Iranian General, Qassem Suleimani, (Credit: Farsi.Khamenei.ir/Creative Commons)

Hamed Chapman

UK ministers are being urged to explain whether the Yorkshire-based secretive RAF Menwith Hill intelligence was involved in recent drone strike assassinations after new research raises questions about the UK’s role in US attacks.

The report, presented to a special meeting of the Menwith Hill Accountability Campaign, concludes it was “probable” that Iranian General, Qassem Suleimani, was assassinated in January last year using information obtained from the British site, which “acted as a foreign outpost of the US National Security Agency.”

It also raises questions about whether British personnel on what is the world’s largest electronic monitoring station are involved in assisting deadly US drone strikes – in particular in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, all conflict zones where the UK is not formally at war.

In the report, Barnaby Pace, an investigative journalist, complains that the US and UK forces at Menwith Hill “operate beyond public scrutiny and accountability” – and that, unless there were changes, “Orwellian surveillance systems and extrajudicial executions exposed in recent years will likely continue”.

“Intelligence programmes at Menwith Hill have reportedly played a key role in operations to ‘eliminate’ people in Yemen, as part of a deadly drone bombing campaign that has resulted in dozens of civilian deaths in a country that neither the UK nor the US has declared war with,” Pace added.

The report calls for “any US military activity or US security agency activity carried out at Menwith Hill be carried out in such a way as to make those responsible fully accountable to the UK”.
Soleimani, head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, together with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Commander of Iraq’s

Popular Mobilisation Forces, was killed in a drone attack at Baghdad airport in January 2020 in a strike ordered by US President, Donald Trump. The UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings, Agnes Callamard, confirmed the controversial assassination violated international law. Although nominally an RAF base, Menwith Hill is in fact the largest known overseas site of the NSA, with 600 US personnel outnumbering the 500 British civilians on site.

Leaked documents from the Snowden files have shown that the base is part of an eavesdropping network, able to collect data from hundreds of millions of emails and phone calls daily and of pinpointing phones on the ground.

According to the Ministry of Defence spokesman, RAF Menwith Hill is “part of a worldwide US defence communications network, with the base supporting a variety of communications activity.”

It states that “for operational security reasons and as a matter of policy, neither the MoD nor the [US] Department of Defense publicly discusses specifics concerning military operations or classified communications regardless of unit, platform or asset.”