STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
British officials say they've learned more about what happened at a military base where American bombers took off for Iran. They say it's highly likely that Iran is directly connected. This is the incident about two weeks ago in which masked men were arrested in the middle of the night near the base. NPR's Lauren Frayer is covering this story from London. Hi there, Lauren.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK. How are the British saying Iran was involved?
FRAYER: So almost immediately, the Trump administration said a foreign actor was involved. And after a few days, British officials started mentioning the possibility of Iranian links. U.S. officials also mentioned the possible use of drones. But for two weeks or so, it's been rather vague, until yesterday when British Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced this in Parliament.
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PRIME MINISTER ANDY BURNHAM: I can confirm our assessment that it is highly likely to have been coordinated in Iran, almost certainly directed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
FRAYER: Last night, the British foreign secretary summoned the Iranian ambassador. And the British government imposed fresh sanctions on two Iranian nationals. One is a Revolutionary Guard official. The other is described as a facilitator of a criminal network.
INSKEEP: Interesting that there is an Iranian ambassador, a reminder that the British, unlike the United States, have relations with Iran. So they summon the ambassador. They make their complaint. What does Iran have to say?
FRAYER: Iran denies all involvement and has done so from the beginning. Its ambassador in London said last night he'll cooperate with this investigation. Overnight, Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement calling this an ugly conspiracy.
INSKEEP: OK. If it was Iran, some kind of terror attack here, why is it that the suspects would've been freed on bail?
FRAYER: Yeah, kind of feels like a contradiction, right? I mean, there is actually not much evidence, though, at least revealed publicly, of any crime here. I mean, these masked men were caught outside the airbase, not believed to have penetrated its perimeter. No explosives have been found, no drones. The suspects are all British men in their 20s, except for one, a dual British Iranian citizen.
And so I asked Karin von Hippel, a former U.S. State Department official who's a fellow at a defense think tank here in London, about this contradiction. And she said, you know, we're familiar with Iranian proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Houthis in Yemen. But she says there is another type of proxy as well.
KARIN VON HIPPEL: What they do is they hire petty criminals, kid who needs a bit of cash and doesn't always understand what they're doing. And so it's a really good way to keep forces distracted, make sure intelligence and police assets are just overextended. And it's a way to avoid attribution.
FRAYER: And she says Russia is actually known to do this. Today, Britain's domestic spy chief said the same, that Iran and Russia are both ramping up what he called hybrid warfare. Now, Von Hippel says one theory is that what happened at Royal Air Force base RAF Fairford last month may have been a decoy operation, you know, employing low-level criminals to distract authorities from something that we don't know about yet. British counterterrorism officials say the suspects in this case might not have even known who they were working for. And last night, Britain, the U.S. and 27 other countries issued a statement condemning what they call lethal plotting by Iran through proxy actors.
INSKEEP: OK. Well, where does that leave the safety of American military aircraft abroad?
FRAYER: Well, that's exactly what British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband talked to Secretary of State Rubio in a phone call last night. The U.S. has pulled its heavy bombers out of the U.K., but it still has fighter jets and aerial refueling tankers stationed here. And the former diplomat von Hippel told me there's concern, you know, about the proliferation of cheap drones, about these decoy operations and also about Iranian psyops, psychological operations, because, you know, in this case, masked men without weapons were enough to get the U.S. to move its bombers out of this country, bombers that are worth billions. And now those planes have to fly longer from the U.S. to attack Iran, which may have been exactly Iran's aim was here.
INSKEEP: NPR's Lauren Frayer. Thanks for the insights.
FRAYER: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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