James Woolsey, who between 1993 and 1995 ran the Central Intelligence Agency, says that both American and British intelligence made the same mistake. Communist ideology had actually died a long time before communism itself imploded. Western intelligence agencies therefore no longer had the analysts who could recognize and decipher an ideology. So they never understood that with the resurgence of the Salafi/Wahhabi form of Islam, they were facing a set of ideas that had gripped the minds of believers so deeply they would march against the free world under its banner. Instead, the agencies tended to discount what such people were saying because it all sounded so crazy. “When they talked about the worldwide rule of the caliphate, we dismissed it,” Woolsey said.16
Britain, moreover, believed that it had no Middle East interests that might present a problem. It was America that was principally embroiled in the Israel/Arab impasse. France, which had been facing Islamic terrorism on the streets from the early 1990s, was thought to be suffering the after-effects of its entanglement with Algeria. Britain had no such issues in the Middle East. It furthermore never occurred to the establishment that Britain’s Muslims might be touched by Middle East radicalism since they had come overwhelmingly from the Indian subcontinent. So after the Cold War, MI5 decided to focus its attention upon Northern Ireland, the drugs trade and economic espionage. That was what the government asked it to do. The intelligence world did not deliver the goods on what was going on in the Middle East because its customers in the political world didn’t commission it to do so.
In 1994, MI5 disbanded G7, the unit it ran jointly with the foreign intelligence service MI6 to monitor Islamist terrorism. When it reorganized its coverage again in late 1996 in response to the growing phenomenon of Islamist violence, vital continuity and expertise had been lost from the service. “People just disappeared from view,” a source was reported as saying. “We more or less had to start again.”17 Perhaps just as crucially, in 1992 it also disbanded its anti-subversion unit, which had been engaged in studying communism and, to a lesser extent, neo-Nazi ideology.18 With the disappearance of this unit there vanished not only irreplaceable expertise in spotting subversion and analyzing the way it worked within societies, but the very notion that subversion remained a problem to be addressed. Indeed, to this day the suggestion that radical Islamism poses a subversive threat to Britain and the West tends to be dismissed with incomprehension by those responsible for directing British counterterror strategy.
Nevertheless, the explanation for official indifference does not lie wholly in the dismal ignorance, among the political and intelligence class, of the intellectual earthquake taking place in the Muslim world. For there were people in Britain who tried to alert the rest of the establishment to what was happening.
Oliver Revell was head of counterintelligence for the FBI from 1980 to 1991 and then headed the FBI in Texas for a further three years. He had much to do with the British intelligence community in the 1990s. During that period, he says, there was certainly an awareness within that community of the development of Wahhabi Islamism and the potential threat this posed to the West. But the politicians weren’t listening.19
The former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, recalls that he was so concerned in the early 1990s about the Islamist extremists pouring into London that he told Prime Minister John Major about his anxieties, but was fobbed off with a meeting with the head of MI5, who agreed that “we needed identification cards.”20
A senior Conservative politician, the Marquess of Salisbury, says that during the 1980s and 1990s he tried to warn the governments of both Margaret Thatcher and her successor, John Major, about the growing threat to Britain and the West from Islamist extremists, but was brushed aside. “There were people then who saw very clearly what was happening,” he said. “Alastair Crooke [a former MI6 officer] wrote a brilliant paper about the nature of fundamentalist Islam when he was station chief in Islamabad, in which he warned of the danger it posed to the West. I read it. But no one listened. It was like appeasement before the Second World War. If you have a set of prejudices, it’s inconvenient to question them.”21
Another intelligence source said that during the 1990s, opinion within British intelligence circles was divided. “There was a lot of talk about extremist activity but it was said to be better to let them let off steam than bottle it up,” he said. “They thought that if the Muslim community was targeted, the fallout would be greater. It could affect British interests around the world and project Britain as a less than democratic society. There were some who said there was no threat at all, and some who said there was a threat—but it could be dealt with in a different way. There were substantial constituencies on both sides of this argument.”22
David Blunkett was Britain’s home secretary from 2001 to 2005. He believes that the British security and political establishment did not—and still does not—fully understand the dimensions of the monster it is fighting. The security world, he said, was not generally given direct instructions from politicians but was instead sensitive to the general zeitgeist. “It all got mixed up with people’s perceptions of what was going on in Israel and the Middle East,” he said. “People were saying, if only there was justice across the world these demands would be negotiable. Politicians were looking for political solutions to issues such as Palestine; this was what was in the air at the time, and the intelligence world would take its cue from that.”23
Reda Hussaine is an Algerian journalist who started inquiring into Algerian radicals in London after his Paris office, where he was trying to start up an independent Algerian newspaper, was ransacked in 1993. The French police told him that the attack had been organized from London, that the group responsible was sending money to terrorists in Algeria, and that Abu Qatada was behind it.
Hussaine came to London and met supporters of the GIA, the Algerian terrorist group. “I went to the mosques and picked up leaflets claiming killings and assassinations,” he said. “Scotland Yard was approaching these groups to find out what was going on but it was being told lies that they were doing nothing. But they started talking about launching attacks in Europe against France. They killed a French diplomat in Algeria, hijacked a plane and planned to bomb the Paris Metro. All these claims were coming from London.
“I went to French intelligence and started to understand from them that the British wouldn’t listen. The French thought the British didn’t care about what was going on outside the UK. The British thought it was an Algerian and French problem.”
Hussaine made contact with Scotland Yard. “I told them these people were going to Afghanistan to train. They said they couldn’t arrest them because they were free to come and go on their papers. I told them these were false papers but they said it was difficult to interfere. I told them: ‘They are being trained to kill you, not Algerians’; but they said they couldn’t interfere. They didn’t believe me.”24
A few months later, Hussaine was put in touch with MI5. With the Algerians and the French, he had dealt with senior people. But MI5 sent him only junior officials to talk to, a sign of the lack of seriousness with which his intelligence was being treated. He gave them information, he says, between 1999 and 2000 before he finally gave up because they were ignoring what he was giving them.
“I watched young Muslims at the Finsbury Park mosque in London in the late 1990s being prepared for journeys to military camps,” he said. “Money was raised for their air fares by selling books and films in stalls at the mosques. Those who were chosen to go were the most fanatical—and also the most obedient. I saw Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, at the mosque and many others like him before they went abroad to learn their skills as mujahideen.”25
So why were such warnings brushed aside? According to Hussaine, his MI5 handlers told him the reason.
“My contacts there said to me, we are giving these people a roof over their heads, food, free health care—and the security of Britain will be very safe. We don’t care what is going on outside this country.
They told me this face to face. The British had a problem understanding the culture of the Arabs. I told them, you don’t understand this kind of threat. One day they may attack you as unbelievers. They said, we don’t think they will do it here. This is a special place. I told them Britons were going to fight, but they never thought they would fight their own country. But when these people go to the mosque they are told that their country is paradise and they swear allegiance not to their country but to God.”26
British officials privately admit that such a bargain did indeed form part of their calculations. The Islamists were being left undisturbed to conduct their activities on the assumption that they would not then attack Britain. As a former British Special Branch security officer was reported to say, “There was a deal with these guys. We told them if you don’t cause us any problems, then we won’t bother you.”27
The Islamists understood very well what a gift they were being handed by the British state. In 1998, Omar Bakri Mohammed was asked why the Islamist groups never attacked Britain. He replied: “I work here in accordance with the covenant of peace which I made with the British government when I got [political] asylum. . . . We respect the terms of this bond as Allah orders us to do.”28 Once Britain started defending the West against them in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, however, the Islamists declared that this covenant was destroyed. But the fact is that Britain had always been a target of the war upon the West. It simply had failed to understand this until it was too late.
This bargain, or “covenant of security,” had been the dirty little secret at the heart of the British government’s blind-eye policy. It had allowed Islamist radicals free rein in London and elsewhere in Britain in a kind of unspoken “gentlemen’s agreement” that if the British authorities left them alone, they would not turn on the country that was so generously nurturing them. The British didn’t care what they were up to in other countries. Abroad wasn’t their concern. As long as there was no threat to Britain, the government and security establishment just didn’t want to know. They kept a weather eye on the radicals, but only to make sure that English law wasn’t being broken.
Such tunnel vision was accompanied by attitudes straight out of the colonial handbook. To the higher mandarinate of Whitehall, Islamist extremism was merely an arcane dispute between different kinds of unpleasant, swarthy people who were always doing terrible things to each other in far-flung places. There was certainly no cause for Britain to take sides.
Accordingly, the Islamist exiles in London were seen as being but the latest of all the dissidents and radicals to whom Britain had traditionally given refuge for centuries. At a dinner one evening, the bishop of Rochester was startled to hear the Algerian foreign minister complain that when the Algerians had tried to warn the British government about the terrorists in London, the British replied dismissively that they were “freedom fighters.”29 In a country that had so catastrophically lost its role in the world, the sacred principle of freedom of speech now came to define its claim to global virtue. It trumped all other considerations. Moral judgment, along with common sense, was therefore suspended for the duration.
It was also inextricably mixed up with the delicate issue of Britain’s traditionally close if ambiguous ties with the Arab world. Not for nothing was the British Foreign Office known jovially as “the camel corps.” Britain’s interests had long been associated with Arab countries to such an extent that a mindset composed of both unprincipled groveling and postcolonial contempt towards the Arabs, possibly in equal measure, had come to suffuse much of the British establishment.
“The intelligence world did take the view that we should soft-pedal on these radicals in London because of our interests in the Arab world,” said the former home secretary David Blunkett. In particular, Britain had extensive commercial interests with Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia was impaled on its own huge internal contradiction. It was the principal exporter of Wahhabism to the world, and yet it was also a principal target of the Wahhabis of al-Qaeda. So while it was trying to buy off those radicals who it thought posed a threat to its own security, it was doing nothing to shut down the conveyor belt of fanaticism it had set in motion. “Our people just didn’t understand the nature of this threat at a time when it could have made the difference,” said Blunkett.30
Saudi Arabia’s internal contradictions were reflected in Britain’s deeply ambiguous relationship with the oil-soaked kingdom. After all, wasn’t Britain doing huge business with the Saudis? And yet, it also said to itself while holding its collective nose, were they not a despotic regime that flagrantly abused human rights?
Lord Salisbury recounts how, when parliamentarians like himself visited Saudi Arabia during the 1980s, the Foreign Office would brief them on how to respond when the Saudis inevitably complained that Saudi radicals had been allowed into London. “The answer was that we had freedom of speech, that Saudi was a repressive regime and although it was important to us there was a limit to what we would do for our allies. It was the attitude of the ‘camel corps’ that this was a fight between people of an alien faith and it was nothing to do with us. We were prepared to sell them almost anything. But we shouldn’t be seen to have part of our domestic policy dictated by Saudi. We were all ‘white men’ and we had a tradition of refugees. It was hugely self-indulgent.”31
It was also congruent with the example being given from the top. For during this period the British government was dealing with terrorists all the time—such as the Irish Republican Army or Yasser Arafat—under the most transparent of fig leaves. Indeed, British governments have always been prepared to negotiate with terrorists, as they once showed in Kenya, Malaya, Aden and elsewhere. Even when the IRA were engaged in blowing up bits of the United Kingdom, the government was still talking to them. This is because the official British mind always goes for the short-term solution. Some call this pragmatism. Others call it a national instinct for appeasement. In the case of Londonistan, it was a policy of gross irresponsibility. In cynically promoting the narrowest interpretation possible of the national interest, the British acted as midwife to the monster of global jihad.
But there was another part of the British mindset that was more troubling even than its cynical short-termism or postcolonial arrogance. This was its profound unwillingness—shared with the United States—to acknowledge that what the country was being confronted with was religious fanaticism, an unwillingness that continues to this day.
The former FBI officer Oliver Revell says that both the U.S. and the UK have serious problems in dealing with radicalism rooted in religion. “The extremists have found the soft underbelly of Western civilization, the sanctuary provided in its very heart by the commitment to freedom of speech,” he said. “In both the U.S. and the UK, there was and still is a great reluctance to investigate any religious activity unless there is clear evidence that a crime has been committed. It’s a fastidious reluctance to enter into the sphere of religion, which is felt to be a legitimate private activity in which the state has no right to interfere. So there has been no support for collecting intelligence on a religion, and we are also reluctant to intervene in fundraising by terrorist groups because they often shelter behind religious social welfare activities.”32
To understand the depth of this reluctance and incomprehension in Britain, however, it is necessary first to bear in mind one of the most deeply rooted of all aspects of the British character. This is its belief in the rational, the everyday and what is demonstrably evident, and its corresponding suspicion of the abstract, the theoretical and the obscurantist.
Wars of religion, when different kinds of Christian burned each other at the stake in post-Reformation England, are seared into the British historical memory but belong to a premodern period of savagery upon which the country has long resolutely turned its back. The liberal settlement that followed the Enlightenment in Britain put religion very firmly back into its box and elevated reason to pole position as the supreme national virtue. This sturdy empirici
sm lies at the very core of the British love of liberty, and has bequeathed to them their deep skepticism of all forms of extremism. Presented with a ranting ideologue, the British are less likely to succumb than to scoff.
But the downside of this robustly down-to-earth approach is that the British now find it very hard to deal with religious fanaticism. They no longer recognize it—or want to recognize it. Presented with patently ludicrous ideological ranting, they refuse to believe that anyone can take it seriously. So when Islamist clerics such as the hook-clawed Abu Hamza or Omar Bakri Mohammed were loudly trumpeting their hatred of the West and their calls to holy war against it, MI5 regarded them as little more than pantomime clowns, shooting their mouths off in the open where everyone could hear them and laugh them to scorn. Except, of course, a number of impressionable young Muslims did not laugh at all. Such ranting incited them instead to enlist in that holy war against the West which Britain refused to accept was an actual and lethal reality.
As one foreign intelligence source put it: “During the 1990s, many attempts were made to enlighten the British about what was happening. But they refused to see this problem as having a religious character. If this was a religious problem, it became a religious confrontation—and the specter of a religious war was too horrendous. A religious war is different from any other war because you are dealing with absolute beliefs and the room for compromise is very limited. Religious wars are very protracted and bloody, and often end up with a very high toll of lives.
“So the British turned a blind eye to the fact that freedom of religion for Muslims means the freedom to propagate their religion in every possible way. There was almost a conscious psychological suppression of this subject. Politicians didn’t want to think about it at all. The official class wanted to think about it in as narrow a way as possible by dealing with individual incidents as they occurred, but no more than that. They were very concerned about social unrest among Asians in cities like Bradford, but they treated it more as a criminal matter. There was a conscious and subconscious effort to deracialize and depoliticize it and distance themselves from its religious aspects. After 9/11, they woke up in principle but not in practice. They still thought that the UK wasn’t in the front line, and if they continued with their policy of ‘benevolence’ the same thing wouldn’t happen to them.”33
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