ISTANBUL: THE IGNORED WARNINGS by Gordon Thomas With America once more in a state of elevated security this Thanksgiving, it has emerged two intelligence warnings were ignored that the British Consul and the HSBC Bank in Istanbul were prime Al Qaeda targets. The warnings came from the CIA and Mossad. This latest intelligence failure by the usually "safe pair of hands" of British MI6 has highlighted the continuing lapses in global intelligence to fight Al Qaeda. "These failures continue to make a mockery of President Bush's claims that we are winning the war against terrorism", said Sami Mader, a director of the Paris based Centre for International Studies - a major European intelligence think-tank which advises the European Community. "The further we are away from Istanbul, the closer we are to it happening again", Mader added. President Bush was in London when the Istanbul attacks happened. He was so shocked, he immediately ordered Americans to be once more warned they are facing an unprecedented security threat. Over 50 people died and 700 were injured, many seriously, in the Istanbul truck bombings. Both targets had been identified by the CIA and Mossad - as "soft targets" and in need of "urgent protection upgrading". Their first warnings had been passed on to MI6 last May. The second warning came only a week ago after suicide bombers partly destroyed two Istanbul synagogues. British Consul-General Robert Short was working on a security review for MI6 when he died in the bombing. His report was due to be in the hands of MI6 chief Richard Dearlove this week. So sensitive were its contents that Short had asked his personal assistant, Lisa Hallworth, 38, to personally encrypt it after typing the document. She also died in the blast. They were together in Short's temporary office on the first floor of the consulate gatehouse when the car bomber - in a green van bearing the logo of a local food catering company - detonated his 500-pound bomb only yards from them. The two Turkish security guards on duty outside the gatehouse may have thought the van had come to discuss catering arrangements for Short's 59th birthday later this week. Framed photos of the Consul's wife, Victoria, and their three children, were on his office desk. Shards of frame were found hundreds of yards away. On that fateful morning, Short was, as usual, dressed in his grey flannels and blazer. A non-smoker, in his pocket was the memento he carried everywhere - a solid gold lighter that Victoria had given to him when she accepted his proposal. Short had been asked to write the MI6 report following last weekend's attack on the two synagogues in the city. He had been in frequent contact during the week with MI6's senior officer in Turkey. During their conversations, Short had spoken of his fear that Turkey's Islamic government had failed to fully distance itself from its fundamentalist roots - and had not done enough to reign in extremism in the country. Shortly before his death, he said: "the jury is still out on how committed is the Turkish government to be ready to confront Al Qaeda". Britain's intelligence chiefs are urgently trying to find answers to questions the Consul's report could have answered. Did Short tragically misread the situation on the ground and adopt a wait and see attitude? A fluent Turkish speaker, he had developed good connections with Turkish intelligence, MIT. Had MIT's own agents seriously misjudged the reality of the Al Qaeda presence in a city of 10 million? Was there a more sinister reason for the failure of Turkish intelligence to anticipate the attacks virtually on the doorstep of its own headquarters? Did "rogue elements" known to exist in Turkish security deliberately turn a blind eye to the impending attack? Turkish intelligence, for all its strong-arm "Midnight Express" interrogation methods, is also not renowned for its analytical skills. The service has also made no secret of its resentment of the can-do mentality of security services like Mossad and the CIA. Both have a strong presence in Turkey. How far did inter-service resentment play a part in the way the warnings were handled? Mossad itself suspects members of Turkish intelligence are sympathetic to the aims of the many extreme Islamic groups in Istanbul. These include Chechen rebels and Turkish Hezbollah. The first warnings came last May from the CIA and Mossad. Their agents had separately picked up "credible evidence" that both the consulate and bank were "sitting targets". Both intelligence services had identified an alliance between Al Qaeda and fanatical Turkish groups planning to destabilise the country. Mossad are satisfied that the sophistication of last week's attacks points to the training and expertise of Al Qaeda. Mossad analysts have told me that help may have come from Absar al-Islam. It has links with a shadowy group called Great Islamic Raiders of the Orient (IBDA-C). Backed by Iran, this group is violently anti-Christian. Other groups are: Islamic Action. Again, Tehran-baked, the group promotes an Islamic state in Tehran. Beyyiat el-Iman. Born out of Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, six of its members are now in custody after the attacks on the Istanbul synagogues. Hezbollah is not connected to the group of the same name in Lebanon. Its aim is to create an Islamic state in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. All the groups have one common link: they are violently anti-West. Yet the threats they pose remained, unaccountably, not a priority to Britain's security services. Until last week. But the threat was so serious that Meir Dagan, Mossad's chief, and George Tenet, CIA director, informed Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, of their views in May. They were passed on to the Foreign Office - and relayed back by secure diplomatic email to Short. "He appears to have checked with his own Turkish security contacts. We are not yet clear what, if any action, they proposed. But Short was a very experienced man and would know the effect of crying wolf to the British business community without it being absolutely necessary", said a Mossad intelligence officer in Istanbul. Nevertheless, Washington ordered its own consulate in the city to relocate to the suburbs. A team of US security experts quickly turned the building into a secure fortress, bristling with bomb-proof windows and a range of sophisticated electronic defences to warn of and repel any attack. All approaches were heavily guarded. But the British consulate - two buildings and a gate lodge - was not similarly protected. Its entrance was directly on the road and, though guarded, its metal gate offered only token resistance to a truck bomber. An open-air market next door would have enabled the terrorists to spy on the consulate. Only occasionally did a Turkish policeman stroll past the gatehouse - where consul-general Roger Short had set up a temporary office. The main buildings were being renovated. There were no security checks made on the workers - some of whom are now suspected of having provided valuable information for the suicide bomber attack. The HSBC building - one of the tallest in Istanbul - was also virtually unprotected, though it housed two Jewish-owned supermarkets, Marks & Spencers and Tesco. While there were Turkish security guards on duty at the entrance to the high-rise in the fashionable Levent district of Istanbul, the building had no other visible defence. The second warning, following the attacks on the synagogues, came again from Mossad. Its team of 30 agents in the city to investigate the attacks had once more picked up "highly credible intelligence" of an impending further attack. With the Bush visit to London already about to begin, last Tuesday Mossad passed on details to the MI6 officer at the British embassy in Ankara. Almost certainly that warning was passed on to Roger Short. What action he had taken before the bomber struck will now never be known. But the questions will continue: What steps did Turkish intelligence take after the synagogue bombings to brief British firms in Istanbul on the threat? What steps did the London headquarters of those firms take to warn their managers of the impending risks? Turkey is a long-standing NATO ally and an eager applicant for EU membership. But how much support has it had to fight Al Qaeda? What happened in Istanbul has shown that Turkey's proud boast to be a "modern secular democracy" in the end meant nothing to Osama bin Laden. MI6, the CIA and Mossad are all satisfied that the choice of targets, the timing and co-ordination of the attacks were carefully pre-planned weeks ago. Turkish Muslims, suicide bombers, were used to launch the attack. But they were sub-contractors. The guiding intelligence was Osama bin Laden thousands of miles away - somewhere in the mountains on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Al Qaeda has exploited the suffering of the Palestinians in Israel, the crushing of Chechen independence and the US-led occupation of Iraq. These events have been fused into a common resentment of "Western aggressors" and a "defence" of Islamic territory. There are massive US and British business interests in Istanbul. At the crossroads with Europe and Asia, the country has become the trade focus for European nations. Yet it was the powerful presence of Western capitalism which ironically helped to turn Istanbul into a graphic snapshot on the latest battlefront in the Age of Terror. Al Qaeda regards capitalism as "a sinful practice of usury". The goal of Osama bin Laden is the eradication of Western secular influence and the re-establishment of a caliphate based on Islamic fundamentalism. This vision calls for "a new golden age" and seeks revenge in bin Laden's perceived humiliation of Muslims in the Crusades, in Napoleon's defeat of the Mameluks in 1898, in the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and in the continuing US influence in the oil-rich sheikdoms of the Gulf. The Istanbul bombings were the latest in a grim line of attacks. Yet many Europeans have been astonishingly slow to still grasp the impact of what happened on September 11. Istanbul is only further proof that the West and its allies, along with moderate Muslims through the world, are facing an enemy who glorifies their deaths and eulogises the murder of innocent people as a passport to Paradise. Istanbul is the latest proof - if it was ever needed - for Europeans to recognise that bin Laden represents an ever-present danger. There is no other reality. ends Gordon Thomas is a writer on intelligence - his many books include : Gideon's Spies_The Secret History of Mossad Robert Maxwell - Israel's Superspy Seeds of Fire - China and the Story Behind the Attack on America GLOBE-INTEL is a free subscription service provided by http://www.globe-intel.net