Lockdown London: the £1bn Olympic security minefield

There is something slightly Blitz-like and exhilarating about the notion of London being ringed by anti-aircraft missile batteries, especially the one on the roof of the Lexington Building in Bow, the gated block of flats that is home to affluent young professionals. Londoners have been invited to digest the specifications of the laser-guided Starstreak High Velocity Missile Systems, as though we are buyers at an international arms fair. These lethal pieces of kit are supposed to bring down any incoming aircraft that breaches the total air exclusion zone over East London this summer. This is assuming that some lumbering jumbo has chanced to outrun the RAF Eurofighter Typhoon jets that will permanently patrol the Home Counties for the duration of the Olympics.

To emphasise the ‘belt and braces’ spirit of this biggest and most expensive security operation in British history, Rapier missiles will be stationed on Blackheath Common and Oxleas Wood, with a range of just over four miles. It’s fun to imagine David Cameron chillaxing over his fourth glass of Merlot on a Saturday afternoon when the red telephone rings on the Chequers kitchen table. According to the scenario laid down by the Defence Secretary Philip Hammond, the PM will then have to make the most momentous decision of his life. Will he give the authority to shoot down, say, a potentially hijacked Emirates Airbus A380 that General Sir Nick Parker, head of the military’s arm of the 2012 operation, has reason to believe is under the command of al-Qaeda rogue pilots?

Of course it won’t happen that way; almost certainly it won’t happen at all. Defence officials say that every Olympics since Atlanta in 1996 has had some form of aerial defence component. In truth, media coverage of the missile installations was deliberately confected to reassure Londoners that everything is being done to protect us, and to remind al-Qaeda not even to contemplate trying a re-run of 9/11 over the Thames. And the other point, sources make clear, is that any aerial defence of London cannot rely on a general being instantaneously able to get through on the telephone to the Prime Minister, who might be locked in summit negotiations trying to save the euro, or volleying balls on a tennis court. Shortly before the Games begin, the military will be ‘pre-authorised’ to take the momentous decision to shoot down a civilian airliner, because in the real world, as opposed to a Hollywood film, the decision has to be taken in a handful of seconds. In reality, the fateful, final decision would be taken by a man staring at a radar screen. One really wouldn’t want to be him.

No one will ever know the true cost of the Olympics security operation because so much of it is concealed within existing police and military budgets. But we do know that the taxpayer subsidy for security within Olympics venues had to be abruptly doubled earlier this year, to £553 million, due to a drastic under-estimation of the work involved and the number of sites that the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) deemed necessary to protect. The true cost will never be admitted but it will not be much below £1 billion, though if the Games pass off without a terrorist incident, in the general relief no one will be asking.

Never before in the course of athletic endeavour will 17,000 competitors from more than 200 countries, observed by an estimated 10.8 million ticket-buying spectators, have been so comprehensively and expensively protected — assuming, of course, that they have managed to stagger through immigration at Heathrow. The scale of the operation dwarfs anything previously undertaken on these shores. Protecting the royal participants during the Thames Jubilee Pageant was a challenge, but that lasted six hours. London has to be in a state of high-alert lockdown for 45 days for the Olympics and Paralympics.

In truth, the rogue commercial aircraft scenario is not one that keeps security officials awake at night. Nor is it likely that anyone planning an Olympics terrorist attack is going to be coming through Heathrow a couple of days before the opening ceremony. The much, much bigger problem is the domestic sleeper terrorist cell, or the lone operator seeking attention for whatever cause he espouses. Because of the July 2005 attacks on the London public transport network — which, one tends to forget, occurred the very day after the announcement that London had won the Games — we think primarily of an Islamist terrorist threat this summer. But there are other groups out there that Special Branch might not know of, and some that they do. The various dissident Irish Republican terrorist rumps, the Real IRA and Continuity IRA, could certainly do with the kudos of mounting a successful operation on mainland Britain.

Therefore, the real challenge facing the security organisers is the gathering of crucial intelligence, which is much more likely to thwart an attack than a uniformed copper walking down Whitehall. MI5 is central to this intelligence-led effort. Because of the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks, its numbers were already on course to double in a decade to 3,500, even before the present Olympics challenge, and the agency is currently drawing heavily on input from SIS (formerly MI6) — the external service — and the eavesdropping GCHQ.

Al-Qaeda’s capacity to strike in America and Europe has been denuded by targeted assassinations of its key leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which is why jihadists are urged to develop their own tactics and use their initiative locally. These cells may not be in regular contact via mobile phone or email to minders abroad, so they are much harder to trace. Hundreds of Islamist extremists have the will to attack the Olympics; the current priority for MI5 is making assessments of those who have the actual capability to do so.

The Olympics security operation was planned at a time when the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre — which is based at MI5 HQ on the river, but is technically independent of it — rated the terrorism threat as severe. Since then the threat has been lowered to substantial, because at the moment there is no specific, credible threat beyond the recognition that any self-respecting terrorist would love to make an entrance in the global arena that is the London Olympics. Perhaps perversely, it is the very fact that London has been a prime al-Qaeda target for more than ten years that makes this vast security operation viable.

‘We have been living with a terrorist threat for many years,’ Assistant Commissioner Chris Allison, operational head of the Met’s security operation, tells ES, noting that lessons were learned as far back as the IRA bombing campaigns of the 1970s. ‘It’s not like we’ve said, “Oh my God, we’ve got the Games; now we’ve got a terrorist threat.” For years, we’ve been building on systems that we know work, from the recent Jubilee to big sporting events.’ Ever since that dreadful day in July 2005, Londoners have known that our transport system is a prime target. In normal times we forget the potential risk, but any time we are in the vicinity of a Tube or mainline railway station, we are under constant video surveillance, and images of our faces are being flipped around various counter-terrorism control rooms.