Porton Down’s experts were called upon to decide what kind of liquid explosive would be used. Around the clock, surveillance reports continued to come to the work stations. In between long days and nights, men and women catnapped in a nearby dormitory in the basement. One report was from an MI5 undercover team near a house in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. Other teams reported from south London and Birmingham. GCHQ specialists analyzed phone intercepts from suspect houses. In communities where the suspects lived, MI5 had set up other sophisticated surveillance sites. Some of the suspects had become assimilated into British society, but had made regular trips to relatives in Pakistan and elsewhere. Pakistan’s intelligence service had provided JTAC with details. The suspects were known as “Trojans,” JTAC-speak for those who may have been recruited to become home-grown terrorists. Their cell phones were bugged. Their every movement noted. Radio waves bounced off windowpanes to monitor conversations in a room they occupied. The latest technology filtered through thousands of e-mails. The surveillance teams’ information was studied by a JTAC lawyer to ensure their findings would be admissible in court.
Seventy-two hours later sufficient information had been gathered for arrests to go ahead. Twenty-two people were taken into custody. They included a convert to Islam and a seventeen-year-old youth. But in JTAC the work continued to establish the full extent of the plot. Scotland Yard predicted it could possibly be a year before the suspects were brought to trial.
In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan received a thank you call from Eliza Manningham-Buller. At the end she said, “We may not have caught them all, but it’s a start.” For the intelligence chief it was a good result to justify what Mossad tries to do.
In September 2006, the arrival once more of the first cooling breezes was a time to which the Jews of Israel and the Muslims of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip would look forward. A time when Jewish mothers prepared borscht, beetroot soup, and young lovers walked down the Cardo, the covered street in the Jewish quarter of Old Jerusalem and, nearby, the Muslim faithful worshipped within the cool of Haram al-Sharif, the enclosure in the Muslim quarter of Old Jerusalem, which contained the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site of the Islamic world. This, too, all went on as it had for many centuries, rituals as ancient as wearing the Tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl, and the checkered Arab headdress.
But now there were other matters to preoccupy the people of the Holy Land. In Gaza the fighting continued with guerrilla attacks by Hamas and counter assaults by Israel. The Israeli Air Force launched precision-bombing raids across the Strip. Shin Bet, the internal security force, rounded up more legally-elected members of the Hamas-dominated parliament on the grounds they belonged to an organization whose military wing was responsible for the continued kidnappings, rocket attacks, and suicide bombers.
In Israel, the fallout from the war in Lebanon continued and calls came every day for the resignation of those deemed to be responsible for the country’s failure. Early on in the conflict, Dan Halutz, after his air force had destroyed fifty-four Hezbollah rocket launchers, had announced “we have won the war.” Now, on the streets of Israeli cities, the words were publicly mocked as it gradually became clear after five weeks of fighting the last of the optimism had evaporated, and with it, the invincible reputation of the Israeli armed forces. Instead of celebrations, which had greeted other victories, the air was filled with anger over poor training of the soldiers and outdated equipment. Despite individual acts of bravery, some of the men of the IDF had been pushed to the point of mutiny. A humiliated Halutz wrote a contrite letter to all his soldiers in which he admitted “there were mistakes and these will be corrected.” But as the days of September passed, it became far from clear whether the fifty-eight-year-old fighter pilot, who had flown with distinction in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, would survive. A poll revealed that 54 percent wanted Halutz to resign.
