Daily Express : MI5’S Grannies Fight al Qaeda

MI5’S GRANNIES FIGHT AL QAEDA

MI5 feared a shopping area in Manchester was a prime target

By Gordon Thomas | April 19, 2009

MI5 used some astonishing new weapons in its action against suspected terrorists in the north of England last week.

Playing a leading role were teams of women who kept an eye on the suspects during the long investigation into what is believed to be the biggest campaign plotted by Al Qaeda since the London bombings.

Created by the Security Service’s A4 surveillance division, the teams were tested for the first time in the operation, code-named Pathway, which was directed by MI5’s 50-year-old head Jonathan Evans.

They worked in two groups: one, made up of 72 elderly women, the other, young mothers with babies in prams.

Both had undergone a crash course in surveillance techniques.

Some of the elderly women walked the streets of the northern cities where the suspects lived, ostensibly walking their dogs or going shopping.

But miniature recorders hidden in their hair or beneath a headscarf were monitored by surveillance vans nearby.

These were linked directly to another unit specialising in locating a suspect’s mobile phone by triangulating its signal between two or more transmission masts.

The recorders used by the “granny squad” were also linked to GCHQ, the Government eaves-dropping centre in Cheltenham, Gloucs.

The mothers’ prams were also wired for surveillance. Beneath the real babies was a range of recording equipment that turned the prams into self-contained mobile surveillance units.

A further development by the MI5 scientists was also used. This is a colourless chemical that can be “painted” on a suspect’s clothing.

Another MI5 team, known as ­BS-1, the Burglar Specialists, break into a suspect’s home and spray the long-lasting chemical on to a shoe, skirt, jacket or trousers, which can then be detected by specially trained dogs.

It was these dogs who pursued the 12 Pakistani students now in custody, as they photographed the smart shopping area in Manchester, which MI5 feared was to be a prime target.

It was the grannies who picked up crucial details of ­e-mails exchanged by suspects.

During the long operation, which culminated in MI5’s swoop last week, they filed regular reports to a committee of senior MI5 officials based in a sound-proof room in the Security Service’s headquarters in Thames House, London.

It was one of the young mothers pushing her baby through a Manchester street who picked up details of a possible attack over the Easter holidays.

Analysts who studied her tape noticed a reference to the arrest in December last year of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists in Brussels, who were said to be plotting to launch an attack against a two-day summit in the city.

That assault was never launched, however. One possible reason was that it had been replaced by the Manchester plot.

This had all the hallmarks of Rashid Rauf, one of Osama Bin Laden’s top terrorist plotters. He was the mastermind behind the London bombings in July 2005.

Last November, he was reportedly killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a pilotless Predator drone by the CIA on the Pakistan-Afghan border.

A shroud-covered body was removed from the rubble. It was purported to be Rauf, but that is now thought unlikely.

The young mother pushing her pram in Manchester had picked up a snatch of conversation that led GCHQ to believe that Rauf was still alive, probably in Pakistan.

He would almost certainly have pulled off the latest attack except for the undercover operation ­inadvertently exposed by Bob Quick, the Metropolitan police chief who was Britain’s senior anti-terrorist officer. The blunder cost Quick his job.

It may also have enabled details of Rauf’s plan to escape detection. MI5 boss Evans has told his officers that if Rauf is still alive: “The further we are from his last crime, the closer we are to the next.”