Terror Experts Fear Athens Games Are 'Peach Of A Target'

The Guardian (UK) ^ | 8-16-2003 | Helena Smith/Richard Norton-Taylor

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Terror experts fear Athens Games are 'peach of a target'

Greece has not grasped scale of possible threat, they say

Helena Smith in Athens and Richard Norton-Taylor
Saturday August 16, 2003
The Guardian (UK)

MI5 and Scotland Yard are advising the Greek authorities on how to protect the 2004 Athens Olympic Games amid concern that the local police are struggling to grasp the scale of threat posed by al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, the Guardian has learned. The Briton who has been appointed chief security consultant for the games admits he has "a very tough job" because the world has changed so fundementally since September 11.

Security experts from seven countries are now providing assistance to Athens police - a reflection of what one Whitehall source called "the massive undertaking" of protecting an event which anti-terrorist investigators regard as "a peach of a target".

Although the games will have a massive security cordon, with a record 58,000 police, armed forces and safety volunteers being deployed, the host nation's response to warnings and offers of help was described by one security source as "patchy".

"Greece poses a separate challenge to Australia," he said. Whereas in downtown Sydney, exercises were being conducted at this stage by commandos in Black Hawk helicopters, Greek secretiveness has made that extremely difficult.

"The reluctance to get people even to share information here is very frustrating," said one western security official.

The safety concerns were highlighted this week when Australia's Olympic committee chief, Jim Coats, announced his team would be using its own security force in the Greek capital.

Despite massive international pressure, it was only three months ago that Athens' ruling socialists finally reached agreement with an American-based firm to set up a sophisticated command-and-control communications network for the Games.

Last May, when it became apparent that the country had fallen behind in security planning, it hired British-born Peter Ryan, the senior officer in the New South Wales police responsible for security at the Sydney Olympics.

Mr Ryan said he not only faced the huge task of equipping and training police and other security forces for the event, but, unlike Australia, Greece was intrinsically more dangerous because of its long porous borders and position at the crossroads of the Balkans, Mediterranean and Middle East.

"The nature of police and security forces in Australia and the collaboration between them was of a different sort than in Greece," he said. "There, they were very well equipped and highly advanced technologically. We did not need to build infrastructure from scratch. Planning was therefore a lot easier. Here, they do not have that type of infrastructure, it has to be built and after building it you then have to train people how to use it".

There are also fears that the Schengen agreement makes it more difficult to monitor the passage of EU passport-holders in and out of the country - even though Athens international airport has recently won awards as one of the safest in the world.

Mr Ryan insisted that it was impossible to compare Athens with Sydney because of September 11.

"We are in a different world now than we were when we were planning the 2000 games. The very nature of terrorism, the methods used by the people who conduct it, are quite different to the ones we were facing then," he said.

Counter-terrorism had thus become a different business with a much greater need for intelligence rather than response-driven policing.

"We have to start from a position of total prevention," said Mr Ryan, who started out as a policeman in Lancashire.

In the past, most security forces' exercises and preparations "pre-supposed" that terrorists would get through.

Now, he said, experts had to start thinking about scenarios many months prior to a possible attack to prevent it happening at all. That involved thousands of analysts being recruited to "pull together" all the threads.

In the case of the Athens Olympics, counter-terrorism officials have come up with "150 different plans for different things". Intelligence is being fed to the Greek National Security Service (EYP) from seven countries - the UK, US, France, Germany, Spain, Australia and Israel.

The countries have provided "training in areas where we see the weaknesses are ... everything from forensic management all the way through to specialist anti-terrorist assault forces".

The scenarios envisaged include deployment of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, aeroplane hijacking and hostage taking.

Mr Ryan said some of the £377m budget was being used to buy new equipment, ranging from radio systems for police and coastguard officials to data-storing and computer systems, vehicle locators, closed-circuit television systems and control centres.

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