In his recent evidence to the Sept. 11 Commission, Richard Armitage, US President George Bush's deputy secretary of state, said: "I don't think we had the imagination required to envisage such an attack."
I sympathized, because the same thing had happened to me -- as it has, I suspect, happened to most intelligence analysts at some time or other. My own imagination failed in the run-up to the fall of the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995, when I was the head of the Yugoslav crisis cell in the UK defense intelligence staff. I expected Ratko Mladic, the Serb commander, to shoot any Bosnian Muslim fighters who fell into his hands, but it never occurred to me that he would murder all the men and boys in the city. I never made the same mistake again. In the current war against Islamist terrorists, we must ensure that we are never again taken by surprise as we were on Sept. 11, 2001.
So how are we doing so far? In many ways, the news is good. The raids around London on March 30, and the rumors of the thwarting of a chemical attack on the capital's subway that emerged on Tuesday, suggest that the UK's security services are able to acquire actionable intelligence on which to act. Source information is rightly highly classified, but the March 30 swoops, which netted not only men but bomb-making material, indicate either good signals intelligence (better than the "chatter" we so often hear about), or a very good human source.
To an extent this is hardly surprising. The US and UK, in concert with other English-speaking allies, operate the most powerful interception system on the planet. Codenamed Echelon, this system of listening stations and computers is able to "sniff" millions of messages a day for hints of terrorists communicating with each other.
We should remember that the majority of the UK's Islamic community is just like everyone else -- they condemn terrorism and would alert the authorities to suspicious groups or individuals. And there will always be men prepared to keep their eyes and ears open in return for money or the promise of a helping hand with the immigration or welfare authorities.
Encouragement
So we should be encouraged by our recent successes against terrorists. We can also take some reassurance from a good general counter-terrorism record stretching back nearly 60 years. Most recently, our record against the IRA has been good. After a steep learning curve in the early years, the army and the intelligence services managed to squeeze the IRA, primarily through surveillance.
IRA teams never knew when their operations had been compromised. This kind of life is wearying and diverts the energies of terrorists away from attacks and towards their own security. To some extent this kind of atmosphere can deter even suicide terrorists -- the last thing they want is Parkhurst rather than Paradise.
So how do Islamist terrorists plan and mount their attacks -- and how can intelligence help to thwart them? Although most such groups attempt to maintain a low profile, we already have one inestimable advantage in our battle against them: we know where to look. This kind of terrorism has a kind of epidemiology that tends to lead back to various forms of extremist preaching or mentoring. It is generally practised by young men in their 20s -- the individuals arrested in the UK on March 30 are between 17 and 32.
They do not attack out of nowhere. Nearly all attacks are a long time in gestation, and even a suicide terrorist is invariably the final link in a long organizational chain involving others who have no intention of killing themselves. Remember, it is only the finished-product suicide bomber who is supposedly undeterred by death. Everyone else within the chain or in support roles falls within the usual rules.
For example, target selection, the first stage of a terrorist operation, usually requires some reconnaissance. The Spanish authorities will probably discover in time that the Madrid terrorists took the appropriate trains more than once, and probably held a dress rehearsal for the operation. Secondly, the terrorists have to be recruited. Suicide terrorists usually require some form of brainwashing, or "grooming." In addition, terrorists have to get hold of explosives: in Madrid they appear to have bartered hashish in return for explosives used in the mining industry, while in London the March 30 plotters appear to have stolen a large quantity of fertilizer from a farm in Abergavenny. All these activities are difficult to mount without attracting attention.
Sometimes the intelligence is not specific. Usually this means that electronic intelligence alludes to the possibility of an attack -- this is what is meant by "chatter." Or it may be that a human source has picked up a rumor of an attack, but is unable to pin down details. This is probably what lay behind the cancelling of BA flights to Washington and Riyadh earlier this year and the alert at Heathrow last year.
Difficult options
This kind of warning is difficult for the authorities to handle. If they put in place extra security measures, they are accused of over-reacting. But if you are an officer at the UK's Government Communications Headquarters listening center monitoring e-mail traffic between Islamist extremists and you start to pick up vague messages that might suggest London's Heathrow airport is being targeted, you have little choice but to act. In the days when the IRA was our principal problem, it was easier: a slight increase in security and vigilance around Heathrow could well deter an IRA operation.
The Madrid bombings on March 11 also give us some pointers on how to uncover terrorist plots. Far from being a daring and brilliant attack, it looks, on deeper examination, to have been a ruthless but bog-standard terrorist operation which could have been revealed at any stage if the authorities had enjoyed a little more luck. The mobile phones used to set off the bombs were bought from a dealer already under observation by the Spanish police. A stolen car carrying the terrorists and their payload was stopped for a routine traffic check in February. A further attack on the high-speed Madrid-Seville railway line on April 2 appears to have been thwarted by basic security checks.
The mechanics of the plot became apparent soon after the attacks. A number of arrests were made quickly, and most of the remainder of the gang, including the ringleader, were tracked down to a flat in the Madrid suburb of Leganes the following night, where they blew themselves up. Two further members of the gang may be still on the run, but within three weeks of the outrages this cell appears to be neutralized: a significant post-attack success for the Spaniards. All of which suggests that despite the organization behind the original bombings on March 11, the terrorists' own security plans were not that sophisticated.
Will it happen here in the UK? Certainly, public alertness in this country has increased over the past few weeks, but preaching the "inevitability" of an attack, as London's Metropolitan police commissioner did on March 16, is a dangerous message. It suggests that we cannot so arrange our security affairs as to stand a good chance of thwarting catastrophic attacks. This is a bad idea, as any general or football manager will explain. Assigning inevitability to Islamist terror attacks risks aggrandizing the terrorist in his own mind as well as that of the public. The UK home secretary has rightly now modified the message.
My guess is that both our political and security force leaders are going to have to raise their game in the years ahead. European countries must ensure that they improve cooperation with each other.
It may also be necessary to consider restricting free movement throughout the EU, which may be giving terrorists too much operational freedom. (Interestingly, the Spanish authorities intend to suspend the Schengen agreement temporarily prior to the wedding of the heir to the Spanish throne in May.)
Imagination needed
But tightening existing procedures may not be enough. We need to think imaginatively about how we will combat Islamist terrorism in the medium to long term. I have two suggestions which I believe will help us win this war. First, the English-speaking intelligence world, so often dismissive of European agencies, should learn from their European counterparts, especially the French. Both the US and British models have come to rely too much on technical intelligence, monitoring of electronic bits and pieces which rarely present a coherent picture.
The French arrange things differently, basing their work on the human intelligence acquired by the Renseignements Generaux, a section of the French police based in Paris. France's president and prime minister receive a daily report on the mood of the capital, which frequently concentrates on the mood within France's five million-strong Islamic community. Although it will report unfolding operational developments rapidly up the chain of command, it is principally interested in moods and intentions. This system is manpower-intensive and expensive, but it provides France with a better understanding of the sources of Islamist terror within its own population than any other European government.
Second, we should widen the recruiting base of our intelligence services. Currently, we have highly effective and professional "doers." What we need now is "thinkers," men and women who can steal a conceptual and intellectual march on Islamist terror. Somehow we need to entice our best analytical brains into the intelligence services. After all, the great triumphs of British intelligence in the Second World War were largely the responsibility of talented individuals imported from the private sector at short notice. During the Second World War, some of the most outstanding analysts at Bletchley Park were recruited through a crossword competition held by the London Daily Telegraph in November 1941.
Islamist terror is not as great a threat to our way of life as nazism, but the dangers are sufficient, and will persist long enough, for us to look imaginatively at who we should employ in the intelligence war that will underpin our safety in the decades to come.
Crispin Black was a UK government intelligence analyst until 2002.
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