The alleged plot to blow up airplanes with liquid explosives has highlighted the importance of intelligence-sharing, which officials and experts say has improved among countries since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

American officials have strongly praised British intelligence, with President Bush describing U.S.-U.K. cooperation as “solid.”

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said the “FBI and other law enforcement intelligence agencies have worked closely with our colleagues at MI-5 on all aspects of this case, and they have aggressively pursued every domestic lead that has arisen from the intelligence that led to these arrests.”

House Homeland Security Chairman Peter T. King, R-N.Y., said the uncovering of the alleged plot “ was a classic case of seamless communication between British and American intelligence agencies.”

Increased intelligence-sharing and cooperation with foreign countries, especially Britain, has been “one of our biggest accomplishments since 9/11,” King said.

Not only do the British coordinate well with Americans on intelligence, they might be better at some aspects of it.

William Rosenau of the Rand Corporation said the British are better at human- source intelligence and “they’ve been willing to make investments in language skills that we haven’t be willing to make.”

“The British trump us in their use of police in counterterrorism,” while in the U.S., police are viewed largely as first-responders, said Rosenau, who served as senior policy adviser in the State Department’s counter-terrorism office.

In Britain “the police are really an integral part of counterterrorism, they’re the state’s eyes and ears in these communities” and “get a solid understanding of the communities” where a terrorist might live.

The police are integrated into the intelligence community in Britain in ways they aren’t in the U.S., except perhaps in New York, L.A., and Chicago, Rosenau said.

The British also learned from their experience with the IRA that creating distrust within a terrorist organization is key to foiling terrorists, he said.

Infiltrators took more than a decade to get inside the IRA, but eventually they not only gathered information but sewed the “seeds of destruction,” creating distrust that was “absolutely devastating” to an organization that had prided itself on loyalty.

The Americans and British have cooperated on intelligence since World War II, and the relationship “flowered” at the beginning of the Cold War, he said.

In the late 1940s the two countries starting cooperating on signals intelligence and the U.S., Canada, Australia and to some extent New Zealand “have worked hand in glove particularly on signals intelligence, the eavesdropping stuff,” according to Rosenau. British-American intelligence sharing is “as good as it gets in terms of two western democracies,” he added.

Intelligence sharing among the U.S. and other European countries is also very good, as indicated by a “vast intelligence base in Paris,” according to Rosenau.

Disagreements with various European countries over the war in Iraq hasn’t decreased intelligence sharing with those countries because “all of these countries recognize the value of cooperation,” he said.

Experts disagreed on whether Italy’s intelligence sharing has lessened in light of the recent arrest of a top-level Italian official who had been cooperating with the United States on intelligence.

Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation says there is great “frustration” among British law enforcement officials because that country’s laws prevent use in court of human intelligence gathered by American authorities from detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Elsewhere, drug interdiction coordination with Mexico has improved and has laid the groundwork for other coordination with that country. U.S.-Canadian intelligence sharing was praised after an alleged terrorist plot in Toronto, but Mexico’s intelligence community is less advanced.

Jim Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it is a “very different environment with Mexico, it’s not really institutional cooperation,” as with the British or Canadians, but rather based personal relationships.

With the British and Americans, similar laws and culture, as well as a shared language help intelligence coordination, said Lewis, a former diplomat who worked on intelligence at the State Department.

After Sept. 11, the United States reached out to a broad range of countries to share intelligence, “some friendly and some not so friendly,” and found cooperation even in “unexpected places,” such as Russia, Lewis pointed out.

Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation said the British strength in intelligence gathering comes in part from their location and historical involvement in many countries. Australia and New Zealand are important sources of intelligence on Southeast Asia, he said.

William E. Odom of the Hudson Institute and once the head of the National Security Agency said “in some respects the events in Britain are good news. The terrorists are home-grown. We don’t have to go to Pakistan to collect on them.”

However, the ability to track home-grown terrorists in the United States is hampered because the FBI is bad at collecting intelligence and Congress’ post-Sept. 11 intelligence overhaul was misguided, according to Odom. He said “we needed to split the FBI and take the counterterrorism part out and create a new independent, national counterterrorism organization.”

Jamal Ware, spokesman for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., said leaks are “one of the greatest threats” to intelligence cooperation with countries that do not want to be public about the cooperation.

Hoekstra “firmly believes that we should work to expand intelligence sharing cooperation with other foreign governments as appropriate and necessary” and that’s something the United States is “continually working on.”

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called the British government “terrific, in terms of close information sharing and close coordination, recognizing that both countries, which are bound together with great common feelings of culture, are also, unfortunately, bound together by being targeted through terror.”

Eleanor Stables can be reached at estables@cq.com.

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