Residents in East Anglia might have thought Christmas had come early when they saw unusually bright lights in the night sky last month. But the fast-moving UFOs had not been sent to spread festive cheer.
Farm worker Ricky Fletcher, 43, was leaving work when he saw one passing overhead. ‘I almost thought it was a helicopter, it was so big,’ he told the Mail. ‘But the way the lights flashed, it wasn’t a plane. It was definitely a drone.’
Soon after that, he says, the sky filled with more: ‘All of a sudden we looked up and saw about ten. They were just circling around. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing.’
In fact what they were seeing was some of the illegal and so far unexplained drone activity over four American airbases in the UK – RAF Lakenheath and Mildenhall in Suffolk, RAF Feltwell in Norfolk, and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire – that caused a major security alert last month. On some nights, there were dozens of drones over Lakenheath, which is on course to host nuclear weapons.
Now the Mail has learnt that it wasn’t just US air bases that were targeted – defence sources have revealed British bases around the country were also buzzed by drones, as part of what the government believes was a coordinated operation by a foreign state. ‘There was a lot of activity which was pretty widespread across the UK, and not just US bases,’ said an insider.
But who was behind it?
The nature of the activity – with large numbers of similar drones, not all of them commercially available and targeting myriad bases in a short period – prompted investigators quickly to rule out the theory that amateur drone enthusiasts were responsible. This looked like hostile state action.
Then there was the timing.
An image captured some of the suspected drones seen flying over RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk
US Air Force F-35 jets at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, a base used by the US Air Force in the UK
After the British government granted Ukraine permission to fire UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles into Russian territory, President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed the first such strikes on November 20.
The drones appeared in Britain’s skies that very same day. An investigation last month was led by police, but
British Special Forces were reportedly also brought in to hunt for the operators.
There have reportedly been at least two meetings of Cobra, the government’s emergency response committee, to discuss the drones.
The military has started using a counter-drone system called ORCUS to help protect the US bases. It can jam the signal to the device and electronically take control of it, which means it can then discover its operator.
While the government has so far been reluctant to officially point the finger at Russia over the drone activity, others are not.
Philip Ingram, a former British army intelligence colonel, said the sightings had ‘all the hallmarks’ of an operation by Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, which is responsible for operations on foreign soil.
‘It’s a distinct possibility if not a certain probability this is all down to Russian intelligence,’ he said. ‘I would say we will see another flurry of activity in the next few months for sure.’
A number of drones have been spotted being used illegally over four air bases used by the US Air Force (USAF) in the UK
General Sir Richard Shirreff, former Nato Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, told the Mail that while he is no longer privy to official intelligence, the culprit is clear. ‘It entirely conforms to Russian hybrid warfare,’ he said. Hybrid warfare is a type of conflict favoured by Russia that combines irregular tactics such as political interference, cyber attacks and economic sabotage. Harassing air bases is a part of that strategy, said Shirreff.
And that’s not to mention potentially vital information gathered about American and British military assets.
Even sending drones to surveil the US base at RAF Feltwell – which provides logistical support to other bases and housing for personnel and their families – made perfect sense, the former general argued. ‘It could be that in conducting surveillance over eastern England they are preparing themselves [for war] so that they know where the married quarters are, and they could take out all the pilots before they get in their airplanes,’ he said.
Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, the ex-head of the British Army’s chemical weapons unit, believes the Kremlin may have been attempting to ‘test the waters’ – probing the defences of military bases and logging response times, personnel numbers and equipment.
Some, though not all, of the drones that were identified are commercially available rather than exclusively used by the military. Given their relatively short range, this would indicate that their operators were in the UK. De Bretton-Gordon agrees the Russians could be using ‘sleeper agents’ – deep-cover spies embedded as ordinary citizens. Ten such agents were uncovered in America by the FBI in 2010. ‘It’s no secret that there are sleepers and stuff around. It’s espionage 2.0.’ he said.
But, he says, even ordinary UK citizens could be persuaded to do the job. ‘If you’re a young person and somebody is giving you several thousand dollars to do something that seems dead straightforward, you will do it.’
If it was British nationals in the pay of the Russians, it would not be the first time that the Kremlin has employed such tactics.
Warning notices are pictured fixed to the perimeter fence of RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk
In March, Russian operatives allegedly hired a group of six men to set fire to a Ukrainian-owned business in east London. The blaze took 60 firefighters to bring under control.
The Kremlin has long been testing plans to bring mass disruption to the West. Russian intelligence is suspected of using saboteurs to carry out a series of parcel fires targeting delivery companies in the UK (including one at a warehouse near Birmingham), Poland and Germany as ‘test runs’ for targeting cargo flights to the US.
In October, Ken McCallum, head of MI5, said that Russian secret agents had carried out ‘arson, sabotage and more – dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness’. Naturally, the Kremlin denies it carries out any such activities in the UK.
So if Russia was behind the UK drone incursions, is it also behind the wave of similar – and pretty much simultaneous – incidents in the US earlier this month?
Americans are prone to lay the blame for any hostile state espionage at China’s door, but defence insiders say it would be too much of a coincidence for Beijing to launch a wave of drone incursions on US military sites just as Moscow is doing the same across the Atlantic – and add that the notion that the two countries might be coordinating drone operations is far-fetched.
The vast majority of the mysterious night-time drone sightings over New Jersey and other parts of the north-eastern US in the past month were false alarms. A White House security spokesman said that only 100 out of 5,000 incidents reported in recent weeks required further investigation. Many people have simply seen ordinary planes and there have also been copycat incidents.
But Russia may well be responsible for the genuine sightings.
Defence experts point out that at least some of the confirmed incidents were reported by trained observers at military installations.
The mysterious drones have been spotted in the air across the UK, experts fear they could be Russian
In an incident ten days ago, drones described by a military official as being of various ‘sizes and configurations’ were spotted over the vital Wright Patterson Air Force Base, hundreds of miles west of New Jersey in Ohio, causing it to it close its airspace.
As in the UK, the official line is that there’s no evidence the drones were deployed by a foreign power, with federal agencies denying there’s any threat to national security.
Many suspect Washington is not saying all it knows.
Meanwhile, some Americans agree with Donald Trump that it’s time to blast drone intruders out of the sky, only for officials to warn they could shoot down manned aircraft by mistake.
Just the sort of lethal mayhem that would surely make the Kremlin very happy.
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