London, perhaps informed in part by decades of battling the Irish Republican Army, viewed this more as a law enforcement problem - quite serious, certainly, but requiring a scrupulous commitment to collecting evidence for a future trial.īut that didn’t mean the U.K.
The United States, still reeling from the trauma of 9/11, saw the conflict against al-Qaeda as a war against an implacable foe that needed to be destroyed one way or another.
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What ultimately became a model for successful international cooperation against a major terror plot was not always such, because of fundamentally different perspectives about how to confront the adversary. As the fuzzy bits of data sharpened, intelligence officials realized the men they were tracking planned to blow up several passenger flights bound for North America. London focused on the plotters, Washington monitored their emails, and Islamabad began to try to locate the mastermind hiding somewhere inside Pakistan. Because the suspects were British citizens trained in Pakistan, all the countries’ intelligence agencies had to get involved. It became increasingly clear that the terror group was planning something big. The British quickly informed the Americans that Ali was in contact with other suspicious individuals in Pakistan and Britain with known and suspected al-Qaeda ties. But the 2006 disruption of the liquid bombers stands out as a highlight in a long, and still ongoing, struggle to keep citizens of democracies safe while respecting civil liberties, human rights and the rule of law.īy mid-2006, British authorities were monitoring a London native named Abdulla Ahmed Ali, tipped off by his communications with a man who had tried and failed to blow himself up on the Underground the year before.
war against terrorist groups over the last two decades has had a mixed track record at best. But the thwarted scheme has a bigger legacy: as an object lesson in how to successfully fight transnational terror alongside allies and without resorting to illegal or legally dubious tactics. Most people remember the transatlantic terror plot - if they do at all - as the reason they cannot bring more than 3 oz. Cooperation from the United States, as well as from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), had been critical to the effort that ended with the raft of arrests on that August night. “If the Boy Scouts had a surveillance team,” Steve Dryden of the London Metropolitan Police dryly noted, “we’d have used them as well.” Across the Atlantic, the White House, CIA, NSA and other departments were providing as much assistance to their British counterparts as possible. OVERT was a huge undertaking over 800 surveillance officers worked on cracking that cell, with teams pulled in from Northern Ireland and the military. and Pakistan worked together to crush what would come to be known as the transatlantic aircraft plot: a terrorist conspiracy to kill thousands of passengers by detonating liquid explosives hidden in plastic bottles. It was the culmination of Operation OVERT, a massive investigation that had been whirring relatively quietly for months as the U.S., the U.K. That night and into the following morning, scores of police kicked down doors across London and elsewhere, tackling suspects on the street, dragging others from their homes and safehouses. Thus began a massive crackdown throughout the United Kingdom. Utterly caught off guard, two men who had spent the last several months plotting to bring down multiple passenger planes over the Atlantic Ocean gave up without a fight. These men and women were suddenly tasked to arrest the two top suspects in al-Qaeda’s largest terror plot in the West since 9/11 - and they didn’t have a single firearm among them. But this was Great Britain, where the police do not carry guns. Their high-priority targets had converged on a single spot, and there was little time to waste. The surveillance team watching the men from afar was ordered to move in and arrest them immediately.
There, they leaned against a wall in the dark, chatting.Ī little way off in the darkness, the command crackled over the police comms. They met in the parking lot, briefly rummaging around in the back of one of their cars, before walking off toward the Walthamstow War Memorial. Two local men had arranged to meet at the Town Hall complex to discuss an urgent matter. It was evening in Walthamstow, East London. Aki Peritz is a former CIA analyst and the author of Disruption: Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History, from which this article is adapted.Īugust 9, 2006.
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