Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [301]
After the 7/7 London bombing, the then home secretary Clarke claimed that the attack had ‘come out of the blue’, as the work of so-called ‘clean skins’. This turned out not to be accurate. In 2004 Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer showed up on the margins of an MI5 surveillance of Islamist meetings. Both men were photographed—although not identified—and Siddique Khan’s telephone number was known from his contacts with a suspect who had been monitored since 2003. On one occasion, MI5 had trailed Khan as he drove 150 miles home to Dewsbury in West Yorkshire. The two were deemed a low priority at a time when surveillance resources were stretched to the limit. No attempts were made to identify them, to get clearer pictures, or to show the existing photographs to a detainee held by a foreign intelligence agency who, in early 2004, had testified that Anglo-Pakistanis had visited Pakistan seeking meetings with Al Qaeda. Although Richard Reid had tried to blow himself up on a plane, and two Anglo-Pakistani suicide bombers had attacked Tel Aviv, the security services seem to have been reluctant to believe that British citizens would launch suicide attacks on British soil. Incredibly, they asserted that there was not a sufficiently developed climate for long-term indoctrination. The first part of that claim, evidently accepted without demur by a House of Commons intelligence committee which reports to the prime minister, was surprising, since for decades the UK had been home to several Islamist fanatics, while anyone seriously familiar with suicide bombers would know that it does not take long to recruit or activate them.
Naturally, the security services work with finite resources, and have to establish priorities, points which conflict with government claims that they receive all the funding they ask for. As the MI5 director Jonathan Evans, appointed in 2007, has underlined, a successful bomb attack is a particularly bitter pill for his agency, whose overriding priority is the safety of the British public. Partly because of the lack of a regional MI5 presence—unlike Germany’s security services or the FBI it was centred in the capital—there was little or no in depth familiarity with Islamist culture as it had formed in various central and northern cities. The British knew a lot about Belfast, and much about Arabs and North Africans in London, but their own northern provincial cities were a mystery. Instead of pseudo-academic discussions about how to define terrorism or what to call Islamist fanatics, more effort should have been put into getting a rich picture of the milieu in which jihadists are formed, radicalised and operate. The historic separation of MI5 and the foreign intelligence agency MI6 was anachronistic too in a globalised world where cheap air travel and migration linked Beeston and Bradford with Peshawar in a single continuum of malign activity. Regionally based police Special Branch sections were routinely under-funded, in the interests of high-speed traffic vehicles, helicopters and campaigns against burglars. Key appointments in the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Branch, notably of its head Peter Clarke in early 2002, have led to much smoother co-operation since.108
‘7 July began unsettled, with heavy showers in places. The early morning rush in London started as normal.’ Only the British could begin a report on a mass atrocity with the weather. The day before, Britain had won the competition to host the 2012 Olympics, and the G8 summit was in full swing in Scotland. Around 4 a.m. a car sped down the M1, containing Mohammed Siddique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer and Hasib Hussain. At 6.49 they met Jermaine Lindsay, parked in a Luton car park. All four donned rucksacks, as if they were going camping. Each rucksack contained two to five kilograms of high explosives. The bombs had been