Ahmad’s visits to Britain had much greater significance than was apparent at the time. Their purpose only became clear after 9/11, from documents recovered by US forces in Afghanistan in 2001. Among the documents was correspondence between ‘Abu Mohamed’ and ‘Abu Ibrahim’ about procurement of equipment, cultures and training for BW production. ‘Abu Mohamed’ was quickly identified as UBL’s deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri. ‘Abu Ibrahim’ took longer to track down. References in the correspondence to his foreign travels, attendance at conferences in the UK and attempts to procure dangerous pathogens, however, were discovered to match exactly the information on Ahmad in Security Service files.62 That discovery confirmed existing fears that UBL continued to regard as ‘a religious duty’ the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction for use against the monstrous conspiracy of ‘Jews and Crusaders’ who – in his deluded imagination – have threatened Islam for the last thousand years.
Morale in the Security Service at the beginning of the twenty-first century, following the end of the era of cutbacks, was high. In April 2000 a ‘Staff Opinion Survey’, conducted for the first time by an external consultant, produced ‘some of the highest scores we have seen in the ten years we have been involved with staff surveys and this applies to both the public and private sector . . .’63 In recent years only the romantic publisher Mills and Boon had registered even higher job satisfaction ratings in surveys carried out by the consultant.64 Collaboration with SIS was closer than at any time since Cumming and Kell sat in the same office in the Drew detective agency in 1909. In the spring of 2001 the Security Service carried out an ‘audit’ of relations with SIS among its nineteen section heads. All reported that they knew their opposite numbers in SIS and that members of their sections had visited SIS within the last three months. Two-thirds of operational section heads reported that they ‘routinely’ invited SIS colleagues to planning meetings.65
From the early summer of 2001 onwards the Security Service received mounting intelligence which pointed to a major Al Qaida attack on US targets, but gave no indication of the attack plan. An early warning to senior Whitehall officials on 22 June reported specific threats to American interests in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey, Italy and Kenya.66 The Service concluded on 6 July:
It is not yet clear to what extent the recent rise in threat reporting reflects increased intelligence coverage. The reporting itself is of varying reliability, and is too recent to expect much corroboration. But the increase in volume is sufficient to indicate that UBL and those who share his agenda are currently well advanced in operational planning for a number of major attacks on Western interests. References to vehicle bombs and suicide bombs in some of the intelligence are consistent with UBL’s modus operandi, although such details are not usually discussed so openly.
The most likely location for an attack on Western interests by UBL and those who share his agenda is in the Gulf States, or the wider Middle East. But the recent references to e.g. Rome and Nairobi are a reminder of UBL’s and his associates’ readiness to target further afield.67
Similar Security Service warnings to Whitehall of imminent attack continued at intervals over the next two months, up to and including the morning of 11 September. The intelligence received during the summer of 2001, however, did not point either to a major attack in the United States or to an operation based on hijacked aircraft.68
The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States brought the Security Service more visibly to centre-stage in Whitehall than ever before in its history. Three months into the second term of Blair’s government, 9/11 produced an overnight transformation in his attitude to the Service.69 The news of the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon by suicide hijackers who had taken over US passenger jets reached the Prime Minister in a Brighton hotel where he was putting the finishing touches to his speech to the TUC annual conference. Instead of delivering the speech, he made a brief appearance on the conference platform, then took the train to London, leaving the text to be circulated in his absence.70 By the time Blair reached Downing Street, COBR had already met under the chairmanship of Sir Richard Wilson who had become cabinet secretary in 1998.71 Before COBR convened again, this time chaired by the Prime Minister, he was briefed by Wilson, Lander and John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.72 In the light of later intelligence, the briefing paper prepared by G9 for Lander before his meeting with Tony Blair somewhat underestimated Bin Laden’s direct control, through Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, of the 9/11 attack plans:
We should not think of Usama Bin Laden as the head of a coherent unified terrorist structure. He is not a terrorist commander in the sense that, for example, Abu Nidhal was.
The group which he nominally commands, Al Qaida, is not hierarchical and does not have formal membership. We should think in terms simply of those who are most inspired by Bin Laden’s teachings and most loyal to him.73
Alastair Campbell, Blair’s adviser and director of communications and strategy, wrote in his diary after the briefings:
Scarlett and Lander were both pretty impressive, didn’t mess about, thought about what they said, and said what they thought . . . Lander said this was a logical step-up from the car bomb. Turning a plane into a bomb and destroying one of the great symbols of America takes some doing but they have done it and they have been able to do it because they have any number of terrorists prepared to kill themselves.74
Campbell noted after further briefings next day that ‘both C [Sir Richard Dearlove] and Lander were very good on big picture and detail.’75 Lander, in Sir Richard Wilson’s view, was ‘brilliant’.76 The DG was struck by ‘how unprepared some key Government figures were on 11 September’. He later told Service staff:
None of the key Ministerial team had any direct experience of major terrorism and some key officials were new in post. The Prime Minister picked up the issues very quickly indeed following the intelligence briefings, involving us, on 11 and 12 September. By the evening of the second day it was clear that the Taleban and Al Qa’ida was on his agenda.77
Though the great majority of lives lost on 9/11 were American, more British citizens – sixty-seven of them – were also killed than in any other terrorist attack.
The Al Qaida attacks on New York and Washington immediately gave a new intensity to the intelligence Special Relationship. While Lander stayed in London to brief Blair and COBR, the DDG, Eliza Manningham-Buller, flew to Washington on 12 September – at a time when US airspace was still officially closed – with the Chief of SIS, Sir Richard Dearlove, and the Director of GCHQ. Their aircraft was accompanied to Andrews Air Force Base by an escort of eight USAF F-16s, and the British delegation was immediately whisked away to dinner and prolonged crisis talks at the CIA’s Langley headquarters with the DCI, George Tenet, the Director of the National Security Agency and the Deputy Director of the FBI. Lander told Security Service staff: ‘It was clear that the American side, who were exhausted (few had had any sleep) and angry, deeply appreciated seeing friends from the UK, coming to offer support and help.’78 It was an emotional moment – in Tenet’s view, ‘as touching an event as I experienced during my seven years at the CIA’.79
9/11 transformed relations between Blair and Lander from distant to warm. Like previous DGs at meetings with ministers, Lander always wore a dark suit. Blair and his advisers were sometimes casually dressed. Campbell wrote after one intelligence briefing, ‘The spooks were all in dark suits and carrying their battered briefcases.’ Blair told them, ‘If I didn’t know you were all so young, I’d say there was a generational gap.’80 He was plainly unaware that, while Rimington was DG, efforts had to be made to spruce up Lander, who had no great liking for dark suits and well-polished black shoes, before he met ministers and senior officials. David Blunkett, who had become home secretary three months before 9/11, was less enthusiastic about Lander than Blair. He was, however, almost certainly in a Whitehall minority in complaining that ‘it’s almost as though [Lande
r] talks in riddles, which makes it very difficult to pin him down.’81
Not all Security Service staff were happy with President Bush’s call for a ‘War on Terror’ (a phrase later lampooned in a Service revue entitled ‘The War on Terry (WOT)’). Lander sought to reassure staff on 27 September: ‘This is a war on terrorism in the same sense as we talk of a war on drugs. A military response is obviously under consideration, but you should be reassured that political, humanitarian and intelligence/law enforcement responses are also high on the UK agenda.’82 The ‘military response’ began with the bombing of Afghanistan on 7 October by the USAF and the RAF after the ruling Taleban regime had refused to hand over Bin Laden for trial in the United States and close down Al Qaida bases. Alastair Campbell was struck by how quickly War Cabinet meetings at Number Ten became routine, ‘with the spooks and defence guys sitting up straight and getting ready to do their stuff, Scarlett, C [Dearlove], Lander, C[hief of the] D[efence] S[taff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce] all chipping in, very matter-of-fact and straightforward’.83 By early December, though Bin Laden escaped from his mountain hideout in the Tora Bora caves, the land forces of the US-led coalition had defeated the Taleban. Shortly before Christmas, Blair wrote to Lander:
The Government and the British people are fortunate to be served by security and intelligence organisations whose professionalism is admired and, by our enemies, feared throughout the world. My thanks on behalf of the Government for all you are doing. We all have cause to be grateful for your efforts.
Lander told staff early in the New Year:
For once Government has put its money where its mouth is and has given us extra money this year and next year for additional effort on ICT [international counter-terrorism], so funding should not be a problem. Until recruitment can catch up, however, that will continue to mean lower priority work having to be reduced or put on a care and maintenance basis.84
During Blair’s remaining years at Number Ten, the Security Service received far more public praise from the Prime Minister and successive Home Secretaries than from any previous government. Reflecting on the period since the end of the Cold War before his retirement in October 2002, Lander noted the major ‘change in the relationship between the Service and the rest of Government’:
During the Cold War the day to day work of the Service did not engage ministerial attention at all since it concerned the intricacies of security (vetting, visas etc) in the context of a well understood strategic threat. Today with over 60% of our work on terrorism, what we do and what we find out can be of direct relevance to Ministers’ day to day concerns and thus to those of their Departments.85
1 Most Muslims saw jihad primarily as non-violent (for example, as a spiritual struggle to lead a better life). UBL was obsessed with the idea of jihad as holy war.
3
After 9/11
During the year after 9/11 the Security Service’s most visible successes were in counter-espionage rather than in counter-terrorism, which for the past decade had been its main priority. The Service succeeded in catching two employees of British Aerospace who were attempting to sell highly classified defence secrets to Russian intelligence. Both were caught by sting operations. The first was Rafael Bravo, a security guard at the British Aerospace offices in Stanmore, Middlesex, who made a ham-fisted attempt to pass classified documents to the Russians which he was believed to have found in a security cabinet that had been left unlocked.1 Bravo pleaded guilty at his trial, which opened in December 2001, and revealed that he had tried to telephone the Russian embassy to offer his services, but the number he found in a phone book connected him only to an answering machine: ‘So I decided to post a document with a post-[it-]note saying if they were interested in more documents to contact me on my pager number.’2 Soon afterwards Bravo was telephoned by a Russian-speaking G Branch officer, who introduced himself as ‘Volodya’, a Russian intelligence officer, and arranged a meeting at the White House Hotel in central London. Despite technical hitches (a concealed microphone malfunctioned and the view of a Service photographer in the hotel was obstructed by a piano),3 Bravo handed over four further classified documents to ‘Volodya’ and demanded substantial payment for them, thus enabling the police to make an arrest. The whole operation lasted only eleven days.4 The Home Office sent its congratulations to Thames House: ‘Short, sharp operations like this are always of interest to Ministers and you may like to know that we have briefed the Home Secretary [David Blunkett] about the operation.’5 It was later discovered that Bravo intended to offer the Russians classified documents on state-of-the-art electronics warfare surveillance, defence systems of British warships, and equipment for Harrier jump-jets and Apache helicopters. He was sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment.6 When the sting was revealed during Bravo’s trial, the Service was surprised to receive a formal protest from the officially declared London representative of the SVR at ‘Volodya’s’ impersonation of a Russian intelligence officer.7
On 4 March 2002, just over a month after Bravo’s conviction, a disaffected test co-ordinator at BAE Systems Avionics in Basildon, Ian Parr (who appears to have been on holiday during Bravo’s trial in January and unaware of it), also attempted to make contact with Russian intelligence, by passing a packet to the Russian embassy containing three floppy discs with a typed note which read: ‘Attached are sample documents available. I will telephone Friday 8th March at 3pm to confirm your interest, and discuss a meeting. I will give the code word “Piglet”.’ Parr had failed to realize, however, that 8 March was International Women’s Day, a Russian holiday, and the Russian embassy was closed. On 8 March he received a phone call from the Security Service officer who had earlier contacted Bravo and this time called himself ‘Aleksei’. They later arranged to meet at the Tower Bridge Thistle Hotel on 19 March. At a further meeting at the Esplanade pub in Southend-on-Sea on 22 March, Parr handed over fifty-six floppy disks and fourteen sets of classified documents relating to the STORM SHADOW missile system. ‘Aleksei’ paid him and left. Parr stayed behind and had just ordered a lager when the Essex police moved in and arrested him on suspicion of theft and of committing offences under the Official Secrets Act. He was later sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for passing classified information and two years for theft, to run concurrently.8
By the time Parr was jailed, the counter-espionage budget was once again under threat. Though almost 20 per cent of the Service’s budget in 2000–2001 was devoted to CE (up from 12 per cent in 1996–7),9 it was cut back once again after 9/11. As the Annual Report for 2001–2 acknowledged: ‘The gearing up of work against international terrorism post 11 September was achieved at a cost to the Service’s counter-espionage work. Coverage was reduced effectively to four potentially hostile states and lower priority casework was suspended.’10 At the time of Sir Stephen Lander’s retirement as DG in October 2002, however, the full extent of the threat to Britain from Islamist terrorism was still not grasped. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of Counter-Terrorism Command at Scotland Yard, later acknowledged, ‘In 2002 the perception was that if there was a threat to the UK, its origins were overseas. The spectre of a home grown terrorist threat was not yet with us.’11
Well before Lander’s retirement, the DDG, Eliza Manningham-Buller,12 then aged fifty-four, was widely regarded as the front-runner to succeed him. Good at managing personal relations with both her colleagues and Whitehall, she succeeded in conveying authority and friendliness at the same time. As the daughter of the first Viscount Dilhorne (born Reginald Manningham-Buller), successively Solicitor General, Attorney General and Lord Chancellor in the Conservative governments of 1951 to 1964, she was the only DDG or DG in Service history who had been used since childhood to the company of ministers. At Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she read English, she had been a prominent member of OUDS (Oxford University Dramatic Society) and was chosen in 1968 to play the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, the first ever OUDS pantomime. The producer, Gyles Brandreth, later a Tory M
P, described her performance as ‘absolutely superb’. ‘It is great fun,’ Manningham-Buller was quoted as saying, ‘but I am not intending to be a professional actress.’13 After a few years teaching English following graduation, she was talent-spotted by a Security Service officer who met her at a party; she joined the Service in 1974. Her brief career as an English teacher left its mark on her MI5 career. She later told alumnae of her Oxford college: ‘I have a reputation inside the Service for being particular about grammar. A draft letter or note presents the opportunity for me to indulge my struggle for maintaining standards of written English.’ Some of her colleagues, she admitted, probably wished she had taught mathematics or geography instead.14 Her insistence on high standards (not merely of English grammar), which some of her staff found intimidating, was balanced by a sense of fun which made her many friends. Manningham-Buller later became the first DG (perhaps the first head of any intelligence agency anywhere) to give a talk to staff entitled, ‘Fun at Work’.15 She first began to establish herself as a potential DG under Stella Rimington, when her interpersonal as well as intelligence skills as first head of T2, with responsibility for mainland Republican counter-terrorism, played a crucial part in the fraught but successful transfer of the lead role from MPSB to the Service.16
In April 2002, six months before Lander’s retirement, four senior mandarins, chaired by Sir Richard Wilson, now cabinet secretary, interviewed a shortlist of three applicants (all internal) for the post of DG. As Manningham-Buller later acknowledged, the essence of her letter of application for the post of DG was that, after the Lander era, ‘I was going to be Miss Continuity.’17 The letter had a characteristically engaging conclusion, influenced by memories of the paparazzi pursuit of Stella Rimington a decade earlier and the thought that they might turn up at the farm where she and her husband spent as many of their weekends as possible: ‘I am supported by a happy marriage, many friends and lots of other interests, so can keep work in perspective and switch off. I also derive strength from my home life to sustain me in crises. What really frightens me is the prospect of being photographed in my farm overalls by the Sun.’18 The panel unanimously recommended Manningham-Buller’s appointment as DG:
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