U.S. intelligence officials were unable to independently verify several warnings from Israel over the past year regarding alleged Iranian plots to assassinate President Donald Trump. According to a current U.S. official and two former officials, the warnings included threats involving snipers, knives, and shoulder-launched missiles.
The reports of these alleged plots began prior to a 12-day war in June 2025 and increased before the United States launched a military campaign in Iran in February 2026. While the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has long assessed that Iran seeks retaliation for the 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani, it has assigned "low confidence" to some of the specific threat data provided by Israeli intelligence since early last year.
In July 2026, Israeli officials briefed the White House on a potential threat to Air Force One involving a shoulder-launched missile during a NATO summit in Turkey. Although Turkish and U.S. intelligence agencies could not corroborate the claim, the Secret Service conducted a deception operation by moving the president to a different aircraft for his flight out of Turkey. Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi stated that the agency analyzes a wide range of information to guide protective operations but declined to discuss specific intelligence.
The scale of this issue involves high-level intelligence sharing between the U.S. and Israel, which has historically been a primary source of information on Middle Eastern affairs. However, the report indicates a significant internal shift, as the CIA stopped working on joint assessments with the National Intelligence Council (NIC) last year due to tensions with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Layoffs at the ODNI have further reduced the number of analytical reports available to policymakers, potentially limiting the breadth of information used to evaluate international threats.
For the general public, these developments illustrate the internal processes that precede military actions, such as the strikes in Iran in February 2026. While the administration took Israeli intelligence into consideration before those strikes, U.S. agencies had simultaneously assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. What happens next depends on the ongoing evaluation of threats by the Secret Service and the CIA, as well as the progress of the current war in Iran. No specific dates for new intelligence reports or policy changes were provided in the reporting.