Pentagon Elaborate ruse made Tehran look wrong way

Late on Friday night, eight US B-2 bombers took off from Whiteman air force base in Missouri and turned westwards towards the Pacific.

- Julian Borger

Amateur flight trackers plotted their progress on social media as the black flying-wing warplanes joined up mid-air with refuelling tankers and checked in with air traffic controllers once they had reached the open ocean.

The movement of the B-2 bombers towards the US Pacific base on Guam triggered speculation that Donald Trump was arranging his pieces on the board in advance of a decision on whether to join Israel in bombing Iranian nuclear facilities.

On Thursday, Trump had let it be known that he would make that decision over the following two weeks, suggesting a window remained open for some last-ditch diplomatic alternative to war. He angrily denied a Wall Street Journal report that he had already approved a strike plan.

The British, French and German foreign ministers seized the opportunity to meet their Iranian counterpart, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, for talks in Geneva on Friday, but it was to little or no avail. Trump himself was characteristically dismissive of European efforts. "Nah, they didn't help," he told journalists.

We know now that this and the B-2 flights over the Pacific were part of the same elaborate ruse to ensure Iran was off its guard and looking the wrong way, and that the president's two-week diplomatic window was likely to have been part of the same ploy.

The Pentagon described the eight bombers that were spotted flying west as "a decoy, a deception effort" known only to an extremely small number of planners and leaders in Washington and at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida.

As they were tracked across the western states and then the Pacific, another seven B-2s took off from Whiteman base and headed in the opposite direction - eastwards.

These seven planes made no communications with each other or with the ground as they crossed America and flew unnoticed over the Atlantic.