The MI5 surveillance team picks up its suspect as he leaves his parents’ house in an Asian-dominated area of one of Britain’s major cities. The watchers keep their distance unobtrusively as the target — we will call him Jamal — stops to speak to another young Asian.
The body language makes it clear that Jamal is in charge. The conversation is not aggressive, but nor are they merely chatting. It is clearly not a chance encounter, and it is taking place on a well chosen patch of waste ground where they cannot be overheard. The MI5 team holds off.
Jamal has no record of extremism. He has never been seen publicly to side with the angry young men who after Friday prayers rage against Britain’s involvement in the war in Iraq.
Jamal’s family has been here for several generations. He is regarded by those who know him as fully assimilated into British society. He has what his mother rightly regards as “a respectable job” working in computers.
On the face of it his frequent trips to Pakistan are innocent visits to see his aunts and uncles. But intelligence obtained by MI6 from a “liaison service”, in this case the CIA, shows that Jamal spends most of his “holidays” in Pakistan in guesthouses in the tribal homelands, talking to known members of Al-Qaeda.
Jamal does not exist, but his profile and the way the intelligence services deal with him exemplify the war on terror.
Britain’s security and intelligence services have had to revamp their operations completely in the four years since the September 11 attacks to keep track of home-grown terrorists like Jamal.
Surveillance is not confined simply to “watching”. His mobile phone is bugged, his conversations are recorded and analysed, his movements are filmed and his contacts are subjected to the same deep surveillance.
MI5 knows that simply dragging Jamal off the streets is not a solution; someone else will take his place.
Jamal has been under surveillance ever since the MI6/CIA report arrived in the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), based in MI5’s Millbank offices.
Set up in May 2003, JTAC contains experts from every UK security and intelligence-gathering agency and is entirely focused on international terrorism.
Commanded by a member of the Defence Intelligence Staff and controlled by MI5’s director, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, it is a key part of Britain’s war against terror.
Changes designed to make the security service less hierarchal ensure that all the specialists, including the “visual surveillance” experts and the technical experts, are working together. Their work takes up around half the service’s annual budget, which has rocketed in recent years.
In Jamal’s case, the watchers have taking over a house close to his home, videoing everything. Conversations inside his home can be recorded by bouncing radio waves off the window panes.
These intrusive intelligence methods have been justified legally on the suspicion that Jamal is building up what is effectively a franchise for Al-Qaeda.
All such surveillance teams have an MI5 lawyer attached to the operation, overseeing everything they do to ensure that any evidence they collect will be admissible in court should they arrest their target.
Nobody is yet sure what role Jamal has been groomed for by Al-Qaeda. During his time in the Pakistani guesthouse he may have been trained as a bomb-maker. Certainly he has been taught leadership and recruitment skills, how to persuade other young Muslims that it is their duty to force the “new crusaders” out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The MI5 team knows that, using a pseudonym, he has set up his own weblog with links to radical websites that accuse Israel of being behind the 9/11 attacks. Visitors to the site are encouraged to post their own views. Jamal picks out those that seem most susceptible to recruitment, pliable young men who want to know more.
These recruits are steered away from the weblog to private one-to-one e-mail conversations in which they are groomed for roles within a group that Jamal initially portrays as innocuous.
Slowly and carefully Jamal will ease them into joining his terrorist group, not a part of Al-Qaeda but nevertheless one that regards Osama Bin Laden as its guiding light.
The warrants the MI5 watchers have obtained permit them to intercept Jamal’s e-mail conversations with those he is grooming, and to carry out “portscans” on his computer. Using sophisticated software, they reach into it to search for incriminating files.
His mobile telephone is being monitored by specialists from the British signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, whose experts carry out “traffic analysis” of all the calls to and from his phone, building up a picture of his contacts and, where appropriate, seeking fresh warrants to monitor their telephones.
GCHQ specialists don’t even need Jamal to be using his phone. As long as his mobile is switched on and he has it with him, it can be used to listen in to anything he is saying to anyone else.
Mobile telephone networks operate in a cellular structure with each cell of around 100 square miles controlled by a base station that keeps the phone linked to the central network. As its owner moves between the cells, the phone continuously links into the nearest base station, using a completely separate frequency to the one on which conversations take place, so that the network knows where to direct any incoming calls.
This “control frequency” can be used to take over the mobile phone and turn it into a bug. That’s the theory. But today Jamal’s telephone is in his pocket and its microphone cannot pick up what he is saying as he stands on the waste ground near his parents’ house.
This does not concern the surveillance team unduly, because the young man Jamal is talking to — we will call him Naz — is an undercover operator who has infiltrated Jamal’s terror network.
Naz, who is on loan from MI6, turned up on Jamal’s weblog not long after that first report from the CIA came in. One of a small but increasing number of young Asians using their understanding of their own culture and communities, Naz is helping to ensure that the JTAC teams can keep a watch on people like Jamal and stop terror attacks.
The lesson of last week’s outrages in London is grim, however. All the sophisticated surveillance of terror suspects had produced no hint of preparation for the bombings. MI5 knows that the likes of Jamal could never plant a bomb; it is the ones MI5 does not know about who are the real danger.
