Clarke added that over the last year, “There has been an unrelenting demand for intelligence to be investigated and operations conducted to arrest suspects or disrupt terrorist activity when judged to be appropriate. The Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch have around 70 current investigations, spanning London, the U.K. and the globe. That is the nature of what we face.”
Citing information provided by Britain’s counter-intelligence service MI-5 (also known as the Security Service), the British Broadcasting Corporation earlier this week reported that “around 400,000 people in the U.K. are ‘sympathetic to violent jihad around the world.’” The BBC added that within this large pool of sympathizers, as many as “1,200 people have been identified as being activists the Security Service believe are engaged in acts of terrorism at home and abroad.”
While declining to confirm the specific figures reported by the BBC, a spokesman for the Home Office, the UK cabinet department responsible for supervising MI-5’s operations, acknowledged that British authorities had indeed conducted private polling of attitudes in the U.K. Muslim community and that the BBC’s figures were “in the right ballpark … We wouldn’t quibble with that.”
The Home Office spokesman described the four plots that Clarke claimed UK authorities had disrupted over the last year as “pretty well advanced” at the time they were foiled by authorities. The Home Office official, as well as a spokeswoman for Scotland Yard, confirmed that three of the plots were disrupted by the filing of criminal charges, which are still pending against suspects who have not yet been tried. The British government spokespeople said that the Home Office had used administrative anti-terrorist powers—which include powers to either deport aliens “deemed” threats to national security or to subject them to stringent control measures similar to house arrest—to foil the fourth plot which Clarke spoke about.
The U.K. spokespeople added that the four serious plots which they claim to have disrupted since last year’s attacks did not include a series of attempted public transport bombings on July 21 of last year, which resulted in the arrests of numerous suspects. The July 21 attacks, believed by investigators to have been an effort by “copycats” to imitate the deadly July 7 attacks, fizzled when all of the home-made knapsack bombs carried by the July 21 attackers failed to go off when the would-be terrorists pressed the triggers.
Apart from the continuing threat hanging over both residents of, and visitors to, Britain, the estimated numbers of terror suspects potentially active in Britain also pose potential problems for authorities in the U.S., the European Union and any other country where people with British passports can enter with relative ease. U.S. State Department and Homeland Security officials acknowledge that U.K. citizens remain eligible to enter the United States as tourists under a “visa waiver” program, under which the foreigners do not have to apply in advance for a U.S. visa at an American Embassy, but instead can just fly into a U.S. airport, fill out an immigration form, and be allowed into the country for up to 90 days.
Homeland Security inspectors at airports and other U.S. entry ports are supposed to check “visa waiver” applicants in online data bases and, usually, to take their pictures and record their fingerprints using equipment installed at immigration screening points after 9/11. However, if a “visa waiver” applicant from Britain is unknown to intelligence officials in the United States or the U.K., it is unlikely that Homeland Security officials would have any grounds for denying them entry.
A U.S. counter-terrorism official, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject matter, said that U.S. intelligence agencies for some time had been aware of the possible terror threat posed by disaffected or militant Muslims living in Britain with U.K. passports; all but one of the four perpetrators of the July 7 London bombings last year not only had a U.K. passport but was born in Britain (the fourth July 7 bomber was born in Jamaica but was a U.K. resident). The official said that the possibility that the U.K. was a staging area for militants who could use British passports to gain easy entry to the United States was “something that concerns us”—but added that such concerns extended to other friendly countries, including European nations whose citizens were also eligible for U.S. visa waivers. The official noted that a Belgian-born woman who became a suicide bomber in Iraq after converting to Islam could perhaps just as easily have traveled to the United States. Another American counter-terrorism official said U.S. agencies have a master database of the names of around 300,000 terrorism suspects, but added that some of these names could be aliases for persons also listed under other names.
At Britain’s Home Office, a spokesman said there was a “high level of cooperation” on anti-terrorist investigations between the U.K. and United States and added that British authorities “flag and share information” with American authorities “about those who pose a national security threat.” Published U.K. government reports on the July 7, 2005, London Transport bombers established, however, that while British agencies had acquired sketchy intelligence information about two of the attackers—including the suspected bombing team leader, Mohammed Siddique Khan—during both 2003 and 2004, the men were deemed to be low priority counter-intelligence targets and were not thoroughly investigated due to limited manpower.
A spokesman for the U.S. Homeland Security Department had no immediate comment on whether U.S. border authorities were being urged to pay extra attention to U.K. visitors even though they are eligible for visa waivers. A U.S. official knowledgeable about the visa waiver program said, however, that the countries whose citizens were eligible to apply for easy U.S. entry under the program were designated by Congress, and that changes in the law governing the program would therefore also be up to Congress to make.
In the wake of last summer’s attacks, U.K. authorities stepped up intelligence gathering and MI-5, which was once so secretive it had no public address and did not exist in law, launched a major recruiting campaign via the Internet. Earlier this week, several U.K. media outlets, including the BBC, reported that Al Qaeda sympathizers had tried to join MI-5 during its recruiting drive, but had been spotted and “weeded out” during the course of background investigations.
