.
"It endangers everybody in the process — Secret Service guys, military aide guys, Air Force guys that are on alert, Army guys that are on alert," Patterson said.
The retired officer said presidential protection plans are deliberately compartmentalized so that very few people know the full operation.
That is what makes the source of the disclosures particularly concerning to him.
Patterson warned there could also be a longer-term cost to revealing too much about presidential deception tactics: Future commanders in chief could lose the ability to make surprise visits to troops or enter high-threat regions at all.
If the tactics become predictable, he argued, planners would have to devise entirely new security procedures.
"If we were to expose everything, we would have to overhaul the entire security apparatus of the United States of America," Patterson said, warning that doing so could put "the presidency and the Cabinet members in incredible danger."
Asked whether overexposing such programs could effectively prevent Trump or future presidents from making some high-risk overseas trips, Patterson agreed.
"That’s correct," he said.
For Patterson, that makes the argument over the Trump flight bigger than one president, one press corps or one flight out of Turkey.
The tactics being publicly dissected today, he warned, may be the same ones needed to save a future president — and everyone traveling with that president — tomorrow.
"We just need to leave them alone," Patterson said.