On 3 August the camera in the flat showed Ali and his chief lieutenant, Tanvir Hussain, drilling a hole in the bottom of a soft-drink bottle in order to replace its contents with concentrated hydrogen peroxide without breaking the seal on the cap. The hydrogen peroxide had been purchased by Sarwar using the alias Jona Lewis from a garden centre in South Wales; he had also been detected buying a probe thermometer and other equipment to produce the correct concentration of hydrogen peroxide. The Tang powder which Ali had brought from Pakistan was to have been used to colour the hydrogen peroxide to give it the appearance of a soft drink and increase its explosive potential. The surveillance camera in the bomb factory showed that the detonators for the explosive soft-drink bottles which Ali, Hussain and their fellow suicide bombers planned to take on board transatlantic flights were to be disguised as AA batteries whose contents had been replaced with HMTD (hexamethylene triperoxide diamine). Placed inside disposable cameras in hand luggage, the batteries were highly unlikely to arouse suspicion. When bomb-making, Ali and Hussain spoke in semi-coded language: ‘stock’ was hydrogen peroxide, a ‘cricket bat’ was a detonator.99 Though they were to be arrested before any of the bombs was ready, in a later BBC TV Panorama programme one of the explosive devices they had intended to construct, assembled by the weapons expert Dr Sidney Alford, blew a hole in an aircraft fuselage.
On 3 August, the day when the surveillance camera in the Forest Road flat provided the first evidence of bomb-making, an email sent by Ali to Pakistan (later obtained by the Met) appeared to give a coded indication that the attack plan was almost complete: ‘. . . I’ve set up my mobile shop now. Now I only need to sort out an opening time.’100 Operation OVERT had become the largest surveillance operation in the history of MI5 and the Met. Andy Hayman, the Met’s Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations, wrote later: ‘We logged every item they bought, we sifted every piece of rubbish they threw away (at their homes or in litterbins). We filmed and listened to them . . .’ 101 Sarwar was tracked as he travelled to South Wales to buy large quantities of hydrogen peroxide, and was videoed buying a suitcase in which he hid some of his purchases in woods near his High Wycombe home.
As well as being used as a bomb factory, the Forest Road flat was also used by six of the plotters to record martyrdom videos to be made public after their deaths and (they believed) entry into paradise.102 Wearing headscarf and black robe, and jabbing his finger repeatedly at the camera, Ali declared angrily (though not always coherently):
. . . Sheikh Usama [bin Laden] warned you many times to leave our land or you will be destroyed, and now the time has come for you to be destroyed and you have nothing but to expect that floods of martyr operations, volcanoes and anger and revenge and raping among your capital and yet, taste that what you have made up taste for a long time and now you have bear the fruits that you have sown.103
Other martyrdom videos also emphasized that there would be many more such attacks. Tanvir Hussain regretted that he could only be a suicide bomber once:
For many years, you know, I dreamt of doing this, you know, but I didn’t have no chance of doing this. I didn’t have any means. (Thank God) Allah has accepted my duas [prayers], yeah, and provided a means to do this. You know I only wish I could do this again, you know, come back and do this again and just do it again and again until people come to their senses and realise, realise you know, don’t mess with the Muslims.104
On 6 August Ali was observed in a Walthamstow internet café noting from airline websites the departure times of transatlantic flights. On the 9th a co-conspirator was overheard asking him in the Forest Road flat, ‘What’s the timeframe anyway?’ ‘A couple of weeks,’ Ali replied.105
During the final stages of the plot both the DG and the Prime Minister were on holiday. Manningham-Buller was at her farm some way from London (though in daily contact with, and returning frequently to, Thames House). Tony Blair was in Barbados. The DG’s deputy, Jonathan Evans, briefed the Home Secretary, John Reid, twice a day. Reid in turn briefed Blair in Barbados. Evans found Reid ‘very, very interested in the operational detail and very focused, but scrupulous in not interfering in the conduct of the operation’. Delaying the arrest of the plotters until there was enough usable evidence to convict them required political courage by Reid as well as a strong nerve by MI5 and Met senior management. At one critical moment in Operation OVERT Reid told Evans: ‘If this goes wrong, I’m out of a job, you’re out of a job, and the government will fall.’106
US intelligence chiefs were, unsurprisingly, nervous at the prospect of another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11, this time mounted by British Islamists from Heathrow, and worried that any delay in arresting the plotters might allow them to go ahead. Though unable to influence the timing of the arrests in Britain, the Americans brought pressure to bear on the Pakistanis to arrest Rashid Rauf.107 When stopped by local police in a taxi in Rawalpindi on 9 August, Rauf initially gave his name as Ghulam Hassan. A search of his bedroom, however, found the UK passport in his real name which he had used to enter Pakistan when fleeing from a murder investigation in Britain in 2002. Police also found two other passports with Rauf’s photograph (one British, one South African, each in a different name), two other identity cards, six Visa cashpoint and bank cards in three different names, five mobile phones, a laptop with a USB external drive (which contained targeting information and details of chemical and biological weapons), a stun gun and twenty-nine small bottles of hydrogen peroxide.108
The premature arrest of Rauf, which dismayed MI5 and the Met, denied them the two further days they had wanted to complete the pre-arrest phase of Operation OVERT. Peter Clarke said later: ‘We were at a critical point in building our case. If word got out that [Rauf] had been arrested, evidence might well be destroyed or scattered to the four winds. More worrying still was the prospect of a desperate attack [by the plotters in Britain].’109 Arrests of the alleged plotters and their associates began the same evening. In Ali’s possession, when he was arrested with Assad Sarwar in a Walthamstow car park, was a computer memory stick containing details of seven transatlantic flights due to take off from Heathrow Terminal 3 within a period of two hours thirty-five minutes. For much of their journeys to cities in the United States and Canada, they would have been airborne simultaneously.110 The destruction of seven aircraft in mid-air by suicide bombers would have caused loss of life on the scale of 9/11 (even greater if some of the planes had exploded over cities).
At about 10 p.m., John Reid, wearing dark glasses because of a painful eye condition, chaired a first meeting of COBR, which continued until after midnight.111 At 2 a.m., with most of the suspected plotters under arrest, the news that JTAC had raised the alert level to ‘critical’ was made public. COBR reconvened at 5 a.m. At the height of the holiday season airports were thrown into chaos as passengers were suddenly forbidden to take on board liquids, gels or cream, as a precaution against the kind of explosive devices being manufactured in the Forest Road bomb factory, and severe restrictions were imposed on hand luggage. At COBR Andy Hayman watched ‘politicians’ stress levels . . . rising as they saw television news pictures of irate holidaymakers waiting for delayed and cancelled flights’.112
On the morning of 10 August Reid announced to a Westminster press conference that the ‘main players’ involved in preparations for a terrorist attack which would have caused deaths on an ‘unprecedented scale’ were under arrest. In Barbados Blair paid public tribute to MI5 and the police for their ‘extraordinary amount of hard work’ in tracking the plot over a ‘long period of time’.113 A few days later, with Manningham-Buller back at Thames House, Evans left on a delayed family holiday, substituting a few days in Paris by Eurostar for the longer Mediterranean vacation he had planned. Shortly after the Prime Minister returned from Barbados on 25 August, Manningham-Buller, Evans and the counterterrorist director went to brief him. Blair invited them into his study and watched intently video footage on the counter-terrorist director’s encrypted
laptop of Ali and Tanvir constructing bombs in the Forest Road flat.114 A few weeks later there was a series of detailed briefings, this time including dramatic extracts from the martyrdom videos (of which copies had been found in Sarwar’s possession), for MI5 staff in the Thames House basement restaurant. It was easy for those present115 to imagine extracts from the videos being broadcast, as Al Qaida had intended, by TV stations around the world in the aftermath of what would have been the most devastating terrorist attack in aviation history.
Most of those who had seen the intelligence obtained from the Forest Road bomb factory were incredulous that, despite the large amount of evidence which the jury had to consider, it took a six-month trial and a six-month retrial for the three ringleaders – Ali, Sarwar and Hussain – to be found guilty of conspiracy to murder by causing explosions on aircraft. In September 2009, at the end of the retrial, Ali, Sarwar and Hussain were sentenced to life imprisonment with minimum terms of, respectively, forty, thirty-six and thirty-two years. As a result of the first trial, the retrial and a further trial which concluded in December 2009, two other plotters were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and five others of lesser charges.116
Though Islamist terrorism remained by far the greatest threat to national security, the Service allocated 15 per cent of its resources in the financial year 2007–8 to dealing with Irish-related terrorism. In October 2007, for the first time in its history, the Service was given the lead intelligence role in Northern Ireland, with a new Belfast headquarters. In its report for 2007–8, the ISC endorsed the Service’s assessment that ‘dissident republican groups such as the Real IRA and Continuity IRA . . . continue to pose a threat to Great Britain and to Northern Ireland in particular.’117
These groups had mounted a number of unsuccessful attacks principally against police officers. On 7 March 2009 the Real IRA claimed responsibility for the deaths of two soldiers of 38 Regiment, Royal Engineers, Sappers Patrick Azimkar and Mark Quinsey, killed by gunmen as they came to the entrance of Massereene Barracks, County Antrim, to collect pizzas. No soldier had been killed in Northern Ireland for the past twelve years. Two other soldiers and the pizza delivery men were seriously wounded. On 9 March PC Stephen Carroll, a member of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), was shot dead as he answered a 999 call in Craigavon. This time Continuity IRA claimed responsibility. Carroll was the first member of the PSNI to be killed since it succeeded the RUC in 2001. Though such killings had been sadly commonplace during the Troubles, the response to them in March 2009 was eloquent testimony to the progress made by the peace process over the previous decade. Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein, Deputy First Minister in the powersharing government headed by Peter Robinson, leader of the Democratic Unionists, denounced those responsible for the murders as ‘traitors to the island of Ireland’ and appealed to the public to help the police find the murderers.
There was no sign, however, of a full-scale return to the Troubles. A representative of the Real IRA Army Council declared in April 2009 that it would limit itself to ‘tactical use of armed struggle’: ‘The days of a campaign involving military operations every day or every few days are over. We’re looking for high-profile targets, though we’ll obviously take advantage when other targets present themselves.’118 Though there were no more killings by dissident Republicans for the remainder of 2009, two huge bombs which failed to explode came close to causing serious loss of life. In August a 600-pound bomb was discovered in Armagh with a command wire running across the border with the Irish Republic. A robbery near by had been apparently intended to bring PSNI officers to the vicinity where some would have been killed had the bomb been successfully detonated. In November the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the dissident Republican threat in Northern Ireland was at its highest level for almost six years. Shortly afterwards a car containing a 400-pound bomb was driven through a barrier outside the Policing Board headquarters in Belfast. The men inside ran off and the car burst into flames, but the bomb only partially exploded. There were no casualties.
Dissident Republican violence continued during the early months of 2010. In January a thirty-three-year-old Catholic PSNI officer was seriously injured by an under-car bomb in County Antrim, and the Real IRA opened fire twice on police stations in County Armagh. In February forty families had to be evacuated from their homes after a pipe-bomb attack on a Belfast police station, and a large car bomb exploded outside Newry Courthouse in County Down, while police were evacuating the area. The PSNI said that it was a ‘sheer miracle’ that no one had been killed or injured. It seemed only a matter of time before one of the dissident attacks ended in tragedy.
By 2008–9 three-quarters of Security Services resources were devoted to countering Islamist terrorism (up from two-thirds in 2007–8).119 In 2005 the Service had identified five key elements in the radicalization process: attendance at a mosque linked to Islamist extremism; the influence of Islamist friends and associates; the role of an extreme spiritual leader; the influence of Islamist propaganda; and attendance at jihad training camps. Operation OVERT helped to modify the Security Service’s view of the problem of Islamist radicalization. By 2007 the Service placed less emphasis on the mosque:
Extremists are moving away from mosques to conduct their activities in private homes and business premises . . . We assess that radicalisation increasingly occurs in private meeting places, be they closed prayer groups at mosques, self-defence classes at gyms or training camps in the UK or overseas.
Social networks, MI5 now believed, could sometimes be more important than Islamist preachers: ‘In the case of Op OVERT, it is assessed that friendships from school and universities were the initial basis for many of the relationships of those involved.’ The most effective Islamist propaganda was increasingly spread in cyberspace rather than by radical mosques:
Recent study has also raised the importance of the internet as a vehicle for extremist propaganda, which may be of particular importance to younger individuals, for whom access to more conventional meeting places (and the radicalising influences therein) may be restricted. Chat rooms, message boards and forums provide opportunities for extremists to establish contacts and radicalise each other.120
The Security Service was well aware that its own operations could do no more than contain the threat from Islamist terrorism. The success of a broader government strategy, summarized as Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Prepare, was vital:
• preventing terrorism by tackling the radicalisation of individuals
• pursuing terrorists and those that sponsor them
• protecting the public, key national services and UK interests overseas
• preparing for the consequences
In an address to Security Service staff early in 2009, Jonathan Evans added a fifth ‘P’: Perseverance to underpin the other four.
In the two years from January 2007 to January 2009 eighty-six people (almost half of whom pleaded guilty) were convicted of Islamist terrorist offences. Among them, in December 2008, was Bilal Abdulla, a twentyeight-year-old doctor at the Royal Alexandria Hospital, Paisley, described as ‘a religious extremist and bigot’ by the judge who sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum term of thirty-two years. With a fellow Islamist, Kafeel Ahmed, Abdulla had staged unsuccessful attacks on London nightclubs and Glasgow airport, using cars loaded with explosive material. Ahmed died from severe burns sustained in the Glasgow attack before he could be brought to trial. After the arrest of Abdulla, two further vehicles were discovered, together with gas cylinders and petrol cans, which, it appeared, were intended for a further series of attacks designed to cause mass casualties.
The success in bringing Islamist terrorists to court paradoxically made MI5 operations against them more difficult. What they learned from court cases about operational methods also increased their ability to take evasive action. The Security Service believed that the core Al Qaida leadership on Pakistan’s north-west frontier continued to plan major at
tacks in Britain, using British nationals and residents. Seventy-five per cent of the British Islamists investigated by the Security Service in recent years had links with Pakistan.121 In January 2009, Jonathan Evans publicly acknowledged that, if another attack took place, the Service would probably discover, as after 7/7, that some of the terrorists responsible were already on its books. ‘But the fact we know of an individual and the fact that they have had some association with extremists doesn’t mean we are going to be indefinitely in a position to be confident about everything that they are doing, because we have to prioritise.’ In the summer of 2009 as the Security Service approached its centenary it was engaged in almost 200 major investigations of Islamist terrorism, over 15 per cent of which, it concluded, represented ‘a high level of threat’.122 Almost none of the 2009 investigations were publicly revealed. A rare exception was Operation PATHWAY. Late in 2008 the Security Service began investigating intelligence reports that Al Qaida attack personnel were present in the north of England. By the spring of 2009 its investigations focused on Abid Naseer, a twenty-three-year-old Pakistani living in Manchester and studying for a BSc in computer studies at John Moores University Liverpool, who was believed to be linked to Al Qaida. On 3 April Naseer was seen seated at a keyboard in an internet café in Cheetham Hill, Manchester. An unsigned email (subsequently recovered) sent while he was at the keyboard, and believed to be from him, included what was thought to be a coded reference to attack planning:
My mates are well and yes my affair with Nadia is soon turning to family life. I met with Nadia family and we both parties have agreed to conduct the Nikkah [Muslim marriage ceremony] after 15th and before 20th of this month. I have confirmed the dates from them and you should be ready between these dates. I am delighted that they have strong family values . . .
The Defence of the Realm Page 112
