John Grieve, the long-time head of the Metropolitan Police’s Anti-Terrorist Squad, observed shortly after the conviction of the IRA men who bombed South Quay in 1996: ‘It’s great — but every time we have one of these long trials, we give the men of violence a free masterclass on how we go about protecting the public and how they can try to get around us next time.’
On the day after the triumphant conclusion to the ‘Crevice’ trial, I asked Peter Clarke — Grieve’s lineal successor — about this in his 15th-floor office at New Scotland Yard. Clarke takes the point. But the pluses of taking this case through the courts still massively outweigh the minuses.
‘The system was able to deal with a big and highly complex international conspiracy, in a trial that took many months, with 17 lawyers, and with robust challenges to the evidence — as well as jury sickness,’ notes Clarke. ‘Yes, the terrorists now know for sure that we are listening in on them and they may adjust their tradecraft accordingly — but they can also see and feel the extent of our reach.’
One of the biggest gains for Clarke is that Crevice has proved that there is a large organised transnational terrorist conspiracy, with carefully managed counter-surveillance techniques. Few can claim now — as some Muslim leaders did after the partly abortive ricin trial in 2005 — that threats have been exaggerated by the authorities to justify measures such as control orders.
Clarke had flagged up his thinking on these issues in the first Colin Cramphorn Memorial lecture, delivered the previous week at Policy Exchange think-tank. The bulk of the very extensive media coverage focused on Clarke’s strong language about leaks of anti-terrorist investigations. But what Clarke had to say about the flow of useful information emanating from Britain’s Muslim population was far more revealing about the enduring vulnerabilities of the security system.
Clarke stated that ‘almost all of our prosecutions have their origins in intelligence that came from overseas, the intelligence agencies, or from technical means. Few have yet originated from what is sometimes called “community intelligence”. This is something we are working hard to change.’ But how this flow is improved is critical: Clarke hinted in his lecture that it would not be done through a ‘trade’ that involves greater presharing of intelligence before raids, as demanded by bodies such as the Muslim Safety Forum.
According to one authoritative figure in the policing world, Clarke was being generous in his assessment of community intelligence: as of mid-2006, there was virtually nothing from such sources. By ‘community intelligence’, Clarke meant those low-level titbits from friends and neighbours — of aberrational behaviour that could be early signs of violent radicalisation.
The Crevice trial proved Clarke’s point abundantly, with so much of the evidence being garnered by eavesdropping. The lack of telling community intelligence is matched by the continuing difficulty in recruiting CHISs — the spook world’s current acronym for Covert Human Intelligence Sources, or undercover agents, within jihadi organisations.
It is a weakness that also dogs MI5. The security service has borne the brunt of the criticism in recent days for failing to spot that the 7/7 bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan — who appeared on the periphery of the Crevice plot — was already becoming a major ‘player’ in his own right. He was therefore far removed from being a bolt from the blue, or a ‘clean skin’, as the initial briefings suggested.
But if any inquiry now looks at the surveillance logs of the security forces, it may find that the picture is much cloudier than many accounts have so far suggested. Certainly Colin Cramphorn, the much-loved chief constable of West Yorkhire who died of cancer last November, told me that MI5 had known something of Khan’s links to the Crevice plotters — but had not informed him or his officers in time. Other senior police sources are not so sure. They note that until recently West Yorkshire Police had one of the weakest records in counter-terrorism provision and pitifully small penetration of the world of Islamist radicals in their patch — despite Cramphorn’s best efforts to raise their game.
It is perfectly possible therefore, says one authoritative veteran of the Yard, that some West Yorkshire officers were informed by MI5 or knew something about Khan, but that they too did not adequately exploit the intelligence. ‘I would not bet my police pension that everyone in West Yorkshire was entirely unaware of what happened — or that Colin would necessarily have known,’ notes this source. Anyhow, pre-7/7, there was a residual turf-consciousness between the agencies that meant that the exchange of information both ways was not what it has since become.
That said, the failure to spot Khan’s potential early enough goes far wider than the sins of omission of a particular twentysomething desk officer in MI5’s ‘G’ branch, who failed to grade his threat highly enough, or the inadequacies in supervision of that person’s line managers. Yes, the security service and police lacked resources and had to make snap judgments on what was and wasn’t urgent — and sometimes got it wrong. But why did they lack resources? Who supplies them with those resources?
John le Carré once claimed that intelligence services — the police can now be included in this category — are the most accurate reflections of the nations which they serve. MI5 and the police lacked the resources because the challenge of radical Islamist terrorist networks in Britain remained far too low a priority for government, opposition and Whitehall mandarins, even after 9/11. In the 1990s and for a long time thereafter, few careers were made by taking on Abu Hamza or any of the hate preachers — especially after the Macpherson report. Islamist London was part of the capital’s rich diversity.
Again, Peter Clarke’s Policy Exchange lecture is most revealing. ‘Many people believed that the [Islamist] extremists and dissidents were, if anything, pursuing agendas against foreign governments, and posed little or no threat to the UK....The spectre of a homegrown terrorist threat was not with us.’ Why did the powers that be delude themselves into thinking that we might be able to exempt ourselves from this threat — a kind of geopolitical ‘nimbyism’?
The Crevice trial underscores the point that the burden of meeting the challenge of radical Islamism cannot be handled exclusively by the security forces. As in previous cases, several of the convicted were apparently ‘well integrated’ by the standards of government policy. They were enrolled in Britain’s bloated higher education sector. What part did their university experiences play in radicalising them? Are all vice-chancellors doing enough to implement the government’s guidelines on fighting extremism on campus — of which Ruth Kelly reminded them recently? Or do many of them still take the view that they should not become an ‘arm of the state’?
And are the social services willing enough to provide early warnings of radicalisation? Colin Cramphorn knew all about this last point from hard experience. As he was fond of saying, if you delve long and hard, there is no such thing as a ‘clean skin’. The Crevice verdicts represent a bleak reminder that few in this country looked deep enough, quickly enough.
Dean Godson is research director of Policy Exchange.