Britain’s closest ally was, as its vice-president Dick Cheney put it, working ‘the dark side’. The top Al Qaeda prisoners who were picked up in the War on Terror were taken on a journey to ‘black’ sites, secret locations in Eastern Europe and Asia where pliant governments had allowed the CIA to harbour secret facilities. There the agency could engage in acts everyone but the administration itself would describe as torture. The CIA was becoming, in effect, a military command as well as an intelligence agency which would be engaged in everything from interrogation of detainees to firing guided missiles to killing Al Qaeda leaders, creating an awkward situation for an ally who worked closely with it.
How much did British intelligence know about their cousins’ walk on the dark side? Very little, they claim, which in itself points to an intelligence failure. ‘It took us longer than it should have done to find out,’ accepts one former official. There were warning signs early on, however. ‘I was worried by the reaction that one heard – which was a very emotional reaction – in the weeks after 9/11 from a number of American officials,’ Dearlove said later. ‘We tried even at that stage to point out we had lived with a serious, different type of terrorist threat. We had gone down a track which had caused great problems. I’m thinking of internment in Northern Ireland. And we had learnt many hard lessons … our position was if you forfeit the moral high ground in confronting these types of problems you make it maybe much more difficult. You maybe gain a short-term advantage, you certainly lose long-term advantage.’51
Britain and America share most but not all secrets. The secret rendition programme in which high-value Al Qaeda suspects were tortured was highly classified, but it was still clear that something was happening to these prisoners in the years after 9/11 because they had disappeared. What’s more, the UK was happily receiving intelligence reports based on their interrogation. A ream of very interesting reports began to reach Britain in 2003. The material was gold dust but the Americans were saying very little about its source. Was it a newly minted agent inside Al Qaeda’s leadership? some in British intelligence wondered. Soon it became clear that material was coming from the self-confessed ‘mastermind’ of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was spewing out details of plans and plots and plotters. ‘I said to my staff, “Why is he talking?” because our experience of Irish prisoners and terrorists was that they never said anything,’ Eliza Manningham-Buller recalled.52
Another intelligence chief wondered if Mohammed had been turned to work with the West. What had really happened was that he had been waterboarded, a technique which makes the body think it is drowning, a total of 183 times. ‘The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing,’ Manningham-Buller said. ‘One of the sad things is Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush all watched 24,’ she added, referring to the TV drama in which an American spy uses extreme techniques to extract information and stop attacks.53
As they processed the leads supplied from Washington, MI5 was relieved to find that it already knew about half the people Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had identified in the UK. But the remaining half were new leads which were hurriedly pursued. An urgent hunt began for one of those he helped identify named Dhiren Barot, a key Al Qaeda figure in the UK, who proved well trained enough to lose his surveillance team temporarily. Eventually he was picked up, but the FBI was furious he was not handed over to it.
When MI5 officers interviewing detainees in Guantánamo Bay became concerned over mistreatment in 2004, protests travelled through intelligence channels and also through Downing Street and the Foreign Office.54 But the spies also say that the leads that emerged out of torture in the black sites were important for national security (although not quite to the extent President Bush later claimed when he wrote that they directly prevented attacks on Canary Wharf and Big Ben). Ask them quietly and a few of those who have worked at the heart of the secret state will whisper that the idea that torture is never useful and always produces flawed intelligence is too easy a truth to cling to. They will say that Algeria, whose methods were brutal, was an important partner after 9/11, providing vital intelligence. They will say that you never really know how intelligence you are handed was produced. And, they ask, can you imagine the witch-hunt and the blame game if there was to be an attack on Britain tomorrow and it was found that intelligence on it from, say, Saudi Arabia had been declined because of concerns over its provenance? But while passive receipt of intelligence is one thing, the moral terrain becomes even more treacherous when you are watching interrogations on video monitors from neighbouring rooms (as Pakistani officials say occurred with some detainees) or sending questions over to the Americans to be put to someone you know has been spirited away somewhere secret, as happened with British resident Binyam Mohammed, held in Pakistan and then in a secret prison in Morocco. In his case there was sufficient concern over wrongdoing to justify opening a criminal investigation into complicity with torture. ‘No torture and there is no complicity with torture,’ John Scarlett said, defending MI6’s actions. ‘I have every confidence and always have had every confidence in the standards, the values, the integrity of our officers.’ The relationship with the Americans had nonetheless experienced tensions, he acknowledged. ‘Our American allies know that we are our own service, that we are here to work for the British interests and the United Kingdom,’ Scarlett later said of the relationship. ‘We’re not here to work for anybody else and we’re an independent service working to our own laws – nobody else’s – and to our own values.’55 Trust between the two countries’ intelligence services began to erode as British inquiries unearthed and made public details of American techniques, breaching the ‘control’ principle in which a country which originates an intelligence report maintains control over where and how it is passed on or released. Some Americans fumed at the way in which European governments distanced themselves from American policy on detainees while at the same time using the intelligence produced. Speaking before Congress, Mike Scheuer, the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, lashed out at ‘effete sanctimonious Europeans who take every bit of American protection offered them while publicly damning and seeking jail time for those who risk their lives to provide the protection’.56
The British and Americans have long had a classified no-spy agreement which says they do not collect secret intelligence on each other and do not recruit each other’s citizens as agents. This is partly about sovereignty and partly about the problems of parallel intelligence operations pranging into each other as they go after the same agents. The British can, however, occasionally run unilateral operations inside the US against other nationals with US approval (approval which is extremely rare, although some US officials suspect that Britain may have run unilateral operations without approval against the IRA at various points). The US does not have the ability to run approved unilateral operations in the UK, much to the annoyance of some CIA officers (very occasionally they have been caught evading this). After 9/11, some senior American intelligence officials pushed hard to run their own operations inside the UK to collect intelligence. London resisted strongly, fearing not least that the Americans might end up carrying out rendition operations as they did in other European countries like Italy in which suspects were snatched off the street. One former CIA official recalls a meeting at which the head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, never one to be shy of expressing her opinion, resisted US unilateral operations particularly strongly. ‘Try it and we’ll arrest you,’ the CIA man recalls her saying. Another CIA official at the same meeting came out irritated by what he saw as a patronising lecture about how Britain was a country of rules where the Magna Carta had been written and fumed to his colleague about being told what he could or could not do by a ‘medium-sized power’.57
When a man in Birmingham is communicating with a terrorist planner in Karachi the distinction between foreign and domestic information quickly blurs. Streams of information from different sources need to be integrated and trails of data mined and manipul
ated to establish how someone might be linked to a network. Staff from MI5 and MI6 were thrown together in joint teams alongside colleagues from GCHQ who pluck terrorist communications out of the ether. MI5 found itself co-ordinating closely with the police with whom it used to have an often difficult relationship. The days of bitter rivalry between MI5 and MI6 had passed, although the odd clash still occurred. Most of the difficult entanglements, particularly the case of Binyam Mohammed, centred on the Security Service, MI5, rather than on MI6. After 9/11 senior MI5 officials had been keen to take the lead on all intelligence which related to threats to the UK. Even if detainees were held abroad, they wanted to carry out the interviews. In the past, MI6 officers used to joke that their counterparts should never be allowed beyond the Straits of Dover because their understanding of the ways of foreign intelligence services was so limited. There used to be a running joke about the telegrams MI6 officers in a faraway country received from MI5 in London which was looking for help from the local intelligence service in some investigation. ‘Please instruct your liaison …’ the telegrams would begin before going into the details of the request. ‘You weasel, you cajole, but you don’t instruct liaison partners,’ explained one old hand from MI6. But there was no Schadenfreude at the mounting allegations faced by its sister service, not least because it coloured the reputation of all of British intelligence. Paradoxically, public perception and reputation is remarkably important for those who work in the secret world. It is precisely because they cannot talk much about their work that they worry more about the ways in which it is perceived by the public.
MI5 also had to deal with its fictional portrayal in the BBC drama Spooks, which began broadcasting a few months after 9/11. ‘I don’t think the public think it’s like Spooks. I think they realise Spooks is fiction in the same way as they know that James Bond isn’t like MI6,’ says Manningham-Buller, who claims not to have watched the programme since the first series and the unfortunate demise of a female officer in a vat of boiling chip fat (the programme was thought to have led to a drop in female applicants because of its violence). ‘There are two regrets I have. One is that it portrays intelligence as simplistic, as a simple thing to be understood if you only do things in the right order – that things can be solved in forty minutes by six people. The second thing I regret about it is it portrays the service as having utter disregard for the law. Whereas we are very careful that everything we do has a proper legal basis.’58 The hits to the MI5 website, and particularly its recruitment pages, surge after every episode of the drama, but insiders are less sure that the Bondish image of gun-toting, rule-breaking secret agents is as helpful to a domestic security service trying to investigate its own citizens as it is to a foreign intelligence service, like MI6, out trying to do bad things to foreigners. If Spooks was like real life, one MI5 officer explained, the camera would cut to the officer at 3 a.m. still filling in his warrant form and all the associated paperwork before being allowed out the door.
At times the pace of a counter-terrorist investigation is not far off that portrayed in Spooks. Intelligence gathering can involve some of the same techniques as were used in the old Cold War world – human motivations are much the same when it comes to recruiting agents who know the secret intentions of an enemy. But the differences are also stark. Intelligence is much more time-sensitive. Discerning the Soviet order of battle could be pieced together slowly. Intelligence about a planned terrorist attack or the location of a terrorist leader requires immediate action. The shelf life of good intelligence in counter-terrorism may be days rather than years. The shelf life of an agent in the badlands of Pakistan, whom it might have taken a long time to recruit, may be much shorter as well.
MI5 officers in early 2004 watched grainy surveillance of a terrorist cell inspecting fertiliser for a bomb in a storage facility and listened to the men in their bugged cars and flats talk of the nightclubs and shopping centres they were planning to attack. One night in March, they recorded the driver of a Vauxhall Corsa picking up the ringleader of the plotters and another man in Crawley and driving them around before taking them back. The driver was identified in the log as ‘UM’ – unidentified male.59 It was clear that ‘home-grown terrorism’ had arrived on British shores. These were second-generation Britons of Pakistani descent. It was a trend that had not been appreciated in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In the 1990s, the radicals who had found a home in Britain were seen as plotting against their homelands of Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Arab intelligence services would privately describe the UK as a ‘terrorist sanctuary’ to CIA officers, but despite those complaints a blind eye was turned by the British as long as individuals were not breaking any law or plotting against Britain. The 2004 investigation, codenamed ‘Crevice’ by the police, revealed for the first time that Britons would attack Britain, in this case with support from an Al Qaeda which had been ejected from Afghanistan but had been able to regroup in the wilds of the tribal areas of Pakistan. ‘Crevice was the moment when the lights went on and you could see the state of the kitchen,’ explained one intelligence official soon afterwards.60 There was worse to come. Home-grown radicalisation was now on the radar, but still no one expected British suicide-bombers to strike.
The first that staff at MI5 knew of what was happening on 7 July 2005 came as they watched their TV screens. Soon the images of a blown-apart bus opened like a tin can would be seared on their minds. The UK’s threat level had been lowered a few days earlier. No one had seen the four young men with their rucksacks coming. ‘We did not know it was a suicide bombing until the forensics began to come through,’ recalled Eliza Manningham-Buller. ‘So at the beginning we were trying to support the police in possibly finding the team who had done it, who for all we knew at that stage were still alive and capable of mounting another attack.’61 The aftermath was chaos. At one point closed-circuit TV from Luton, where the bombers had passed through, made it seem as if there was another person carrying a rucksack. Should they tell the public? Someone from MI5 thought they saw the same person from the CCTV around Westminster and Buckingham Palace. Everywhere was locked down. ‘It wasn’t until the evening when I got home quite late that the emotional impact of that day hit me,’ recollected Manningham-Buller later.62
Eliza Manningham-Buller addressed her staff the next day inside MI5 headquarters at Thames House in Millbank. She said it had been a day they had always feared would happen but hoped would not. Many had been up all night and she said she was proud of them. They needed to continue to do what they had been trained to do. Brace yourselves, she also warned; by the end of the week there would be speculation about whether we were to blame for allowing the attack to take place. Don’t read the papers, get on with your job. The accusations would indeed come. The night of her speech, the credit card of Mohammed Siddique Khan was found close to where the bomb at Edgware Road tube station had detonated. MI5 investigators soon realised that they had come across him before. He was the unidentified male who had been driving the Vauxhall Corsa in March 2004. He had come under MI5 surveillance on multiple occasions as part of the Crevice investigation but had never been prioritised sufficiently to be followed up. There had been a number of leads dating back to 2001, including that Khan had attended training camps in the UK and Pakistan, but the different strands had never been woven together to understand that all the pieces of intelligence related to the same man. The explanation for not placing him higher up the list of targets was a lack of resources, especially as a new set of leads had arrived at Thames House in 2004 (including those generated by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s waterboarding). ‘We’re not the Stasi, we can’t cover everyone,’ explained one official defensively.63
Two weeks to the day after 7/7, there was another attack. This time it failed. ‘For me, it was worse,’ recalled Manningham-Buller, who was having a regular lunch with her directors when news came through. ‘Although nobody died, I had that feeling that if this is going to happen every fortnight, how are we going to be able to
cope with this?’64 The fear of an endless army of suicide bombers coming over the horizon filled everyone with apprehension. Authorities were unsure that they would be able to cope as they circled the date two weeks ahead and wondered if something would happen then. For the coming months and years, it felt like ‘trench warfare’. ‘It’s like the old game of Space Invaders,’ explained one person involved in the day-to-day work of counter-terrorism. ‘When you clear one screen of potential attackers, another simply appears to take its place.’65 The days of playing investigations long, watching them patiently in order to build up enough evidence, were disappearing. That was too resource intensive. Disrupt and move on to the next network was the only game-plan available. ‘We had more than we could cope with and had to make some uncomfortable decisions on prioritisation,’ explained Manningham-Buller. Government money soon came flooding in and MI5 more than doubled in size and expanded into the regions. A transformation from the old counter-espionage agency of Arthur Martin to a modern counter-terrorist organisation which had begun with the tackling of the IRA in the 1990s was now under way.
MI5 launched a blitz, recruiting new human sources on an ‘industrial scale’, working its way through lists of people who could be approached. ‘We knew that we needed many more human sources and much greater coverage,’ said Manningham-Buller. These agents remain the lifeblood of intelligence work. For all the talk of ‘community intelligence’, insiders say that there is no substitute for agents within the organisations themselves. ‘Like the IRA you don’t get it [the intelligence] from housewives. To get to terrorist planners you need people to get to people in the middle. The sort of detailed information to stop an attack isn’t swilling around the mosque.’
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