Source: New York Times
by Katrin Bennhold
“At first, it seemed like a large terror attack on a British air base had been thwarted. Then the story turned stranger. The five men arrested last week had been traveling in white vans in the middle of the night near a base in southern England that the U.S. has used in its war against Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had warned over the summer that ‘any base used to launch attacks on Iranian territory’ would be ‘a legitimate target.’ The arrests suggested that threat had materialized. But the details we’ve learned since then have been confusing. The men in the white vans? Not radicalized ideologues or hardened operators, but ‘unwitting chumps,’ one official said. … British security officials have warned for years about the dangers of these sorts of plots. Russia pioneered them; Iran has since taken up the mantle.” (10/05/26)