7/7: No more locked doors

One institutional failure involving MI5 and special branch would have merited closer examination by the 7/7 inquiry

 

Peter Taylor  

6 May 2011

In her forensically detailed coroner's report Lady Justice Hallett concludes that there were no organisational or individual failings on the part of MI5 that caused or contributed to the tragedy of 7/7. But there was a serious institutional failure at the time that merits some examination. It concerns MI5's relationship with special branch.
 

Crucially, MI5 did not initially share one vital piece of intelligence with West Yorkshire special branch. I first got an inkling of this several years ago when a special branch officer told me that MI5 had followed Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammad Sidique Khan up the MI to Leeds and Dewsbury – the heart of West Yorkshire's patch – but never informed the local special branch about it. 

 

Subsequently, an even more senior officer in West Yorkshire police told me about the omission as an illustration of how MI5 was not sharing intelligence at the time. He described how MI5 officers were housed in the same building as special branch but operated behind a locked door, only sharing intelligence with their police colleagues on a "need to know" basis. Clearly at the time MI5 believed that special branch did not need to know everything. This dysfunctional relationship may possibly have played a part in the failure to identify Khan and Tanweer as potential terrorists – although MI5 insists it had no reason to suspect them since subsequent technical intercepts indicated they were peripheral figures involved in fraud, not terrorism. 

 

The lack of communication and trust between MI5 and special branch only emerged publicly at the trial of the home-grown bombers arrested in 2004 as a result of the fertiliser bomb plot codenamed Operation Crevice. Most were subsequently sentenced to life. Khan and Tanweer were first seen by undercover surveillance teams monitoring the Crevice cell. Although their identities were not known at the time, they were clearly thought to be of sufficient interest to warrant MI5 officers following their Honda from Crawley to addresses in West Yorkshire where they were "housed". 

 

Given the pressure that an overstretched MI5 was under, with 55 suspects and 4,000 "contacts" in the Crevice frame alone, you might have imagined that MI5 would have immediately informed West Yorkshire special branch and asked its officers to mobilise a surveillance team to watch them and find out all they could about them. MI5 did subsequently provide details of the Honda in which Khan and Tanweer had travelled up the MI, the addresses where they had been dropped off, and general background to the Crevice investigation – although West Yorkshire police says it never had detailed knowledge. 

 

After the 7/7 bombings, lessons were learned. Regional counter-terrorist units, already in the pipeline, were accelerated and set up in West Yorkshire and elsewhere. MI5 and special branch officers worked side by side; there were no more locked doors. That was all in the past. West Yorkshire police describes this as "a stronger working relationship", and in her report Lady Justice Hallett notes that intelligence liaison between MI5 and the police has changed "beyond recognition". 

 

The successful disruption of the subsequent plot to blow up transatlantic airliners with liquid bombs is testimony to how intelligence-sharing has now dramatically improved. Further convincing evidence is the fact that there has been no successful terrorist attack resulting in civilian deaths in Britain since 7/7. MI5 and its partner agencies have so far succeeded in keeping us safe by disrupting a series of plots, only some of which we know about. 

 

Whether the intelligence services will be able to protect us so successfully in the aftermath of the killing of Osama Bin Laden remains to be seen. The manner of his violent death may make him a more powerful inspirational figure in death than in life. It's not surprising that MI5's current assessment of the threat level is "severe".