ON THE CUTTING EDGE: It All Came Out In The Wash
Washington Post military correspondent Tom Ricks recounts a presentation by a former British intelligence officer at a CI [Counterintelligence] Center briefing a year ago that described an imaginative operation to find Irish Republican Army terrorist bomb factories in Belfast:
The plan was simple: Build a laundry and staff it with locals and a few of their own. The laundry would then send out “color coded” special discount tickets, to the effect of "get two loads for the price of one," etc. The color coding was matched to specific streets …
While the laundry was indeed being washed, pressed and dry cleaned, it had one additional cycle - every garment, sheet, glove, pair of pants, was first sent through an analyzer, located in the basement, that checked for bomb-making residue. …
To narrow their target list, [the laundry] simply sent out more specific coupons [numbered] to all houses in the area, and before long they had good addresses.
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