Further counter terror preparations around the 2012 Olympics

Alongside the recent police counter terror operations being reported in the mainstream media, the deployment of ground to air missile defence systems around London rooftops and the mobilisation of key military and special forces units around the city there have been reports coming in of enhanced combat readiness exercises at two Ministry of Defence RAF bases in Oxfordshire and Kent. These bases are home to, amongst others, the UK Rapid Deployment Typhoon squadrons, a key part in the UK defence grid against potential incursion into UK airspace by Russian nuclear bombers. When the RAF say that these boys are armed for bear they are serious. They are specifically loaded out to intercept and destroy Russian Bear nuclear bombers and are armed with air to air heat seeking missiles. These squadrons routinely fly training sorties out over the North Sea, where they are able to fly supersonic in simulated intercept and engage missions, but over the last three months there have been reports from the Oxfordshire and Surrey areas of what sound remarkably like sonic booms, something that is normally not permitted over land and certainly not over populated areas.

Initially there were cover stories of a helicopter pilot accidentally triggering his radio to a frequency reserved for signalling hijack situations, but this story is not backed up by amateur radio operators in the area who monitor air traffic control frequencies as a matter of course. It appears that coinciding with the sonic booms are instructions to local ATC towers to re-route commercial aircraft from specific corridors matching closely to defence analysis reports of credible flight paths for hijacked aircraft carrying out attacks on the games. These flight paths tend to be in direct line from smaller local airports towards key London targets. So, just how credible are the stories of terrorist plots against the games? It is certainly the case the leading defence analysts have rated the Olympics the single biggest terrorist target in the World, and that police forces across the UK are on the highest level of alert. It is also the case that there have been increases in the numbers of regular and territorial army personnel placed on standby or re-assigned. There have also been reports of special forces exercising in the capital, including live fire exercises, along with reports of joint operations between US, UK, Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies.

All of this adds up to a serious and credible threat of a major incident being planned, but it also highlights the levels of security that are now a matter of course at events such as these. The security company running the games themselves G4S has been preparing rapid evacuation drills from Olympic venues, as well as installing and training with state of the art metal detectors and X-ray scanners at venue entrances. There are also three new CCTV monitoring and control centres in operation in London, solely to monitor the areas around the Olympic venues and village and G4S have been working closely with IBM and Raytheon, the military hardware specialist to install state of the art face recognition software and superfast data processing using a custom built IBM supercomputer. It is to be hoped that this reliance on technology does not come at the expense of more mundane or traditional security and intelligence measures. Sometimes you just can't beat a bit of old fashioned police work.