The Defence of the Realm (153 page)

Soon after Ali returned to Heathrow from Pakistan on 24 June, the Security Service discovered that he had brought with him large quantities of AA batteries and a powdered soft-drink concentrate called Tang, whose purpose did not become clear until MI5 was able to watch Ali and his associates making the bombs they intended to explode on board transatlantic aircraft. The opportunity to do so came on 20 July when a member (or members) of Ali's family purchased for £138,000 in cash a two-bedroom flat at 386a Forest Road, not far from Ali's Walthamstow home, which within a few days was turned by Ali and other plotters into a bomb factory.
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Despite the fact that the plotters were wary of surveillance, the flat was quickly fitted with listening devices and a miniature camera in what Jonathan Evans remembers as ‘a difficult but spectacularly successful operation.' Evans was reminded of the operation which had kept
the leading PIRA bomber, ‘Rab' Fryers, under surveillance before his arrest in 1994 and stopped the Provisionals' bombing campaign against the City of London: ‘We could see what they were doing in some detail, and that's a very reassuring place to be. We could play it long because of the penetrative coverage and be reasonably confident we could control the risk.' The MI5 surveillance team were able to monitor the flat at 386a Forest Road in real time, choosing daily edited highlights to show to senior management.
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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.
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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.'
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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 . . .'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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].'
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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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'.
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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.
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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 present
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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.
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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.'
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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.'
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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.