Financial Times (8.17.05)

Transatlantic co-operation stepped up.

By Peter Spiegel, Roger Blitz and Demetri Sevastopulo

Five years ago, a British-born Muslim flew to New York’s John F. Kennedy airport for what US officials maintain was an eight-month reconnaissance mission for al-Qaeda.

American investigators allege that he and two other Britons collected details of some of the most iconic buildings in global finance: the International Monetary Fund’s head office in Washington, Prudential’s world headquarters in Newark, New Jersey, and the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup Center in Manhattan. His goal, according to an indictment in New York in April, was to help put together an attack plan that included use of a weapon of mass destruction.

Indeed, according to interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda mastermind being held by the US, the Briton was sent on his mission by Osama bin Laden himself to “case potential economic and ‘Jewish’ targets in New York City”.

Despite the scale and audacity of the plot, American officials learnt of it only in July 2004. The administration of President George W. Bush made the discovery very public: it raised the declared national threat level, warned the buildings that had been targeted and asked the UK to detain the British national (who for legal reasons can currently not be named in Britain). That achieved, American officials began crowing. “The kind of information available to us today is the result of the president’s leadership in the war against terror,” Tom Ridge, then the homeland security secretary, said last August.

But the way things had been handled did not please the Bush administration’s closest ally in the war on terror. According to people briefed on the case, the suspect had been under surveillance by British authorities – and the public disclosure of the plot forced the UK to end the intelligence gathering and make an arrest. British legal action followed and no extradition has yet taken place.

“There are very good reasons why we shouldn’t reveal certain information to the public,” David Blunkett, then home secretary, wrote in an opinion article for The Observer days after Mr Ridge’s announcement. “We do not want to undermine in any way our sources of information, or share information which could place investigations in jeopardy.”

It was a rare public split between the two countries. In dozens of interviews with the Financial Times since the July London bombings, current and former diplomats, intelligence agents, and police officers on both sides of the Atlantic have argued that the Anglo-American relationship on intelligence sharing and law enforcement is closer than that of any other two nations.

But as each country grapples with its set of terrorist threats, there have been tensions and disagreements about how to proceed. As in the case of the Briton sought by the US, many of the disagreements have centred on how aggressively to dismember – rather than gather intelligence on – suspected terrorist cells. They have also touched on issues of political culture, such as how and when the public should be informed about a potential terror threat.

Indeed, in the weeks since the London bombings, the differences between the two countries have sometimes been more noticeable than the co-operation. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police chief, last month blamed American “agencies” for leaking photographs of the July 7 blast scenes and unexploded bombs to US television. Then, two weeks ago, the New York Police Department was forced to apologise to its London counterparts after officers briefed local business executives about how the bombers built and transported their explosives – details that came to be reported in the US press.

“[The problem] we have had with the British is the failure to see that the existing laws and protections, privacy etc, aren’t getting the job done in terms of protecting their own society,” says one former senior US intelligence official. “The place was being used as a recruitment centre and also a place from which people were being dispatched out for training to other places.” A diplomat involved in bilateral relations adds: “We have different styles. It tends to be more of a familial dispute than an inter-state dispute, but sometimes those can be a lot nastier.”

Despite the high-profile disagreements of recent weeks, officials and analysts on both sides of the Atlantic point out that moves by the government of Tony Blair to clamp down on UK-based radicals, along with an increasingly vocal debate over whether British authorities should be more open about when they have learnt about domestic terrorist threats, are slowly moving Britain to what many consider a more American-style approach to counter-terrorism.

The policies announced this month by the prime minister include allowing the Home Office to deport foreigners for “fostering hatred, advocating violence to further a person’s beliefs, or justifying or validating such violence”. In many ways, the move mirrors American policies adopted since September 11. Indeed, the US has been arresting and prosecuting radical Islamic preachers – such as Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian cleric accused of inciting followers to bomb New York landmarks – since the mid-1990s.

At the same time, some of Britain’s senior police officers are questioning their tradition of keeping a tight grip on intelligence about suspected domestic terror groups – although the courts, which have much stricter rules on jury bias than those in the US, frequently prevent officials from disclosing much of what they know about potential threats. In addition, UK officials occasionally disparage American tendencies to overplay intelligence that has been gathered – in the case of the alleged eight-month reconnaissance of US east coast landmarks, for instance, information that was years old – and the way it is disseminated.

According to several officials on both sides of the Atlantic, the UK would never adopt a colour-coded warning system that the US has used. Yet some urge a rethinking of how to keep the public informed, and thus provide millions of additional eyes and ears for police attempting to learn more about domestic threats. “Do we put enough information out? My direct answer is No,” says James Hart, commissioner of the City of London Police. “We could put a lot more information out in the public arena. It’s a cultural thing: that is not what we do.”

Yet many are wary of UK actions taking on a more American guise. “I’m not sure that we can learn [from the US],” says Tarique Ghaffur, the Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner who is responsible for community policing and is Britain’s most senior Muslim police officer. “We police with communities, not in spite of them. All our roots are embedded in communities. We do not have large jumbo agencies parachuting into communities.”

The basis for the different national approaches to domestic terrorism, experts and officials agree, goes back generations. “Karl Marx is buried in Highgate Cemetery,” observes Peter Bergen, an American-born but British-educated terrorism expert now based in Washington. “There is a long and honourable tradition of allowing dissidents to operate openly in the UK.”

That history of tolerance – which allowed men as varied as Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta and Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh to call London home – has been followed by decades in which the British security services infiltrated Irish Republican terrorist groups during the troubles in Northern Ireland. Combined, experts say, those experiences produced a political and security culture that allowed Islamic radicals to operate in the UK relatively unhindered – indeed, frequently protected by the courts – even as intelligence and law enforcement officials kept them under scrutiny.

The practice has drawn criticism in some American quarters, where sceptics argue that allowing radical imams to voice support for Islamic extremism foments anti-Western violence. “It would be wrong to say that there was ever a bad relationship [between the intelligence agencies],” says one former senior US intelligence official. “It was just that some of us, when we looked at our British colleagues, felt they were being short-changed in terms of policy . . . and the societal laws were putting them in a position where it was almost impossible to work.”

A recent report to the US Congress, issued just weeks after the July 7 bombings, argued that the UK had been following a practice of “watchful tolerance” of Islamic radicals, noting British arguments that any more severe treatment could be counterproductive.

“Many point to the UK as a key sanctuary for Islamists claiming political persecution at home,” said the report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service. “UK officials have been inclined towards ‘watchful tolerance’ of such extremists, claiming that freedom of speech must be protected and that cracking down on them would only drive them underground and deprive authorities of valuable intelligence information.”

Indeed, in probably the highest profile case involving a London-based radical imam, British authorities repeatedly refused to detain Abu Hamza al-Masri until American prosecutors indicted him last year on charges of conspiring to kidnap western tourists in Yemen.

The US has taken a more aggressive tack in dealing with radicals – a stance that has engendered its own criticism, particularly from civil liberties groups that accuse American authorities of jailing Islamists simply because of opinions they hold.

The most hotly debated of such cases concluded last month when Ali al-Timimi, an American-born Islamic scholar, was sentenced to life in prison for urging his Virginia followers to train for holy war against the US, including joining the Afghan-based Taliban, in the weeks following the September 11 attacks. Even Leonie Brinkma, the federal district court judge presiding in the case, appeared to sympathise with Mr al-Timimi when she described the congressionally mandated sentence as “very draconian”.

American officials acknowledge that the UK faces a different environment, with a much larger and frequently more radical domestic Muslim population than the US. “Second-generation American Muslims become Muslims,” argues Mr Bergen, but they “don’t go off to fight in Kashmir”.

One American diplomat who has worked closely with the UK on counter-terrorism issues also notes that Britain’s small size and island geography make it easier for the security services to track and gather intelligence on local extremists, a luxury he contends that the US does not have. “You can get lost in the US a lot easier,” says the diplomat. “Letting people wander around and watching them presents more of a dilemma.”

Whatever the reason, the Labour government has now decided that the “watchful tolerance” policy, if it ever officially existed, is no longer adequate. In the prime minister’s words, “the rules of the game are changing”, and he has vowed to fight British courts in order to keep Islamists who vocally back jihadi violence out of the UK. Many in the intelligence community argue, though, that the impact of radical imams can be overstated and other complicated and long-simmering motivations can drive disaffected Muslims into violent extremism.

Others maintain that both the US and the UK have been slow to wake up to the threat posed by domestically based Islamic extremism, one that countries on the Mediterranean have been forced to confront much earlier because of their proximity to North Africa and the Middle East. “However lax the British have been in this, we have been just as lax in the US,” argues Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA agent who worked in the Middle East and Central Asia. “There’s only one country in Europe that worked terribly hard on this issue before September 11 and that was France.”

Several current and former government officials suggest that any tensions between the US and UK on how to approach terror threats are no different from tensions that exist within each country, where intelligence and law enforcement agencies have clashes of their own. Mr Gerecht argues that pushing hard to break up terrorist networks, rather than patiently monitoring them, was more a characteristic of the Federal Bureau of Investigation than any US intelligence agency.

“I don’t think the agency [CIA] would have a great deal of difference with the Brits regarding a surveillance regime on the ground,” Mr Gerecht says. “Usually, there is no great desire to take these people down.”

Retired Admiral James Loy, until recently the number two official at the US department of homeland security, says he had regular meetings with his counterparts at the Home Office – talks where intelligence, strategy and methods were discussed with full openness. “I cannot remember any incident in my work where we were hesitant to share anything,” Admiral Loy says. “It’s a bit of a special case with the Brits.”