126. Al Qaeda’s Deadliest Plot: The Terror Attack That Never Happened (Ep 2)

13:52Gordon:The way you've written it and said it makes it sound sort of, he happened to leave after his uncle was stabbed. No, no. I think he's wanted for the murder. He stabbed his uncle. Him and a friend. Him and a friend are wanted for the murder. Which I think is an important character trait to establish.

14:06David:And then he goes out to Pakistan, he marries into jihadist circles even deeper, comes into contact with Al-Qaeda, and effectively becomes a talent scout for them. So he is looking at Britain's coming into Pakistan arm from Britain and working out which ones Al-Qaeda could use for different operations. So in late 2004, he does this for the ringleaders of the 7-7 and 21-7 2005 attacks. So he meets the leaders of that and introduces them to an Al-Qaeda operational planner and a bomb maker called Abu Ubaid al-Masri. And then he does the same for Ali from this liquid airline plot. So we talked about Ali coming out linked to this charity.

14:43David:Ralph recruits him, takes him to meet Abu Ubaid al-Masri. Ali initially seems to say he wants to fight in Afghanistan and be a martyr out there. He's angry, he says, about Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq. But Ralph and Abu Ubaid al-Masri see the value of Ali in going back to the UK. They can see he's pretty smart. And, you know, Ralph will later write, he was a very clever, patient brother and a natural leader. So Ali returns to the UK January 2005, but he goes back to Pakistan again June 2005. He's actually in the camps with his friend, who we mentioned last time, Asad Sawa, who lives in High Wycombe, when the 7-7 attacks happened.

15:24David:And Rashid Ralph, who's been behind those two attacks, wants to do more attacks. And this is crucial to the origins of this liquid bomb plot, because he recognises that after 7-7, it's going to get harder to build the same kind of hydrogen peroxide bombs because those were built and sourced in the UK, even though the people have been trained in Pakistan. But it's now going to get harder to get hold of the large amounts of hydrogen peroxide chemicals to make a bomb because you need to concentrate it. Because it's going to be much more suspicious if you're seen buying this hydrogen peroxide, especially in the kind of quantities you'd need.

16:02David:So you need to do it in a smaller quantity, but it is easy to get in Pakistan. So it's really interesting because Ralph's first idea is to buy the chemicals in Pakistan, concentrate them in Pakistan, and then send them over to the West. The challenge of that is getting them on a plane, obviously. So Ralph starts to look at airport security and he starts to research how bomb detector machines work at airports. And he says, we analyze the various machines that we use for checking baggage and persons, and we found it was very difficult to detect liquid explosives. So he can see that the liquids are easier to smuggle than solid explosives.

16:40David:So his first idea is to ship the concentrated hydrogen peroxide to the UK for use in bombs in bottles marked rose water, which looked unopened. And then, of course, he has this kind of brainwave, a really dark one, though. If you can smuggle it onto the plane to send to the UK, the concentrated hydrogen peroxide, could you go one step further? Could you actually take it on a plane and then detonate it on a plane and find a way to use that to blow up a plane? That's the kind of origins of the plot through this idea of how do you get hydrogen peroxide onto a plane?

17:20Gordon:One of the questions for me that hangs over this story that I don't... And I actually, I put this to Jonathan Evans when we saw him. And I'm still not quite... sure about the answer is, why didn't they construct these in Pakistan, where presumably you would not have had a similar high counterintelligence environment that you would have in the UK, and then you could just bring them fabricated into the UK and conduct an attack from London as the base. Because the amount of preparation, the provisioning, the need to sort of recruit accomplices here, those are all of the things that get them caught.

18:01David:I guess we'll come back to it, but I think the key point is that they want the operation to be launched out of the UK and towards the targets, as we'll see, which is the US. And I think that is part of their thinking.

18:15Gordon:You still could have just brought it into the UK and then flown out two days later. Rather than make it in the UK. Yeah, it's the fabrication here, which is going to take time and creates a whole bunch

18:26David:a surface area for MIFire to find them. Yeah, because they're going to try and work out how to get them onto the planes. And they're going to realize that you could color the hydrogen peroxide without losing its explosive properties. And they recall Ali to Pakistan once they've worked this out in the camps. So that May trip, May 2006, Ali comes back to Pakistan and he meets the bomb makers and he gets really specific training for the bomb. Now, it's interesting because Ralph will actually later claim that Ali was actually questioned at Heathrow on departure and that the Brits alert Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, to track him on arrival.

19:09David:Now, Ralph claims, this is on a later account he leaves, and it may be true, it may not be, that the ISI actually requested local police in Islamabad to stop and search him, but that Ali gets tipped off because of contacts and friends a family about the interest and so he evades it but he's out there in this may june period 2006 sawa asad sawa who's the quartermaster also joins them they agree that ali will build a team to use the devices and separately sawa will be the quartermaster to get hold of the supply sawa looks like doesn't want to blow himself up which is understandable and so he'll be kind of kept largely separate.

19:51David:He's the one in High Wycombe, everyone else in Walthamstow. And the idea is he's going to get together the materials and he's going to build a team and build the actual devices at the last minute. And then Sarr will stay and be able to organize further waves of attacks. So that seems to be the plan. And they are worried about surveillance. They know that there's greater monitoring. So Ralph actually says, we trained him, Ali, quickly and wanted him to leave as soon as possible. He was told to do anti-surveillance measures when he got back and only start work when he was comfortable that everything was clear.

20:27David:So then having had that training, yeah, it doesn't go so well. Having had that training, that is when Ali then comes back June 2006 with the batteries he's brought back with him, with the Tang, to start pushing forward the plot, having been trained in this special bomb.

20:43Gordon:There is still a line of communication once Ali is back. Yeah. Between Ali, his cell here, and Ralph in Pakistan.

20:51David:And I think that is also another important part of the story. It's quite intense communication between Ali and Sawa in the UK and Ralph in Pakistan. Which MI5 does not have at the time. Well, it's a bit unclear because we learn about it later. So it is quite possible they were intercepting the communications and we only get the details from a later trial when some of the material is going public. So it's a little bit unclear how much MI5 know at the time, but they're definitely kind of security conscious. Sawa sends details of a new phone number in code in which the last four digits had to be subtracted by two to generate the real number.

21:27David:Sawa then uses that phone only for contacting Ralph, and there's 30 calls over the next month. Ralph has individual email accounts for each person he contacts. Ali registers two email addresses in Pakistan to fake names. Ralph has four phones with him in Pakistan, three for the plotters in the UK and one for other people in Pakistan. He even asks Sawa for a voice changer because he's worried about interception. And I think the point is Ralph in Pakistan is micromanaging the plot, especially the making of the explosives. And this goes back to the previous year, the 2005 bombings, because 7-7 had worked.

22:03David:And if you remember in that case, it's partly because Ralph had been talking to the plotters kind of pretty regularly. The 21-7 team had had much less contact with him, and that bomb had not gone off. And so again, the communication is constant because they want to make sure it works. There's contact about planning, and they're feeding back the team in London and High Wycombe about what's going on. There's messages from Sawa to Ralph, July 18th, going, you know, I have 15 suppliers to give Calvin Klein aftershave. One box of 50 is only£175. pounds. The aftershave was code for the hydrogen peroxide and the 175 pounds was the concentration.

22:42David:So they're starting to put together the team and put together the packages for the bomb. But the crucial question is, what is the plan?

22:51Gordon:So it's clear now to MI5 that this is a bomb. But I think the question has got to be, what's the

22:58David:target? Yeah. And as they see them in the kitchen on this video surveillance, drilling in the bottle and doing things, the surveillance also overhears the men talking about American cities, including New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Dallas, where you are, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles. And it started to become clear that this is to do with the US and it's to do with aircraft. Because the point about what they're working on, these bottles, are these are ordinary things that you could carry on a flight. crucially the unopened drink bottle and a disposable camera and some batteries so those are the kind of items you need to make the bomb and you could carry them all in your hand luggage quite innocently and then in a few minutes go into a bathroom in a plane and put it together yeah you open up the camera attach wires tape it all to the drink bottle and then what you could do is press that against the side of a plane and you press the camera button which sends the charging to heat up the filament start the initiator and then do the main detonation that's not going to kill anyone as you said there's no shrapnel attached to it but plane in midair it's going to blow a hole in the side of it mi5 test this right yeah so the investigators will get mi5s they've got weapons intelligence team they've got scientists linked to the DSTL, which is the kind of weapons, you know, an explosive lab in the UK, who are going to look and say, could you, would this work?

24:36David:Would it punch a hole in the side of the plane? And the answer is it would. There's also another revelation from the surveillance, which makes them understand this is potentially massive, not just the one or two attackers they're seeing. There's a crucial conversation where they hear Ali saying, we got six people in it. There's another three units. There's another three dudes. Then Tanvir replies, There's another three more, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. That's 15, 18. Phew, think of it. Yeah, one man more. 19, if they got there, would match the number of hijackers on 9-11. Now, that might have been their kind of ideal, but they're at least looking at 6, maybe 9.

25:14David:There's something in that ballpark of people that they're going to have as part of the team, ideally, to carry these bombs onto planes.

25:22Gordon:Which, when you think about what that could have meant, if it happened over the Atlantic, as they seem to be planning, Jonathan Evans at MI5 brought this up, there would be no understanding of what exactly had happened. And you would probably not recover the wreckage for a very long time, if ever. Yeah. And so there'd be no forensics to understand why the plane had gone down. It would have probably ground global aviation to a complete halt. Not for like a day, but for a while. And you would have left open the possibility that there could have been more waves of attacks as soon as planes start flying again.

26:08Gordon:It would have been potentially on the scale of or greater than 9-11.

26:12David:I think that's right. Because I think if you do the math, depending on how many planes you've got, you've got maybe 300 people on each plane. If you did have nine planes, you're suddenly looking at a death toll comparison. Pretty similar. And as you said, the fact that you wouldn't know if they went down over the Atlantic, you wouldn't have the forensics to know. You would either let planes continue to fly, in which case these guys are preparing more waves. Or you stop all flights until you understand it, which could be who knows how long, which destroys the kind of global economy. So as well as loss of life, the economic and the social impact of this would have been massive.

26:52David:would have been massive yeah i think that's why it's so significant as a plot so we're into the early days of august ali sends an email to rashid ralph it says by the way i've set up my mobile shop now now i only need to sort out an opening time ali's also keeping rashid ralph up to date about new recruits he talks about my mate googie he's up for the gig okay is it okay if we put him in no longer looks like he's a junkie whatever that means and then there's another message i spoke to fatty and explained to him he has to move his office within one month and start fresh you know he's doing well and keeps his head down and he don't like the junkies anymore you know weird messages which you could imagine if you're intercepting them if you're mi5 if they were intercepting them they're not obvious what's going on right because these guys are aware of possible surveillance and ali tells raf it'll take a few days then i'll start trading you know ali is concerned.

27:47David:It's interesting that he's being followed by police or MI5. And Ralph later says, I told him not to panic. And they refer in their emails to possible surveillance as a skin problem. You know, I've got a skin problem or skin complaint. And so Ralph is also worried about this and pressing him to move faster. They're also seeing some of the men fill out new passport applications, claiming they lost them or accidentally put them in the washing machine, hoping maybe that might reduce the risks when they do get on a flight. At one point, they're even talking about taking a baby with them. First week of August, though, another development is going to take authorities' fears up another notch and really make them fear something may be on soon.

28:29David:August 6th, a mobile surveillance team are on Ali, and they see him head to an internet cafe in Walthamstow. It's quite a small internet cafe. I mean, internet cafes, they're still around, but less so than they used to be. Yeah, but not nearly what they would have been. No, but the police surveillance team decide they need to follow him in to know what's going on. A female police surveillance officer, she's young in her 20s, follows him in. She's going to sit as close to him as she can, just a few feet away. And it means she can see over his shoulder what he's doing online in this cafe. And it looks like he's communicating with someone.

29:04David:He's actually emailing Ralph to say the surveillance on him doesn't feel too bad. And they will open up shop soon. If only he knew.

29:13Gordon:Literally looking over his shoulder.

29:16David:He's a police surveillance officer. But then he starts opening tabs on his web browser, one for Heathrow looking at baggage restrictions. And then he starts to look at flight times. And he's noting down the flight times on a notepad app on the computer. And he notes details of seven direct flights from London to the US and Canada. The first one is a United flight, which leaves San Francisco at 2.15 in the afternoon. The last one was an American Airlines flight to Chicago, which left at 4.50 in the afternoon. So the crucial thing is all the flights are within a window of two hours, 35 minutes. And the idea was that they would do this simultaneously.

29:57David:Yeah. And that they would all, if they all leave in that period, if you're going to blow, let's say, seven of them, then they will all be in the air at the same time yeah and ideally over water so as we were saying you can read forensics a bit so he's he's specifically researching the flight times for flights to target other destinations toronto montreal chicago again washington new york he's looking for one-way flights and you know clearly now they are moving to actually researching the times and he's going to download the notes of the flight times onto a memory stick he's brought with him. And then he writes to Ralph, I've done all my prep.

30:36David:All I have to do is sort out opening timetable and bookings. Why do terrorists always buy one-way tickets?

30:42Gordon:It's super suspicious. Just buy the round trip. Just spring on the round trip ticket. It's like the most suspicious thing in the world. You get a one-way ticket to San Francisco. You've never been to san francisco yeah and you're going for six weeks like just yeah i mean it's ridiculous yeah this is gonna make mi5 feel as though it's becoming imminent now at this stage he feels like he's sorted the bomb making and now you're getting into final logistics yeah and and that is going to

31:13David:be the crucial question which is how imminent there's another warning sign because the teams are listening into live surveillance of forest road the flat and they hear ali and another man in the flat at one point and they can hear a conversation, but they can't see it. It's not in the kitchen where they've got the video coverage. And Ali sounds like he's coaching the other guy to say things. I'll ask you this, you say that. And they actually realize that they are listening live to a martyrdom video being made by the attackers. I mean, that must be chilling if you're actually hearing people preparing for the video that's going to be broadcast after they've carried out one of these attacks.

31:51David:And I mean, they'd actually already recorded some. We spoke earlier about July 27th. They'd seen them go in. So this is before they had the surveillance and they drew the curtains. Then they were there for like a couple of hours. That's when they'd made some of them already. Now they're making more what they refer to as wedding videos in the coded emails to Pakistan. So it's clear now you're getting close to the final stages.

32:15Gordon:Well, I guess this is where things start to get tricky, don't they? And our American listeners will be grateful to know that in the next few episodes, we're going to see the arrival of the CIA because we have not had Americans in this story yet. Much to my chagrin. Although, Gordon, the way you've sort of written this story, the CIA is not going to come off too well in this because we're going to see in these next few episodes, I think, the intelligence relationship between the two countries really at work, how it works. how sometimes there can be incredible tension between the US and the UK over counterterrorism operations in particular in this era.

32:57And even you're going to admit this is a tricky one.

33:01David:Even I'll admit this is a tricky one. It's a tricky one. And I think the power imbalance is going to become clear as we look next time at just how it's not maybe surprising the Americans know about this plot, but it's once they understand that it's US cities, North American cities, that the target, that suddenly that sends tensions really skyrocketing.

33:23Gordon:So we're there, Gordon, with both services potentially going at each other's throats, and this plot really ready now in these advanced stages. And when we come back next time, we will see how this all unfolds and how the CIA and the Brits eventually cooperate to stop it.

33:44David:That's right. And just a reminder, if you want to hear the rest of the story straight away, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. You'll also be able to hear those special episodes we've done inside MI5 with Jonathan Evans. Otherwise, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.

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