On Sunday morning, an apparent terrorist attack against the Royal Air Force Fairford base was narrowly averted after the arrest of five men in three vans in the village of Whelford. While the police investigation is in its early stages, the activities of the security services at the scene suggest that the alleged terrorists planned to use the vans as car bombs.
In off-the-cuff remarks, US President Donald Trump said that “we had them under view for a long time” and America “worked with a lot of [British agencies]” to stop the attack. According to Whitehall sources, however, the Government’s response was not an “intelligence-led operation”.
This is alarming because the visible scale of what was planned would make this one of the most serious terrorist plots in some time. While it is not as potentially lethal as Al-Qaeda’s 2006 airlines plot, it is still a significant escalation from the low-tech operations in the Islamic State’s terrorism wave in the 2010s. There is still much that is unknown about the RAF Fairford incident; a possible explanation for the difference is that this attack was state-sponsored.