The Defence of the Realm (151 page)

Despite changes in the Service and mounting pressure of work, a Staff Opinion Survey in May 2003, conducted once again by an outside consultant, found morale even higher than three years earlier – probably due to strong belief in the Service's role and its ability to make a difference.
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The main source of dissatisfaction was pay. Fifty-four per cent thought their pay compared unfavourably with that of the police and only 44 per cent (up 5 per cent since 2000) believed they received a fair salary. Though not an issue inquired into by staff surveys, there was also minor irritation among some staff at the growing inroads made into the Service's vocabulary by ephemeral jargon invented by Whitehall bureaucrats and management consultants with a tin ear for the English language and a passion for performance indicators. Irritation was reflected in the enthusiastic applause at a Service revue for a sketch on the appraisal interview of a wartime fighter ace, disappointed by his ‘overall box marking':

WING-COMMANDER ‘TIN-ARSE' FROBISHER: Well, the thing is, Smedley, you've done jolly well on shooting down the Hun. In fact, you've exceeded your target by 953%. Trouble is, you have personal development needs.

FLIGHT LIEUTENANT SMEDLEY: Personal development needs, Sir?

WING-CO: Yes, Smedley. You have personal development needs in the areas of policy formation, project management and resource planning.

SMEDLEY: But Sir, I'm a Spitfire pilot. Surely, my job is to shoot down Nazi bombers before they obliterate London?

WING-CO: That's all very well, Smedley, but we senior managers have to . . . consider broader issues.

A similar theme was pursued in another sketch, when pirates of the Caribbean, despite record levels of stolen booty, complain that their careers are being blighted by the lack of‘a skills-based competency audit framework'.
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Such minor irritants had no significant influence on overall morale. A later report by ‘Investors in People' found that ‘the Service is in a remarkable state of health, despite the pressures,' ‘morale is very positive' and ‘staff have a real passion for the work that they do.'
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Operation RHYME in 2004 pre-empted an even more dangerous Islamist attack than Operation CREVICE. The chief plotter was a British Hindu convert to Islam, Dhiren Barot, who, the DG told staff, was ‘believed to have been personally selected and groomed for operational deployment by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the A[l] Q[aida] planner behind 9/11'.
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Among the plots devised by Barot was the ‘Gas Limos Project', which aimed to explode three limousines crammed with gas cylinders, explosives and nails in London underground car parks. He wrote gleefully about
another of his projects: to explode a bomb on a tube train travelling in a tunnel beneath the Thames: ‘Imagine the chaos that would be caused if a powerful explosion were to rip through here and actually rupture the river itself. This would cause pandemonium, what with the explosions, flooding, drowning, etc that would occur/result.'
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It was also Barot's ambition to explode a radioactive ‘dirty bomb', though he acknowledged that ‘for the time being we do not have the contacts that would allow us to purchase such items.'
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In the summer of 2004 Operation RHYME faced the Security Service and the police with an acute form of a familiar counter-terrorist dilemma. Further surveillance and investigation seemed to be required in order to gather the material for a successful prosecution. Delay in disrupting the plot, however, might give Barot and his accomplices time to mount an attack. It was therefore decided to arrest Barot on 3 August. Peter Clarke wrote later:

It is no exaggeration to say that at the time of the arrest there was not one shred of admissible evidence against Barot . . . I know that some in the media were sharpening their pencils, and that if we had been unable to bring charges in that case, there would have been a wave of criticism . . .
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The massive surveillance before the arrest and the complex hunt for evidence afterwards made RHYME the most labour-intensive CT operation so far in the history of both the Security Service and Scotland Yard. More than 300 computers and 1,800 discs, CDs, zip drives and hard drives, many encrypted, had to be examined and the information on them decrypted. Police officers also found more than 600 sets of keys and spent fourteen months visiting over 4,000 garages and lock-ups, trying to match them up and succeeding in only seventy-seven cases. The hunt continued for so long for fear that one of the premises might contain explosives or even radioactive material.
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The end-result was to gather so much evidence that Barot became the first Islamist terrorist in Britain to plead guilty to conspiracy to murder. At his trial two years after his arrest, evidence was produced that he had planned attacks against high-profile US as well as UK targets. It included film of the New York World Trade Center taken by Barot before 9/11 with a commentary including a voice imitating an explosion. Though Barot was a protégé of the chief planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he is highly unlikely to have had advance knowledge of the attacks on the twin towers. His film was, as the prosecution put it, more in the nature of a ‘macabre prophecy'.
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Barot was given a life sentence with a minimum term of forty years (reduced to thirty
on appeal). At a separate trial seven of his co-conspirators also received lengthy prison terms.

For almost four years after 9/11 the only successful Islamist attacks against British targets took place outside the United Kingdom, notably a car-bomb attack in Istanbul on the British consulate and the HSBC Bank in November 2003. British citizens were also among those killed in the bombing of Bali nightclubs in October 2002 and of Madrid commuter trains in March 2004. The Service knew, however, that sooner or later an attack in the UK was bound to succeed. Manningham-Buller warned in the summer of 2004:

There are worrying developments in the radicalisation of some young British Muslims. Action collectively and internationally has prevented or deterred some [terrorist] attacks. But it can only be a matter of time before something on a serious scale occurs in the UK.

. . . It remains the case that we do not know nearly enough about Islamist extremists in the UK, their whereabouts, networks and activities, to give confidence that terrorist attacks in planning in the UK can usually be disrupted.
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The bombings of three Underground trains and one London bus by four suicide bombers on the morning of Thursday 7 July 2005, with the loss of fifty-two other lives, were the first successful Islamist attacks in the UK. Jonathan Evans, who had become DDG in February, recalls that it had been ‘a quiet and routine week', memorable only for the unexpected announcement on the Wednesday that London was to host the 2012 Olympics. Though he received the news of the first of the explosions at 9.20 a.m. on 7 July, it was not until after 10 a.m. that the evidence pointed to a series of terrorist attacks. Evans remembers the day as a classic example of ‘the fog of war', with senior officers watching television to discover what was going on. By lunchtime, with tube carriages still trapped in Underground tunnels, Evans feared that the casualties might rise as high as the 191 deaths caused by Islamist attacks on crowded commuter trains in Madrid in February 2004. Initially, there was only one possible lead to go on. An email in Arabic received from North Africa a few days earlier, but only just translated, offered to provide information on plans for an attack in London in return for a visa to the UK. The sender of the email later agreed to a meeting in North Africa but failed to turn up. Convincing evidence quickly emerged that he was a fraud.
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Though no member of Security Service staff was killed or injured on 7 July, a majority had come to work by Underground or bus, and phoned
anxious relatives to say that they were safe. For a time the Thames House phone system was in danger of being swamped. The impact of 7/7, as it came to be called, was thus direct and personal. One member of the Board recalls that even fellow intelligence agencies ‘did not understand just how deeply the Service felt about the July attacks, the shock, anxiety, and deep need to ensure it didn't happen again'.
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In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the Service was bound to ask itself whether there was more it could have done or whether warning intelligence had been overlooked. In May investigations of several Islamist groups (not including the 7/7 suicide bombers) had concluded that none of them was planning an attack. JTAC had reported, ‘We judge at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the UK,' and took the decision to reduce the UK threat level from ‘Severe General' to ‘Substantial'. Alert levels, however, were not affected.
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The DG told staff meetings in the Thames House restaurant on 8 July: ‘What happened on Thursday [7 July] is what we've feared, been warning about and have worked so hard to prevent. We were shocked by the horror but, while we had no intelligence that could have prevented it, not surprised.'
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The Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, visited Thames House at midday and seemed impressed by the early stages of Operation STEPFORD, the Service's investigation into the 7/7 attacks. After meetings with ministers, Manningham-Buller told her senior colleagues that evening that Blair and Clarke were ‘onside, not keen on knee-jerk responses, not witchhunting and keen to let the Police and MI5 get on with the job'.
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During STEPFORD the Service discovered that it had previously encountered two of the suicide bombers, thirty-year-old Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leading plotter, and twenty-two-year-old Shehzad Tanweer, on the periphery of its investigation into Operation CREVICE. Both were British Islamists of Pakistani origin, born and brought up in the UK. The Service also discovered that it had on record a telephone number which, after (but not before) the attacks, it was able to identify as that of a third suicide bomber, Jermaine Lindsay, a nineteen-year-old Jamaican-born British convert to Islam. There was no trace in Service records of the youngest suicide bomber, eighteen-year-old Hasib Hussein, like Khan and Tanweer a British Islamist of Pakistani origin.
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The first evidence of Mohammed Siddique Khan's involvement was discovered on 9 July, when credit cards in his name were found at the
sites of the two attacks.
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Subsequent investigation by the Service revealed that Khan had visited Pakistan in 2003 and spent several months there with Shehzad Tanweer in the winter of 2004–5, probably in contact with Al Qaida, planning and training for the 7/7 attacks. However, the Service concluded, and the Intelligence and Security Committee agreed, that ‘even with the benefit of hindsight, it would have been impossible from the available intelligence to conclude that either Khan or Tanweer posed a terrorist threat to the British public.' During Operation CREVICE they had figured only as petty fraudsters in peripheral contact with the plotters.
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The shock generated within the Security Service by the slaughter of innocents on 7/7 was reinforced by further, this time unsuccessful, Islamist bomb attacks a fortnight later on three Underground trains and a London bus. Once again the Service had no advance warning. The search for the four would-be suicide bombers – Muktah Said Ibrahim, Yassin Hassan Omar, Ramzi Mohammed and Hussein Osman (all East African immigrants in their twenties who had come to Britain during the 1990s) – turned into the UK's largest ever manhunt.
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Intelligence provided by the Service during Operation HAT contributed to the arrests and the discovery of a bomb factory in Omar's eighth-floor north London flat.
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Ibrahim and Mohammed were seen live on television emerging in their underpants with their hands up from Mohammed's Dalgarno Gardens flat, forced out by police use of CS gas. Omar was arrested in Birmingham, whither he had fled dressed in a burka. Osman was tracked down in Rome.
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Subsequent investigation revealed that Ibrahim, the leading plotter, like Siddique Khan and Tanweer had travelled to Pakistan late in 2004 for training in suicide-bomb attacks. Ibrahim, Omar, Mohammed and Osman were later sentenced to life imprisonment with minimum terms of forty years.
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Jonathan Evans remembers 21/7 as ‘even more of an emotional blow than 7/7': ‘We were already feeling under the cosh and wondered, ‘‘Have they got wave after wave to throw at us?'' ' Late summer and autumn 2005 was the period when the Service felt under the greatest pressure since 9/11. Evans recalls: ‘With new threat intelligence each week, we asked ourselves: ‘‘Can we cope? Are we running out of troops?'' '
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The main lesson learned from the July attacks, Manningham-Buller told the ISC, was the need to penetrate the terrorist ‘unknowns'. Hitherto the Service had been fully occupied in following up intelligence leads generated by its own investigations and by SIS, GCHQ and foreign liaison.
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Among the most successful ways of diminishing the ‘unknowns' over the next few years was a
closer working relationship with the police at a local level through the MI5 regional offices. The head of Scotland Yard's Counter-Terrorism Command, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, declared in 2007:

There can be no doubt that the most important change in counter terrorism in the UK in recent years has been the development of the relationship between the police and the security service . . . It is no exaggeration to say that the joint working between the police and MI5 has become recognised as a beacon of good practice. Colleagues from across the globe, in law enforcement and intelligence, look to the UK as a model, and many of them are, quite frankly, envious. That is why it is sometimes frustrating to hear and read the same tired old comments about MI5 and the police not working together. That is out of date. It is wrong, and is a lie that deserves to be well and truly nailed.
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