Strange purchasing requirements from UK Government

It is amazing what you can glean from keeping an eye on government procurement requests. Since these started to be published online as part of a European requirement for competitive tendering there have been one or two that catch the eye. Just a couple of weeks ago a small unit within the Home Office department put out a tender request for hazmat (hazardous materials protection) suits. After a bit of investigation the requirement turned out to be for a significant number of these suits, delivered into London by the end of June and that these were required to be suitable for medical staff engaged in a biohazard contamination scenario. These are the kind of situations where a contagious disease has to be contained, and patients treated in quarantine. On its own this isn't such an unusual request. Most hospitals have some basic hazmat facilities and equipment, particularly in large population centres around international airports, these being common disease vector hubs with people arriving from all over the World. What was interesting in this case was that although this individual request looked pretty innocuous, at around the same time, there were requests from three other units from three other departments, all seeking equipment that would be useful in the event of a biological disease outbreak.

Now, it could certainly be the case that with the upcoming Olympic games in London, this is just a fairly reasonable precaution given the number of overseas visitors this event will attract. Disaster preparedness specialists have long been aware that global events like this are prime nodes for the spread of disease, and there has been plenty of analysis into how this can be planned for and managed. Still all looks reasonable, but the fact that these requests were coming from multiple sources rather than being integrated flagged up that it was worth further investigation. A conversation with a couple of contacts within regional government gave an interesting insight. Back in May there was a major exercise involving police, fire, medical and military units which involved sealing off an area of South London for 24 hours, establishing roadblocks, overt and covert surveillance, house to house investigation and traffic management around a closed zone. Shortly after this there was another less obvious exercise in the Brecon militarised zone, an area of mid-Wales that is used for special forces exercises. This second event was primarily focused on dealing with civil disorder, and unlike previous similar exercises it involved advisers who had experience of the use of military and particularly live ammunition group control and lethal force scenarios.

This is the first time such exercises have been developed for UK based military resources, and when tied to the tenders suggests that there is intelligence of a credible threat around the Olympics. It appears that the threat is biological in nature, and thinking back two years there were reports out of the former Soviet territories of Ukraine and Azerbaijan of research facilities being plundered for both chemical and biological agents, and these being distributed to key underground groups. It is also interesting to note that given the media interest in Iranian biological weapon development this could be an ideal opportunity for a false flag operation to create an excuse for military action against Iran. Whether real or false flag, expect to see further military operations in the Middle East before the end of 2013.