COUNTRY CODES• 117and Western personnel, among them a British military attache ́, Briga-
dier Stephen Saunders, shot dead in June 2000, and theCentral In-
telligence Agencystation chief in Athens, Dick Welch, murdered in- The organization’s entire membership was convicted and im-
prisoned in 2004.
Of all these groups, it is the religious fundamentalists that provide
the hardest targets. The English cells of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, its
rival al-Gama‘at al-Islamiya (responsible for the deaths of 65 tourists
in Luxor in November 1997), and the Islamic Army of Aden are hard
to penetrate with outsiders, and the opportunities to recruit insiders
are very limited.
Another difficult problem to solve is the tendency of these volatile,
politically motivated groups to develop offshoots, such as the Salafist
Group for Call and Combat (GSPC) that split from the Armed Is-
lamic Group (GIA) in 1998. Both remain committed to a civil war in
Algeria that has gone largely unreported in the West and has resulted
in the deaths of an estimated 50,000 people. Like the GIA, the GSPC
is particularly active in France, indulging in ‘‘commuter terrorism’’
from London, much to the frustration of MI5’s French counterpart,
the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire.
While the Security Service enjoys extensive liaison contacts over-
seas, with official links to nearly a hundred other foreign police and
security agencies, it occasionally encounters a degree of state spon-
sorship, the best example being that of Hezbollah (‘‘Party of God’’),
which has been directed from Tehran. Like Abu Nidal, which has
attacked British targets on 17 occasions, Hezbollah attracts special
attention from MI5 because in the past it kidnapped three Britons in
the Lebanon. While Libya has renounced its sponsorship of terror-
ism, chiefly as a result of the isolation imposed after the destruction
ofPanAm 103over Lockerbie, Scotland, Iran’s role remains ambig-
uous, and Hezbollah retains plenty of adherents in British mosques.
Accordingly, surveillance on Iranian and Syrian diplomatic missions
is as intensive now as when Somalia was providing Carlos the Jackal
with a safe haven in Khartoum.See alsoSPECIAL AIR SERVICE.
COUNTRY CODES.Before and during World War II, theSecret In-
telligence Service(SIS) adopted a system of two-digit numeric
codes to identify particular countries. By 1940 it was so compro-