British Pakistanis are considered the biggest threat to the USA now. It is truly unfortunate. But to some degree, Islamists have successfully changed many British-Pakistanis to create terror and mayhem. I hope everyone remains safe.
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CIA considers British-born Pakistanis biggest threat to US
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- Former officer says CIA has stepped up operations in UK after Mumbai attacks
- Intelligence briefings for Obama detail dramatic increase in US espionage in Britain
- Riedel says British Pakistani community recognised as probably Al Qaeda’s best mechanism for attack
Daily Times Monitor
LAHORE: With the war on terror focussing on Pakistan’s Tribal Areas and Afghanistan, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has told President Barack Obama that British-born Pakistanis – who have ‘extensive contacts’ with the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LT) – are the ‘biggest threat’ to the US, according to a report by a US daily.
The Sunday Telegraph report quoted American spy chiefs as telling the president that the CIA had launched a vast spying operation in Britain to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks being planned from Britain. The spy chiefs believe that a British-born Pakistani extremist entering the US under a visa waiver programme for all Britons is the ‘most likely source’ of another terrorist attack on American soil.
British operations: A former CIA officer who had advised Obama said the CIA had stepped up its British operations after the Mumbai terror attacks.
Increase: Intelligence briefings for Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5, the British security service.
A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of 10 CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the US are now conducted against targets in Britain, according to the newspaper.
The CIA has already spent 18 months developing a network of agents in Britain to combat Al Qaeda, unprecedented in size within the borders of such a close ally, according to intelligence sources in both London and Washington.
Best mechanism: Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who has advised Obama, told The Sunday Telegraph, “The British Pakistani community is recognised as probably Al Qaeda’s best mechanism for launching an attack against North America. The American security establishment believes that danger continues and there’s very intimate cooperation between our security services to monitor that.”
Riedel, who served three presidents as a Middle East expert on the White House National Security Council, said, “President Obama’s national security team are well aware that this is a serious threat.”
The British source told the newspaper, “The Americans run their own assets in the Pakistani community … they get their own intelligence. There’s close cooperation with MI5, but they don’t tell us the names of all their sources. Around 40 percent of CIA activity on homeland threats is now in the UK. This is quite unprecedented.”
Explaining the increase in CIA activity over the last month, Riedel said, “In the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, the US and the UK intelligence services now have to regard LT as just as serious a threat to both of our countries as Al Qaeda. They have a much more extensive base among Pakistani diaspora communities in the UK than Al Qaeda.”
Information gleaned by CIA spies in Britain has already helped thwart several terrorist attacks in the UK and was instrumental in locating Rashid Rauf – a British-born Al Qaeda operative implicated in a plot to explode airliners over the Atlantic – who was tracked down and killed in November. But some US intelligence officers are irritated that valuable manpower and resources have been diverted to the UK. One former intelligence officer who does contract work for the CIA dismissed Britain as a “swamp of jihadis”.
Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, admitted in January that the Security Service alone did not have the resources to maintain surveillance on all its targets. “We don’t have anything approaching comprehensive coverage,” he said.