Intelligence

British terror plot foiled by the spies from the Puzzle Palace

Adam Nathan, Gareth Walsh and David Leppard
Message intercept linked to Al-Qaeda

THE tip-off arrived in a sterile computer room deep inside the Puzzle Palace one cold morning in February. The machine’s gentle whirring was to spark a sequence of events that led to last week’s cracking of a suspected bomb plot in Britain.
Formally known as Fort Meade, the Puzzle Palace is the Maryland headquarters of America’s National Security Agency (NSA) and is the world’s largest electronic eavesdropping centre.

Its giant computers monitor millions of phone calls and e-mails each day. Most are innocent. A few weeks ago, as the printer fed out an automatic translation of a communication thought to be between Britain and Pakistan, the NSA’s analysts knew they had to act fast.

On the other side of the Atlantic, some of Britain’s most senior terrorist-hunters were alerted. Within hours of the printout, they had gathered in London.

Those present included David Veness, head of special operations at Scotland Yard, and Eliza Manningham-Buller, director-general of MI5, the security service. Also present were a sprinkling of officers from MI6, the foreign intelligence service, and GCHQ, Britain’s own version of the Puzzle Palace based in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

The meeting marked the beginning of Operation Crevice, an international anti-terrorist sweep involving as many as 1,000 police officers in Britain alone.

Detectives from the National Crime Squad (NCS) were redeployed from dealing with organised crime. A large part of the surveillance capability of Scotland Yard was switched to Crevice. “It takes up to 40 officers to keep tabs on one suspect and we pulled in absolutely everyone to make sure we didn’t mess up on this one,” said one Metropolitan police commander involved in the operation.

It resulted last week in the seizure of half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser in a lock-up near Heathrow. The chemical, widely used in home-made terrorist bombs, would have been enough to wreak havoc on the scale of some of the IRA’s most devastating attacks. The operation, which is continuing, has so far led to 10 arrests, including those of nine Britons, eight of Pakistani origin and one from an Algerian family. A tenth arrest was made in Canada.

The reason the original tip, picked up by NSA satellites, had been given such high priority was that it appeared to be instructions for an attack passing between Al-Qaeda commanders in Pakistan and associates in Britain.

The sender was apparently in the circle around Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the world’s most active and feared terrorists. Zarqawi has been blamed for masterminding synchronised attacks on the Iraqi cities of Baghdad and Karbala that killed 280 people during a Muslim religious festival in March.

He has previously been linked to Islamic militants in Britain. For months now, the growing wisdom among intelligence experts has been that the old Al-Qaeda organisation had broken up — still a potent danger, but consisting of loosely linked Islamist groups around the world sharing a similar anti-western agenda.

The old command structure, it was thought, had been scattered by the fall of the Taliban and the destruction of training camps in Afghanistan, together with the worldwide roundup of suspects. Here, 2½ years into the war on terror, was evidence that Osama Bin Laden’s lieutenants were issuing orders to militants in Britain.

“We all thought there were cells operating in isolation and had been told that the Al-Qaeda network had been destroyed from the top when suddenly we find a chain of command leading back to Pakistan,” said a senior Scotland Yard source.

Elements of the SAS’s counter-terrorism unit were called up to support the police operation. Eventually, the round-the-clock monitoring — by electronic means and agents on the ground — paid off. Police and MI5 officers picked up information that led them to a self- storage unit in Hanwell, west London.

A specialist Scotland Yard team was given orders to break into the building, but to leave no trace of its presence. Inside, the team found the half ton of ammonium nitrate. The IRA used it as explosive, but it has also been used in attacks such as last year’s suicide bombs in Istanbul, which killed the British consul and many others.

A decision was made to ensure the explosives could not blow up, said a Scotland Yard source, who would not specify how this was achieved. “Let’s just say we did something to make it safe for the public no matter what happened,” he said.

Finally, the order was given for the swoop that brought the first phase of Operation Crevice to a spectacular close. The first move was in Ottawa. Mohammad Momin Khawaja, 29, a software developer who was born to Pakistani parents but brought up in Canada, was arrested at work while police smashed down the door of his home.

Investigators claim he had a “pivotal role” in the alleged plot, as well as links to Saudi Arabian extremists.

About 12 hours after Khawaja was pulled in, the main phase began in Britain at dawn on Tuesday. Officers launched a series of raids across southeast England.

All of those picked up are now being held under anti-terrorism legislation at Paddington Green, the high-security police station in west London. Police are trying to determine who was actually involved in the bomb threat, who bought the bomb material and what was the intended target.

Since the arrests, attention has turned to the backgrounds of those arrested and fears of “home-grown” terrorism. More than half the suspects come from the Crawley area of West Sussex, mainly from Langley Green, an apparently innocuous suburb.

Langley Green has one of the highest percentages of ethnic minority inhabitants south of London. Almost a quarter of residents described themselves as Asian or British Asian in the 2001 census.

The growth in numbers from the subcontinent has led to some tensions with the white population — and the minority communities are themselves divided by heroin and crack cocaine on the one hand and Islam on the other.

“There is a big split here between the religious and the druggies. You are either in one camp or the other,” said one local Pakistani youth.

Most of the men picked up are thought to have been far too young to have been to Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.

One of those arrested, a teenager, was hoping to go to university. All were described by bemused locals as models of suburban respectability. Most of those detained were British citizens, who had gone to local secondary schools and in some cases gained good GCSE results.

By Thursday evening, four-strong forensic teams were continuing to trawl through at least six properties in Langley Green. At one address, the patio was being dug up.

Sources close to the investigation said the searches were part of an effort to locate detonators and boosters that would be needed to set off a bomb. Ground was also being dug up in woodland near Crawley police station.

Omar Bakri Mohammed, leader of the radical Muslim group al-Muhajiroun, last week claimed 40 of his organisation’s members had, in 2000, formed an ultra-radical splinter group in Crawley after complaining that he and his followers were not sufficiently hardline. The al-Muhajiroun extremists are believed to have infiltrated the Langley Green mosque near the men’s homes.

“There were rumours that people in Crawley were being encouraged by someone at Langley Green mosque to go on jihad and for terrorism,” said one Muslim youth.

Last week, the mosque denied the allegations.

Less than a week before the raids, websites operated by some members of the British arm of al-Muhajiroun were taken offline, apparently without the group’s co-operation.

Anyone trying to visit the pages was confronted with a message telling them that access was forbidden and giving a stern warning that their request “should not be repeated”.

Just hours after the arrests, however, one of the sites displayed a warning suggesting a repeat of the Madrid bombing “is promised in the UK”.

Some of those arrested are believed to be computer experts. During the raids, police seized eight laptops and five desktop computers from an internet cafe in Langley Green.

Police computer experts are scouring e-mail records from the cafe for links between the arrested suspects and senior militants in Pakistan, as the intelligence agencies try to establish links between nine British terror suspects and senior militants in Pakistan.

As detectives continued to question the young men suspected of plotting a huge bomb attack in Britain, MI5 and MI6 pressed on with their investigations into influential foreign figures who might have been advising them.

“More will surface on the external aspects of this alleged plot,” said a source familiar with the operation. Officials made it clear that Pakistan was in their sights.

Several of the suspects had visited Pakistan and one had been to disputed region of Kashmir. Of those arrested on Tuesday, one is 32, but the others are all under 22 — three of them teenagers. They are not particularly religious, intelligence sources say.

As Operation Crevice progressed, news came through of the Madrid bombings on March 11, in which 191 people were killed.

Shortly afterwards, Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan police commissioner, said a similar attack on this country was “inevitable”.

Police said that there would be arrests in Britain shortly in connection with the financing of the Madrid attacks.

Police believe that Al-Qaeda had been planning to hit “soft” targets in Britain such as nightclubs, buses and shopping centres.

Scotland Yard said there were concerns that a truck filled with explosives could be parked unnoticed near a busy nightspot and called for greater public vigilance. “We urge anyone who sees something suspicious to phone the anti-terrorist hotline,” said a spokesman.

Copyright 2004 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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