Security concerns overshadow London Games
The potential enemies are numerous, so officials plan for all contingencies
LONDON – The security situation on the eve of the 2012 Summer Olympics was “a humiliating shambles,” one of the principal architects of the plan told the British parliament Tuesday.
Nick Buckles, who runs G4S, a British-based security firm with a global empire, acknowledged that in return for a contract worth more than $350 million his firm had only been able to hire 4,200 of the 10,000 security guards it promised it would. Ominously, most of these “guards” are apparently kids just out of high school who appear to have passed only the lightest of security screening processes and received the most rudimentary training.
Abject apologies are of little help at this point. To try to head off trouble the government has ordered an emergency draft of soldiers and police officers from already seriously over stretched units, including many just returned from the war in southern Afghanistan or whose jobs were eliminated last week in the latest budget cuts.
In a sign of how desperate organizers have become, there is also an old-fashioned press gang of sorts to try to persuade retired police officers to help out.
Even at this late hour – the Games begin July 27 but many of the athletes are already in the capital – the exact breakdown of security numbers is unknown.
What is known is an extra brigade of 3,500 troops has been rushed to Olympic venues and several battalions are on emergency standby amid reports many of G4S’S guards failed to show up for work this week.
Soldiers from the Parachute Regiment, armed only with their distinctive maroon berets, were already going through their paces by the end of June at Stratford, where the main Olympic Park, the opening and closing ceremonies, the athletics and the aquatics are to be held. The paras were part of a fullscale security rehearsal that lasted more than a week.
The airborne specialists were in the vanguard of a security force to protect 14,000 athletes that will soon number at least 17,000 troops, 1,000 combat support troops, more than 20,000 police officers, including about 9,000 Bobbies drawn from around the U.K. and an unknown number of private guards.
Among those troops already maintaining a quiet watch over London are Britain’s legendary Special Air Service commandos and scores of snipers. Meanwhile, undercover agents from the police and the two main spy services are said to already be out mingling with the crowds and the athletes.
Jonathan Evans, who heads MI5, the inter nal counter-intelligence service, revealed in a rare speech last month that the security threat in the lead-up to the Games was “substantial.” In intelligence parlance, that rates two notches below the maximum level. However, it still means that an attack is a strong possibility.
Half of MI5’s work con- cer ned possible attacks against Britain by Pakistani or Afghan jihadis, although threats from terrorists with links to al-Qaida who are based in Yemen were up sharply, Evans said.
“The Games present an attractive target for our enemies,” the usually reclusive spymaster said. But he was understandably rather vague about what exactly was attractive.
The media focus on the security hiring fiasco has diverted attention for a moment from what many Londoners regard as the over-the-top planning by government officials charged with preventing terrorist attacks on the Olympic quadrennial.
When NATO forces wanted to impress the enemy in Afghanistan and Iraq, they would send fighter jets screaming low over the piece of turf of interest in what was called “a show of force.” The equivalent for the 2012 Olympics has been to place surface-to-air missile batter-
“No doubt some terrorist networks have thought about an attack.” MI5 HEAD JONATHAN EVANS
ies atop two highrise apartment buildings near the main Olympic Park and in four other places in and near the city.
Some of the artillery, which can travel at Olympic-like speeds in excess of 3,000 kilometres an hour, will apparently have a direct line of fire toward the biggest sporting venues. If they are ever used, there would obviously be, to use another favourite military term, a high risk of “collateral damage.”
The deployment of the missiles is being contested in court by East Londoners. These lethal instruments of war are, depending on your point of view, the beginning or the end of the massive security arrangements made for the Games. But there are many others.
The official position of the British government is that the security cloak now descending on London is necessary to ensure the athletes and spectators are safe and secure. But there are far more high priority visitors who need to be protected, too.
The Olympics have also been a magnet for heads of state and billionaires, some of whom have fanatical enemies. Although it is loath to speak about it publicly, the Olympic movement and the host cities have never forgotten that Black September hijacked the Munich Olympics in 1972 by murdering 11 Israeli athletes and coaches and a German policeman.
The security forces and their paraphernalia cost big money. The Olympic security bill is expected to be well north of $1.6 billion, or more than double what had been estimated when London was awarded the Games only seven years ago.
Still, this figure is a relatively small part of the staggering $15 billion Britain is spending on the 17-day Olympic extravaganza at a time when Downing Street is drastically cutting public spending.
So what is the biggest threat? Is it terrorists with formal or informal links to al-Qaida, such as the four suicide bombers who bombed three trains and a bus, killing 56 people, including themselves, in the so-called 7/7 attacks the day after London was awarded the Games in July 2005? Radical offshoots of the Irish Republican Army, which regularly carried out bombings in London until a few years ago? A brain-addled loner with a specific beef, or anarchists on the fringes of the Occupy movement?
Or is the biggest danger really street violence similar to the wild, apparently spontaneous and totally unpredictable riots that hit parts of London for five days last August, causing about $300 million in property damage?
A serious complicating factor in developing a comprehensive security plan has been that the London Olympic Committee chose to build the main Olympic park right next to residential areas in the borough of Newham, which has one of the highest concentrations of ethnic minorities in the U.K. A quarter of the 275,000 people who live in the neighbourhood are Muslims, including many from Pakistan, which is widely known to be a favourite hideout of terrorists.
Policing Stratford is a chore at any time, let alone during the Olympics. A youth was murdered two weeks ago in a gang brawl inside the huge, two-billionpound ($3.2 billion) Westfield Stratford City shopping centre that was intended to transform the area outside the Olympic Park. The British media have also reported that a mosque beside the Olympic Park is being investigated because of past links to some of al-Qaida’s most famous clerics.
“No doubt some terrorist networks have thought about whether or not they could pull off an attack,” the spymaster Evans said.
“But the Games are not an easy target. … We are far from complacent. But I think we shall see a successful and memorable Games this summer in London.”
Despite the controversies, a billion pounds should buy a lot of security. Whether it actually does will be known soon enough.