Art of Betrayal (60 page)

At times the pace of a counter-terrorist investigation is not far off that portrayed in
Spooks
. Intelligence gathering can involve some of the same techniques as were used in the old Cold War world – human motivations are much the same when it comes to recruiting agents who know the secret intentions of an enemy. But the differences are also stark. Intelligence is much more time-sensitive. Discerning the Soviet order of battle could be pieced together slowly. Intelligence about a planned terrorist attack or the location of a terrorist leader requires immediate action. The shelf life of good intelligence in counter-terrorism may be days rather than years. The shelf life of an agent in the badlands of Pakistan, whom it might have taken a long time to recruit, may be much shorter as well.

MI5 officers in early 2004 watched grainy surveillance of a terrorist cell inspecting fertiliser for a bomb in a storage facility and listened to the men in their bugged cars and flats talk of the nightclubs and shopping centres they were planning to attack. One night in March, they recorded the driver of a Vauxhall Corsa picking up the ringleader of the plotters and another man in Crawley and driving them around before taking them back. The driver was identified in the log as ‘UM' – unidentified male.
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It was clear that ‘home-grown terrorism' had arrived on British shores. These were second-generation Britons of Pakistani descent. It was a trend that had not been appreciated in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In the 1990s, the radicals who had found a home in Britain were seen as plotting against their homelands of Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Arab intelligence services would privately describe the UK as a ‘terrorist sanctuary' to CIA officers, but despite those complaints a blind eye was turned by the British as
long as individuals were not breaking any law or plotting against Britain. The 2004 investigation, codenamed ‘Crevice' by the police, revealed for the first time that Britons would attack Britain, in this case with support from an Al Qaeda which had been ejected from Afghanistan but had been able to regroup in the wilds of the tribal areas of Pakistan. ‘Crevice was the moment when the lights went on and you could see the state of the kitchen,' explained one intelligence official soon afterwards.
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There was worse to come. Home-grown radicalisation was now on the radar, but still no one expected British suicide-bombers to strike.

The first that staff at MI5 knew of what was happening on 7 July 2005 came as they watched their TV screens. Soon the images of a blown-apart bus opened like a tin can would be seared on their minds. The UK's threat level had been lowered a few days earlier. No one had seen the four young men with their rucksacks coming. ‘We did not know it was a suicide bombing until the forensics began to come through,' recalled Eliza Manningham-Buller. ‘So at the beginning we were trying to support the police in possibly finding the team who had done it, who for all we knew at that stage were still alive and capable of mounting another attack.'
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The aftermath was chaos. At one point closed-circuit TV from Luton, where the bombers had passed through, made it seem as if there was another person carrying a rucksack. Should they tell the public? Someone from MI5 thought they saw the same person from the CCTV around Westminster and Buckingham Palace. Everywhere was locked down. ‘It wasn't until the evening when I got home quite late that the emotional impact of that day hit me,' recollected Manningham-Buller later.
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Eliza Manningham-Buller addressed her staff the next day inside MI5 headquarters at Thames House in Millbank. She said it had been a day they had always feared would happen but hoped would not. Many had been up all night and she said she was proud of them. They needed to continue to do what they had been trained to do. Brace yourselves, she also warned; by the end of the week there would be speculation about whether we were to blame for allowing the attack to take place. Don't read the papers, get on with your job. The accusations would indeed come. The night of her speech, the credit card of Mohammed Siddique Khan was found close to where the
bomb at Edgware Road tube station had detonated. MI5 investigators soon realised that they had come across him before. He was the unidentified male who had been driving the Vauxhall Corsa in March 2004. He had come under MI5 surveillance on multiple occasions as part of the Crevice investigation but had never been prioritised sufficiently to be followed up. There had been a number of leads dating back to 2001, including that Khan had attended training camps in the UK and Pakistan, but the different strands had never been woven together to understand that all the pieces of intelligence related to the same man. The explanation for not placing him higher up the list of targets was a lack of resources, especially as a new set of leads had arrived at Thames House in 2004 (including those generated by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's waterboarding). ‘We're not the Stasi, we can't cover everyone,' explained one official defensively.
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Two weeks to the day after 7/7, there was another attack. This time it failed. ‘For me, it was worse,' recalled Manningham-Buller, who was having a regular lunch with her directors when news came through. ‘Although nobody died, I had that feeling that if this is going to happen every fortnight, how are we going to be able to cope with this?'
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The fear of an endless army of suicide bombers coming over the horizon filled everyone with apprehension. Authorities were unsure that they would be able to cope as they circled the date two weeks ahead and wondered if something would happen then. For the coming months and years, it felt like ‘trench warfare'. ‘It's like the old game of Space Invaders,' explained one person involved in the day-to-day work of counter-terrorism. ‘When you clear one screen of potential attackers, another simply appears to take its place.'
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The days of playing investigations long, watching them patiently in order to build up enough evidence, were disappearing. That was too resource intensive. Disrupt and move on to the next network was the only game-plan available. ‘We had more than we could cope with and had to make some uncomfortable decisions on prioritisation,' explained Manningham-Buller. Government money soon came flooding in and MI5 more than doubled in size and expanded into the regions. A transformation from the old counter-espionage agency of Arthur Martin to a modern counter-terrorist organisation which had begun with the tackling of the IRA in the 1990s was now under way.

MI5 launched a blitz, recruiting new human sources on an ‘industrial scale', working its way through lists of people who could be approached. ‘We knew that we needed many more human sources and much greater coverage,' said Manningham-Buller. These agents remain the lifeblood of intelligence work. For all the talk of ‘community intelligence', insiders say that there is no substitute for agents within the organisations themselves. ‘Like the IRA you don't get it [the intelligence] from housewives. To get to terrorist planners you need people to get to people in the middle. The sort of detailed information to stop an attack isn't swilling around the mosque.'

After 7/7, Manningham-Buller approached the Chief of MI6 to ask him to lend her his best agent runners because running agents has traditionally been more of a domain of expertise for MI6 than MI5. At one point, the largest deployment of operational MI6 officers was not to any country overseas but within the UK. They would work alongside MI5 officers to try and recruit agents who could be sent into Pakistan's tribal areas and elsewhere to infiltrate Al Qaeda and its allies. Getting into the heart of networks takes time. The ambition, just as the KGB had for Philby, is to find someone who can survive inside the enemy's ranks, prosper and rise. The higher they rise, the more complex their moral choices may become. When does revealing a terrorist plan to your handler endanger your own life? When does going along with a terrorist plan involve innocent people dying? Agent motivation is infinitely variable. For some it is the desire to prevent violence in their community, for others it will be a grudge against someone they know. The approach to an agent is always the hardest moment. Typically an officer has between half a minute and a minute in which to keep someone interested or lose them for ever. A bit like an approach at a nightclub for a different type of assignation, a good opening line and the right manner can go a long way. When approaching someone to be an agent, the first ten seconds are typically lost anyway as the subject is in shock at the officer revealing their hand.

Amid the danger and excitement also lies the mundane. MI5 agents and their handlers can spend up to half a day conducting complex counter-surveillance routines to make sure they are not followed when they are preparing to meet. The initial thrill of feeling as if you are in your own spy film is quickly replaced by the boredom of having
to jump on and off yet another bus but with the added edge that getting it wrong could cost someone their life. The process could end up with the agent climbling into a covert vehicle. These are hardly the height of luxury – some have no windows in the back and a small light illuminates what looks like carpet peeling off the walls. There are no seatbelts and no air conditioning or heating. In an emergency, a meeting can take place in a vehicle but otherwise the agent may be driven, by a circuitous route, to a lock-up somewhere where a half-dead yucca plant sits in one corner and his case officer waits with a cup of tea. The first question is always the same – ‘How long have you got?' If the answer is only fifteen minutes then they will cut to the chase. If there is longer then there will be time to talk about the agent's welfare and whether they have any security concerns or other needs. The idea is to make them feel confident. ‘The main aim is not to extract intelligence. If that is your top priority and all you do then it goes wrong,' explains one former agent handler. The art lies in building a relationship and establishing empathy and sympathy while always remaining in control.
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A room full of MI5 agent handlers would look like a cross-section of British society from old men to young women, black and white, skinheads and men in suits, one for each occasion and for each type of agent.

In a modern warehouse somewhere in central London, a young Muslim man sits, observed by his MI5 handler. A small heater keeps the room warm and a cup of tea sits untouched on a coffee table. A driver stands by the vehicle just outside, ready to organise a fast getaway in case of any sign of trouble. ‘I don't see myself as a spy in that sense anyway because I am just fulfilling my duty and my right as a Muslim citizen – you know keeping my eyes out,' the Muslim agent working for MI5 explains.
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The bearded man could still recall his first nerve-racking meeting with MI5, the fear that he might be a suspect, the relief quickly followed by a new anxiety when he was asked to inform. ‘I'm not going to go and spy on Mohammed buying halal sausages in the local store because that's not what I do. I would never do that. But if I know there is a bunch of Muslims who intend to do something and I hear about that or find out about that in whatever way then, yes, I was more than willing to see them again and talk about that and if they [MI5] ask me, to query more about these individuals. I felt that that's OK because these lads are not just
the normal Mohammed or Abdullah praying in the mosque … I don't want anyone to blow up a bomb next to me or blow my family up … so I don't feel that this is against the Muslims in that sense. It is against the criminals.'
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The agent meets maybe three or four times a month with an MI5 officer, sometimes for half an hour, sometimes for two or three hours with a twenty-four-hour number for emergencies. ‘I never thought I would have personal contact with MI5 but it's not like the TV. It's not like the movies, yeah, so I don't feel like I'm in some kind of
Bourne Ultimatum
… Some of them look a bit dodgy, some of them are ugly, some of them are nicer. You know, that's how it goes you know. Men and women, big and fat. You know. Thin, chubby. Black and white.'

The agent's work includes trying to stay close to people, although he maintained he was never pushed to do anything by MI5. ‘The pressure is not really from them. The pressure is when you are out there on your own … It's not comfortable sitting there with a terrorist or a criminal or whatever it is. You don't want to associate with these kind of people. So sometimes when you do sit there, yeah, it's a little bit of adrenalin kick there … I don't really see them as practising Muslims. I see them like any other criminal, any other gangster out there who is just using the name Islamic or Muslim … if someone's going to blow up a place and I find out about it, I'm going to make sure someone is going to stop it because that's harmful to Islam. Because that's what now people are going to think, “Ah Muslim, the terrorist, Muslims they're barbaric, Muslims they're this, Muslims are that,” and that is not the true picture of Islam and if I can stop that before it happens then I am happy … there are limits to what I am willing to do. If I was asked, and I mean that, if I was asked to do something specific against specific Muslims and they're not really any threat to society or threat to anyone then I would never do anything like that because that's not right, because that's not straight down like that. I would never do it.'
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The more agents it recruited and the harder it looked, the more threats MI5 found. In 2003, it was watching thirty networks linked to terrorism; by 2004 it was fifty. By November 2006 it had suddenly climbed to 200 groups with 1,600 individuals. Thirty of these groups were actively planning attacks.
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There was no telephone directory of Al Qaeda officials outlining its structure of the type Penkovsky had
supplied decades earlier. The enemy was fluid and constantly evolving. It felt like chasing a will-o'-the-wisp.