A seventh man has been arrested in connection with a suspected terror plot near RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire, last month, which Andy Burnham has said was most likely linked to Iran.
Amid fears that Tehran was planning a complex drone attack against Fairford, which serves as a forward operating base for US aircraft targeting Iran, the Trump administration made a “historic, unprecedented” decision to withdraw all its 12 B-1 bombers on Sunday, said David Dunn, a professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham.
The incident “tells us much about Iran, Britain and the emerging threats to US forces and assets. None of it is good,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial.
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The Fairford plot is far from an isolated event. On Tuesday, three Iranian men appeared in court accused of spying on British-based dissident journalists on behalf of Iran’s foreign intelligence service. Earlier this year, a wave of arson attacks targeting British Jews were linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). And in July, a Tehran-backed cyberattack halted operations at a UK power plant for four days.
It is important to note here that the UK is technically “not at war with Iran”, said BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner. But the US is, and “that is a distinction Tehran has publicly challenged”.
In July, Iran warned “any base used for aggression against Iranian territory constitutes a legitimate target for our forces”. As far as the IRGC “is concerned, Britain is already a participant in America’s war with Iran”, said Gardner.
The emergence of sophisticated state-run drone attacks, such as Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web last year, when low-cost drones were smuggled into Russia and carried on lorries to locations near airbases before being set upon strategic targets, have changed the game when it comes to perceived threats from hostile nations.
But “the question on minds in London is not whether Britain could stage such an attack but whether it could repel one”, said The Times’ defence editor Larisa Brown.
Given that it would require “months of planning, utmost secrecy and the purchase or smuggling of large quantities of explosives undetected by Britain’s security services”, one senior US diplomat asked, does Iran “really have the capability to pull off an Operation Spider’s Web on foreign soil? I think most of the community doubts that.”
“Yet there was enough concern for America to act”, said The Times.
What next?
The government’s strategic defence review published last year earmarked up to £1 billion for homeland air and missile defence over the next four years.
This week, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch ramped up this pledge to £10 billion over the next 10 years to go towards a “Britannia Shield” that would protect military bases and critical infrastructure from missile or drone attacks.
While defence experts have questioned these figures, for Britain the “bigger problem has been finding the will to confront the Iranians and go on offence against their terror networks. Does protecting US jets and UK Jews fit the bill?”, asked the WSJ.
“The IRGC, like Vladimir Putin, clearly doesn’t think it will pay much of a price for orchestrating terror in Britain – or many other states. Until that changes, even the best defence technology can only do so much.”
