US rushes to withdraw bombers from UK airbase after new threats
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US B-1 Lancer bombers at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, England, on Sept 28.
PHOTO: EPA
Eric Schmitt
WASHINGTON – The United States rushed at the weekend to withdraw all 12 B-1 Air Force bombers from an airbase in southern England after commanders received new threats about an Iran-backed plot against the installation, two US officials said on Oct 4.
The withdrawal was highly unusual. Such moves are rarely made so quickly from an allied airbase in a peacetime country thousands of kilometres from a combat zone.
The need to move the bombers out of the RAF Fairford base was deemed so urgent that some of the planes and their flight crews left while aerial refuelling aircraft were still being scrambled to support their flights to the United States.
At least three of the planes had landed at their home base in South Dakota by Oct 4, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
The Pentagon’s European Command confirmed on Oct 4 that the bombers had left England but declined to comment on any new warnings.
“We can acknowledge now that all US bombers that were deployed to RAF Fairford are redeploying to their home stations in the United States,” the command said in a statement.
“US Air Force bombers routinely operate around the world to support global force readiness and operational requirements.”
The British Ministry of Defence declined to comment on the movements of US military assets.
US officials on Oct 4 declined to specify the nature of the new information that prompted the rapid withdrawal of the Air Force bombers, some of which had just arrived in the past week as part of a normal rotation of forces.
One US official said the new information was part of the same threat warnings that had surfaced three weeks ago, but specific details and a sense of urgency spiked in the past 24 hours, alarming commanders.
The sudden pullout of the bombers came a week after British police arrested five men who had been travelling on Sept 27 in white vans near the base, which has been used by US bombers in the US-Israeli war against Iran.
The men were released on bail a day later after the authorities did not discover explosives in the vans.
But the police have repeatedly said the men remain under investigation, and a dual British-Iranian national was arrested on Oct 1 on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said last week that the British government believed Iran played a part in planning those events.
US and British officials, as well as those in Germany and Israel, believe the operation is connected to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) or a separate military headquarters in Tehran. Iran has denied the accusations.
The episode has presented the authorities with myriad puzzles as they try to sort out the events over the past week, including the arrests, the frantic evacuation of 85 homes, a bomb disposal robot searching the vans for explosives, and a national security meeting convened by Burnham.
In July, the IRGC issued a statement warning that allowing the United States to use the base “makes London responsible” for US actions. “Any base used to launch attacks on Iranian territory”, the statement said, “is a legitimate target for our forces”.
In September, US military commanders received a chilling warning from US and other Western intelligence agencies, according to US officials briefed on the information: RAF Fairford was the target of a potential Iran-backed attack.
The murky outlines of a plot had been pieced together through a combination of intercepted communications, informants and other intelligence.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his intelligence officials had also warned their British counterparts of a probable Iranian-sponsored attack, though they did not provide a specific target.
Follow-up attacks were likely to include drones, the confidential assessments warned.
After that initial warning in September, concern among officials across Europe surged.
According to a senior US official, Israel warned Germany that US bases there were at heightened risk, noting Spangdahlem and Ramstein in particular.
An Iran-backed plot to commit an attack in Britain would be a major escalation by Tehran against a Western country in apparent retaliation for the US-Israeli war against Iran. NYTIMES
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.