The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  Stella Rimington declared during the Dimbleby Lecture in June 1994: ‘The threat to British interests from terrorism of international origin is lower than it was in the 1980s.’ Among the first terrorist bomb attacks in Britain after the Cold War not mounted by Irish Republicans were the car-bombings of the Israeli embassy and a London Jewish charity in July, only a month after Rimington’s lecture.17 Suspicion initially fell on Hizballah, which had already planned one attack on the Israeli embassy, successfully disrupted by the Security Service.18 Subsequent intelligence, however, indicated that, though Hizballah had indeed been planning another attack, it had been both surprised and annoyed to be upstaged by a secular Palestinian group which struck first.19 Two members of the group were later sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment.20

  While continuing to warn of the threat from Iranian state-sponsored terrorism, the Service told the heads of special branches in December 1995 that transnational Islamist terrorism was much less of a problem:

  Suggestions in the press of a world-wide Islamic extremist network poised to launch terrorist attacks against the West are greatly exaggerated . . . The contact between Islamic extremists in various countries appears to be largely opportunistic at present and seems unlikely to result in the emergence of a potent trans-national force.21

  The Security Service saw Usama bin Laden chiefly as a terrorist financier rather than as the emerging leader of ‘a potent trans-national force’. Throughout the 1990s it regarded the source of his wealth as a ‘mystery’: ‘He owns construction companies etc. but these do not appear to be sufficiently large to provide the scale of income needed to fund his organisation.’ The Service was sceptical of reports that he received money from ‘the rest of the Bin Laden clan’, noting contrary claims, of which it was also sceptical, ‘that the family were planning to assassinate him’.22 The Service’s decision to open a permanent file on UBL in 1995 reflected the increasing number of references to him in intelligence reports. It noted in September: ‘No matter where you look in studying Islamic Extremism from Kashmir to Algeria, the name Bin Laden seems to crop up. He is clearly an important figure and we are intensifying our efforts to discover what influence he has over individuals and groups in this country . . .’23

  Though a new section was created in 1995 to investigate the Islamist threat, its main initial priority was not UBL but Algerian extremists in Britain connected to the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) which was believed to be responsible for bomb attacks in France which killed seven and wounded 180.24 A Service investigation, prompted by requests for assistance from the French DST and supported by MPSB and the Met’s Anti-Terrorist Branch, led to the arrest in December 1995 of six Algerian militants in London, one of whom was helping to finance a terrorist campaign in France. Another operation, in conjunction with the French and other foreign services, led to the arrest of the UK-based co-ordinator of GIA arms procurement in Europe.25 Records found in one GIA militant’s home showed that he had received funding from UBL’s headquarters, then in Khartoum.26 Bin Laden was also reported to be financing Mujahedin groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad, but as yet the Service had no intelligence ‘that Bin Laden is personally involved in planning or carrying out terrorist attacks’:27 ‘Should Bin Laden come to the UK we do not believe he would instigate acts of terrorism here or use Britain as a base for organising terrorism. However, there is little doubt he would take the opportunity to encourage Islamic extremist groups in the UK to continue their activities.’28

  Late in 1995 there was a probably erroneous (though prophetic) intelligence report that ‘Bin Laden is involved in a plot to mount a suicide bomb attack in the UK.’29 On the recommendation of the Security Service, in January 1996 the Home Secretary signed an exclusion order prohibiting UBL from entering the UK in the interests of national security.30 The Service was bemused by continuing reports in the media and even from some foreign intelligence agencies that Bin Laden had visited, or was about to visit, Britain.31 It dismissed as ‘risible’ reports by the US television channel NBC and the Evening Standard that Bin Laden regularly flew in and out of London by private jet.32 The Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Yossef Bodansky, later claimed, however, that in the mid-1990s Bin Laden ‘settled in the London suburb of Wembley’, where ‘he purchased property’.33 Since Bin Laden was then, at an estimated 6 foot 7 inches, probably the world’s tallest leading terrorist, had a long beard and dressed in flowing robes, it is unlikely that he would have passed unnoticed in Wembley.

  Until 9/11, instead of referring to Al Qaida (a name never used by UBL in public), Security Service intelligence reports used phrases such as ‘Bin Laden and his associates’. Stella Rimington had never heard the name Al Qaida until March 1996, when it cropped up during a farewell visit to the United States a few weeks before her retirement.34 She and SLO Washington were taken aback by the interest shown in UBL by those they met in the US. During their meeting with the National Security Advisor, Tony Lake, on 4 March, the threat from Bin Laden was the first issue raised by Lake after an initial discussion of PIRA and the Troubles. ‘We were’, reported SLO, ‘unprepared for this, and were able only to acknowledge reporting of his extensive role as a financier of Islamic terrorist groups.’ Unusually, the DG had been poorly briefed before the meeting. She and SLO were unaware till after the meeting that, a few days earlier, senior CIA counter-terrorist officers had paid a prearranged visit to Thames House where, wrote a doubtless irritated SLO, UBL ‘issues were presumably discussed exhaustively’.35 Shortly afterwards, however, the Security Service became, it believed, ‘the first UK, and perhaps first Western, agency to obtain a sample [recording] of Bin Laden’s voice’, which it shared with the Americans.36

  The Security Service’s role in helping to contain state-sponsored terrorism enhanced its reputation in Whitehall. The percentage of its reports on this subject rated ‘extremely valuable’ or ‘very valuable’ by its Whitehall customers rose from 33 per cent in 1996–7 to 52 per cent in 1997–8.37 The tone of these reports was increasingly reassuring. The Security Service was cautiously confident by 1998 that, save for the continuing menace to Rushdie, the threat to Britain from state-sponsored terrorism had been successfully contained: ‘This may reflect international pressure to desist from terrorism. But it also owes much to HMG’s commitment to a tough visa regime towards identified intelligence officers; and the continued deployment of intelligence resources to investigate their intelligence activity.’38

  The Security Service Annual Report for 1997–8, completed in July 1998, was the first to mention Bin Laden by name and ‘important collaboration with the Americans’ against him.39 Soon afterwards, on 7 August 1998, Al Qaida carried out its first major terrorist attack. Huge bombs in trucks driven by suicide bombers almost demolished the US embassy and surrounding buildings in Nairobi and, ten minutes later, badly damaged the embassy in Dar es Salaam. This first use of simultaneous suicide-bomber attacks against different targets was to be repeated on a much larger scale on 9/11. In Nairobi 213 were killed (only twelve of them American) and several thousand injured, of whom 150 were blinded by flying glass. In Dar es Salaam the toll was eleven dead and eighty-five wounded, all Africans.40 On 20 August Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from US navy vessels in the Arabian Ocean at two Al Qaida targets: the Khost training camp in Afghanistan and a Khartoum pharmaceutical plant which, according to US intelligence reports, was manufacturing a precursor agent for nerve gas with financial support from UBL. Though the targets were hit, Bin Laden survived the attack; he was reported to have left Khost with only a few hours to spare. Controversy continues over whether the Sudanese target had really been involved in nerve-gas production.41

  In the aftermath of the Al Qaida attacks in August 1998, the Security Service recognized for the first time that the main international terrorist threat no longer came from the state sponsors with which it had become well acquainted ove
r the past two decades but from the growth of transnational Islamist terrorism of which it had far less experience.42 Seven weeks after the East African embassy bombings, Security Service surveillance of Islamist extremists in London led to the disruption of a plot to bomb the US embassy in Tirana by members of al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). In late July, the Service had received intelligence indicating that the EIJ leader in the UK, Ibrahim Eidarous, had instructed EIJ militants in Albania to reconnoitre the US embassy in preparation for a terrorist attack.43 He and five other EIJ members were arrested in London on 23 September. There were further arrests in Turin on 2 October and an EIJ militant was killed while resisting arrest in Tirana. The Service reported that:

  With the main players in the UK and Albania now neutralised, the planned attack against the Embassy will have been disrupted. Although Eidarous indicated that a separate team would enter Albania to launch the attack itself, we believe that this would be difficult to do without an infrastructure of support already in place and the basic reconnaissance incomplete.44

  The Service’s Annual Report for 1998–9 put the disruption of the attack on the US Tirana embassy at the top of its ‘successes against international terrorism’ in the course of the year, but warned of worse to come.45 In the year after the East African embassy bombings, there was increasing intelligence that ‘UBL and his allies’ were planning widely dispersed attacks on US targets in the Gulf, the Middle East, Central Asia, South-east Asia, the Indian sub-continent, Europe, North America and East, West and Central Africa. According to a Security Service report of 21 July 1999: ‘Intelligence has linked UBL to plans for bomb attacks, the use of biological toxins, kidnaps, hijackings, and missile attacks on aircraft. Most intelligence has pointed to attacks against US embassies although reports suggest that UBL now also sees the UK as one of his prime targets.’

  On the strength of these reports, in June 1999 the United States closed its embassies in Gambia, Senegal, Liberia, Madagascar and Namibia. Britain followed suit except in Liberia. The Security Service puzzled over why there were so many more reports of threats than actual attacks:

  The allied intelligence community does not have a clear view of UBL’s terrorist planning process. Even the most reliably sourced intelligence received on this question usually consists of a snapshot of a proposed plan being discussed. Most of the reporting does not make clear how far advanced the plan is. It is rare that intelligence has named those who are to take part in a planned attack.

  The fact that there had been no attacks by Bin Laden since the East African embassy bombings, however, did not necessarily mean that the warnings of further attacks were false: ‘Intelligence on planned attacks may reflect initial targeting/planning rather than fully formulated attack plans.’ It was possible that some of the planned attacks had been disrupted by the arrests of Islamist militants in Albania, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mauretania and Tajikistan. The Security Service also believed that some attack warnings might have derived from deliberate disinformation by UBL. A senior member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad was reported to have said that there had never been any intention to attack the US and UK embassies in Africa which had been closed in the summer of 1998. Bin Laden had simply been conducting psychological warfare ‘to instil fear in the minds of Americans and Britons’.46

  Since 1995, G Branch had had a desk officer responsible for studying the problem of radicalization within the British Muslim community which was to preoccupy the Security Service during the early twenty-first century.47 The Service’s Annual Report for 1998–9 was the first to highlight the problem:

  In recent years we have given much thought to how to identify those in the UK who develop extreme Islamic views and to deter them from subsequently becoming involved in terrorism . . . The challenge for us is to find ways of predicting the associations and conditioning factors in the UK which convert young Muslims into militant extremists, but to do so in a way which does not exacerbate religious and racial sensitivities. In short, we need to understand how individuals who are attracted by militant Islam at home become terrorists or potential terrorists when overseas, and to find ways of undermining that connection.48

  The Service still failed to foresee that radicalized Muslim ‘militant extremists’ might engage in terrorism inside as well as outside the United Kingdom. The growing priority given to the Islamist threat was, however, marked by the appointment of Jonathan Evans, one of the leading high-fliers of his generation, as G9 (Middle Eastern counter-terrorism) in the autumn of 1998. Evans had joined the Service in 1980 immediately after graduating from Bristol University in classical studies. On his first day in Gower Street, he was greeted by an older Service officer from a military background with the words: ‘Ah, one of the young intellectuals!’ ‘The nicest thing anyone ever said about me,’ Evans recalls.49 Nine years after his appointment as G9, he became DG.

  Like all other Western security and intelligence agencies, the Security Service had no prior warning of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. A Service report in the summer of 1999 somewhat exaggerated the obstacles in the way of an Al Qaida attack in North America: ‘Intelligence suggests that whilst UBL is seeking to launch an attack inside the US, he is aware that the US will provide a tough operating environment for his organisation.’50 We now know that by the time the Service issued this report, planning for the 9/11 attacks by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), with the active personal involvement of UBL, had already begun. Though KSM was still ‘off the Service’s radar’,51 he had helped his nephew Ramzi Yousef plan and finance the first, failed attempt to bring down one of the twin towers of the New York World Trade Center in 1993 as well as the unsuccessful ‘Bojinka’ plot to plant bombs in twelve US airliners timed to explode in mid-air over the Pacific in 1994. The failed 1993 attack on the World Trade Center was remembered in the United States chiefly for the bizarre behaviour of Mohammed Salameh, the terrorist who had rented the truck used in the bombing and tried afterwards to get back his $400 deposit by claiming the truck had been stolen. What tended to be forgotten was the technical ingenuity of Ramzi Yousef, who planted a bomb which ripped a hole through seven storeys of the World Trade Center, killing six (a miraculously low figure) and wounding a thousand.52 The level of protective security at the US airports which were to be used by the suicide hijackers on 9/11 scarcely justified the Security Service claim that Bin Laden was faced with ‘a tough operating environment’ in the United States. Over the previous few years the Federal Aviation Authority had reported repeated security violations at Logan Airport, Boston, from which two of the hijacked planes took off.53

  In July 2000 a Security Service operation, codenamed LARGE, uncovered the first Islamist bomb factory to be detected in Britain. A Bangladeshi-born British Muslim in Birmingham, Moinul Abedin, was discovered to be seeking to purchase weapons and explosives. Together with a chemist and fellow Muslim, Dr Faisal Mustafa, who was alleged to have advised him on the production of home-made explosives, he was arrested on 17 November.54 It was later revealed at their trial that fifteen Service officers and four agents had been involved in the surveillance operation. The A Branch team leader gave evidence in court from behind a screen, revealing that they had codenamed Abedin PIVOTING DANCER. Despite Abedin’s claim that he had simply been setting up a fireworks business, he was convicted and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. Mustafa was acquitted.55 At the time of his arrest it was believed that Abedin had no Al Qaida connection – or even, as the DG, Sir Stephen Lander, told Service staff, ‘any obvious affiliation to a specific Islamic group or network’. The targets for his explosives remained unknown.56 That was still the belief at the time of Abedin’s conviction in 2002. Opinions within the Service on the likelihood that Abedin had an Al Qaida connection later varied. At one point, as Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller revealed in a public speech, it was believed that Operation LARGE had uncovered an Al Qaida operation ‘to detonate a large bomb in the UK’.57 Further research, however, concluded that, though the opera
tion was inspired by Al Qaida’s global jihad ideology, there was no intelligence to show that ‘Al Qaida tasked or directed the operation.’58

  Well before 9/11 it was believed that the greatest potential long-term threat from Bin Laden came from his desire to acquire chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear weapons. The CIA believed that Al Qaida had been deeply impressed by the sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the fanatical Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo in March 1995 ‘and saw the attack as a model for achieving their own ambitions’.59 Al Qaida’s understanding of radiological and nuclear material, however, still remained unsophisticated. According to intelligence received in the autumn of 1999, Bin Laden fell for a nuclear scam which had been current for a quarter of a century, purchasing a substance known as ‘red mercury’ – physically similar to uranium oxide but chemically quite different.60

  We now know that a year before 9/11, thanks to its counter-proliferation operations, the Security Service – without realizing it at the time – succeeded in disrupting an attempt by Al Qaida to develop biological weapons (BW). In September 2000 the Pakistani microbiologist Rauf Ahmad attended a conference in Britain on dangerous pathogens, where he sought samples from other delegates as well as help in obtaining a bioreactor and cell counter. The Service was alerted to his activities and a search of his luggage on departure from the UK revealed £13,000, which he claimed was ‘to buy equipment’, documents detailing his contacts (including UK companies) and a copy of his CV. The CV revealed that Ahmad had a PhD from a university in Pakistan, had attended earlier conferences in Britain in 1997 and 1999 and had published scientific papers on anthrax. Security Service officers visited the UK companies with which Ahmad had made contact and they broke off their dealings with him.61