The man who wove London's security blanket

Charles Farr operates at the very highest level, as the director of the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism at the Home Office, he has played a pivotal role in devising the largest peacetime security operation in history for the 2012 Olympics.

LONDON // Every morning, as visitors make their way to the Olympic Park and to venues across the city, a team of Britain's most senior "securocrats" meets in Whitehall.

The business of each day is always the same: the security of the Olympic Games. Risk is assessed and reassessed "obsessively".

This is a world of which the public sees only a fraction. If all works as planned it is one about which people can remain, for the most part, blissfully ignorant.

This is the world in which Charles Farr operates at the very highest level. As the director of the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism at the Home Office, he has played a pivotal role in devising the largest peacetime security operation in history. It involves 40,000 people and has a budget of £1 billion (Dh5.73bn).

In a rare interview, Mr Farr explains his approach, outlines the threats and looks ahead to the period of "transition" which begins on Monday and goes on to the Paralympic Games.

"Our first job was to write a clear strategy for security which embraced everybody's responsibility. There could be no ambiguity about what everybody had to do and we had to understand where our role begins and ends," Mr Farr said yesterday.

The Home Office does not deliver the security on the ground. They do not order doors to be kicked in at six in the morning and have people arrested. That falls to the police. Venue security is the responsibility of the organising committee.

Mr Farr said: "We provide the operational plan in very close consultation with the police, the military, G4S and other agencies and then stand back a bit. But with the Olympics we're closer to the day-to-day adjustments. We like to be present and to know about them."

On July 7, 2005, the day after London won its Olympic bid, suicide bombers attacked the city's transportation network, killing 52 people. Since then there has never been any doubt that the London Games would be the first conducted in a high-threat environment.

Over the past six months the Home Office, police, military and intelligence agencies have staged live play scenarios - the bombing of an underground tube was one - and conducted tabletop exercises, thinking the unthinkable and taking it to its ultimate conclusion.

"Everything we do on counter terrorism is based on threat and risk. We are obsessive about risk assessment because otherwise you spend vast amounts of money, you don't prioritise correctly and you get lost in the weeds," Mr Farr said.

To that end, a team travelled to Vancouver and studied the security at other Olympic host cities, including Sydney and Athens.

But it was just as important for British planners to understand how terrorists are behaving now.

"Since the attacks in Mumbai in 2008 we have been developing our response to a firearms attack. Preceding years have been dominated by attacks using improvised explosive devices (IEDs)," Mr Farr said.

"Now we've seen Oslo and much more recently Toulouse," he said, referring to Anders Behring Breivik who killed 69 people at a youth camp, and the attacks this year in France, where seven people were killed and five injured in three attacks by Mohammed Merah.

"We had already programmes in place here, with the police, with the military, to build up our ability to respond very quickly to what we call a marauding firearm attack. The Olympics built on that work and on very sound foundations. Although there are new things, some new techniques, some new capabilities."

There is also what he refers to as the "Olympic difference", which is partly down to the sheer numbers of people who attend the Games. But more particularly it is the vast international presence as nations bring their own notions of security and their own threats.

An added factor, he said, is that "with crisis management you don't usually have to think: 'are the Games going to carry on?'"

When it comes to managing a crisis, the major difference about these Olympics is that they are the first "Twitter Games".

"Facebook and Twitter have changed the way government responds to a crisis. Because government has to work much harder to stay visibly in control when the Twitterati are out there doing their own thing probably from the site of an incident," Mr Farr said.

Indeed technology plays an important role in these Games. The threat of cyber-attack from so-called "hacktivists" is another area on which Mr Farr and his colleagues focused.

"Imagine say, knocking out some system on which LOCOG [London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games] is completely dependent," he said. "That could be a very good way of bringing the Olympics to a halt."

Crime and public disorder such as the riots seen a year ago could also present a risk.

The response to some of these threats is more visible than others. On a busy day there are as many as 18,000 guards on the gates and perimeters of venues.

Counter-terrorism is less visible with the public seeing "substantially less than 50 per cent" of the work being done, Mr Farr said.

In recent months the level of threat as set by the Joint Terrorist Assessment Centre has actually reduced from severe, to substantial - towards the middle of the scale.

"We planned all our processes as though the threat was going to be higher than it actually is," Mr Farr said.

He takes no satisfaction in saying that the resources devoted to security have been higher in London than any other Games. But visitors, competitors and residents might take comfort from that fact.

The security of the Games does not rest solely at Mr Farr or indeed the Home Office's door. But his, and its, role was key in establishing a strategy now being delivered calmly - and so far successfully.

On Monday the "transitional" period begins. Security will be stepped down post-Olympics, then rise again for the Paralympics.

The success of these Games has seen an "Olympic bounce", with tickets for the Paralympics selling in unprecedented numbers so levels of security presence must take that into account. They will be at the "higher end of the model".

"It is about proportionality and balance. Security can't be too dominant or oppressive. It should reassure people not disconcert them," said Mr Farr. "I think we've got the balance about right."