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FROM BLETCHLEY PARK TO A BRAVE NEW WORLD 537
being replaced with 'Soothsayer', which offers greater interoperability
with the Americans and a much higher level of
automation. Significant investment in front-line sigint equipment
to serve the troops is, at last, being made.
While circling over Afghanistan, the RAP's Nimrod R 1 s noticed
something rather interesting. From 2005, it was increasingly
common for these surveillance planes monitoring Taliban radio
communications to come across militants speaking with Bradford
or Birmingham accents. A case in point was Rashid Rauf, a
Birmingham man sought by British police in connection with
an August 2006 plot to bomb transatlantic airliners. He is
believed to have escaped from a Pakistan prison in 2007, and
was killed just inside Pakistan in a CIA missile attack on a militant
stronghold in 2008. Intelligence officers observed privately:
'He's not the only British Muslim to die out here: Predictably,
this raised fears that experienced fighters might have returned
home from Afghanistan to plot attacks in Britain, and it was
not long before RAF aircraft with similar listening equipment
began circling over British cities searching for returned Afghan
fighters. Their brief was to seek out suspects using 'voice prints'
of fighters with British accents that had been collected by the
Nimrods from Taliban battlefield communications. 14
The surveillance effort between the war in Afghanistan and
the 'war' at home was now seamlessly connected. The RAF had
purchased three Britten-Norman Islander aircraft which were
equipped with sigint suites and used as airborne listening stations.
Based at RAF Northolt in west London, they are used for covert
surveillance by MIS, which provides the monitoring staff in the
aircraft. In early 2007 they were used to support the West
Midlands Police when tracking suspects connected to a plot to
kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier. These aircraft can
fly at fairly high altitude, and have been seen loitering over the
East End of London for long periods. They are also known to
operate out of Leeds-Bradford Airport. Many have presumed
that they were deployed as part of a post-91 11 surveillance effort,
but newspapers have published photographs of an MIS officer