Jihadists Aim To Outsmart New Western Intelligence Efforts In Fighting Terrorism.

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BEIRUT - APS learns that Al-Qaeda and affiliated groups, together with other jihadist organisations, have been meeting to establish a joint strategy aimed at overcoming new Western intelligence efforts to combat global terrorism. Their focal point is Iraq, where the Sunni triangle is becoming more lethal to US-led troops as well as to Iraqi security personnel and foreigners working for the multinational force (MNF) there.

For their part, counter-terrorism networks in the US, Britain and Australia are building a new global intelligence-sharing structure that will allow security services to assess threats. This will issue warnings continuously across all time zones.

The new system is intended to allow each country to benefit from the daytime collection and assessment of information on the threat from groups affiliated to Al-Qaeda and other organisations classed by these powers as being terrorist, such as Lebanon's Shiite group Hizbollah (which is backed by Iran and Syria), Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades of Arafat's Fatah movement. Security services in the different time zones will assess information received from the other services and then pass on updated assessments in an unbroken flow. A "senior security official involved in creating the new system" was on June 30 quoted as saying: "The step change has been in the intelligence sharing because no one country can understand Al-Qaeda".

Extensive intelligence sharing on terrorism and other issues between the three countries is already routine. But Al-Qaeda's fragmented structure has intensified the focus on local terrorist cells whose cross-border links have become increasingly difficult to identify.

The foundation of the system will be the new terrorism assessment centres which the three powers have established. Three such centres have been established already, one in each of the three countries.

In the aftermath of the bombing of a nightclub in Bali on Oct. 12, 2002, which killed 199 people, including many Australians, several security services blamed a lack of intelligence co-ordination for having limited the sharing of information available before the bombings.

Part of the British response was the creation of the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, through which all information on the terrorist threat to the UK or UK interests abroad now passes, according to The Financial Times of June 30. The US followed the British lead by creating the Terrorist Threat Integration Center in May 2003, and Australia with the creation of the National Threat Assessment Centre last October. All three centres have brought together staff from government departments ranging from transport to secret intelligence. The aim of the three centres has been to maximise the range of experience and allow threat assessments to be tailored to the needs of different economic sectors and other fields.

Al-Qaeda and its allies have been closely monitoring these centres.

Britain's JTAC grew out of a 20-person terrorism assessment centre that operated within MI5, the security service. The new centre, which has its offices at MI5's headquarters and is handling 30,000 items of terrorism-related intelligence annually, now has a staff of 100, of whom about a third are MI5 officers. The secret service of the Bank of England, the oldest intelligence network in the financial world, is said to be contributing to the new centre. NTAC, its Australian equivalent, draws on a similar range of staff and established a round-the-clock operational ability on June 1. The head of the American TTIC, John Brennan, recently told the bi-partisan commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that the US centre now had direct access to 14 American government databases and planned to create access to 10 more information networks.