7/7 an intelligence failure?
Updated on 01 May 2006
The man behind 7/7 had appeared on MI5's radar several times. So were the bombings the result of an intelligence failure?
It's what everyone has had to keep quiet about, connections between those caught and those who got away, between the convicted terrorists in the fertiliser case and those who the UK's security services missed the July 7 bombers.
A blurred photograph of Shazad Tanweer and Mohammed Siddeque Khan had never before been seen outside the confines of the security services, the images are somewhat sharper on the original.
It was taken during MI5's surveillance of the fertiliser bomb suspects in February 2004. A year and a half later, these two blew themselves up on the underground.
What's emerged is just how agonisingly close MI5 got to Khan and Tanweer without knowing it, while listening watching and following those they had identified and who've been convicted today.
Two reports have failed to dispel suspicions that the intelligence services were in some way to blame for failing to prevent their suicide mission.
Last year members of the Intelligence and Security Committee were muted in their criticism of MI5.
But they were never shown and never asked for the transcripts of the bombers conversations recorded during MI5's surveillance of the Crevice suspects.
Instead, they accepted the assessment from the head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham Buller that Khan and Tanweer were simply focused on fraud or training and insurgency operations in Pakistan.
Tonight, the committee announced a review of its original report. Channel Four News has obtained the transcripts which the committee never examined.
MI5 observed four occasions in early 2004 when Khan and Tanweer travelled down from West Yorkshire to meet Omar Kyham and others. One was on 21 February at Kyham's flat in Slough.
Their conversation centred around going to Jihadi training camps in Pakistan. Khyam told them that going to fight was a one way ticket. Khan asked for a delay because his wife was due to have a baby.
Terror plotters' conversation
Fertiliser bomb plot guilty
He said: "I was looking maybe mid-June coz the child is due on 25th May. Would be like two months after that so that's she physically OK and the child is alright."
Omar Khayam: "No problem"
Shazad Tanweer: "Any extra risks getting into Pakistan?"
Khayam: "We had five Bengalis last year, all the way across India into Pakistan. We bribed the guy, you know. When you go to check in so it was all set up.
Tanweer: "How much money is needed?"
Khayam: "Well... You will leave with about £20k..."
Mohammed Siddique Khan: "With regards to the babe, I'm debating whether or not to say goodbye and so forth."
Khayam: "You know what my advice is, right, when the time comes for me to leave, at the end of the day, by telling them of course- you love them bruv this much, that we stay away from them cause I know it's better for me and it's better for them and that's my advice."
Their conversation then turned to Pakistan, and how they would sign up for college courses in electronics and computers there and only then would they be approached by their group leader.
Omar Khayam: "The only thing I will advise you, yeah is total obedience to whoever your Emir is, whether he is Sunni, Arab Chechen, Saudi, British, total obedience. I'll tell you, up there you can get your head cut off."
MSK: "How long to the training camp..
Khayam: "You'll be going to the tribal areas, stay with families, you'll be with Arab brothers, Chechen brothers, you'll be told our operation later.."
MI5 video surveillance picked up Khan a month later arriving at Khyam's flat in Slough in a hired car. The talk centred around how to raise money through borrowing from banks, selling cars and various credit card scams. At one point Khan is asked what he does for a living:
Khan: "I counsel children. It becomes a very superficial thing, something from within, even from ourselves.
"I placed a lot of emphasis on scholars that we have today. They are not doing their jobs. If they were, we would not be in this situation. We sit on our backsides moaning and munching for the rest of our lives....."
"We wouldn't be like this, there would a real buzz in the air. Much more acceptable. We would not be running and clucking from our families, from our communities from this and the issues we face."
The plan
On the 2nd February this photo of him and Tanweer was taken at Toddington Services on the M1 just outside London.
MI5 had followed them and Khyam up the motorway.
But at Toddington, they split, the bombers to be went back to West Yorkshire in Khan's wife's car, with the security services on their tail, while the main surveillance operation on Kyham and others returned to Slough.
It was to be one of two occasions that after a trip down south Khan was followed back and yet up to the July attacks 17 months later, the voices on the recordings were never, in MI5's words, fully matched to faces, nor to the photograph, nor to names and they never were until after 7/7.
The currency of the MI5 is intelligence. But intelligence is not the same as knowledge and the difference has never been more clearly exposed than the attacks on 7th July.
A security source has told Channel Four News that even with the resources the intelligence services now have, even if the threat to the UK was the same now as back in July 2005, even with advancements in technology MI5 would be in the same position in trying to identify MSK any earlier.
The intelligence services ambiguous defence at the time was that it was gaps not failures which allowed the 7/7 bomb plot to go undetected. In context they say.
The surveillance part of Operation Crevice, was the largest ever counter terrorism operation in the UK at the time.
Crevice by numbers
- In three months between 60 and 70 people came up on MI5's radar.
- There were 97 phone taps
- 3,500 phone numbers registered
- 12 covert searches
- 34,000 man hours of surveillance
The numbers came down to the seven suspects with their imminent threat and that left 55 friends, associates, and fellow jihadists not directly implicated.
Priorities were set. The remaining 55 which included the two London bombers was reduced to 15 classified as having an awareness of terrorism, with the potential to carry out mass casualty attacks.
Khan and Tanweer were not among them and slipped away into the background and never to reappear on MI5's radar again. If MI5 had established the identities in this image, could 7/7 have been avoided.
A much clearer image than this one was shown to some terrorist detainees held in other countries a couple of months after it was taken in 2004.
No one at that time identified Mohammed Siddique Khan. But MI5 didn't show the photo to this man.
Junaid Babar, an al-Qaida fixer, was arrested in the US at the request of MI5 for being heavily involved with the fertiliser bomb conspirators both in the UK and Pakistan. So if he was linked to them, he could possibly have identified Khan.
Why he wasn't shown the photograph has never been established. It was only much later the security services would discover that Babar had even visited Khan at his home in Beeston.
Interest in Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shazad Tawneer didn't completely dry up. There were two further attempts to gather information. But the voices and the photos came very low down on the priority list of risks to public safety.
'We cannot see how we could have made a different decision'MI5's new director general
Surveillance restarts
Within months of the Crevice arrests, another heavily resourced surveillance operation began.
By then Khan and Tanweer were well down the path of radicalisation, while evidence of their links to British jihadi groups were gathering dust on the shelves.
Today MI5's new director General Jonathon Evans published his agency long prepared response, countering allegations with what it terms the reality of what it knew and didn't know, and the conclusion is neither Khan nor Tanweer were fully identified until after 7/7.
He said: "We have gone back over everything since Crevice. We have looked at if we should have made different decisions based on intelligence and resources for investigation. We cannot see how we could have made a different decision."
