At 35,000 feet the coastline of Delaware appears as a faint blur against the grey-blue of the Atlantic Ocean. On Wednesday evening last week, as the Boeing 747 of British Airways (BA) flight 223 crossed Delaware Bay en route to Washington DC, it was only an hour or so from Dulles International Airport, its passengers preparing for arrival in the US.
At the headquarters of the FBI and the CIA, alarm bells were ringing about the flight. For even as flight 223 crossed the US coastline, an urgent intelligence alert had been relayed to the US Department of Homeland Security and to the Pentagon, warning that the daily BA flight was suspected of being the target of an attack by suicide hijackers who might detonate the plane above the US capital. Air force officials scrambled a pair of F-16 fighter jets with standing orders to shoot the aircraft down if it posed a real threat to the capital.
It was an action that sparked a remarkable series of events -- the grounding of BA flights to Washington for two days for fear of a terrorist threat -- and which, experts say, marks not only a new phase in the "war on terror" but, perhaps, the transformation of an airline industry that so many take for granted.
ILLUSTRATION MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
For in the past two weeks, it emerges, more than 15 flights have been canceled, delayed, turned around or escorted by US fighter aircraft to their destinations in perhaps the most high-profile security crisis since Sept. 11, 2001. It is an event that has raised as many questions on the nature of the al-Qaeda threat as it has answered accusations of a climate of panic fed by questionable or fragmentary intelligence.
Among those who are certain of their ground is Michael Mason of the FBI's Washington field office, who justified Wednesday evening's interception in the Los Angeles Times.
"I am feeling pretty good about what has happened so far," he told the paper on Saturday.
"All of our actions are dictated by intelligence reports and sometimes it can be sketchy. They don't say there is a bomb in the cargo hold on this flight or that. So you scramble the jets as a safeguard.
"I think that this is our new reality, because our actions are completely and utterly decided by intelligence. I would like to say that the threat will go away. But it is not going to," he said.
It is a view shared by the British Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling, who said yesterday that the cancelation of British Airways flights to both Washington and Riyadh had been prompted by British intelligence that supported information from US sources.
"The threat that we now face is likely to endure for many years. We are dealing with a different order of magnitude of threat," he said.
Most of all it is a view shared by the small group of senior police and intelligence officials who met the day after the interception in a conference room at MI5's imposing headquarters at Thames House. These were the men and women of the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC).
Established after the Bali bombing, JTAC draws specialists from the Security Service (MI5), the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the Foreign Office and Special Branch under the nominal direction of MI5's director, Eliza Manningham-Buller, and includes the Prime Minister's adviser on security, Sir David Omand. It is JTAC that advises the Cabinet and ministries on terrorist threats.
What JTAC had to confront was a colossal problem that would not only have implications for British security, but also commercial implications for the country's flagship carrier, BA.
For, according to security sources, in the hours since the interception of Wednesday's flight, British intelligence analysts had uncovered confirmation of a "discernible and specific threat" involving flight 223, almost certainly culled from communications intercepts by the government's listening centre, GCHQ, in Cheltenham.
JTAC's decision was rapid -- a warning to the Department of Transport's security cell, Transec, requesting the immediate cancelation of BA flight 223 to Washington and flights scheduled for Riyadh in Saudi Arabia for the New Year holiday period.
The crisis that has engulfed BA over the last few days seems sudden, but in reality it has been the culmination of events that began almost two months ago when intelligence officials in Saudi Arabia uncovered an al-Qaeda plan to shoot down a BA jet leaving Riyadh with a missile launched from a shoulder-held weapon.
US, UK and European intelligence agencies began concentrating on the idea that al-Qaeda was once again planning a "spectacular" involving passenger aircraft -- this time an attack on a European or Mexican carrier.
What alarmed the intelligence agencies was not just that one disrupted plot, but their increasing understanding of how al-Qaeda and its sister networks operate -- not least the practice for building redundancy into big operations by setting several cells to work independently about the same task in case one, or even several, are disrupted.
Armed with this information, they began listening to electronic intercepts for anything referring to airlines. As the Christmas holiday period approached, analysis of interceptions both in Britain and the US detected a dramatic increase in so-called "chatter" -- communication between suspected jihadists linked to al-Qaeda -- which has presaged devastating attacks against Western interests in the past.
What that "chatter" was suggesting was an attempt to bring down an airliner with a suicide hijacker over a US city during the Christmas and New Year period.
By two weeks ago the "chatter" was loud and specific enough for Washington to put the US on a Code Orange alert, the country's second highest state of readiness.
The warning, say sources, was generated by a single source -- and a threat that was specific to both BA flight 223 and to the tight time-frame of the New Year holiday period. Someone would try to bomb the BA Washington service.
For as the analysts at JTAC and their equivalents in the US Department of Homeland Security pored over the information culled over recent months, a picture of the potential threat was beginning to emerge.
Worryingly, it pointed to the profile of a man already in jail: Richard Reid, the man who had tried to bring down an aircraft flying between London and Miami with a crude explosive device hidden in his shoes.
What they believed they were searching for was a suicide hijacker or team of hijackers. Several, if not all, of those involved would hold legitimate passports for a European country and would have identities which did not draw attention from security profilers.
As the week went on, there was more and more focus on the alarming possibility that the team might contain British passport holders resident in the UK and Europe.
"The real worry," one source said last week, "is that what we are looking for is a European-based team with legitimate passports, even UK passports. The kind of people who might in the past have been able to easily board an aircraft."
It is a concern that has been heightened by increasing evidence gathered by MI5 and other agencies that jihadist networks with links to al-Qaeda have been increasingly active in the UK, seeking recruits for suicide missions in Iraq and also elsewhere.
It is a version of events, however, that is denied by MI5 sources.
One thing that is certain is that the crisis has shaken the global airline industry and British Airways in particular.
As the JTAC warning arrived at the Department of Transport, BA's top management -- the director of operations, Mike Street, and the director of safety and security, Geoff Want -- were called into a crisis meeting to be informed by the Transec cell that flights should be canceled. With two hours' notice Street and Want halted Thursday's and Friday's flights.
Simon Bennett, an aviation safety expert from Leicester University, said that the decision was particularly dramatic because the Washington flight is one of BA's most prestigious routes.
"To cancel it two or three times, that would suggest to me there is hard evidence out there," he said.
But the widespread view that intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic believed the threat to be genuine has not absolved them from criticism from the airline industry over the way this crisis was handled.
One senior airline source said many believed the government was covering its back by taking the most cautious decisions despite a lack of clear information.
"They are very worried on both sides of the Atlantic about being blamed if anything happens; they are trying to insure themselves for anything that may happen, or may not," he added.
In particular, experts are critical of the way that the US has used often suspect intelligence to target suspicious passengers on airline manifests -- methods that have drawn severe criticism from Mexico and France.
Chris Yates, an aviation expert for the publishers Jane's, said there were also doubts about the quality of information used by the US to identify suspect passengers.
This concern was apparently backed up by emerging details about several Air France flights to the US that were grounded last month on the insistence of the FBI. The agency has admitted six cases of mistaken identity -- including a five-year-old Tunisian girl with the same name as a suspected terrorist, and a Welsh insurance agent.
"If the data on those lists is flawed, which it is, then they could be highlighting normal people who have no connection whatsoever with terrorism. They are being held on the ground or not allowed into US airspace," Yates said.
Some more sceptical airline insiders are also deeply suspicious over the way the latest crisis has emerged amid the row over the US' insistence on sky marshals on aircraft -- speculating that the crisis may have been engineered to force acceptance of the US initiative.
One of the many theories on why the flights were canceled posits that the airline could have refused to allow an armed sky marshal onto the service.
It is a version rejected by an official at the Department of Transport.
"Do people want us to take appropriate precautions or not?" he said.
"The Government believes this is the best way of acting on the information received. While there's inconvenience to passengers, what we have got at the moment is a minute proportion of all the flights taking off for the States involved," he said.
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