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Exercise Atlantic Blue

Details of the Exercise

April 2005

Exercise Atlantic Blue (known as TopOff 3 in the US and Triple Play in Canada) was a major international counter-terrorism exercise involving the UK, US and Canada. It tested our response to internationally linked terrorist incidents.

Objectives of the exercise:

• Incident management - To test the existing procedures for domestic incident management of a terrorist event and to improve, through practice, top officials' ability to work together across the affected countries.

• Public information - To practice the joint response of the UK, US and Canadian governments to media handling and public information.

• Intelligence and investigation - To test the flow of operational time-critical intelligence among US, UK and Canadian agencies.

This exercise was part of the Home Office counter-terrorism exercise programme. The programme is centred on three annual large-scale live exercises with police forces, other government departments and agencies testing counter-terrorist contingency plans.

Between the beginning of 2003 and the end of 2004 there were six large-scale live exercises and 32 tabletop exercises within the Home Office national counter-terrorism exercise programme.

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