Spectators observe a F-15E Strike Eagle war-plane at RAF Lakenheath, Suffolk, which has hosted US forces since 1949. JETPHOTOS/ALAMY.
LONG READ
THE NEW INTERNATIONALIST
1 September 2024
Matt Kennard
So-called RAF bases filled with US military personnel are a tell-tale sign of Britain’s key role in US imperialism, writes Matt Kennard.
Four years after my book The Racket was first published, I started my own media outlet with historian and journalist Mark Curtis. It was a departure from what I had focused on before – the consequences of US imperialism around the world – because this new publication, Declassified UK, would cover British foreign policy.
Britain handed the mantle of world domination to the US after World War Two and the received history is that it then retired from any kind of imperial role. I found out pretty quickly at Declassified that this was a misunderstanding. The truth is the empire never died. Britain merely became a ‘junior partner’ to the US hegemon. London’s adjunct status did not mean it was insignificant, however. The City of London’s role as the world’s financial capital which spreads neoliberalism around the world, Britain’s vast network of military bases, alongside its corporate giants like BP and BAE Systems, showed the country still served a critical imperial role for its senior partner.
But a more interesting realization for me came when I started to look at the institutions that make up the US empire and their role in Britain. I had spent years looking at what institutions like the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the US military were doing in the Global South, where their power was exercised against often weak states. But I saw quickly that the infrastructure of the US empire which had colonized so much of the world had also colonized my home country, the country where I had lived nearly all my life. Britain, in fact, appeared to be more completely under the control of its American ally than any country I’d looked into around the world in The Racket.
The similarities did not stop there. Like the mainstream media could never mention the term ‘US empire’ or explain its real role in world affairs, those same establishment journalists did not touch US influence in Britain. This was, again, an invisible empire, hiding in plain sight. The work I began doing would have never made it into the pages of my old employer, the Financial Times, like so many truths in The Racket never could.
Into the state
The colonization by the US empire of Britain became particularly clear when the Labour party elected Jeremy Corbyn leader in September 2015. A veteran anti-war and anti-imperialist politician and activist, Corbyn was a complete outlier within the British political system. He was dangerous to the rule of the British establishment, but also the ability of the US to retain Britain as a vassal state. The different pressure points that stay hidden in normal times, when the system is running like it should, quickly became exposed. This was made explicit in June 2019, when US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Britain and was recorded saying privately: ‘It could be that Mr Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.’
Pompeo had served as CIA director from 2017–18, and Corbyn later told me he believed Pompeo’s comments were intended as ‘a quite deliberate message’ to him. Corbyn then mentioned the CIA-organized overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected president Salvador Allende in 1973.
Britain’s traditional subservience to the US ‘could have gone a different way at various points in modern history, recently if Jeremy Corbyn hadn’t been destroyed by a vicious media campaign,’ Noam Chomsky has written. But it was not a coincidence. The US was integral to building a British political system that made a ‘different way’ next to impossible. I began looking at how the US state had been interfering in British politics to stop the rise of anti-imperialist leaders. Britain has never had a prime minister that was not signed up to the US imperial project. I started to realize this was not a mistake, but the result of concerted efforts from Washington.
One particularly interesting organization was the British-American Project (BAP), which describes itself as ‘a transatlantic fellowship of over 1,200 leaders, rising stars and opinion formers from a broad spectrum of occupations, backgrounds, and political views’. Work to create the BAP began, with funding from the US embassy in London, in the early 1980s when Labour was headed by Michael Foot, the first non-atlanticist Labour leader to emerge since World War Two. The BAP’s aim was to push British progressives into a pro-American political position at a time when the CIA was worried about the strength of the Labour left and its ‘anti-American’ views.
Many Labour figures who became outspoken critics of Corbyn’s leadership from 2015–2020 were also involved in the BAP. Corbyn was the first non-Atlanticist Labour leader since Foot resigned in 1983.
Corbyn was dangerous to the rule of the British establishment, but also to the ability of the US to retain Britain as a vassal state
Declassified files from the CIA show how concerned the intelligence agency then was by the left turn in Labour. The BBC noted ‘the deep level of concern inside the CIA about the strength of the Left within Labour in the early 1980s, a political force which the agency regarded as anti-American’. The CIA was particularly concerned about Foot winning the 1983 general election, with an internal report stating that ‘a Labour majority government would represent the greatest threat to US interests’. Foot’s 1983 election manifesto questioned ‘the programme for establishing American-controlled cruise missiles on our soil’ and noted that a new European security pact should end with the ‘phasing out’ of NATO. The BAP’s own official history notes that ‘the traditional British leftwing remained deeply suspicious of the United States, particularly on foreign policy and security issues’ in the period, adding ‘this was the era of Michael Foot’s leadership of a Labour Party committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament’.
Historian Stephen Dorril has written that Eugene Rostow, President Reagan’s director of the US arms control and disarmament agency, was in 1982 ‘concerned about the growing unilateralist movement’ and ‘helped initiate a . . . propaganda exercise in Britain, aimed at neutralizing the efforts of CND’. Michael Foot was a founder and strong supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), while Corbyn has been a member of the peace group since he was 15 and was, at the time of his election to the Labour leadership, its vice-chair.
The US neutralization campaign, which was leaked to the Washington Post, ‘would take three forms’, Dorrill continued: mobilizing public opinion, working within the churches, and a ‘dirty tricks’ operation against the peace groups. William Casey, then head of the CIA, met with the US Information Agency to organize the propaganda campaign in Europe. But in 1985, with Foot defeated and the BAP established, the CIA expressed concern that the Labour Party was still ‘in the hands of urban leftists given to ideological extremes’.
The CIA made its 1980s files about Labour available online in 2017, soon after Corbyn was elected leader. They were extensively covered by the British media and contained two specific references to Corbyn, who was a Labour MP at the time.
Michael Foot's non-atlanticist position was considered a major threat to US interests. Here he boards a plane to Moscow with shadow foreign secretary Denis Healey to strike a nuclear disarmament deal with the Soviet Union. PA IMAGES/ALAMY.
One file noted Corbyn’s support in 1986 for an El Salvadoran trade union federation, Fenastras, which was linked to Marxist guerrillas during the country’s civil war, while the US backed the military government. Corbyn was also mentioned in a US diplomatic cable sent from Istanbul in 2002, and published by WikiLeaks, describing a protest in the city against the US push for war in Iraq, which embassy staff apparently monitored. ‘Union leaders made speeches and the crowd chanted anti-US and anti-war slogans including “No to Imperialist War”, and “We Will Not Be American Soldiers”,’ the cable noted, adding that ‘speakers included a British Member of Parliament, Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party’.
THE NEW INTERNATIONALIST
1 September 2024
Matt Kennard
So-called RAF bases filled with US military personnel are a tell-tale sign of Britain’s key role in US imperialism, writes Matt Kennard.
Four years after my book The Racket was first published, I started my own media outlet with historian and journalist Mark Curtis. It was a departure from what I had focused on before – the consequences of US imperialism around the world – because this new publication, Declassified UK, would cover British foreign policy.
Britain handed the mantle of world domination to the US after World War Two and the received history is that it then retired from any kind of imperial role. I found out pretty quickly at Declassified that this was a misunderstanding. The truth is the empire never died. Britain merely became a ‘junior partner’ to the US hegemon. London’s adjunct status did not mean it was insignificant, however. The City of London’s role as the world’s financial capital which spreads neoliberalism around the world, Britain’s vast network of military bases, alongside its corporate giants like BP and BAE Systems, showed the country still served a critical imperial role for its senior partner.
But a more interesting realization for me came when I started to look at the institutions that make up the US empire and their role in Britain. I had spent years looking at what institutions like the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the US military were doing in the Global South, where their power was exercised against often weak states. But I saw quickly that the infrastructure of the US empire which had colonized so much of the world had also colonized my home country, the country where I had lived nearly all my life. Britain, in fact, appeared to be more completely under the control of its American ally than any country I’d looked into around the world in The Racket.
The similarities did not stop there. Like the mainstream media could never mention the term ‘US empire’ or explain its real role in world affairs, those same establishment journalists did not touch US influence in Britain. This was, again, an invisible empire, hiding in plain sight. The work I began doing would have never made it into the pages of my old employer, the Financial Times, like so many truths in The Racket never could.
Into the state
The colonization by the US empire of Britain became particularly clear when the Labour party elected Jeremy Corbyn leader in September 2015. A veteran anti-war and anti-imperialist politician and activist, Corbyn was a complete outlier within the British political system. He was dangerous to the rule of the British establishment, but also the ability of the US to retain Britain as a vassal state. The different pressure points that stay hidden in normal times, when the system is running like it should, quickly became exposed. This was made explicit in June 2019, when US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Britain and was recorded saying privately: ‘It could be that Mr Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.’
Pompeo had served as CIA director from 2017–18, and Corbyn later told me he believed Pompeo’s comments were intended as ‘a quite deliberate message’ to him. Corbyn then mentioned the CIA-organized overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected president Salvador Allende in 1973.
Britain’s traditional subservience to the US ‘could have gone a different way at various points in modern history, recently if Jeremy Corbyn hadn’t been destroyed by a vicious media campaign,’ Noam Chomsky has written. But it was not a coincidence. The US was integral to building a British political system that made a ‘different way’ next to impossible. I began looking at how the US state had been interfering in British politics to stop the rise of anti-imperialist leaders. Britain has never had a prime minister that was not signed up to the US imperial project. I started to realize this was not a mistake, but the result of concerted efforts from Washington.
One particularly interesting organization was the British-American Project (BAP), which describes itself as ‘a transatlantic fellowship of over 1,200 leaders, rising stars and opinion formers from a broad spectrum of occupations, backgrounds, and political views’. Work to create the BAP began, with funding from the US embassy in London, in the early 1980s when Labour was headed by Michael Foot, the first non-atlanticist Labour leader to emerge since World War Two. The BAP’s aim was to push British progressives into a pro-American political position at a time when the CIA was worried about the strength of the Labour left and its ‘anti-American’ views.
Many Labour figures who became outspoken critics of Corbyn’s leadership from 2015–2020 were also involved in the BAP. Corbyn was the first non-Atlanticist Labour leader since Foot resigned in 1983.
Corbyn was dangerous to the rule of the British establishment, but also to the ability of the US to retain Britain as a vassal state
Declassified files from the CIA show how concerned the intelligence agency then was by the left turn in Labour. The BBC noted ‘the deep level of concern inside the CIA about the strength of the Left within Labour in the early 1980s, a political force which the agency regarded as anti-American’. The CIA was particularly concerned about Foot winning the 1983 general election, with an internal report stating that ‘a Labour majority government would represent the greatest threat to US interests’. Foot’s 1983 election manifesto questioned ‘the programme for establishing American-controlled cruise missiles on our soil’ and noted that a new European security pact should end with the ‘phasing out’ of NATO. The BAP’s own official history notes that ‘the traditional British leftwing remained deeply suspicious of the United States, particularly on foreign policy and security issues’ in the period, adding ‘this was the era of Michael Foot’s leadership of a Labour Party committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament’.
Historian Stephen Dorril has written that Eugene Rostow, President Reagan’s director of the US arms control and disarmament agency, was in 1982 ‘concerned about the growing unilateralist movement’ and ‘helped initiate a . . . propaganda exercise in Britain, aimed at neutralizing the efforts of CND’. Michael Foot was a founder and strong supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), while Corbyn has been a member of the peace group since he was 15 and was, at the time of his election to the Labour leadership, its vice-chair.
The US neutralization campaign, which was leaked to the Washington Post, ‘would take three forms’, Dorrill continued: mobilizing public opinion, working within the churches, and a ‘dirty tricks’ operation against the peace groups. William Casey, then head of the CIA, met with the US Information Agency to organize the propaganda campaign in Europe. But in 1985, with Foot defeated and the BAP established, the CIA expressed concern that the Labour Party was still ‘in the hands of urban leftists given to ideological extremes’.
The CIA made its 1980s files about Labour available online in 2017, soon after Corbyn was elected leader. They were extensively covered by the British media and contained two specific references to Corbyn, who was a Labour MP at the time.
Michael Foot's non-atlanticist position was considered a major threat to US interests. Here he boards a plane to Moscow with shadow foreign secretary Denis Healey to strike a nuclear disarmament deal with the Soviet Union. PA IMAGES/ALAMY.
One file noted Corbyn’s support in 1986 for an El Salvadoran trade union federation, Fenastras, which was linked to Marxist guerrillas during the country’s civil war, while the US backed the military government. Corbyn was also mentioned in a US diplomatic cable sent from Istanbul in 2002, and published by WikiLeaks, describing a protest in the city against the US push for war in Iraq, which embassy staff apparently monitored. ‘Union leaders made speeches and the crowd chanted anti-US and anti-war slogans including “No to Imperialist War”, and “We Will Not Be American Soldiers”,’ the cable noted, adding that ‘speakers included a British Member of Parliament, Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party’.
Old dogs, new tricks
The BAP and its cultivation of the progressive forces in Britain to a pro-US position reminded me of what I had seen around the world, with the funding of civil society to keep target societies under Washington control. I started then looking at some of the specific institutions I’d seen enforcing US control in places like Bolivia and Ecuador. One of them – the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – pops up regularly throughout The Racket. I quickly found that the NED was also working in Britain, funding media groups, something which had picked up around 2015, the year Corbyn was first elected leader of the Labour party. A non-profit corporation funded by the US Congress, it had ploughed over £2.6 million into seven British independent media groups in the five years up to 2020.
The NED was ‘created… to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades,’ the New York Times reported in 1997. That included spending millions of dollars to ‘support things like political parties, labor unions, dissident movements and the news media in dozens of countries.’ Since the end of the Cold War, the NED had grown and been involved in trying to undermine or remove governments independent of Washington, including democratically elected ones in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. Allen Weinstein, the director of the research study that led to the creation of the NED in the 1980s, remarked in 1991: ‘A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.’13
The NED traditionally focused on Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia. But I found the organization had recently funded three British media outlets and four UK press freedom groups. All were seen as on the progressive end of the political spectrum.
The NED was created in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan, who actually set out the idea in a set-piece speech in Westminster, in front of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The aim, he said, was ‘to foster the infrastructure of democracy’. This was a time of embarrassing scandals for the CIA. A Washington Post article soon noted: ‘The old concept of covert action, which has gotten the [CIA] into such trouble during the past 40 years, may be obsolete.’
The NED was meant to defend against these scandals by putting certain programmes out into the open. ‘The sugar daddy of overt operations has been the National Endowment for Democracy,” the Washington Post continued. “Through the late 1980s, it did openly what had once been unspeakably covert.” CIA whistleblower Philip Agee, who served in the agency in the 1960s, commented in 1995: ‘Nowadays, instead of having just the CIA going around behind the scenes and trying to manipulate the process secretly by inserting money here and instructions there and so forth, they have now a sidekick, which is this National Endowment for Democracy.’
John Kiriakou, a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, told me that recent changes in the law have widened the potential targets of US information operations. ‘In 2011, the US Congress changed the law that forbade the Executive Branch from propagandizing the American people or nationals of the other ‘Five Eyes’ countries – the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand,’ he said.
‘The National Endowment for Democracy, like Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, countless Washington-area “think tanks”, and Radio/TV MartÃ, are the vehicles for that propaganda,’ he added, referring to the US broadcaster that transmits to Cuba.
Kiriakou, who served in the agency’s core directorate of operations, continued: ‘And what better way to spread that propaganda than to funnel money to “friendly” outlets in “friendly countries”? The CIA’s propaganda efforts throughout history have been shameless. But now that they’re not legally relegated to just Russia and China, the whole world is a target.’ One particularly interesting case was Index on Censorship, the UK’s foremost free expression group which monitors threats to free speech and publishes censored writers. It received £603,257 from the NED in 2016–21, according to its Charity Commission accounts.
Margaret Thatcher meets with Ronald Reagan, 28 November 1978, prior to their respective election wins. Reagan went on to create the National Endowment for Democracy which ploughed millions of dollars into British media. KEYSTONE PRESS/ALAMY.
Index’s chief executive at the time, the former Labour MP Ruth Smeeth, was appointed in June 2020 – six months after losing her seat in parliament. A US diplomatic cable, published by WikiLeaks in 2010, named Smeeth as a source for the US embassy in London to ‘strictly protect’. The cable – written in 2009 by US deputy chief of mission in London, Richard LeBaron – noted: ‘Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Burton Ruth Smeeth (strictly protect) told us April 20 that [Prime Minister Gordon] Brown had intended to announce the elections on May 12.’ The cable continued that ‘a despondent Smeeth said’ Brown had to abandon his election plan after a drop in Labour’s poll numbers following a media scandal. LeBaron added: ‘This information has not been reported in the press.’ The cable was classified as ‘confidential’ and ‘not for foreign eyes’.
One of the founders of Index in 1972, the poet Stephen Spender, had earlier resigned as editor of Encounter magazine when it was exposed as being funded by the CIA. Spender said he was unaware of the funding arrangements. Spender then founded Index, and quickly solicited a ‘substantial grant’ from the Ford Foundation, which Frances Stonor Saunders states, in her award-winning work The Cultural Cold War, acted as a conduit for CIA funds in the period. Saunders told me it was ‘widely known at the time the Ford Foundation was a witting partner of the CIA’. In her book, Saunders wrote: ‘The foundation’s archives reveal a raft of joint projects.’
This is how it works. Not just in the developing world, but, I was learning, in the developed world, too. In fact, the control was even deeper. I soon understood that the US was not just interfering in the British political process, media and civil society. The hidden fist of the US empire which I’d seen deployed all over the developing world – the massive American military – was also occupying Britain.
I found the US Air Force (USAF) had 9,730 personnel permanently deployed throughout Britain, a number which was increasing rapidly. Britain, in fact, hosted the third highest level of USAF personnel of any country in the world, ahead of historic US military outposts like South Korea and Italy. These American airmen had flown bombing missions to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya from their bases in Britain. ‘The USAF presence in Britain isn’t just some remnant of the Cold War, it’s ongoing and very active,’ Kate Hudson, chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, said. During Ukraine tensions in 2022, huge American B-52 nuclear-capable bombers were seen leaving and arriving at a RAF base in Gloucestershire. ‘The US says they were on a training exercise to ensure they are “ready”, presumably for war on Ukraine,” Hudson added. ‘Once again we have a situation where war or other military actions can be prosecuted from Britain without parliamentary scrutiny.’
The hidden fist of the US empire which I'd seen deployed all over the developing world — the massive American military — was also occupying Britain
Of the 55,223 active-duty US airmen deployed overseas in 2021, 16 per cent were hosted in Britain. There were, in fact, more active-duty USAF personnel in Britain than in 40 of the US’s own states. This included Maryland, which hosts Joint Base Andrews, home to Air Force One and known as ‘America’s Airfifield’. US military personnel in Britain are all in England, with access to 11 Royal Air Force (RAF) bases, stretching from Cambridgeshire to Yorkshire. They are known officially as United States Visiting Forces (USVF). Altogether there were 12,147 US military personnel in Britain in March 2022. A further 150 Americans are deployed with NATO, the majority at its intelligence centre at RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire. The US military also had 100 personnel based in London, including 52 inside the American embassy, and a further 135 people deployed at multiple undisclosed locations across the UK.
Jewel in the crown
The largest US military presence is at RAF Lakenheath, a 727 hectare site in Suffolk. Despite being called an RAF base, it is leased to the USAF, and its population is overwhelmingly American. There were 5,404 US Department of Defense personnel based there in 2022. A nondescript village with a population of 5,000 people, Lakenheath directly abuts the US base and has a clear American influence. The Turkish barber proudly displays the Stars and Stripes alongside the Union Jack on its shop front. The Volvo car dealership on the outskirts sells only to US military personnel.
In the Co-op on the quiet high street, Klara, 24, is stacking shelves. She followed her boyfriend, an engineer, to Lakenheath a year ago after he found work nearby. ‘It has been quite weird at times, because obviously there’s a lot of people moving in and out throughout the year,’ she told me. ‘Especially working in the shop, I do see a lot of new faces for such a small village.’ She added: ‘There’s a lot of Americans coming in.’ Klara said the US aircraft have become more frequent in recent months. ‘With the planes it does get loud sometimes.’ Does she have any security fears about living next to a USAF base? ‘Personally I do think about it. If war does happen, we are kind of like the target aren’t we, with the base right there, so yeah it is a bit scary sometimes, if you actually properly think about it.’
A road sign for cars exiting RAF Lakenheath reminds drivers: ‘Drive On The Left’. The issue has been on the national agenda since 2019 when 19-year-old Harry Dunn was killed by the wife of a CIA officer driving on the wrong side of the road near RAF Croughton, another US-leased base in Northamptonshire. The US helped the driver, Anne Sacoolas, leave the country soon after, and later said she had diplomatic immunity for the alleged crime. As well as being a CIA base, RAF Croughton is a USAF communications station and accounts for 25 per cent of all military communications from Europe back to the US.
The US is spending billions of pounds upgrading air bases in Britain to enable Washington to intercept international communications and launch military strikes more quickly. Some of the locations are hubs for offensive bombing missions. RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire is the USAF’s only bomber Forward Operating Location, or military base, in Europe. The aircraft deployed there ‘enable US and NATO warfighters to conduct a full spectrum of flying operations’. Made available by the British government, it was used by US bombers during the war in Iraq in 2003. Just after I visited, two nuclear-capable American B-52 bombers were spotted leaving RAF Fairford for a ‘target acquisition’ exercise over mainland Europe.
But the UK appears to have very little control over what happens on the USAF-operated bases or the missions that are flown from them. The overarching framework for the stationing of US forces in the UK comes from two pieces of legislation. In 1951, NATO agreed a ‘status of forces’ agreement to govern hosting arrangements between its member states. The following year, The Visiting Forces Act incorporated the NATO agreement into UK law. But Hudson said that these agreements ‘ultimately reserve jurisdiction of US personnel to the US’. Most of the American bases are called RAF stations and leased by the US. ‘Because of this, while the physical buildings comprising the bases are usually the property of the UK Ministry of Defence, very little of what happens in them is controlled by the British government,’ Hudson said. The empire never sleeps and, despite the mainstream media working to keep it invisible, it’s everywhere.
This is an edited version of the new preface to The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire by Matt Kennard. The second edition is out now, published by Bloomsbury and available at bloomsbury.com and via all good bookshops.
The largest US military presence is at RAF Lakenheath, a 727 hectare site in Suffolk. Despite being called an RAF base, it is leased to the USAF, and its population is overwhelmingly American. There were 5,404 US Department of Defense personnel based there in 2022. A nondescript village with a population of 5,000 people, Lakenheath directly abuts the US base and has a clear American influence. The Turkish barber proudly displays the Stars and Stripes alongside the Union Jack on its shop front. The Volvo car dealership on the outskirts sells only to US military personnel.
In the Co-op on the quiet high street, Klara, 24, is stacking shelves. She followed her boyfriend, an engineer, to Lakenheath a year ago after he found work nearby. ‘It has been quite weird at times, because obviously there’s a lot of people moving in and out throughout the year,’ she told me. ‘Especially working in the shop, I do see a lot of new faces for such a small village.’ She added: ‘There’s a lot of Americans coming in.’ Klara said the US aircraft have become more frequent in recent months. ‘With the planes it does get loud sometimes.’ Does she have any security fears about living next to a USAF base? ‘Personally I do think about it. If war does happen, we are kind of like the target aren’t we, with the base right there, so yeah it is a bit scary sometimes, if you actually properly think about it.’
A road sign for cars exiting RAF Lakenheath reminds drivers: ‘Drive On The Left’. The issue has been on the national agenda since 2019 when 19-year-old Harry Dunn was killed by the wife of a CIA officer driving on the wrong side of the road near RAF Croughton, another US-leased base in Northamptonshire. The US helped the driver, Anne Sacoolas, leave the country soon after, and later said she had diplomatic immunity for the alleged crime. As well as being a CIA base, RAF Croughton is a USAF communications station and accounts for 25 per cent of all military communications from Europe back to the US.
The US is spending billions of pounds upgrading air bases in Britain to enable Washington to intercept international communications and launch military strikes more quickly. Some of the locations are hubs for offensive bombing missions. RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire is the USAF’s only bomber Forward Operating Location, or military base, in Europe. The aircraft deployed there ‘enable US and NATO warfighters to conduct a full spectrum of flying operations’. Made available by the British government, it was used by US bombers during the war in Iraq in 2003. Just after I visited, two nuclear-capable American B-52 bombers were spotted leaving RAF Fairford for a ‘target acquisition’ exercise over mainland Europe.
But the UK appears to have very little control over what happens on the USAF-operated bases or the missions that are flown from them. The overarching framework for the stationing of US forces in the UK comes from two pieces of legislation. In 1951, NATO agreed a ‘status of forces’ agreement to govern hosting arrangements between its member states. The following year, The Visiting Forces Act incorporated the NATO agreement into UK law. But Hudson said that these agreements ‘ultimately reserve jurisdiction of US personnel to the US’. Most of the American bases are called RAF stations and leased by the US. ‘Because of this, while the physical buildings comprising the bases are usually the property of the UK Ministry of Defence, very little of what happens in them is controlled by the British government,’ Hudson said. The empire never sleeps and, despite the mainstream media working to keep it invisible, it’s everywhere.
This is an edited version of the new preface to The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire by Matt Kennard. The second edition is out now, published by Bloomsbury and available at bloomsbury.com and via all good bookshops.
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