By Gordon Thomas
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
London-- An embattled MI5 – savaged by a government report over its failure to stop the London bombers of July 2005 – has been warned that when Gordon Brown almost certainly becomes Britain's new prime minister in the summer, he will demand a major shake-up in the service.
He plans introducing unprecedented parliamentary control over MI5. It presently answers to the incumbent prime minister and not parliament.
But a radical change will almost certainly see MI5 brought under tighter scrutiny by Brown's government. There could be sackings in Department G, which is responsible for uncovering terrorists in Britain.
Several officers in the department have been unofficially told by MI5's new director, Jonathan Evans, they will be moved out of their present posts to less sensitive positions. Some may be offered early retirement or even sacked.
"This is like the night of the long knives. No one can be sure who will feel the tip of Evan's steel. He and his political masters in Whitehall seem to have forgotten that intelligence is not a precise science where everything can be neatly tied-up".
Nowhere is that clearer, prime minister in waiting, Brown, has told his own security advisers in the report that castigates the "the 7/7 debacle", when MI5 failed to prevent the July 7 bombings despite having two of the terrorist leaders under close surveillance for more than a year before.
Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were unearthed by MI5 agents at an early stage of their planning. But the agents decided they were "domestic criminals and not terrorists".
MI5 photographs of the pair and secret transcripts of their conversations made by MI5 agents tracking British-based terrorists clearly indicated they did have links to Pakistan. Tanweer spoke of going there to "learn to fight".
Yet, almost three years after the London bombings, it has emerged in the scathing government report that "time and again MI5 agents failed to pinpoint the risks both men posed".
On October 3, 2003, computer expert Martin Gilbertson contacted the Security Service to say Khan and Tanweer had asked him to create extremist websites. He refused.
On February 24, 2004, an MI5 agent placed a bug in one of their cars. During a conversation Khan reveals he is "working with terrorists". The report shows this was not followed up.
On April 12, 2004, the FBI arrested a bomb plotter in New York, Mohammed Babar. He told them a man called "Ibrahim" whom he met in Pakistan was really Khan. The FBI informed MI5. But security pictures it had taken of Khan were never sent to New York for Babar to confirm his identity.
Two weeks before the July bombings, Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, alerted MI5 that Tanweer was surfing the Internet for "instructions on bomb-making".
It also emerged in the report that Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, then the head of MI5, dismissed the Mossad alert as "a myth".
The final chance to stop the London bombings had passed. Fifty-six people died and 700 were injured, many seriously, in Britain's greatest peacetime massacre.
Three years later Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, having conducted her own internal inquiry, resigned after four years in the post. Her last public words included: "I am proud of my service. They will continue to fight terrorism with all the skills at their command".
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