LONDON — Sometime over the weekend, all of the U.S. B-1s bombers that the Pentagon had stationed at an air base in southern England took off like a flock of startled pigeons, seemingly spooked by what may or may not have been a terrorist plot outside the base fence.
Police arrested five men in white vans outside the base, RAF Fairford, a week earlier but found gasoline, not explosives. Top U.S. and British officials said Iran might have paid them, but to do what is unclear. All five, as well as a sixth suspect detained later, were released on bail.
Some unconfirmed media reports cited additional recent threats of a plot, but the British government gave no indication of anything imminent. The Pentagon, meanwhile, confirmed only that it had evacuated the bomber fleet, but did not say why or for how long.
“We can acknowledge now that all U.S. bombers that were deployed to RAF Fairford have redeployed to their home stations in the United States,” a spokesperson said Sunday.
Whatever the threat, the mass repositioning of aircraft illustrates how technological advances in warfare have heightened concerns about the vulnerability of bases such as Fairford and other hard-to-protect military facilities in populated areas.
Relatively low-cost drones, including some carried into place by vans and trucks, have delivered sharp blows to high-end military assets in Russia and other theaters, such as the Iran war.
Based on recent operations in other countries, the officials who whistled the B-1s home from Fairford would have been keenly aware of how much damage an attack — by drones costing just a few thousand dollars and, in some cases, available for purchase on Amazon — could do to a $3.8 billion fleet of long-range bombers, experts said.
Nor would an attack need to destroy any aircraft to expose the vulnerability of the base and land a sharp psychological blow, according to Robert Tollast, a land warfare research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based military think tank.
“I think the Americans have acted out of extreme caution or a very low risk tolerance for what would be an extremely high-impact event,” Tollast said. “Even if it’s something really crude, like a petrol bomb that they could somehow get to ignite on a drone.”
Militaries face similar questions at bases across Europe, Tollast said.
He cited Germany’s Leipzig/Halle Airport, which serves as both a civilian field and a NATO hub. The base was breached by an explosive drone in August that technicians managed to defuse. Germany blamed Russia and ordered a Russian consulate closed. Russia denied responsibility.
“It speaks to the risk of large, fixed military infrastructure to [drone] attacks as something that NATO countries are still grappling with,” Tollast added.
It was unclear how long the B-1s would stay away from a base that the U.S. has used for decades.
Among the first missions ever flown from Fairford was the dropping of paratroopers over Normandy, France, on D-Day on June 6, 1944. The most recent involved dropping bombs on Iran.
U.S. officials who ordered the evacuation of the bombers have ready evidence of the potential risk to aircraft parked at a base in the British countryside.
Ukraine hit air bases across Russia last year — destroying at least 12 bombers and other aircraft — using drones that Ukraine operatives had smuggled into Russia in shipping containers as part of a daring plot dubbed “Operation Spiderweb.”
Soon after, Israel orchestrated similar attacks from inside Iran, using swarms of armed drones and explosives that had been concealed in ordinary vehicles before being unleashed to destroy missile launch sites, air defense batteries and other targets.
The covert operation, led by Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, helped cripple Iran’s defenses and to clear the way for 12 days of U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in mid-2025 on Iran’s nuclear weapons sites, as well as the targeted killings of nuclear scientists and members of the inner circle of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.
British officials said they are tracking dozens of plots amid heightened concern that military bases used by U.S. forces could be targeted. But officials said Monday they had no indications of a specific plot in advanced stages.
The U.K. national terrorism threat level remains at “severe” — unchanged since the arrests near Fairford in late September.
The details that have emerged so far about that suspected plot provide no indication that Iran — or any other adversary — managed to position explosive drones or other devices capable of penetrating the base’s defenses or damaging U.S. aircraft.
The release of the six suspects, amid an investigation by British counterterrorism police, indicates that authorities do not see them as posing any imminent danger to the public.
Investigators are still combing through the suspects’ cellphones, dashboard cameras and other devices for clues about potential links to Iran, which in recent years has repeatedly mounted plots on British soil using criminal networks and other proxies.
The suspects were arrested while traveling in white vans near RAF Fairford. No explosives were found on board those vehicles, but authorities said they recovered barrels or other containers containing gasoline, raising the possibility of a plot to set the vans on fire.
British police say they were alerted to the possible attack by one of the five men arrested at the scene, an individual who has not been identified but called Britain’s emergency phone line at 12:45 a.m. — roughly an hour before a second call came in from a local citizen who encountered the men and the vehicles.
It is not clear why the suspect made that call or what he reported.
Investigators are seeking answers to questions including whether he was not fully apprised of the plan and called after realizing that he and his associates were approaching a British military compound.
If Iran did orchestrate the van activity, it may have scored a win in its fight with the Pentagon without ever detonating anything. Bombers flying from South Dakota to targets in Iran would cost more in fuel and flying time than those taking off from England’s Cotswolds region, which is 3,900 miles closer to Tehran.
“It’s hard to conclude anything other than that this will be seen as a success by Iran,” Peter Ricketts, a former British national security adviser, told the BBC.
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