London bombings: 'British intelligence was woeful . . . and that was

THE conduct of the British police and intelligence services over the July 7 London bombings was a "massive failure from start to finish" for which the government must take the blame.

This withering criticism comes from Crispin Black, who worked for the Joint Intelligence Committee, was an army lieutenant colonel, a military intelligence officer, a member of the Defence Intelligence Staff and a Cabinet Office intelligence analyst who briefed Number 10 on terrorism.

Black says the bombings made UK spies appear "laughable" and left the police looking like "the Keystone Cops".

He claims the UK government's refusal to accept that its role in the invasion of Iraq had increased the risk of homegrown terrorism meant that MI5 did not look as closely at British radicals in the run-up to the bomb attacks as it should have done.

"The system failed - fatally, " Black said, adding that the biggest error was the "misappreciation of the extent to which the aims and aspirations of international terrorists had penetrated into small elements of the UK's domestic Muslim population".

In his new book, 7-7 The London Bombs: What Went Wrong? , Black savages MI5's Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre ( JTAC) for reducing the UK terrorist threat level just over a month before the suicide bomb attacks. JTAC also claimed that there was no group in the UK with the intention or capability of launching a terror attack. Black said the JTAC decision "took our eye off the ball" and showed that "we have a bad and confused attitude to terrorism".

"The disturbing thing about this assessment is that it was moving in diametrically the opposite direction to what was about to happen on the ground, " he said, adding that politicians "had set the tone" for such failures. "The entire investigation was a massive failure from beginning to end.

"I felt strongly and still do that we had failed the people killed and wounded that day - badly, " claimed Black. "The way we were organising ourselves to protect our law-abiding citizens against the random and ghastly violence of terror had not worked."

He is now calling for a public inquiry to examine how mistakes were made.

"We pay [politicians'] salaries first and foremost to make sure that we are safe - They risk forgetting their core function, " he stated.

Black said that Britain "went to sleep" in the run-up to the attacks. The intelligence services had previously monitored the leader of the July 7 bombings, Mohammed Siddique Khan, as part of an anti-terror inquiry, but failed to follow up on his activities.

"The authorities decided that he did not constitute a threat. The lead was tragically not exploited, " said Black.

However, some of the most scathing criticism was reserved for the government's refusal to accept that Iraq played a part in fomenting home-grown terror.

"We know that MI5 accepts the Iraq war has been a radicalising factor pushing a small number of British Muslims towards violence, " said Black. "But given the government's absolute unwillingness to accept a link between the British presence in Iraq and terrorism, it would have been difficult for [MI5] expressly to give the correct priority to this question.

"Second, a lack of understanding or inquisitiveness on this matter would also tend to reinforce [now old-fashioned] thinking about Islamist terrorism - that in the UK it is essentially an imported rather than home-grown or semi-homegrown phenomenon."

Black also lambasted the police and intelligence services for allowing Hussain Osman, one of the alleged July 21 "copy-cat" bombers, to flee the country under their noses. "The object of one of the biggest manhunts in British history was able to escape from the country a few days later on the Eurostar after walking past his own wanted poster in Waterloo Station."

The way the government "cooked the intelligence books" over the invasion of Iraq played into the hands of terrorists, he said. "It is not just that many people view the war as unjust and illegal, but they believe it was based on a lie. The enabling atmosphere for Islamist terrorism feeds off the way we went to war as well as the perceived nature of the war itself.

"The intelligence scandals could not have been designed better to cause offence, disaffection and alienation among the Muslim community. The irony is that cooking the intelligence books may well be one of the causes of our current difficulties, and one of the most powerful tools we have against terrorism are our intelligence services - compromised by this cavalier approach."

THE BIG MISTAKES . . .ACCORDING TO BLACK

1 Both the French and Saudis passed intelligence prior to 7/7 to the UK saying Britain was about to be attacked.

2 Police officers were siphoned from London to the G8 Summit in Gleneagles on the week of the attacks.

3 The 7/7 ringleader had come to the attention of anti-terror police before the attack.

4 MI5 lowered the terror threat level from "severe general" to "substantial".

5 The government refused to see the invasion of Iraq as a spur to home-grown terror.

6 There was a failure to tackle Islamic extremism in British muslim communities.

Copyright 2005 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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