7/7 and 21/7 – Delving into Room 101

by Cliff Todd

  It is now some time on 21 July. I think we were just tidying up, ready for remotely igniting the igloo contents. And by the way, when I say tidying up, this does not mean the scene was finished with, à la TV CSI-type programmes. All we had done was remove all the potentially explosive materials, which meant that the police no longer needed FEL or EOD to be there. And most importantly, all the people in the adjacent flats, who had been moved out when the flat was found on the 12th, could finally be allowed back into their properties. Chris and sundry other police still had several more weeks there, meticulously removing everything and anything that might possibly have some evidential or intelligence value.

  At any rate we were all together in our, for want of a better word, control tent (tables, chairs, water heater, etc.), when the news came on the radio, which we just happened to have in there. And the situation we had had for the last two weeks, which you couldn’t possibly imagine ever being more fraught, was about to become exactly that.

  21 july

  There it was – a perfectly calm voice on the radio, announcing that there appeared to have been another attack on the London Underground – it was thought three stations and a bus, but details were still lacking – stay tuned for further updates…

  This bit I remember clearly – there was just silence for a few moments. The EOD guy was the first to speak: “Right, well that’s it then – the gloves have got to come off now!” A proper military response, from a proper soldier, and whatever you might think in a comfortable debate somewhere else, at that time and in that place, we all heartily endorsed the sentiment.

  Shortly thereafter, everyone’s phone started ringing and plans were being rapidly remade. I stayed long enough to see the EOD officer successfully ignite his igloo contents – success being defined by the igloo remaining intact and not erupting skywards! And, as intended, by getting a good fire going in there. So that particular job was done.

  Not long after that, I was heading at some speed back down the M1, with one of the SO15 officers who had been located with the Leeds police to liaise between them and NSY on the 7/7 investigation. He had been recalled for these new incidents, and it was suggested politely that I go with him. Not that I had any issue with that.

  I remember getting back into London, but strangely I can’t remember exactly what happened there – I think I was dropped off at Charing Cross, to make my way home from there, this being now early evening I think. Anyway, back home, and the phone was really going into overdrive now. It was now clear that all of the devices had only partially functioned and that, thereby, there were no casualties, though certainly very many badly frightened passengers.

  You might think that because the devices didn’t function properly, that the scenes were therefore very straightforward to deal with, but that turned out not to be the case at all. Certainly, and very thankfully, everyone was spared the horror of the 7/7 scenes, but now we had a whole new problem. The main charges had not detonated, and so they were deposited out of the rucksacks they were being carried in, onto the floor of the trains (and bus). If it had been something that we recognised or understood then that would have been OK. But this was something we had never seen before – a yellow, glutinous mess, visually fairly similar (though not quite the same) as we had seen in the bomb factory in Leeds. And that material had very clearly detonated, so we had to proceed very carefully here, especially as we still had only a vague idea of what it was – some kind of mixture of hydrogen peroxide with an organic fuel, possibly pepper. Eventually, a plan for collecting the material was formed between the EXPOs and FEL staff, whereby it would be scooped carefully from where it was into large plastic boxes, lined with large, antistatic plastic bags. The actual scooping preferably being done (I said) by the EXPOs, with the police and FEL staff watching from a safe distance – though I’m not sure that it wasn’t actually a joint effort. This was all being coordinated with me, by phone, in between calls from senior police asking me how long before they could open up the Tube stations again.

  And then, just as we thought we had a plan, things started going rapidly downhill. At Shepherd’s Bush, Warren Street, and the bus in Hackney, as soon as they started trying to move the yellow material it suddenly started getting very hot and smoking! Now, bearing in mind that this stuff was apparently the main charge in an explosive device, this was very alarming behaviour, and naturally and sensibly, everyone immediately backed off – and all work stopped again! This is now late evening – and I’m back on the phone again. The one place this behaviour hadn’t (so far) happened was at the Oval Station, but on account of it happening at the other scenes, those at the Oval were told to stop as well.

  So, what do we do now – Cliff? Well, how the hell do I know? I don’t even know exactly what it is, and even if I knew the exact mix, I would still have only the vaguest notion of its properties! But then, no one else would know either. I knew nothing remotely like this had ever been seen in the UK before and, as it later transpired, nowhere else in the world either. But anyway, at that moment it wasn’t the rest of the world’s problem, it was the UK’s – and now specifically mine! OK – well give it an hour to cool, try once more very gently, see if it has finished reacting. Maybe midnight by now. So another attempt – same result, although by now, at all the scenes, I think it had at least been moved off the trains so they could be moved out of the stations and the tracks thereby cleared. All except for the Oval, which was still not reacting, so that was removed from the station and taken to the Fort and placed in a magazine cleared for the purpose. I told the others to just stop for the night, we’ll come back to it in the morning. Well all right, later that same morning. Go and find somewhere to sleep – if such a thing is possible!

  I think I actually did go to bed myself – I may even have slept for an hour or so, and the phone rings. Maybe 04.00 by now? It is the senior investigator at NSY – I’ll call him John. “Cliff, why has everything stopped at the scenes? We (i.e. the government) have to have everything running as normal in the morning.” “Well, John, everything has stopped because the stuff is reacting; that’s very dangerous, and everyone is very tired (including me) and we’ll think again in the morning.” “Not good enough, what are you going to do?” “It’ll have to be good enough, and I don’t know.” And so on, back and forth. To be fair, he was as sleep deprived as everyone else, and under great pressure from his superiors. And in the past, we at FEL had always been able to give answers and/or advice on what to do, even when different devices or explosives had been used, because they had always been materials we had some knowledge and understanding of. What we had now was something completely new – so different that we hadn’t even yet been able to work out exactly what it was – a rough idea was all.

  Now it seemed like the whole of the UK was waiting for – well, just me, to decide on what should be done next, and how. So was I the only person in the whole of the UK who could decide how to proceed in this part of a significant national threat? How did that happen? Well, in a way it was true. It’s a bit like, in a microcosm, a president of a company, or a country – several people could probably do that job, but only one person can actually do it at any one time. And in this particular situation, that person was me. Clearly, I had my own management chain, but no one in that chain would have even the faintest idea of how to proceed, in my opinion at least, and almost certainly not a single one would dream of making a decision on their own. And indeed none had contacted me – for which I was actually grateful. I’m not sure if that was by design – if anything went wrong, they could rightly claim that I was taking decisions on my own that they knew nothing of – or if they actually didn’t know how deeply the FEL were involved at that time. Whatever, this sounds appallingly arrogant writing this now, but something had to be done, a plan had to be formed and executed, and there were very few people that I would trust to devise such a plan – all within FEL, and for all of whom I was the immediate line manager. So it was up to me
then.

  Now, certainly the EXPOs could just have remotely removed and destroyed the material and its containers, but then we would have no idea what had been used – and the suspects were still out there, maybe with more devices to be set off, which might actually work next time. So that would have been a very poor option which no one wanted, least of all the police.

  Anyway, the conversation with John at NSY ended with me saying I would meet with the EXPOs, at their office first thing this morning, and between them, me, and the other FEL staff at the scenes, we would agree a plan and execute it. Best I could do at that moment, so, grudgingly, he accepted that. At the end of all that, I knew there was no point in trying to go back to sleep, so I decided to just get dressed and go into the Fort, before going up to London to meet the EXPOs. I think. I can remember deciding to stay up. I can remember getting a train up to London with Claire, who had dealt with the Oval scene. The steps in between I can’t be sure of. Maybe I was sleep walking! I guess I went in to the Fort, and met Claire there – I know she had been there delivering the yellow material from the Oval, in the early hours, so maybe she was still there and I went to see the stuff, then suggested she come with me to the EXPOs. Whatever, we did both go and meet with them.

  As we got there we heard the latest news – one of the EXPOs had just got back from clearing the body of Jean Charles de Menezes, who had been shot in Stockwell Tube Station. Since he had been shot in the belief that he likely had some kind of explosive device on him, the EXPOs had been called, as standard procedure, to check and deal with whatever device he might have had. But sadly, as became clear, he had nothing and was nothing to do with any of the bombers. At the time, there was therefore no reason for FEL to be involved in any of that, although much later I was asked to give an opinion on some aspects of that incident. More of that later, suffice it to say here that, in my opinion, if anyone should want to lay any blame on someone for that whole episode, then they should look no further than the dickheads who tried to kill and maim as many people as possible just going about their normal daily lives. As far as I am concerned, he was the single physical casualty of the 21/7 bombers.

  Anyway, we all got our heads together, during which I suggested a plan whereby some small (e.g. 200 grams) samples could be taken from the bulk material, to be taken to the Fort for analysis, and we worked out a possible means for transporting the bulk material to a suitable location where it could be destroyed by burning. Once the EXPOs were happy that we had a potentially workable plan (after all, they were the ones that would actually have to implement it!), Claire and I got taken to Warren Street, to check if the situation, at least at one of the scenes, would practically lend itself to the plan we had come up with – which we decided it would. We could only go to one scene (a basic forensic protocol is not to visit multiple scenes in order to avoid possible cross-contamination), and Warren Street was the nearest. So, with the plan in place, Claire and I went back to the Fort. We had included the material from the Oval (which was now at the Fort) in the plan, even though it had so far not reacted like the others – it was still too risky to keep it. We would just sample it, like the rest, with the main bulk being disposed of with the rest. Again, the details of the remainder of the day, up until early evening, escape me, but the FEL was still a blur of activity with the stuff we had so far, while the police were frantically engaged in the biggest manhunt in their history.

  It took until early evening, but eventually one of the EXPOs managed to collect up the bulk material from Warren Street Tube and the no. 26 bus in Hackney, and arrived at the Fort to collect the bulk from the Oval Tube, to take it all for disposal at a site he had identified at the fire training area at Biggin Hill Airfield, which was only a short drive from the Fort. He did not have the Shepherd’s Bush material, as that had stayed too reactive to transport safely, and it was eventually destroyed somewhere very local, by the EXPO at that scene. I went with the EXPO from the Fort to Biggin Hill, along with a couple of other FEL staff, to see for myself how the material would react when it was burnt (which was the chosen disposal method). It turned out to be quite benign, it just burnt in a controlled manner, but by this time it had probably more or less finished reacting, and it was spread out over quite a big area, unlike previously having been largely clumped together.

  So the EXPO went on his way, and we headed back to the Fort, to await the samples from the last scene at Shepherd’s Bush, which we had been told were on their way. Soon after we got there I got what I can only describe as an agonised phone call from Andy, the SO15 exhibits officer bringing the samples. “Cliff, the samples are fizzing and bubbling and the van is filling with smoke!”

  Now I can’t remember exactly what I said, though certainly not what was in my head, which was one stream of expletives! I feel like I must have said just stop and get out and call EXPO, and maybe they did stop briefly, but the end result of the conversation was that they were not far away, and would just go hell for leather to get to us, but just please, please be ready to deal with this stuff when we arrive! Which we were, preparing a safe area to put the van in, and every possible bit of kit we could think of, including several large plastic boxes with copious amounts of cold water to put the samples in. I should just say here that water is by no means always the safest way to deal with unknown explosives, but this was based on our very limited understanding of what these particular materials were likely to be. And these were now only samples, not the large bulk amounts we were dealing with earlier. But still, only educated guesswork, and very stressful – for us. I can only imagine the stress levels of Andy and his driver in the van!

  Perhaps a bit of perspective would be helpful here. It may seem that, at the one extreme I was being incredibly cavalier here, with stuff that could detonate at any moment, or at the other extreme, was being utterly overdramatic about stuff that really posed very little risk at all. Well, at the time I believed the truth to be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum; based on the admittedly very limited knowledge of the mixture that we had gained at that time, plus some educated guesswork, I thought it was actually quite unlikely that the material would just detonate in its current form. On the other hand, I knew personally of two different incidents in which some not very well understood explosive mixtures had undergone sudden, unexpected, and violent thermal reactions. In one case, someone had suffered life-changing injuries, and in the other case someone died. And these incidents occurred during planned work under controlled conditions on licensed explosives ranges. Well, unpredictable thermal reactions, though not so far very violent, were what we were seeing here – with material that we knew was intended to be explosive. So, for me at least, there was a very real level of fear here, but tempered by some educated assumptions, and the urgent need to get enough of the material to test sufficiently to get a proper handle on its composition and properties, in case more devices were ready to be unleashed – the suspects were still at large.

  Anyway, I told the MOD police at the Fort gate, that a police vehicle was on its way to us with some vital samples from the London bombings – and they were on NO ACCOUNT to stop this vehicle at the gate (as they normally would) but just wave them straight through. Fortunately they were used to us in FEL and didn’t argue. Not sure if there was actually smoke coming from the van at the time – but if there was, that may have convinced them to just stand back and let it through, if they had been in any doubt!

  And so the van arrived, the samples still smoking but less so by then (not all of them were smoking, but Andy hadn’t stopped to examine them too closely!), and we dealt with them by placing them, still in their containers, in the cold water that we had ready and waiting for them, which (luckily) had the desired effect of cooling them sufficiently to stop them reacting as they had been. As an added precaution, we also divided them up into smaller individual samples, in case they should start up again. And gradually everyone could take some deep breaths and calm down.