Operation Olympics: Sydney is ready for terrorists

An apparent conspiracy to attack a Sydney nuclear reactor during the Games has focused attention on Australia's security precautions.

CANBERRA - The Australian Army may be mobilised to suppress terrorism and violent demonstrations at the Sydney Olympics.

To the dismay of human rights advocates, the Senate in Canberra will today a debate a bill allowing the federal Government to call in the Army.

The move comes amid new concern about security after the revelation that Auckland police had discovered a potential plot to attack the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in southwest Sydney.

Although the bill is viewed with disquiet by unions, human rights advocates and some senators, there is broad political agreement that the measures need to be in place for the Games, where more than 4000 defence personnel will be on duty.

There may not be any major identified threat, but the Auckland discovery, the rhetoric of arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden and associated groups, the massing of protesters and the arrest of a neo-Nazi bomb-maker have spurred security planners.

Already, a 27-strong New Zealand anti-terrorist squad has flown to Sydney to help sorely stretched Australian security forces, and daily bomb sweeps of the Olympic Village will this week extend to other Games sites.

The bill to allow the Government to call out the troops - which will survive, with safeguards demanded by critics, beyond the Games - will give the Army far greater powers.

If needed to support civilian police, soldiers will be able to search buildings, vehicles and people for bombs and weapons, set cordons around security areas and detain people during emergencies.

For Australia, faced with a massive security job which vastly eclipses the Apec effort that stripped New Zealand's resources to the bare bones, there is little option.

Almost 4900 New South Wales police officers - more than one-third of the force - will be assigned to protect Olympic venues and VIPs, with a further 4500 private security staff hired to guard buildings, man venue entrances and check accreditation.

Police stations will be shut across New South Wales, and the Australian Defence Force, already stretched by Timor and using reserves to plug the gap, will be pushed hard to cover its list of jobs, from driving VIPs to sending divers to check for underwater bombs.

A further 2500 volunteers have been recruited from the Rural Fire Service and the State Emergency Service.

Other strains will be added by an expected upsurge in crime, including a possible increase in people-smuggling as organised rings try to use the crush of Games visitors to slip in more illegal migrants, and a likely influx of fake United States currency and traveller's cheques.

The potential for trouble has already been shown.

Tight security at Sydney airport was breached in July when one man was found on the tarmac and another, mentally disturbed, was arrested in the cockpit of an Air New Zealand jet.

Earlier, a man was charged with attempting to extort $A100 million by threatening terrorist bombings and to shoot down planeloads of athletes with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

And a neo-Nazi who had changed his name to Martin Bormann, a close aide of Adolf Hitler, was arrested after repeated bomb threats to Olympic organisers. Amid racist literature, police found bomb-making ingredients in a cellar beneath his Sydney home.

A more substantial headache for security planners is growing at Victoria Park, near the main Homebush Games site, where Aboriginal protesters are erecting a tent city to push their grievances before more than 6000 international journalists. Organisers insist that the protest will be non-violent, but the 20,000 demonstrators they estimate will join them in marches and rallies make the potential for confrontation very real.

Further fuel will be added by the many other causes that will orbit the Aboriginal campaign. Key among these will be anti-globalisation protesters moving up from the World Economic Forum's Asia-Pacific summit in Melbourne to target the major corporations and executives supporting or attracted to the Olympics.

Organised in Australia by the S11 Alliance of left-wing and anarchist groups, the protesters see the Melbourne summit and the Olympics as a continuation of the fight against capitalism that erupted into street violence at World Trade Organisation meetings in Seattle and Washington.

Australian protesters, who have been trained in street tactics and advised to wear chemical-repellent clothing, will be joined by supporters from New Zealand, the United States and Britain, whose contingent is expected to include some of the J18 group which took part in anti-capitalist riots that left 46 people hurt in London last year.

A more sinister, if more remote, threat comes from terrorist groups. Some whispers have been heard: in June, security agencies tracked telephone calls between New South Wales homes and Mahmud Aboulahimi and El-Gabrowny, New York associates of bin Laden charged in connection with World Trade Centre bombing.

While no one can be sure which of the world's numerous terrorist groups may consider Sydney a target - many of them operate in countries with strong ethnic bases in Australia - bin Laden is considered the most likely danger.

His host country, Afghanistan, is banned from the Sydney Games, an associate involved in the World Trade Centre blast, Mohammed Salameh, was applying to immigrate at the time of the bombing, and he has established close links with other terrorist groups in Southeast Asia.

Among these is Abu Sayyaf, the Islamic separatist group operating in the Philippine island of Mindanao which this year held hostage 21 tourists from a Malaysian resort.

The discovery of the apparent plot against the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor by a group linked to bin Laden has raised further, more worrying, concerns over the potential for attacks on a disastrous scale.

United States security agencies have warned that bin Laden, already suspected of trying to buy biological weapons from a former Soviet republic, has likened his bid to gain chemical, biological and nuclear weapons to a religious quest.

They add that his and similar groups are increasingly disposed to large-scale, indiscriminate killings.

Australian and United States officials rate the prospect of an attack by bin Laden or other terrorists as very low, but do not ignore it and have identified more than 100 potential terrorist targets.

New South Wales police have also imported 200 chemical and biological warfare suits, and this year five people linked to extremist groups in the Middle East, Europe and Asia were deported.

To counter both potential international and domestic threats, Australia has set in place a vast web of military and civilian police intelligence networks, linked to security agencies in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, and permeating down to ethnic communities in its major cities.

This is focused through the Olympic intelligence centre, operating out of the Canberra headquarters of the nation's counter-intelligence agency, the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) - itself under pressure with a 42 per cent rise last year in threat assessments.

ASIO and the centre are linked to the federal Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, which both prepares its own strategic assessments on Olympic threats and plugs the agency into its sophisticated database and communications system that also serves other police and security agencies around the country.

In Sydney, New South Wales police control the Games security effort through the Olympics command centre - which includes direction of police and Special Air Service anti-terrorist squads - with special teams for VIP and athlete protection and a strike force dedicated to major and serious crimes related to the Olympics.

A major effort has already been launched against potential bomb attacks, with the daily sweeps of the Games Village working up to a peak that will involve 1800 soldiers and police, and dogs trained to detect 20 different explosive compounds, embracing 19,000 possible explosive combinations.

Navy divers will check the hulls of boats and ships, and the waterways leading to Games venues, while water police will patrol with 40 new tactical inflatable assault boats and jetskis.

Anti-terrorist squads from the SAS, commando and other elite Army units have been trained to board large vessels under way at sea in addition to dealing with crises on land.

They are supported by a Blackhawk helicopter squadron and three C-130 Hercules aircraft on 24-hour standby for emergencies at Olympic Games events in Canberra or Brisbane.

The Games, federal Attorney-General Daryl Williams says, will be as safe as Australia can make them.

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