Britain’s top anti-terror chief resigns amid security breach

Britain’s top counter-terrorism official resigned Thursday after committing an embarrassing breach of security that forced police to prematurely launch raids against suspected Al Qaeda plotters.

Bob Quick, an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, apologized for having potentially jeopardized “a major counter-terrorism operation” when he was photographed and filmed Wednesday carrying top-secret documents in plain view.

Clutched under his right arm as he arrived at 10 Downing Street for a prime ministerial briefing was a memo titled “Operation Pathway,” whose contents about a terrorist investigation were clearly visible.

Hours later, police fanned out across northwestern England and arrested a dozen men in armed raids that, in some cases, occurred in public places in daylight, terrifying bystanders. Police said 11 of the 12 detainees were Pakistani nationals, some of them in Britain on student visas.

Police have divulged no further details about the suspects or what exactly led to their arrests, though the size and complexity of the operation, which involved hundreds of officers, suggest that the men had been under surveillance for some time. There were unconfirmed reports Thursday that authorities suspected a large-scale attack was in the final stages of planning, perhaps a bombing in a nightclub or shopping center.

“We’re dealing with a very big terrorist plot. We’ve been following it for some time,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the BBC. “We had to act preemptively to ensure the safety of the public.”

Quick, a 30-year police veteran, acknowledged his blunder in a statement, saying he regretted “the disruption caused to colleagues undertaking the operation” and was “grateful for the way in which they adapted quickly and professionally to a revised time scale.”

Pressure on Quick to atone for his mistake began to build immediately after the photographs of him hit newscasts Wednesday. In a country where the threat of terrorist attack is a constant worry, politicians and commentators were aghast over what happened.

Opposition spokesman Chris Grayling of the Conservative Party called it a “quite extraordinary” lapse by Quick that had put a “huge question mark over his judgment.”

“If our most senior counter-terrorism officer can’t be trusted not to expose highly secret information like this in a public place, then who on Earth can be?” Grayling told the BBC.

London Mayor Boris Johnson called Quick an experienced officer whose resignation he accepted with “great reluctance and sadness.”

Still, there was some glee over the resignation among Conservatives who had not forgiven Quick for his involvement in November in the arrest of a Conservative lawmaker and the search of his office as part of an investigation of sensitive information leaks. Legislators of all political stripes denounced Quick for authorizing a violation of the traditional sanctity of parliamentary offices.

But Johnson, who is a Conservative, said, “There was absolutely no kind of witch hunt or effort to get him out” after Wednesday’s blunder.

“I think what people perhaps felt was that . . . an operation that was very, very sensitive and important for counter-terrorism, for rounding up terrorists, had been potentially compromised,” Johnson said in a radio interview. “And there was obviously a real difficulty there.”

Despite some missteps, Quick was widely regarded as a patient and effective officer. He had served as counter-terrorism chief for slightly more than a year.

His successor, John Yates, is also considered an intelligent and able officer but has no counter-terrorism experience. Yates is best known for leading the so-called cash-for-honors inquiry in 2006 on allegations that lawmakers promised peerages -- knighthoods and the like -- to big political donors. No charges were ever filed in the inquiry.

Wednesday’s operation focused mostly on the two large northern cities of Liverpool and Manchester. One of the suspects was arrested on the campus of a Liverpool university, panicking students in a library who watched armed police officers force the man to lie facedown on the ground.

Peter Fahy, chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police, said Thursday that the operation was planned before Quick’s blunder and would have occurred within 24 hours of when police were forced to act.

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henry.chu@latimes.com