MI5 and 7/7: a matter of resources not powers, just like today
- Questions the London bombings raised are pertinent now
Both Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer had appeared on MI5’s radar during Operation Crevice.
Crevice, Britain’s biggest counter-terrorism operation, was to lead to the conviction in 2007 of five men plotting an attack with a large fertiliser bomb on a shopping centre, nightclub, and the gas network.
MI5’s investigation into Crevice threw up 55 individuals associated with the plotters. MI5 said it would have liked to have pursued all of them. But it was a matter of resources and only 15 were seen as “essential” targets.
The remaining 40, including those later identified as Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were “parked up” - not treated as urgent cases. The two had not been heard discussing terrorist acts in Britain, MI5 insisted.
“Like many, they were talking about jihadi activity in Pakistan and support for the Taliban and about UK foreign policy,” a security official told me.
He said that if MI5 possessed in 2004 the new technology and extra staff they were subsequently given, the two men might have been identified earlier as potential suicide bombers.
In 2010, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5 at the time of the 7/7 bombings, told the Chilcot inquiry she was not surprised that British citizens were behind the 7/7 attacks in London.
She was not surprised that a growing number of Britons were “attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and saw the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan as threatening their co-religionists and the Muslim world”.
Unlike MI5, ministers - Labour and Conservative - have always been reluctant to admit any connection between the growth of “home grown” terrorism and Britain’s foreign policy.
British foreign policy is one thing, the question of resources, another. In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, MI5 emphasised, as we have already noted, its lack of resources rather than any inability to intercept communications.
This is pertinent in light of the current dispute
about whether MI5 and GCHQ should have more powers to intercept personal communications, and about how they should be brought more effectively to account.
MI5 wanted evidence to the 7/7 inquests heard in private. It failed to convince the coroner, Lady Justice Hallett. “To my mind”, she said giving her verdict of unlawful killings in May 2011, “the concerns that I would not be able to conduct a thorough and fair investigation into the security issues in wholly open evidential proceedings have proved unfounded.”
She also pointed to the feebleness of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee of handpicked MPs and peers and its failure to correct inaccurate information MI5 gave it.
Questions raised after the 7/7 attacks - how MI5 manages its resources, and how it should be held to account - are extremely topical.
The issue of accountability was raised yesterday by the former Conservative minister and shadow home secretary, David Davis.
“There is a serious problem with the accountability of the security services to parliament if they won’t even state under which statute they are authorised to act”, he wrote in the Sunday Times.
He referred specifically to the recent Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruling that the security and intelligence agencies had unlawfully retained the product of the intercepted communications of Amnesty International.
Davis made a broader point. Whenever MPs ask ministers about anything to do with MI5, GCHQ, or MI6, they are told: “We do not comment on intelligence matters”.
Given the pressure on their resources and the need to choose priorities, why do they spend time and money spying, unlawfully, on human rights organisations?
Perhaps ministers could answer that.
Crevice, Britain’s biggest counter-terrorism operation, was to lead to the conviction in 2007 of five men plotting an attack with a large fertiliser bomb on a shopping centre, nightclub, and the gas network.
MI5’s investigation into Crevice threw up 55 individuals associated with the plotters. MI5 said it would have liked to have pursued all of them. But it was a matter of resources and only 15 were seen as “essential” targets.
The remaining 40, including those later identified as Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were “parked up” - not treated as urgent cases. The two had not been heard discussing terrorist acts in Britain, MI5 insisted.
“Like many, they were talking about jihadi activity in Pakistan and support for the Taliban and about UK foreign policy,” a security official told me.
He said that if MI5 possessed in 2004 the new technology and extra staff they were subsequently given, the two men might have been identified earlier as potential suicide bombers.
In 2010, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5 at the time of the 7/7 bombings, told the Chilcot inquiry she was not surprised that British citizens were behind the 7/7 attacks in London.
She was not surprised that a growing number of Britons were “attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and saw the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan as threatening their co-religionists and the Muslim world”.
Unlike MI5, ministers - Labour and Conservative - have always been reluctant to admit any connection between the growth of “home grown” terrorism and Britain’s foreign policy.
British foreign policy is one thing, the question of resources, another. In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, MI5 emphasised, as we have already noted, its lack of resources rather than any inability to intercept communications.
This is pertinent in light of the current dispute
about whether MI5 and GCHQ should have more powers to intercept personal communications, and about how they should be brought more effectively to account.
MI5 wanted evidence to the 7/7 inquests heard in private. It failed to convince the coroner, Lady Justice Hallett. “To my mind”, she said giving her verdict of unlawful killings in May 2011, “the concerns that I would not be able to conduct a thorough and fair investigation into the security issues in wholly open evidential proceedings have proved unfounded.”
She also pointed to the feebleness of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee of handpicked MPs and peers and its failure to correct inaccurate information MI5 gave it.
Questions raised after the 7/7 attacks - how MI5 manages its resources, and how it should be held to account - are extremely topical.
The issue of accountability was raised yesterday by the former Conservative minister and shadow home secretary, David Davis.
“There is a serious problem with the accountability of the security services to parliament if they won’t even state under which statute they are authorised to act”, he wrote in the Sunday Times.
He referred specifically to the recent Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruling that the security and intelligence agencies had unlawfully retained the product of the intercepted communications of Amnesty International.
Davis made a broader point. Whenever MPs ask ministers about anything to do with MI5, GCHQ, or MI6, they are told: “We do not comment on intelligence matters”.
Given the pressure on their resources and the need to choose priorities, why do they spend time and money spying, unlawfully, on human rights organisations?
Perhaps ministers could answer that.
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