Trump Says Threats Pulled the Bombers Out of Fairford
Asked whether a specific threat prompted the withdrawal from RAF Fairford, Donald Trump said: “Yeah I think we can say that. They didn’t fly out by accident.” He added that “there were some threats”, that Washington knows who made them, and that they “would be linked to Iran”. That contradicts his own Secretary of State, who said hours earlier that he would not tie the move to the incident.
Set the two accounts side by side. Marco Rubio on Monday: “I wouldn’t just directly tie that to the move that was made”, and “it’s not unusual to see movement of assets to different parts of the world based on exercises, redeployments”. JD Vance, later: an “abundance of caution”. The president, speaking by Marine One before flying to Nebraska: “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.” Asked whether Iran had brought combat drones into Britain, he said he could not say, “but if they did they’ll suffer greatly”. About a dozen B-1s went home after the 27 September incident, in which police were called to three suspicious vehicles near the Gloucestershire base; five men were arrested and bailed, and a sixth, a British-Iranian, later. Christoph Bergs of RUSI judged the redeployment will cut America’s ability to surge sorties against Iran quickly, though London had already restricted the base to defensive missions, and suggested Diego Garcia or the Gulf as alternatives. One source close to the White House reached for Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb, the covert drone attack on five Russian airbases last year, as the model of what can be done at distance. The nature of the threat is still not public. Watch whether the State Department reconciles the two accounts.