Ex-terror chief: Cobra "nonsensical"
Cobra, the Government committee which meets to deal with national crises, is cumbersome, bureaucratic and overly political, according to Andy Hayman, who headed Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism operations
Mr Hayman states in a new book, The Terrorist Hunters, that Cobra "is a nonsensical system that drags people away from the serious job in hand to attend a crisis meeting".
Mr Hayman attended Cobra meetings between 2005-07 during security emergencies that included the July 7 and July 21 London bombings, the Glasgow airport and Haymarket car bombs, a series of other terror plots and the assassination of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko.
But in extracts from The Terrorist Hunters published today in The Times, he says that he and other counter-terrorist practitioners were frequently frustrated by political posturing and the slow pace of Whitehall.
