65. Terror Strikes London: The Forgotten Attack (Ep 4)

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Breaking news we're getting from the PA Newswire that there's been reports of an explosion outside Liverpool Street Station.

Well, there may be some time.

We need Andy and Listen to Walker to Brussels to Pink Cross.

Most Londoners actually are not going to be afraid by this.

I think they're going to continue their daily business.

You consider the attack last week on British soil an attack on the civilized world.

And what we are confronting here is an evil ideology.

It is not a clash of civilizations.

All civilized people, Muslim or other, feel revulsion at it.

Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.

We were already feeling under the cosh and worried they got wave after wave to throw at us.

Can we cope?

Are we running out of troops?

Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm David McCloskey.

And I'm Gordon Carrera.

And that was the deputy head and later head of MI5, Jonathan Evans.

reflecting on what it was like in the aftermath of the July 7th bombings when London two weeks later on July 21st, almost gets hit again.

Now, we should clarify here for our American listeners: what does it mean to be under the cosh?

Under the kosh is under pressure.

Okay, this is the feeling in MI5 that someone has been beating them with a stick for two weeks.

And then all of a sudden, we have another,

I mean, nearly successful attack.

Close run thing.

Multiple attempted suicide bombings in London on July 21st.

The bombs have kind of fizzled, not gone off.

And the last time we left the story, there is essentially a manhunt on now to try to capture the potential bombers.

Yeah, that's right.

It's come out the blue.

The warriors, you've got these people who are willing to kill and to die.

They could have more bombs ready to go.

So it is a manhunt.

Now, it's interesting, at this point in the manhunt, one of the things they do is use communications data to track them down.

Now, if you remember back to our Snowden episodes, Happy days, when one of the things Snowden reveals is that the US had a massive database of all the phone calls made in the US.

This kind of metadata, not the content of the calls, but the collections.

Well the UK actually had something very similar but very very secret at the time.

And it was interesting because I remember talking to people and GCHQ,

if they'd been asked, could have said, no, we don't collect phone records in bulk like Snowden says, you know, the Americans do.

GCHQ being

the UK's NSA.

Yeah.

That's right.

But the reason they didn't really want to kind of go out saying that was because they knew MI5 did.

So MI5 was collecting bulk phone records from the phone companies in order to be able to do data analysis.

And this is the first time.

after 21.7 when they really use this kind of tool to do contact chaining, where you're looking at what phones are connected to what other phones.

Because they realized that the attackers had abandoned their phones.

They'd used good operational security.

But by looking at the call records in bulk, they could try and work out which phone calls have been connecting to other phone calls, try and track down kind of family and associates of the men.

So they're doing this kind of contact checking through the numbers that they've got for these men through some of the phones that maybe have been abandoned or where they've got IDs for some of the bombers where they can then find a phone and using data analysis to try and track them down.

So just to bring us into that moment though, so we essentially have bombs that haven't gone off.

And then once the suicide bombers realize it's been unsuccessful, they essentially

flee.

Now, so what is the connection?

How does MI5 work from that

to phone numbers?

Yeah.

So in some cases, they've got material from the bombs and from the devices and the rucksacks, which of course have not exploded, which they can recover and use.

They've also got CCTV.

To get to a name.

To get to a name.

And that's the crucial thing is they're going to get names and bits of IDs from effectively the bags.

So a bit similar similar to 7.7 in that sense.

And they've also got CCTV of the bombers, you know, in some cases.

So they've got some clues, and it's easier than 7.7 where it's been blown up and it's in a tunnel underground.

And I guess these guys having planned to die.

Yeah.

They brought their wallet with them.

Yeah, exactly.

There's pocket litter in bags.

Even though MI5 wouldn't have...

the sort of real-time ability to conduct like facial recognition analysis, they'll have the CCTV and photos that they can sort of start to use to get an ID.

Yeah.

Because these men have just kind of fled.

Weirdly, one of them actually flees.

I mean, this sounds bizarre, but the one who was at Shepherd's Bush Station flees down, I think, Wood Lane, which is where I was sitting, the BBC.

I must have gone maybe.

Ran right by Gordon.

Maybe, yeah, maybe 100 yards from me.

Maybe.

Wow.

While I was sitting at my desk.

And I guess at that point, not like there was police chasing him.

He just...

No, it's failed to go off, and he's just run.

So, you know, they've just escaped.

Now, they're going to then try and trace where those phones are and try and geolocate the phones.

I mean, we talked a bit about how you do that in the bin Laden story in Pakistan.

You see, they took their phones with them.

Yeah, in some cases.

And so, yeah.

And they're looking for the phones that they're associated with.

But in some cases, they've got their phones and they've been able to work out which phones they've got.

And so they're doing that thing, a bit like the bin Laden thing, where you've got people driving around trying to kind of geolocate the phones and seeing if they can work out where they are.

And so they're going to eventually catch one of them in Birmingham, another two in West London in a kind of dramatic raid where armed police surround a building with TV cameras waiting as they come out in surrender.

They see one other phone signal zipping through London really fast.

And they're like, well, you know, how's this person moving so fast?

And the reason they work out is that the target is on the Eurostar and they're heading to Paris.

You know, that's one 150 miles an hour, 150 miles to London.

You don't do that in the traffic in a car.

And that person is actually going to end up in Rome where they're going to be able to trace him.

And his name is Hussein Osman.

But by this point, the hunt for Hussein Osman has already, by the time they catch him in Rome, has already ended in, I think, one of the most terrible tragedies of this period.

So going back to your kind of question about how they trace them.

So on that night, the first 24 hours after the attack, about 2.15 a.m., so I guess that's 14 hours after the first attempt to carry out the bombings, the police are going to find a gym membership card for Hussein Osman in one of the bombers' abandoned bags.

Now they then trace that to a block of flats not far from Stockwell, which is actually fairly close to where we're sitting right now in South London.

And that's also a station where one of the bombers was thought to have got on the tube.

And they've got a picture of him now and they codename him Nettletip.

So this is the guy they're looking for.

Nettletip.

Nettletip, which is, you know, again, feels like a randomly generated codename rather than something.

So they've got a block of flats, they've got from the gym the address linked to it, and and it's called Scotia Road Tulse Hill.

Two police surveillance teams who've got members of the military attached, because I think it's all hands to the deck, arrive at this address early hours of July 22nd.

So again, very early morning after the bombing.

First problem is it's a communal block with nine flats.

They've got an observation van parked outside, which is trying to catch a video of people who are going in and out.

Now, meanwhile, a firearms team from CO19, which is the firearms team of of the Metropolitan Police, had only been deployed later that morning and they're racing to get there to this block of flats, but they're not there yet.

Now, a surveillance officer, apparently from the SAS, from the Special Forces, is in the van, but he is urinating into a bottle.

Which is what you do if you're a surveillance officer.

Sure, yeah, you can't leave.

You can't leave.

But he's doing that at 9.30 a.m.

when a man in a denim jacket comes out.

So he can't video him, but he gives a quick description and says, it could be worth someone having a second look at this man.

And they've got this picture of Nettletip for Saint Osmond and they're looking for him.

Now other surveillance follow the man as he gets onto a bus and they're trying to get a good look at him.

No one officially confirms it was the man in the picture.

One person, one surveillance officer says there's a resemblance between the picture they've been given and the man, a good likeness.

Others say they can't confirm it though.

Now then the man gets off.

the bus at Brixton tube station.

He makes a phone call as he does and then gets back on the bus.

Now, again, someone who's watching him says there's a likeness, and they also say he's kind of twitchy or nervous.

Now, could he be looking for surveillance?

But of course, the reason.

Not particularly hard evidence at that point, right?

And there's no, again, this is 2005, so it's not like there's an algorithm that they're using to sort of confirm it.

Confirm it.

You're often getting glimpses of him through surveillance.

And the general view seems to be he looks a bit like him.

And he's done this weird thing of getting on and off the bus at Brixton Tube station now some people kind of at the time think well is that suspicious but actually the reason is Brixton tube station has been shut so there's an absolutely plausible reason for it meanwhile there's lots of confusion at the control centre at Scotland Yard which is at room 1600 16th floor of Scotland Yard it's run by a woman called Cressida Dick who's in charge that morning she later becomes the commissioner of the met so the head of the whole metropolitan police there's about 20 or 30 people in the room there's screens on the wall there's officers with headphones in touch with the surveillance officers and they're reporting what they're seeing through kind of tiny covert microphones they've got hidden in their clothing called cougar radios.

But there's quite a lot of confusion.

There's a lot of different messages, a lot of different things going on.

Somehow, some people seem to become more certain that the person that they're following is Nettletip, even though there's not been a positive identification.

Why are they becoming more certain?

That's what's not clear.

And there's definitely different levels of confidence within the team.

And meantime, the firearms team are now still racing to kind of catch up with what's going on but they're not there yet and they're just hearing that someone's being followed that he might be twitchy things like that now at the control room there's also an order to stop the suspect

and from crest the dick who's kind of in charge of the operation a decision that he mustn't be allowed to get on the tube but you know what does that actually mean yeah is that stopping him mustn't be allowed does that mean intercept him arrest him kill him the armed police are racing there thinking stop him at all costs.

So he gets off the bus at Stockwell Tube and he heads down to the northbound northern line platform and he's not carrying anything.

The surveillance officers follow him down to the train and they sit around him.

Now, that's one of those things, you know, the train just happens to be waiting at the platform for a signal to leave and it's going to wait there for longer than normal.

It's being held up.

Meantime, the armed police now arrive and they're going to vault the ticket barriers.

And they are racing down to the train.

The comms don't really work properly underground, back to headquarters.

The surveillance officers then are blocking the doors so they can't be shut as the armed officers arrive.

There are 17 other passengers on the carriage who are going to have very confusing accounts of what goes on, as you can understand, because it's going to all unfold in a matter of seconds.

Total chaos.

It's total chaos.

Where is he?

The armed officers shout.

Surveillance officers point to the man.

The man stands up.

A surveillance officer pushes him back into his seat and restrains him.

And then an armed officer runs up to him, fires seven shots point-blank into his head.

And it's a few minutes past 10 a.m.

Wow.

Before we even talk about who this guy actually is, I mean, the seven shots into the head at point-blank range feels...

I mean, is that procedure?

I mean, it's interesting.

There is a procedure called Kratos,

and the Metropolitan Police, and it's their firearms officers, have learned this from talking to Sri Lanka and Israel, which are two countries which have dealt specifically with suicide bombers.

So the fear is, you know, you've got someone who might detonate.

So if you think that's the case and they could have their finger on the trigger or be able to reach for a trigger to a bomb, you basically have to shut their nervous system down.

Exactly.

So you go for the brainstem.

So they haven't got time to actually press a button or do anything.

And people have been trained and there is a procedure, but it's not actually clear that Kratos has been authorized.

No one has given the decision, this is Kratos.

And there is actually inside the Met a procedure to authorize that.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

So you get a picture of just chaos, confusion, miscommunication, poor procedure.

I mean, it is disastrous.

And of course, when the news first breaks that morning, the assumption is this is one of the bombers.

And I mean, I watched there's a very good BBC TV documentary about this period, which was on a few months ago.

And I was taken a bit aback by watching it because at this point in the story, they Pelé a clip of me, a younger version of me on the on the lunchtime news, I think.

22-year-old Gordon Carrera, that a shaker grave.

And the words I say are that the police are insisting that the shooting was directly linked to the attempted bombing the day before.

Now, on one level, it's true because I am reporting, and it's a good lesson for journalists, which is always report your sources.

Because, you know, I'm not saying it was directly linked.

I'm saying the police are insisting it was directly linked, which is what they were saying that morning.

So I'm reporting accurately what I'm told.

And, you know, the police at that point are saying this was linked.

And, of course, in the broadest sense, it is linked because, you know, it's possible.

Sure, it's you.

But people think it's linked.

But there's going to be some, I would describe them as dodgy briefings at that point.

For instance, the claim that the man had been seen jumping the barriers, but that was actually the police who were vaulting the barriers.

He picks up a copy of a free newspaper, taps his car to get in, and walks down perfectly calmly.

And yet the briefings are going to be like someone was seen running and jumping.

Also, that there was an Asian man with a rucksack.

Actually, that's one of the surveillance officers.

So there's a lot of information.

Are sourcing that from just random passerby who then say, oh, someone jumped the barriers.

And so that gets brought into the briefing as the suspect.

Yeah, so in some cases, this is eyewitness accounts, which are wrongly confusing surveillance officers or armed officers with the man.

I mean, there is one particularly bad moment, though, where there's a previously scheduled news conference that they're doing that afternoon to show CCTV from the bombing the previous day.

And they go ahead with it, and the Met Police Commissioner says I understand the man was challenged and refused to obey.

Now that is not true.

Which is not true.

Which is not true.

So I mean again he's you know saying what he thought was true but that is absolutely not true.

So I mean it's pretty disastrous and of course it becomes really clear after they've shot him you're going to check the documents on him.

It's absolutely clear almost instantly actually after that 10 a.m.

shooting.

that the man they've shot dead isn't one of the bombers.

It's only the next morning it's confirmed he is an innocent Brazilian electrician called John Charles de Menezes.

It is still, I think, one of the most shocking things that happened.

Because it is basically an execution of an innocent man.

I just think you put yourself back into that moment and you think this guy's just getting on a bus.

He's just getting on the bus.

He's getting on the bus.

He's getting on the tube.

Wow.

Trying to go to work.

And suddenly police, you know, shouting, it's him, pointing to him.

And then someone comes.

He doesn't even resist.

He doesn't even resist.

He just kind of gets up because someone's saying, it's him.

And the next thing you know, someone comes and fires seven shots into your house.

I mean, it's just like, wow.

It's totally shocking.

I mean, I guess, Gordon, I mean, one very obvious tragedy and aftermath of this is the shooting of the Brazilian electrician, John Charles de Menezes, by the police.

I mean, I'd imagine there's a whole set of inquiries

for that.

I mean, where did that end?

Yeah.

And I mean, there was independent police complaints commission inquiries into it.

You know, there was quite a lot of controversy about it and about some of the evidence and whether the evidence had been collected properly at the time, and eventually a kind of set of inquests and compensation.

So it is going to be something which kind of really haunts, particularly the Metropolitan Police, for years, the mistakes that have been made that day and in that operation.

Yeah, let's take a break.

And when we come back, we'll see who the actual bombers were and their link to the 7-7 attacks.

See you after the break.

Well, welcome back.

We are now, I guess, Gordon, finally going to figure out who in the world these bombers actually were who attempted to conduct multiple suicide bombings two weeks after 7-7 on July 21st, 2005.

That's right.

And the key figure in 21-7, as it's known, is a guy called Mukhtar Saeed Ibrahim.

Interestingly enough, he's not from the Pakistani community, he's actually an Eritrean immigrant who'd moved to the United Kingdom when he he was 12.

And he'd recruited the others.

So he is the ringleader.

He's the Mohammed Sadiq Khan of this cell.

And generally, they'd come from around Finsbury Park Mosque in London, which was known at this point, it's not anymore, but it was known at that point to be a kind of hub for radical jihadist activity way back from the 90s.

Most of the others in his cell are going to be linked to Africa.

Mukchar had some run-ins with the police, found religion, was a kind of regular at the mosque.

Interestingly enough, he, a bit like Mohammed Sadiq Khan, maybe not quite to the same extent, is going to have come to the attention of the authorities multiple times.

Lower-level stuff, outward-bound trips in the UK, photographed, you know, under surveillance as part of a kind of wider surveillance at Finsbury Park Mosque.

Later in the year, he's also going to get involved in a violent confrontation with a police officer.

But the crucial bit here is Muktar also went to Pakistan.

And he's the only one of the group involved in this plot to go to Pakistan.

And the others are then recruited by him.

And crucially here, Muktar is also linked to to Rashid Ralph.

And Rashid Ralph is the sort of al-Qaeda facilitator, middleman, the connector, who is fled the UK because he stabbed his uncle

and is in Pakistan serving almost as a talent spotter for Britons who are coming on this journey over to Pakistan.

And he's sort of, I guess, calling through this community to figure out who could be useful to Al-Qaeda.

Exactly.

And, you know, we looked last time at him having done that for Mohammed Siddiq Khan and Shahzad Tamwir from 7-7.

And actually, Muktar from 21-7 looks like he's out there at roughly the same time, late 2004, and again, is going to be taken around the tribal areas by Rashid Ralph.

Muktar actually heads out December 2004 with some other wannabes.

He claims they were stopped by MI5 at the airport and they missed their initial flight after being questioned, which shows, again, he's kind of, you know, attracting attention, actually more on the way out than Mohammed Sadiq Khan was.

And he says, oh, I'm unemployed.

And then he's carrying £2,000 in cash, brand new video camera.

And he claims, well, I'm going to a wedding.

And he's got a full cover story.

He's got a fake ring for the wedding.

And he says, the cash is for the wedding.

So eventually he's allowed to go.

Would he potentially have been flagged because he's actually not Pakistani?

Like, I don't know if those connections would have been made inside Special Branch, but that would be an obvious reason to sort of say

wedding?

Yeah, who's wedding?

Yeah.

Did Mukhtar Sayyid Ibrahim, did he encounter MSK and Tenwir, the 7-7 plotters, when he was there?

So Ralph is the connecting person, and they're out there definitely at the same time at the very end of 2004, but there's no evidence about them meeting.

And Ralph later will say he received information that a new group of three Britons had arrived in the tribal areas.

Mukhtar is one of them.

And he again takes them out to be trained in explosives.

Now, I mean, this is crazy.

During the training, two others with Mukhtar are killed.

They are blown up.

when mixing the chemicals.

So Mukhtar is kind of a bit away from them.

And so he's nearby and he doesn't die.

But he continues with his training.

And then he heads to Britain.

But he rushes it a bit because his visa is going to expire.

Now, here, I think, is the really interesting difference.

Unlike Mohammed Sadiq Khan, Ralph loses contact with Mukhtar.

So, you know, remember Mohammed Sadiq Khan, we learned last time, 7-7 plotter, he's having phone calls with Rashid Ralph.

But with Mukhtar for 21-7, there's no...

contact.

They lose touch.

And this could have been the crucial factor.

Because remember, the 21-7 bombs don't go off properly.

And Ralph has been giving the 7-7 plotters advice on how to make the bombs and get them to work properly.

And he's not able to do that with the 21-7 plotters.

So that could be the reason why those bombs don't go off when 7-7 did.

The Ji-hide doesn't always attract the best and brightest, does it?

And I think this guy's a good example of it.

What would explain the lack of contact, though?

It was just Mukhtar is just incompetent.

Maybe he's nervous.

maybe he's nervous about it not entirely clear so yeah i guess that takes us close to the end as we kind of look back on this story i mean rashid raf he's still out there he's still out there yeah and i mean rashid raf is a really interesting figure he's not done he actually wants to plan something even bigger than not just 7-7 but even bigger than 9-11.

i mean that's what's kind of crazy is he because he's going to come up you know, in the next year after 7-7 with the most ambitious plot al-Qaeda ever tries, which is known as the airline or the liquid bombs plot, which is going to be 2006.

And if you wonder why you can't take liquids on planes in lots of places, or you know, there's a limit to it,

Rashid Ralph.

Rashid Ralph is amazing because he's behind this plot, which is to use liquid explosives in drink bottles to blow up seven transatlantic flights mid-air with teams coming out of the UK.

So, again, a kind of it would have been like 9-11, but coming from the UK.

Wow.

One thing about him: so, in the sort of MI5 wash-up of 7-7 and 21-7,

was Ralph identified pretty quickly thereafter as the sort of key figure?

So he wasn't in a lot of the reporting at the time.

You know, I wonder inside at MI5 how long it took them to work out he's a key figure.

They definitely work it out by the following year, because 2006 is this airline bomb plot.

We might look at that as a separate story, because it's a really interesting story, and they know he is the key to that.

And he actually,

it's wild, because he actually

gets arrested by the Pakistanis as the plot is being wound up, but then later will escape, and then at one point will be droned and killed.

So that's the kind of fate of his escape from Pakistani custody.

Yeah, in a very odd situation, which is, you know, the frenemy.

Yeah, I think he goes to the bathroom and you know, he's allowed by the people holding him to go to the bathroom and then he just does a runner.

Because I would have thought that once, like, Mukhtar and his cell, the ones who failed to attack on 21-7,

I would think that Rashid Raof's name would have come up in those debriefings.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that there would have been a connection because I would think what MI5 is going to try to work out right after this is, well, who taught you how to do this and what actually happened in Pakistan and who did you meet with?

And they're sort of, you're trying to get all that information.

So it's surprising to me that it took a while.

Yeah.

So sort of maybe people aren't talking right now.

You know, and and it's going to take a while.

I think it possibly takes months to do that.

Going back to one of the questions I think you raised at the very start, and which has been one of the kind of questions hanging over this is, was there an intelligence failure?

Yeah.

Could it have been spotted?

I think that is one of the questions people ask.

I actually think Rashid Rafi is a good way of looking at that because I think if you'd wanted to stop it

and understand it and see both plots coming, the answer would have been to go upstream.

If you'd had penetration of al-Qaeda at that level in the camps,

you know, if you'd had a spy in the camps or you'd been in Rashid Rauf's comms or people around him to be able to see what he's doing and what they're planning, then you'd be able to kind of track back and see the plots kind of coming at you rather than trying to look for the traces and find the people who are here.

It's kind of interesting to me because, you know, that question of like, how could you have stopped it?

In this case, I think...

To me, part of the answer is if you'd been upstream, then you would have been able to see this coming and stop it.

And And I think later they get better at that.

But at this point, clearly, there isn't the coverage there.

That's a very hard intelligence target, right?

It's a small, radicalized group that has effective sanctuary in this period in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

So getting upstream, and frankly, from at least the glimpse we've got of Rashid Rauf in this story, he's practicing reasonable commsc, right?

Communication security.

So he's not on a phone, right?

There's an understanding at this point in Al-Qaeda that he doesn't have a mobile phone that he's using in the tribal areas that would really allow you to have targeted him from a SIGINT or otherwise perspective.

So pretty challenging.

It's a get upstream.

I guess the downstream part that I'm left wondering about is:

I guess if you've got some guys, I'm going back now to the second episode of this series where we talked about this crevice counterterrorism operation in the UK and the fact that you had, I mean, MSK and and Tanwir, two of the 7.7 bombers in a car

doing this kind of dodgy car meeting with

a guy who is plotting an attack in the UK.

Do you invest more in trying to run down who those guys are?

And in retrospect, it's easy to say that.

It's also a question of resourcing.

But I think what I'm left wondering is, is,

was there a reason just by virtue of them having that meeting to sort of elevate them in priority?

That is kind of maybe the missed moment.

Yeah, I mean, I think it is interesting because, of course, when this comes out that MI5 had known and they'd come across the radar, it becomes a big deal.

And MI5, you know, understandably are quite defensive about it and will say we had a lot of potential targets.

We could only put under surveillance those who we know are attack planning.

I think it goes back to that question about what about the people who are on the journey towards attack planning, which is where Mohammed Sadiq Khan was.

I think it's definitely true that at that point, even if they'd put them under surveillance after that meeting in the car,

they wouldn't have found attack planning because it only happens when they come back from Pakistan.

So you'd have needed occasional surveillance on all the people you'd seen in Crevis, dipping back into them.

and coming back into them the following year to see them that now they're plotting and of course to find it now you could say they should do that but i do think you'd have needed a bigger mi5 I don't think there's a kind of simple miss here.

It is a much more question about resources, prioritization, having a kind of structure to go back and look at people, which I think they're going to do more after this, in order to kind of spot plots as they're emerging.

We'll do the 9-11 plot in a future series, I'm sure.

In that story of sort of where were the misses in 9-11, It's complicated.

There are many different factors that led to it, but there were cases where there probably were dots that weren't connected.

Clear ones, where, you know, for example, you had the CIA didn't tell the FBI that there are a couple potential sort of members of al-Qaeda or sympathizers that had come into the States and were actually living.

Things like that.

That's a big myth.

I think in this case, right, we don't have something quite as

clear of a red flag.

I mean, and I guess did 7-7 in the same way that 9-11 spawned the 9-11 Commission, this desire to understand exactly how this happened.

I mean, there are inquests, but was there the same reckoning, I guess, after 7-7 inside MI5 or even inside SIS?

Like, was it a similar dynamic that came out of the attacks?

I think there was criticism because it would kind of come out drip, drip, drip over the following years that they'd known bits about these guys, and that would raise questions.

I think that the answer is partly that they were already changing.

So they're already growing.

They're already regionalizing and trying to build up the regional stations.

I think it does change them to put in more procedures to to go back to contacts and do it.

Also, you get kind of GCHQ going deeper into data analytics to try and kind of trace people, better kind of triaging.

There's lots of other interesting legacies, I think, for MI5.

You know, it drives agent recruitment, someone said, because you get a lot of agents who are offering themselves, you know, from within the Muslim community

to sign up, to help, to offer information, because they're like, we don't want this.

So you get kind of volunteering.

There's some political controversy.

You know, the government at the time is desperate to avoid the idea that Iraq contributes to radicalization.

And so I think that was one of the kind of frustrating things that Eliza Manning and Buller, who'd been head of MI5, had warned before the invasion of Iraq.

This is going to increase radicalization.

There are signs that it does kind of spark a wave of people who are kind of committed to terrorism during this time.

But the government just, you know, because they made the decision to invade Iraq, just want to kind of deal with that.

So you're also living with kind of changes in what's going on.

It's not Iraq as a single point, but it seems pretty clear from, you know, the quote-unquote martyrdom video that MSK records that, yeah,

it's a factor.

I mean, you know, he was involved in jihadism before jihadists were around pre-Iraq invasion, so it doesn't create the problem, but I think it's an accelerant.

Yeah.

And, you know, this problem is going to come up again.

People from MI5 will say, well, you know, the fact that when someone does something terrible, they were known to us.

Is that...

Is that a problem?

I mean, is it almost worse if we didn't know about someone, if they kind of completely come out of the blue?

But I think there will be questions in the future, particularly I think around the Manchester Arena bombing, whether there were missed opportunities there.

I think that's the one where I think the questions might be harder for MI5.

But internally, you know, it really left a legacy, I think, for staff at MI5.

Andrew Parker, who was head of counter-terrorism at the time and then later becomes the head of all of MI5, I mean, he told me years later that he had pictures of all 52 victims of the 7-7 attack on his office wall.

And it was there to remind him every day when he walks in the office why he was there to try and stop another attack like that happening.

Wow.

Well, I mean, maybe there, Gordon, we should end this

series, this investigation into the 7-7 bombings in the aftermath.

I mean, really a tragic story.

And we have tried, I think, to give this as much of the sort of feel of, you know, what is it actually like?

to run a counter-terrorism investigation with all of the ins and outs and the uncertainties, right?

And these kind of these questions of could they have prevented?

I mean, just constantly looming over everything almost from the get-go.

But for our declassified club members, we will have a very special bonus episode linked to the series where we will be talking to Eliza Manningham Buller, who was the head of MI5 at the time.

If you want to get that episode, though, you do have to go to therestisclassified.com, join up, sign up for the club, get access to that episode, all of the bonus content, early access to series like this one.

If not, we'll see you next time.

See you next time.