For the past ten days, villagers living near RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire have felt as though they were caught inside a high-octane thriller.
That is how district councillor Tristan Wilkinson describes the atmosphere. Few would suggest he is overstating the drama.
‘This feels like another plot twist,’ he says, pointing to America’s decision on Sunday to abruptly remove its £3.6billion fleet of B-1 bombers from the base. The move was made to protect the aircraft from being destroyed in a sophisticated Iranian drone attack.
The international crisis that has drawn global attention to this quiet corner of the Cotswolds has all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster — and, depending on what happens next, perhaps a sequel. Villagers have been evacuated from their homes, police have moved against suspected terror suspects and intelligence officers have been deployed across Europe, among other extraordinary developments.
But these events are not fiction. They are frighteningly real. The question being repeated by residents is simple: what happens next? With claims and counter-claims emerging by the hour, the situation around RAF Fairford is becoming increasingly difficult to follow.
First, here is what is known so far.
Life in Whelford, a leafy village less than two miles from the base’s perimeter fence, normally moves at an unhurried pace. Some residents still remember the day a Nasa space shuttle landed at RAF Fairford in 1983. The base had been designated a Transoceanic Abort Landing site, offering an emergency landing option for shuttles because of its two-mile runway.
The United States has used RAF Fairford for decades. Yet with no shops or pub, and only a 19th-century church holding one service each month, excitement is usually in limited supply.
Armed police officers stood outside an entrance to RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire last Monday
The ordeal began when a local farmer spotted three white vans abandoned on a country road
Five men were later arrested near the base early on September 27, though that number has since risen to seven
That changed in March, when former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer authorised Washington to use the base as a staging post for airstrikes in the Middle East. The B-1 bombers, each costing £300million, then began arriving.
RAF Fairford was suddenly in Iran’s sights, and the residents of Whelford found themselves at the centre of an intensely unsettling international crisis.
Tensions around the base had been building for months. Police numbers visibly increased after threats were issued by Tehran.
One woman who has lived close to RAF Fairford’s perimeter for about 50 years said that ‘great big concrete walls’ and vehicles had recently appeared at several entrances to the base.
In March, Seyed Ali Mousavi, Iran’s ambassador to London, told an interviewer that Tehran was considering whether British military bases should be regarded as legitimate targets because they had been used by US bombers carrying out strikes on Iran.
Residents were further alarmed in July, when Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) specifically named RAF Fairford as a potential target and threatened to attack it.
If Hollywood were adapting the events surrounding the Gloucestershire airbase, however, the story might begin with a Saturday afternoon cricket match. The game revealed just how sharply tensions had escalated and suggested that an intrusion — or something worse — could be imminent.
At about 4.30pm on September 26, armed police halted the match near the perimeter fence, citing a ‘live incident’.
One player recalled: ‘We’d played the evening before with no issue but on Saturday two guards ran to the fence with guns and said, “You can’t be here. There is a live incident going on.”‘
Previously it had been assumed that it wasn’t until eight hours later that police got wind something was afoot.
Two officers near RAF Fairford on September 27 as counter terrorism police investigated
A bomber jet flies over the sleepy village of Kempsford, just a 15-minute walk from the military base
That was when a local farmer driving home in the early hours of the morning from a party, came across three seemingly abandoned white vans blocking a quiet country road.
Confused, she turned her car around then spotted a group of men in balaclavas darting through trees and across the fields towards the airbase, a few hundred feet away.
She dialled 999 and later messaged her local WhatsApp group, warning neighbours to lock their doors. Police arrived at the scene ten minutes later and arrested five young men.
Video footage recorded by a villager shows them sitting in the middle of the road with their hands behind their back in restraints. All five had been stripped of their upper clothing by police fearing they may be wearing suicide vests.
Quickly, a major incident was declared and a large emergency services presence, which included a Hazardous Area Response Team within a 400-metre cordon, was put in place.
The first most of Whelford’s residents heard about it was when they were woken by officers banging at their doors, demanding that they evacuate their homes immediately.
With no explanation, or even time to brush their teeth, they left behind their pets and headed to the nearby Cirencester Leisure Centre, which is being used as an emergency shelter.
Julian Tudsbery and his wife were among 85 households ordered to evacuate. He answered the door in his dressing gown at 7am.
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‘There were several police, three police cars in the drive, and they said you need to evacuate, there’s been a major incident, said he couldn’t elaborate,’ said Mr Tudsbery, who had to leave his cat, Misty, behind.
Donald Trump, pictured on Monday, revealed the US chose to remove its bombers over a ‘specific threat’
An American jet is seen leaving RAF Fairford on the afternoon of Sunday, October 4
With the village safely cleared, a bomb disposal robot began inspecting three white vans, two of which had open rear doors, and were surrounded by large black barrels scattered on the ground.
‘Thinking about it now, and what could have happened if they had tried to stop me from driving away, I am quite lucky,’ the farmer said.
‘A plucky amateur shouldn’t be spotting an unusual bit of activity at 1am when the air base is on high alert. I think it’s absolutely astonishing. It’s bloody preposterous that they weren’t on it and I had to phone up. It is pretty incredible, realising you had a brush with potential terrorists face to face and may have foiled a terrorist plot.’
Naturally, Iran was quickly in the frame. Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the BBC the Government believes Iran played a part in the RAF Fairford incident though he did not give further details. Iran denies involvement.
Then Donald Trump said the US had been aware that the men were ‘looking to do big damage’ and ‘we had them under view for a long time’. UK security sources, however, were quick to clarify that the arrests were neither pre-planned nor intelligence led.
The five – a 24-year-old from Camden, three men aged 23, 24 and 25 from Westminster and one aged 24 from Willesden – were detained on suspicion of explosives offences and preparation of a terrorist act but were released on police bail the following day, a decision criticised by President Trump and Marco Rubio, his Secretary of State. It was surely puzzling.
While it would be wrong to deny the farmer her moment of glory, it then transpired that she wasn’t the only public-spirited citizen to raise the alarm.
When she dialled 999, police were already rushing to the scene because someone tipped them off – one of the masked men who would soon be arrested.
That wasn’t the only curious aspect of this case. The Daily Mail’s security editor Rebecca Camber revealed that the vans did not contain explosives after all, which is why the five were so swiftly released.
So what on earth was going on? One theory is that it may have all been an Iranian-backed hoax designed to spread panic and send a message to the US about how easy it would be to carry out a bomb attack at the base.
Or was it a sinister decoy or dummy run? Questions that will no doubt be answered if the case reaches court.
Vicki Evans, senior national co-ordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, said: ‘The investigation into circumstances surrounding events in Gloucestershire is hugely complex and our specialist teams are interrogating multiple lines of enquiry. As we’ve made clear, we’re looking at all possible angles, including possible foreign state involvement.’
The plot thickened last Thursday when it emerged that a sixth man, who has dual Iranian and British nationality, was arrested on suspicion of plotting to attack the base.
The 27-year-old was held in Westminster, central London, on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts under Section 5 of the 2006 Terrorism Act. Police said that another man, a 22-year-old, had been arrested, also in Westminster, on suspicion of the same offence.
On to the stage stepped Donald Trump again, who earlier this week pulled all 12 of America’s B-1 bombers from the base because of ‘threats’ – but didn’t elaborate on what they were.
‘There were some threats and rather than tempting the enemy – we’ll capture the enemy and beat the enemy, but why should we leave them there? So we moved them around a little bit, not very far,’ he told reporters at the White House on Monday.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the BBC the Government believes Iran played a part in the RAF Fairford incident
Two armed policemen are pictured outside RAF Fairford on September 28
When asked if there was a ‘specific threat’ that led to the planes being withdrawn, he replied: ‘Yeah, I think we can say that. They didn’t fly out by accident.’
It was also reported that such was the urgency to withdraw that the B-1s took off while refuelling aircraft were still being arranged to support the flights.
But on Monday Marco Rubio downplayed the withdrawal, saying it was not directly tied to the suspected terror plot at the RAF base.
It then turned out yesterday that it was reportedly part of something more deadly still – a separate multi-pronged Iranian plan to strike aircraft using drones and kill some of the several hundred American personnel stationed at the base.
British and American officials said the plot was modelled on the audacious drone attack Ukraine launched last year that wiped out at least 40 aircraft at five Russian bases. That blitz – described as Russia’s Pearl Harbor – was estimated to have cost Putin’s war machine £5.2billion and had cut the country’s cruise missile power by more than a third.
The complex mission involved transporting high-tech First Person View (FPV) drones concealed inside wooden pre-fab housing units loaded on to trucks. Their retractable roofs were opened remotely when the order was given to attack.
For Britain, the highly unusual decision to abruptly recall the B-1 bombers from Fairford is something of an embarrassment.
General Sir Richard Barrons, who co-authored last year’s Strategic Defence Review, defended the move saying it was the ‘prudent thing to do’.
‘We live in this cyber age, drone age where war has no geography and these bases are vulnerable again,’ he added. ‘I understand the RAF have made great strides in protecting their air bases from a drone threat… but the whole of UK civil society is now a target in the world we live in and our civil resilience is pretty poor.’
It appears then that, even with the bombers gone, the drama for the good people of Whelford will continue.