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.60 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.61 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.62 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.63
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?’’ ’64 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.65 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.66
SIS ‘disruption operations’ against terrorist groups abroad (almost 50 per cent greater in 2006 than in 2005) also made an increasing contribution to counter-terrorism in the UK.67 Ten per cent of the members of the Security Service CT teams were SIS officers. By 2007 over a third of GCHQ’s effort was devoted to counter-terrorism – much of it in support of MI5. Its Director, Sir David Pepper, acknowledged a year later: ‘We don’t quite meet the targets they [MI5] set, but, frankly, the targets they set are at a level where it is very unlikely we would be able to meet them . . . I think their aspirations would almost always exceed our capability.’68 By 2009 GCHQ was more optimistic and reported that it was now confident of meeting ‘Security Service key requirements.’69
The increased range of foreign liaisons and the much greater volume of counter-terrorist intelligence which they generated after 9/11 posed difficult issues. There were media claims that the Security Service condoned the use of torture to extract information by some foreign services. The issue of principle was, and remains, straightforward. The Service has consistently condemned torture,70 and the 1988 Criminal Justice Act makes it illegal for British officials to acquiesce in acts of torture anywhere in the world.2 The Home Office has reaffirmed that members of the Service, like the rest of the intelligence community, ‘do not participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture and inhumane or degrading treatment’. In practice, however, according to Manningham-Buller:
It is pretty well impractical always to check whether something has been derived from torture unless you have reason to suspect it at the beginning. Literally thousands of pieces of intelligence are shared daily between the UK, our allies and people who might not so reasonably be described as our allies.71
Information obtained by torture is inadmissible in prosecutions in UK courts. The House of Lords, however, ruled in December 2005 that intelligence operations can be taken on the basis of ‘tainted evidence’.72
Service management accepted that intelligence liaison on counter-terrorism with states ‘whose standard of treatment of individuals, especially in custody, may fall below the international norms supported by the UK’ raised significant ‘ethical issues’: ‘In conducting these relations we have to pursue our need for CT co-operation with safeguards to ensure that we do not encourage or cause mistreatment.’73 In April 2006 a circular from Manningham-Buller entitled ‘Ethics and the Security Service’ urged staff with ethical concerns not to suppress them: ‘The Service goes to some length to recruit people with a keen sense of conscience who will raise questions if they are uncomfortable . . . I urge staff to say if they have qualms. The idea that airing concern on the proper channels risks damage to career is a myth.’74 Staff who preferred not to raise ethical issues with line managers already had the option of taking their concerns to the Staff Counsellor in the Cabinet Office, to whom all members of the intelligence community had direct access. From May 2006 MI5 staff also had the option of consulting a part-time ‘ethics counsellor’ within the Service, who had the rank of director and guaranteed confidentiality to those who came to see him.75 Though not many did so (fewer than twenty over the next two years), there is no evidence that staff with ethical concerns felt inhibited from raising them.76
The most controversial case involving allegations that the Security Service connived in the use of torture is that of Binyam Mohamed al-Habashi, an Ethiopian and British resident arrested in Pakistan in 2002 who claims he was moved by US ‘extraordinary rendition’ operations to Morocco and Afghanistan before being interned in Guantánamo in 2004. While in Guantánamo, Mohamed told his British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith that British officials had interrogated him after his arrest in Pakistan and that ‘one of them did tell me that I was going to get tortured by the [Arabs].’ He also claimed that he was later tortured by the Moroccans, told that ‘they were working with the British Security Service’ and ‘asked questions, containing details about his life that could only have come from UK sources’. In evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee in 2006, Manningham-Buller denied that the Security Service officer who had questioned Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan had told him he would be tortured or that he had seen any evidence of torture. Since then the Service had had no contact with Mohamed and did not know whether he had been tortured in Morocco. Manningham-Buller acknowledged, however, that, ‘with hindsight, we would regret not seeking full assurances at the time’ from the Americans about Mohamed’s treatment. The ISC also found the Service’s failure to seek these assurances ‘regrettable’.77
The controversy aroused by the Binyam Mohamed case continues. The English High Court ruled in February 2009 that classified American documents in the case of Mohamed ‘give rise to an arguable case of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’. The evidence, however, could not be disclosed because of the damage that would have been caused were the British to reveal US intelligence without consent.78 The Attorney General, Baroness Scotland QC, announced on 26 March: ‘I have decided that the appropriate course of action is to invite the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to commence an investigation into the allegations that have been made in relation to Binyam Mohamed.’ Though the announcement carried with it no presumption of guilt, this appears to be the first time in t
he history of the Security Service that its actions have been the subject of criminal investigation.
The Binyam Mohamed case led in February 2010 to the most severe criticism of MI5 ever made by a British judge. A banner headline in the Guardian on 11 February declared, ‘Devious, dishonest and complicit in torture – top judge on MI5’. As justification for this headline, the Guardian quoted a letter to the Court of Appeal from a barrister acting for the FCO, Jonathan Sumption QC, asking for the removal from a draft judgment in the Binyam Mohamed case by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, of what he described as ‘an exceptionally damaging criticism of the good faith of the Security Service as a whole’:
The Master of the Rolls’ observations . . . will be read as statements by the Court (i) that the Security Service does not in fact operate a culture that respects human rights or abjures participation in coercive interrogation techniques: (ii) that this was in particular true of witness B [of MI5] whose conduct was in this respect characteristic of the Service as a whole; (iii) that officials of the Service deliberately misled the Intelligence and Security Committee; (iv) that this reflects a culture of suppression which penetrates the Service to such a degree as to undermine any UK government assurances based on the Service’s information and advice.
Though Lord Neuberger’s draft judgement and his subsequent final version were not made public for another fortnight,79 reports of his unprecedented criticism of MI5 inevitably gave rise to a media furore. The Security Service’s response was also unprecedented. Jonathan Evans became the first DG to publish a newspaper article defending the Service against attacks made on it. ‘Allegations that MI5 has been trying to “cover up” its activities’ were, he declared, ‘the opposite of the truth’: ‘The material our critics are drawing on to attack us is taken from our own records, not prised from us by some external process but willingly provided by us to the court, in the normal way. No cover-up there.’80 MI5’s case was promptly supported by the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, by the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and by the chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, Dr Kim Howells MP. A substantial section of the media, as well as human rights groups, however, remained on the attack. Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian dismissed Evans’s article as ‘MI5’s propaganda own-goal: The head of the security service is denouncing the media for simply reporting the judicial truth of its complicity in torture.’81
Because much evidence in the Binyam Mohamed case remains sub judice, final judgement will have to await the conclusion of the police investigation into the actions of ‘Witness B’ of MI5 (and any subsequent trial, if the Director of Public Prosecutions concludes that the evidence justifies it and a prosecution is in the public interest). Since September 2008, a series of civil cases have also been winding their way through the English courts, brought by litigants who claim involvement by the British intelligence services in their mistreatment mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Claims that the Service is permeated by ‘a culture of suppression’ are, however, difficult to square with the fact that since 2006 its members have been ‘urged’ (not merely permitted) to take ethical concerns in confidence to an ethics counsellor, who addresses every induction course of new recruits.82
The main difficulty faced by the Security Service in monitoring the Islamist threat in the aftermath of 7/7 and 21/7 was that, for several years, the threat continued to increase. On 9/11 only about 250 individuals in Britain had been identified as having links with international (mostly Islamist) terrorism. By the end of 2007 their numbers had risen to around 2,000, and thirty ‘active plots’ were under investigation. Manningham-Buller told the ISC in October 2006, ‘My main concern has been, and still is, we do not have enough people to do the job.’ The Security Service planned to double in size within a decade: from 2,000 on 9/11 to 4,100 in 2011. Manningham-Buller believed that for the Service to expand even more rapidly would risk compromising the quality of its personnel. Maintaining quality, she argued, was ‘incredibly important because people get access to secrets and responsibility and the capacity to make a major [mistake] very early on’.83 SIS agreed. In the view of its Chief, John Scarlett, ‘If you try to bring in more than a certain number of new people each year, you can literally bust the system . . . You can only tolerate a certain number of inexperienced people dealing with very sensitive subjects.’84
As it approached its centenary, the Service had no doubt that Islamist terrorism was a serious long-term threat rather than a short-term problem. Islamist ‘radicalization’ continued to convert a minority of British Muslims and Muslim converts to the Manichean worldview of a cosmic struggle between good and evil (Muslim versus apostate and unbeliever), underpinned by the conspiracy theory of a Western war against Islam which went back at least to the First Crusade. A minority of the Islamist minority posed a continuing terrorist threat. Manningham-Buller forecast in December 2005: ‘We will continue to stop most [terrorist attacks] but we will not stop all of them.’85 In the two and a half years after 7/7 and 21/7, which MI5 had failed to prevent, it successfully disrupted six other Islamist plots.86
One of the disrupted plots, to use suicide bombers to bring down in mid-air a series of transatlantic aircraft en route from Heathrow to North American cities, was assessed by the Security Service as the most dangerous terrorist conspiracy in British history. Within Britain the organizer of the plot was an unemployed engineering graduate of London City University, Abdullah Ahmed Ali (formerly Ahmed Ali Khan), who had been born in 1980 into a devout East London Muslim family with close links to Pakistan. Ali said in what he intended to be a martyrdom video to be broadcast after his death as one of the suicide bombers:
. . . I was over the moon that Allah has given me the opportunity to lead this blessed operation. Thanks to God, I swear by Allah I have the desire since the age of fifteen/sixteen to participate in Jihad in the path of Allah. I had the desire since then to punish the Kuffar [a derogatory term for non-Muslims] for the evil they are doing, I had the desire since then for Jannya [Paradise] for the Koran.87
Ali succeeded in recruiting a group of other young Islamist conspiracy theorists who shared his conviction that a glorious martyrdom as suicide bombers in the Holy War against the Kuffar would guarantee them eternal bliss in paradise.
Ali first came to the attention of the Security Service in 2003 during surveillance of an Islamist network which it believed had sent ‘significant amounts of funds, goods and trainees’ from Britain to Al Qaida in Pakistan.88 Early investigation of Ali, however, led to the conclusion that he was ‘predominantly involved in criminal rather than extremist activity’.89 That view of Ali changed in January 2005 when intelligence revealed that he had sent funds to Pakistan extremists. By March 2005, he was known to be in contact with Rashid Rauf,90 a sinister and influential Al Qaida figure who had fled to Pakistan from his native Birmingham in 2002 after a warrant was issued for his arrest following the fatal stabbing of his uncle. Subsequent intelligence investigations suggested Rauf’s involvement in terror plots around the world, including the 7/7 bombings and the attempted 21/7 attacks in London. The Security Service believed that Ali’s transition from an Al Qaida support role to attack planning came during a trip to Pakistan in May and June 2006 when he met Rashid Rauf.91 Once Ali returned to Britain on 24 June, Rauf remained the conduit by which he received instructions from Al Qaida in preparing the suicide-bomb plot to destroy transatlantic aircraft in mid-air.92
The British Islamist who became Ali’s quartermaster, Assad Ali Sarwar, visited Pakistan from 13 June to 8 July, made contact with Rauf and is believed to have been taught how to reduce hydrogen peroxide, used by hairdressers to bleach hair and easily available in Britain, to the concentration required to turn it into the explosive which was to be used in the aircraft bomb plot.93 Sarwar’s barrister later described him at his trial as ‘Mr Bean’, a ‘plonker’ and one of life’s losers.94 MI5 assessed him rather differently as a reliable and competent quartermaster. Since Al Qaida intended Sarw
ar to play a support role in future terrorist attacks, he was not selected as one of the suicide bombers. Among the targeting information which he collected on memory sticks which were later discovered during a search of his house were details of Canary Wharf, the gas pipeline between Belgium and the UK, British airports and the London electricity grid.95 Like Ali, Sarwar continued to receive regular guidance from Rashid Rauf.96
Soon after Ali returned to Heathrow from Pakistan on 24 June, the Security Service discovered that he had brought with him large quantities of AA batteries and a powdered soft-drink concentrate called Tang, whose purpose did not become clear until MI5 was able to watch Ali and his associates making the bombs they intended to explode on board transatlantic aircraft. The opportunity to do so came on 20 July when a member (or members) of Ali’s family purchased for £138,000 in cash a two-bedroom flat at 386a Forest Road, not far from Ali’s Walthamstow home, which within a few days was turned by Ali and other plotters into a bomb factory.97 Despite the fact that the plotters were wary of surveillance, the flat was quickly fitted with listening devices and a miniature camera in what Jonathan Evans remembers as ‘a difficult but spectacularly successful operation.’ Evans was reminded of the operation which had kept the leading PIRA bomber, ‘Rab’ Fryers, under surveillance before his arrest in 1994 and stopped the Provisionals’ bombing campaign against the City of London: ‘We could see what they were doing in some detail, and that’s a very reassuring place to be. We could play it long because of the penetrative coverage and be reasonably confident we could control the risk.’ The MI5 surveillance team were able to monitor the flat at 386a Forest Road in real time, choosing daily edited highlights to show to senior management.98
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