The campsite on the 50,000-hectare cattle station in the red dirt country at Louth was booked by phone in the name of Adam George.

Expecting a group of feral fox and pig hunters on safari to the back of Bourke, the property owner left directions in a mailbox and saw just one man, who simply called himself ”Joe”.

The company Joe kept alarmed the locals. The seven men – led by Aimen Joud from Melbourne and Mohamed Ali Elomar from Sydney – got lost and had to ask for directions.

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”They stood out to the local community when they were driving through … some of them were wearing camouflage fatigues … some of them are large gentlemen, so just their physical presence stands out,” NSW Police terrorism investigations squad head Detective Inspector David Gawel, says.

Of course, Adam George was a fake name that had been previously used to try to buy laboratory gear to manufacture chemicals to build a bomb.

The men were on a training and bonding exercise, armed with .308 and .22 rifles and components of an explosive device.

The Louth trip, said the Victorian Court of Appeal last June, was the most significant of several group exercises between two terrorist cells based in Sydney and Melbourne whose members pledged allegiance to Abdul Nacer Benbrika, an Algerian-born pensioner sheikh living in Melbourne.

Over two days in March 2005, the men pitched tents, lit campfires and shot at trees, leaving bullets in the trunks and spent shells on the ground.

They also left the burnt remains of a lantern battery attached to spark plugs, apparently a crude attempt to create an incendiary or sparking device. Other blunders included failing to take enough food and water, according to Gawel.

”The person that’s inclined to commit the politically motivated type offence is probably not the most practised criminal,” the NSW Police counter-terrorism and special tactics commander, Peter Dein, says.

”Therefore, you would probably not be surprised to see a lot of learning on the way as they’re building their particular capability.”

Victoria Police Detective Inspector Chris Murray, who investigated Benbrika, says the ”Keystone cops” elements found in this group and another which plotted to stage a suicide attack on Sydney’s Holsworthy Army base do not detract from their serious implications to national security.

”Terrorist acts are by their nature simplistic and don’t need a lot of technology. they don’t need a lot of planning,” he says.

Twenty-one violent jihadists have been convicted and jailed over the past six years in a series of court cases which put the new home-grown brand of Australian terrorism on display after operations Pendennis and Neath, the two biggest joint ASIO-police investigations ever.

They culminated in December with 13½-year prison sentences for the Neath targets, Wissam Mahmoud Fattal, Saney Edow Aweys and Nayev El Sayed, over their Holsworthy plan.

Part of their motivation was anger over the jailing of the 18 men netted by Pendennis.

The 21 men and their accomplices changed Australia, but not with bombs or heavy artillery blasting a symbolic site as they had planned.

Instead, they have revolutionised counter-terrorism in this country.

”Terrorism is a crime type like there’s armed robbery and murder,” Gawel says.

”It’s a new crime type and it’s a new skill set. Pendennis was important for us because it taught us a lot of lessons which we can now use.

”We’d had some other inquiries before that. We had Brigitte. We had Lodhi. We had Ul-Haque, which got us on the path. And that was primary school and this was pretty much a secondary school where we started to refine our skills.”

The full scope of Pendennis could not be told during six years of trials because of court suppression orders on reporting links between the NSW and Victorian cells and the involvement of a Sydney man, Omar Baladjam. these have now been lifted and Pendennis can take its place as the largest counter-terrorism exercise in Australia, followed by the biggest series of criminal trials the nation has seen.

These have yielded a gigantic lode of material which gave counter-terrorism agencies insights they are now using to head off other plots. Police and ASIO investigators recorded 16,400 hours during the operation, using bugging devices and 98,000 phone intercepts.

In the Melbourne trials alone, which led to nine convictions, including Benbrika, 481 monitored conversations were entered in evidence, including at least 28 conversations in which violent jihad was discussed.

In hundreds of thousands of hours of surveillance, the spies followed the plotters’ reflections, plans, jokes, quarrels and fears. these have now been revealed in court documents and transcripts released to selected academics, which pieced together, tell many stories, among them one of building a bomb.

The Melbourne cell grabbed headlines over its plan to blow up the MCG, but the threat from the Sydney group’s bomb-making plans was far greater.

”They were very advanced into their planning and preparation to commit a terrorist attack … There is no doubt about it. If they continued with their plans, there is every expectation that they were going to put something together and attempt to detonate it,” Dein says.

The timing device

Khaled Sharrouf, a zealot carrying a Nokia mobile bearing an American flag, ”9/11” and a picture of Osama bin Laden, was caught by security guards when he tried to smuggle six clocks and 140 batteries out of the Chullora Big W store in empty potato chips boxes.

He pleaded guilty to possessing goods in preparation for a terrorist act. Sentencing him, NSW Supreme Court judge Anthony Whealy said the clocks could have been modified to create an electric circuit to detonate a bomb.

Sharrouf, diagnosed as a chronic schizophrenic as a result of drug use, told one psychiatrist he heard voices and sometimes went outside his house holding a bat at night looking for the source.

The detonators

Items found in the home toolbox of Moustafa Cheikho, who trained in Pakistan, included battery leads, electrical wire cut-offs, a switch and small bulbs apparently cut from a string of decorative lights. His computer held a file about a bombing device triggered by a mobile phone.

When police raided tradesman Mazen Touma’s Sydney home, they found 165 railway detonators, pistol and rifle cartridges, nails, shotgun shells, lengths of copper pipe – some fused at one end, 13 rounds of ammunition cut in half with the gunpowder removed. Police also seized 15 boxes containing 7500 rounds of ammunition for semi-automatic weapons from his van.

In wiretapped conversations, he and a friend pretended they were talking about plastering a wall when they discussed making an explosive device.

He said in one bugged conversation that he loved being called Osama bin Laden by others and: ”If they kill me I get martyrdom.”

Sentencing him after his guilty plea, Justice Whealy said he was ”a rank amateur in the area of making explosives, but it does not rule out his use of other people, or the use by other people of the materials he assembled, for a terrorist purpose”.

The chemicals and lab gear

Sydney cell members Abdul Rakib Hasan, Khaled Sharrouf and Mohamed Ali Elomar visited Benbrika in Melbourne, where they discussed a long list of equipment and chemicals they planned to order from a secondary school laboratory supplier, Haines.

Hasan, a former butcher, was an associate of Faheem Lodhi, found guilty of terrorism offences in Sydney and Willie Brigitte, who was deported and convicted in France.

Elomar, now serving a minimum of 21 years in jail for his part in preparing for a terrorist act, was the Sydney cell leader, trained by Laksha e-Taiba in Pakistan. According to Justice Whealy, he ”possessed the recipes for explosives”.

After much discussion, an order for 55 items was faxed to Haines from a Melbourne suburb. Police raided the home of Benbrika’s Melbourne lieutenant, Aimen Joud, and found the list in Elomar’s handwriting.

Meanwhile, other cell members collected acid to make explosives.

Omar Baladjam, 34, a Manly-born former spray painter and TV soapie actor, pleaded guilty to acquiring two loaded handguns, acid, 900 rounds of ammunition and a Nokia phone handset in the false name of Jeffrey Leydon, all used in preparation for a terrorist act.

Posing as a market researcher, he phoned a Kings Park car battery outlet and asked about its monthly consumption and supplier of sulphuric acid. Calling himself ”Jeff from Pile Up Batteries”, he then called a chemical supplier and got a price, saying he used about 300 litres a month. Five litres of battery acid and five litres of hydrochloric acid were on his premises when he was raided.

In September, Hasan and Omar Jamal tried to buy sulphuric acid and water from Autoking. Hasan bought acetone from one hardware store and methylated spirits, acetone and sulphuric acid from another at Padstow.

On November 3, just before they were arrested, Elomar, Moustafa Cheikho, Sharrouf and Bosnian-born Mirsad Mulahalilovic bought storage containers, PVC pipes, end caps and other items at Bunnings and other stores.

The training

Shandon Harris-Hogan, a researcher with the global terrorism research centre at Monash University, given access to some transcripts of the convicted men’s bugged conversations, says Melburnians Joud, Fadl Sayadi and Ahmed Raad were envious of their Sydney brothers after the Louth trip.

”There was an awe at ‘Wow they’re organised, they’ve got tents, sleeping bags, compasses – they’re further down the road. I think it motivated these guys … their thinking is: wow, we need to pull our fingers out and catch up,” Harris-Hogan says. The Melbourne cell had its own rather shambolic training exercise.

While scouting for a paramilitary training site in the western suburb of Laverton, they stumbled on a TV film crew. The producer gave them his business card. Quips heard by the wiretappers included ”al-Qaeda comes to Paramount” and ”al-Qaeda comes to Mount Thomas”, the fictional setting for the TV police series Blue Heelers.

Harris-Hogan, who has done a ”social network analysis” of the cell, discovered two distinct cliques at loggerheads. Bugs recorded the squabbles one day when the men were trying to work out how to allocate each of the 12 cell members seats in three cars for a weekend road trip together.

The thinking

The NSW and Victorian cells had a ”common library” of violent jihadist material. for the Sydney trials alone, authorities had to sift through 3.35 terabytes of this material from the offenders’ computers, according to Gawel. that is almost 900 million pages.

In a ”hard, hard grind for up to 12 months”, detectives had to learn new computer skills to manage the sheer bulk, as they worked out which parts of the horrific graphic material could be put before a jury, he says.

Post-traumatic stress disorder has appeared among the police and prosecutors who watched many beheadings and other gory Western deaths to prepare the case, the Herald understands.

In Victoria, the Crown alleged the organisation’s structure was based on a model in a 1600-page publication, The call for the Global Islamic Resistance – Your Guide … to the way of Jihad, which Benbrika said was ”a good and dangerous book”.

Benbrika was taped talking of ”the instances that permit the killing of the protected kuffar [infidels]”.

Violence is better than sex, Benbrika deemed when Abdullah Merhi, a Melbourne cell member asked for advice about the carnal temptations he felt when watching salacious videos on his brother’s computer.

Benbrika advised him to buy his own computer. Merhi did so and downloaded 677 documents justifying violent jihad.

A common theme uniting violent jihadists is a belief that Islam and Muslims are under attack and they must come to the rescue, says Sam Mullins, research fellow at the University of Wollongong.

”One of the major differences between crime and terrorism is that terrorism is motivated by altruism. they see themselves as freedom fighters and protectors of the wider community. they are Robin Hoods, doing all this dirty work and sacrificing to help other people,” he says.

The money

In an Australian Institute of Criminology paper, three researchers led by Russell Smith remarked how little money was involved.

One Sydney cell member spent $2100 on 10,000 rounds of ammunition, while another bought chemicals for $200.

The Melbourne group raised an estimated $7000, supplementing this with a car rebirthing scam in which Ahmed Raad and his brother Ezzit stripped stolen vehicles for parts.

When Ezzit Raad was fined $1000 for possessing one of the cars, Benbrika approved a withdrawal from the cell’s moneybox to cover it.

Ahmed Raad said in an intercepted conversation that the car racket was ”in Allah’s cause”.

The lessons

Australia’s anti-terrorism laws, framed to catch Islamists who had ”radicalised” and had seriously violent intent toward others, required new thinking by police and courts, according to Dein and Gawel.

Police had to learn to pin down the details of crimes before they are committed, because of the danger to the community, Gawel says.

For the first time, he says, courts recognised the process of radicalisation that takes place when a disaffected individual’s mindset becomes the driving factor in their acquisition of weapons and explosives.

Pendennis marked the turning point when counter-terrorism agencies realised they had to switch from a ”need-to-know” to a ”need-to-share” mentality about information, Dein says.

Police now do a lot more work inside communities at risk and have evolved to see families with terrorist members as victims themselves, Lancaster says.

Family investigation liaison officers, traditionally assigned to the kin of victims, worked with the relatives of offenders in Operation Neath from the time the police got search warrants, he says.

”We didn’t just classify them as terrorists or bad people. they were victims as well and we provided them support as well,” he says.

Murray says he feels sorry for the families whose sons fell under Benbrika’s sway.

Academics combing through the transcripts of the Pendennis offenders’ words have discovered that their very domesticity; their lives as part-time terrorists with wives and children, rendered them less effective than they could have been.

Homegrown jihad