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- [00:04]
David McCloskey
For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the Declassified club@the restisclassified.com this podcast.
- [00:19]
Gordon Carrera
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- [02:28]
Breaking news we're getting from the PA.
- [02:29]
David McCloskey
Newswire that there's been reports of an.
- [02:32]
Gordon Carrera
Explosion outside Liverpool street station.
- [02:36]
David McCloskey
Well, there may be fatalities.
- [02:37]
Gordon Carrera
We need ambulances and water to Russell to King's Cross. They're moving back please. Most Londoners actually are not going to be afraid by this. I think they're going to continue their daily business.
- [02:57]
David McCloskey
We consider the attack last week on.
- [02:58]
Gordon Carrera
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.
- [03:21]
David McCloskey
It might be argued by some that MI5 should put everyone they came across under surveillance, gathering intelligence on them until they were sure they did not pose a threat. Had MI5 put unidentified men C, D and E under surveillance for the next 15 months, it is very possible that they would have heard them talking about their plan to bomb London and they could have stopped them. Well, welcome to the Rest is classified. I'm David McCloskey.
- [03:48]
Gordon Carrera
And I'm Gordon Carrera.
- [03:49]
David McCloskey
And that was a quote from a 2009 report by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament called could 77 have been prevented? And that, Gordon, is exactly the question we are going to look at in this episode. So last time, just to refresh our dear listeners memories, last time we looked at what happened on the day of July 7, 2005 itself, this massive terrorist attack, cross buses and the tube in London. We looked at really, I think the first few days of the investigation to identify the four British suicide bombers who had conducted the attack. And I think within a couple of days we left on this cliffhanger. Last time it became apparent that MI5 knew of the bombers, a few of them. Now, I guess that phrase is a bit of a complicated one because they're on sort of on their radar. But what does that actually mean? And I think really the question we'll be looking at in this episode is if MI5 had come across two of these bombers before, could something different have been done to prevent these horrific attacks?
- [04:58]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, that's right. And it's a really difficult, really thorny question. It's one that's been looked at by inquests and oversight committees. And one of the problems is the story kind of comes out in drips due to revelations, court cases, inquiries, which also makes it feel like something's been hidden. And it is a complicated story. We're not going to get into the weeds of it. But I think some of the detail is important because it gets to that question of could it have been prevented? But it also, I think, does quite a lot to explain what the reality of counterterrorist investigations are really like and what the challenges are when you're trying to deal with these terrorist groups and surveillance. So we talked last time about how the security service emergency room at MI5 were handling all the leads. They're coming into this, this conference room, they're arriving in big blue crates. It is hard to remember. It's a more low tech time. It's not yet the era in which everything is digitized, scanned and on big databases. So it's often photocopies of identity documents which are being sent in and then it's being inputted in spreadsheets by hand, if you like, from paper onto big spreadsheets. There's not some single big database in which to look things up.
- [06:09]
David McCloskey
And I guess, I mean, it's 2005, so we're still a couple years away from the iPhone. Right. So most people presumably don't have anything resembling a smartphone.
- [06:17]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. And you don't have the equivalent, you know, in MI5 of Google, where you just put one name in or one, what they call a selector, like a phone number or a name, put it in and then just pops up everything you know about that person. You've got lots of separate databases to see if there's a match. There's no facial recognition software at this point either. So when you get a picture of someone, you're often getting a photocopy and you're having to then take that by hand or photocopy it again and hand it out to agents to say, do you recognize it? They're building network diagrams. And in this emergency room, one person's job is to be on top of the, the overall picture or narrative and update it constantly so that everyone knows the bigger picture. And we left it last time with them finding that in their databases. They've got hits, effectively. You know, they find references to two of the bombers, Mohammed Sadiq Khan, often known as msk, the ringleader, and also Shahzad Tamwi. And they're actually going to find, and I think this is what's going to surprise people, multiple pieces of intelligence that they've got about him, but which were, if you like, separate and you're bound to ask at this stage, aren't you? Did you miss something?
- [07:23]
David McCloskey
Yeah.
- [07:24]
Gordon Carrera
So the biggest set of leads on Muhammad Sadiq Khan or msk, came from this investigation, which was codenamed Crevice. And Mohamed Sadiq Khan actually appeared with the Crevice plotters a number of times. Now, Crevice in itself is a really interesting story. It begins in early 2003. MI5 gets intelligence that an individual from Luton in south of England was the leader of a facilitation network for Al Qaeda in the uk. So that means helping Al Qaeda by sending money and equipment to Pakistan and Afghanistan, but not actually at that point, it's thought planning an attack in the uk. And this were Britons whose families had come from Pakistan originally. Then, in late January 2004, they identify one man, Omar Khayyam, as apparently a courier. They put him under surveillance. February 2004, surveillance of this courier, Omar Khayyam. He drives to Crawley in the South. Honda Civic parks alongside his car. Khayyam gets into that car, drives for 45 minutes for a meeting with one person, while the other three who came stay in Khayyam's car. They all go back into their original cars and drive off. Looks a bit suspicious. This is under surveillance. So at a service station on the motorway, an MI5 surveillance team photograph secretly the three men in that Honda car who've met with a courier. And they are going to be called C, D and e. Unidentified males, UDMs C, D and E. And then these three people are housed, which is like a technical term in MI5, which means you follow them to the address where they go next, just to get the details of that in case you need it for later investigation. Now, they don't know at the time, but D was Shahzad Tamwir and E was Mohamed Sidi Khan. So two of those seven, seven bombers. And people get that car in Leeds and Dewsbury and the car parks at 10 Thornhill Park Avenue. The address of the registered keeper they check is a woman called Taseena Patel. They check her out, they find nothing. She'd actually married Mohammed Sadiq Khan, but their marriage hadn't been registered with civil.
- [09:28]
David McCloskey
Authorities, so they don't actually, at that point, have MSK's name attached to this investigation.
- [09:36]
Gordon Carrera
Exactly, yeah. And it's a really interesting point because people would say, well, you had Mohammed Sidi Khan under surveillance now, they didn't have him under surveillance in the direct sense. And then they've seen him come up in that context of the Al Qaeda facilitator.
- [09:50]
David McCloskey
And this is a pretty shady meeting.
- [09:52]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, it's definitely a shady meeting.
- [09:54]
David McCloskey
Yeah.
- [09:54]
Gordon Carrera
And it's shady enough that MI5 have photographed Mohammed Sidi Khan, Right, and have followed him to a house. But that's it. Then February. So just after that, this Operation Crevice changes dramatically because suddenly they get new intelligence, which I think comes from the us, that the group is planning actually to attack the uk. So this was thought to be a facilitation network. Now they think they're planning to make a bomb out of fertilizer. And the courier, the facilitator, is heard actually discussing targets, mass casualty targets, A shopping center. On February 20, 2004, an electronics expert arrives from Canada to help build detonators. And that same day, and this is, I think, interesting, the police anti terrorist hotline gets a phone call from a member of the public at a storage depot saying that someone's been storing a 600 kilogram bag of fertilizer and they think it's suspicious. I think it's kind of interesting, isn't it, that actually a public tip off is vital in this, in this case to identifying it.
- [10:55]
David McCloskey
Also reminds me of the tip off against the French DGSE team in Auckland for Rainbow Warrior, if listeners remember those episodes where pretty much the only reason that a subset of the French team was identified was that the public, someone saw the camper van that they were in and thought it was a little bit strange and then called the authorities. So this kind of, you get a whole bunch of garbage that floods in from these public tip offs. But in some cases they do prove.
- [11:25]
Gordon Carrera
Absolutely vital and this is definitely one of them because this is going to turn crevice into MI5's top priority investigation at this point in 2004. So remember, we're still more than a year before the, the 77 bombings, their biggest counter terrorist operation. They visit the storage unit and then MI5 replace the fertilizer there, that 600 kilogram bag, with something inert without the group knowing. So they've minimized that threat, but they can't be sure that they haven't got more somewhere else. They basically swapped it out and they're.
- [11:55]
David McCloskey
Basically at this point making the trade off of if we can essentially make the explosives not explosive, we can continue without much fear to watch this network to see how far the tentacles go out and who's involved. Right.
- [12:07]
Gordon Carrera
And it's really interesting because I think this always is the question with these counterterrorist investigations is when do you move to arrest?
- [12:13]
David McCloskey
Yeah.
- [12:14]
Gordon Carrera
Now MI5, remember, is gathering intelligence and the police do the arresting. So they have to kind of coordinate it between them and there's always a tension there because you want to arrest them to stop them doing something that's obvious. But also if you're going to prosecute them, you need enough evidence, then that's going to take time and that might require more watching. And secondly, the more you watch them, the more you can gather intelligence about who else they know. Are there any other plotters? What's the network like? So there is a kind of inherent tension about when you move to arrest as opposed to just collect intelligence. I think almost do you think that.
- [12:47]
David McCloskey
Once the explosive was discovered and the fact that the guy who ends up becoming MSK is effectively kind of off the radar of the investigation, do those two things kind of happening almost within a few months of each other mean that MSK is just kind of lost in.
- [13:06]
Gordon Carrera
Well, not entirely here, not entirely, because he's going to come up again. What's interesting is in this Crevice investigation. So on 21 February, just after the tip off, there's a farewell meal for the bomb maker and MI5 are trying to carry out surveillance. Some men are in a car which is bugged by MI5 and they try and transcribe the talk, but it's a bit hazy what they can get. But there seems to be conversations about fraud and about travel to Pakistan for training, some kind of activity in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mohammed Sidi Khan is one of those in that conversation, but they still don't have his name yet. But the view is that that conversation again, which is suspicious, but it's not about planning an attack in the UK still, so it's not yet a top priority. Then there's more surveillance, like a week after that of someone in Crevice, and they see the same Honda car they'd seen earlier with these men, C, D and E, and there's a 500 mile round trip they do from the north of England, south of England, then back again, which again is just suspicious, just clearing some kind of meeting.
- [14:08]
David McCloskey
Yeah.
- [14:09]
Gordon Carrera
And they now check the car and they now see it's registered to a new A, Sadiq Khan of 11 Gregory Street, Batley. An MI5 surveillance team stays with the Crevice plotters. But then a police team follow these unidentified men back to West Yorkshire. They're talking to the West Yorkshire police about them. Now there's more meetings in March with surveillance officers still not identified the men fully. There's a conversation at the end of March with someone about the success of the Madrid bombings which have just happened. And people are talking about, isn't it amazing? It led to a change of government in Spain. So only later will it turn out that one of the people in that conversation is Shahzad Tamwir, another one of the 77 bombers, but it's not quite clear yet. But then, March 2004, crevice, this existing counter terrorist operation comes to a head because they think that the group are getting jumpy. There's talk they might be thinking about leaving the country. They're. They fear that might be because they want to leave the country after hurrying to do an attack. So at that point the MI5 and police move against the Crevice plotters. So they're going to move against that group which they thought was going to use the fertilizer bomb to carry out the attack. They're not going to go to trial for some time after 7 7. So the details aren't public, but they've arrested them. And then you crucially get this point which is, okay, we've got them out of the way, let's look at their contacts, look at who's left. Yeah, let's look at who's left.
- [15:36]
David McCloskey
And at this point, do they know MSK or Shahzad Tenwer's name? Do they even have the names? I mean, they have, they have MSK's wife's address.
- [15:48]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. They've also, for instance, got Sadiq Khan for one of the cars, so they've got traces. And MI5 is asking the local police up in this Leeds area for further inquiries on the addresses and the cars and the names, but they don't quite. The names are a bit different. And as they're starting to work through the contacts of the Crevice investigation and they've got, I think 4,000 telephone contacts to look at, but then another group comes up, so you get another big counter terrorist operation. So you've cleared Crevice, then you get a separate one called Operation Rhyme. I remember this one as well, which was the summer of 2004, which was a group of pretty serious Al Qaeda plotters planning attacks with limousines or big cars packed with gas cylinders, maybe even dirty bombs. So now suddenly this takes up most of MI5's resources. This becomes the priority. And once they're arrested, August, I think 2004, you then get a load more contacts which MI5 got to work through to check out. Well, who of their contacts are dangerous. So what you can see is each new operation and set of arrests is throwing up more contacts and then pushing down, working through the older contacts, down the list if you like. So basically MI5 are playing catch up.
- [16:59]
David McCloskey
At this point in the Bin Laden series.
- [17:01]
Gordon Carrera
Right.
- [17:01]
David McCloskey
We talked a lot about how the, the path to eventually finding him after 911 led through this one courier. And there is this kind of slow process of going from the courier's war name to his true name to a family phone number to his like. So you kind of go through this methodical thing. In retrospect, it all seems very clear.
- [17:21]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [17:22]
David McCloskey
And maybe somewhat obvious, but I think in this case maybe not giving my 5 enough credit to sort of look at it in retrospect and say, well, look, these. These future 77 bombers here in 2004 are kind of up to some pretty shady stuff with another group that looks to be conducting attacks in the uk. You can almost spin it to look maybe almost obvious. Yeah, they should have been looked at more closely. But the reality at this time is all of the work that MI5 is doing, it's a resource decision. Yeah. Of like, how do we take limited, scarce resources and use them and point them at the most?
- [17:55]
Gordon Carrera
Who do you point at threats?
- [17:57]
David McCloskey
And you'd have to say, looking back at this, I think that it's not at all obvious that these guys should have been maybe higher on the list.
- [18:06]
Gordon Carrera
It's interesting, in one of the oversight reports, it says, in 2001, MI5 you have about 250 primary investigative targets by July 2004. So about this time of the crevice arrest, that's gone to 500. By the time of 7, it's gone to about 800. So they've got a lot of investigative targets. And Jonathan Evans, who's later head of MI5, tells the Oversight committee, they can only hit the crocodiles nearest the boat. You imagine you're in the boat and crocodiles are snapping it. You're just basically hitting the ones which are nearest. And the priority is to go after people who look like they're planning attacks in the uk, against the uk, and then that pushes down other contacts further down the list. Now, I think the one criticism which. Which I think is. Is fair, is it makes sense to look at the ones who are planning attacks. But the harder thing is to look at what if someone is on a journey towards planning attacks and effectively they're looking at people and prioritising people who they can say, right now we see evidence that they are planning an attack on the uk, they go to the top of the list, everyone else goes further down. But I think they're not prioritizing and I think they accept this. One of the witnesses from MI5 in the inquest says, you know, we weren't sufficiently considering people who were on a journey to move up towards attack planning. You know, and that was where the resource issue comes up. And what it means is Mohammed Sidi Khan and Shahzad Tamwe are not themselves investigative targets for top surveillance or to be investigated. Their contacts, who MI5 is kind of looking at and saying to the police, do you know anything about these guys? They're on the list, but they are not priority targets.
- [19:43]
David McCloskey
Right. And they're not really under surveillance.
- [19:45]
Gordon Carrera
No people have followed them, but only because they've met someone who is under surveillance, if you like, rather than them being classified as surveillance targets.
- [19:53]
David McCloskey
But it is true, Right. That. And again, this is a counterfactual. But if they had been prioritized differently.
- [20:02]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [20:02]
David McCloskey
And put under proper surveillance.
- [20:04]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [20:05]
David McCloskey
It is true that the 77 attacks probably would have been prevented. Right. Because they would have seen the preparations ongoing and done something similar to Crevice, where they disrupt the bomb making.
- [20:15]
Gordon Carrera
And that was that quote you read at the start from the Intelligence Security Committee, which basically says if they'd been under continuous surveillance, these men who are known as CD and E for the 15 months from crevice until 7 7, then yes, you would have spotted them. But the report goes on to say, to do that level of surveillance on someone where you didn't have the indications they were planning an attack, you'd need a very different organisation. You'd need a much bigger Mi5 which operated in a different way. So I think that's one of the questions which I think comes up from this, is if you wanted all of the targets to be put under surveillance and to still be under surveillance for months, even before they're spotted as planning an attack, you need a much more intrusive and larger security service than we had at the time. We didn't have that. And would you want that. That as well? It's a kind of interesting question.
- [21:07]
David McCloskey
Well, maybe there to tease that there would be a Pakistan connection here that is going to emerge over the course of this investigation. But let's take a break. When we come back, we'll see how some intelligence supplied maybe by the Americans Gordon, also becomes key into breaking open this Pakistan connection to the 77 bombings.
- [21:26]
Gordon Carrera
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- [22:02]
David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
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David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
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- [22:30]
Millie Bright
Millie Bright and Rachel Daly here from the Rest Is Football Daily Brightness. With the women's Euros underway, we want to tell you how we'll be covering the Euros and all the games this summer, and also what it means to have a little bit of Daily Brightness in your life. For those of you that don't know, myself and Millie were part of the England team that lifted the Euros in 2022 and will be giving all insights into and detailed information about what life is like in camp and what the girls may be experiencing this summer. We will be discussing all the big stories that come out of this summer's tournament and we'll be cheering on England as they look to defend their title. We'll also talk about our lives outside of the game and what we get up to, whether it's DIY time on the golf course, highs and lows of football and the challenges that we face and things that we are eternally grateful for. It's going to be an incredibly exciting summer and we'd love you to join us and come along the journey with us. Just search the Rest Is Football Daily Brightness. Wherever you get your podcast, don't forget to subscribe and also follow us on Instagram and Tik Tok.
- [23:32]
David McCloskey
Well, welcome back. We have looked at how Muhammad Sidi Khan, aka MSK, came up in this MI5 investigation known as Crevice. But there were also, Gordon, I think some other intelligence leads weren't there that I guess peeling them back will help us understand the Dynamics behind the 77 plot.
- [23:53]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, that's right. So you had them come up in the context of Crevice, but you get these other leads. Again, quite complicated but quite important because there's a set of leads that two extremists called Ibrahim and Zubair attended a terrorist training camp in Malakand in Pakistan with the crevice plotters in 2003. Now that intelligence actually comes from the US and it comes from a man called Junaid Baba, who's a jihadist who's in US custody and who's talking. And after the Crevice plotters are arrested, he starts providing information to the FBI, which then they they pass to London and he talks about going to the airport to pick up some individuals associated with the Crevice plot who are going to a training camp. And while they're at the airport in Islamabad they meet two other individuals and this is this Ibrahim and Zubair, and they're being met by someone else, but they all have breakfast together. So there's a sense that there's question mark about who these people are. And photographs are shown to Junaid Baba to see if he can identify who those people might be, because you want to know who they are. And it's interesting if they're going to a camp and there's, you know, sources saying they're coming from West Yorkshire, which is where some of the plotters have come from, there's also a second detainees providing some of this information. So Junaid Baba, this guy in U.S. custody, is shown a photograph of Shahzad Tamweer and also kind of Mohammed Sidi Khan at Toddington Services, which is the one taken on the motorway that first time in the crevice car, you know, where they've been followed back, these identified men in their car, they'd stopped at the service station. They'd been photographed by MI5. But the photograph he's shown is really badly cropped.
- [25:32]
David McCloskey
It's the surveillance photograph and it's weird.
- [25:34]
Gordon Carrera
Because it's really badly cropped and Sadiq Khan has actually been cropped out of the picture and only half of Shahzade Tamwir's faces is there. It's a really bad quality picture and it's badly cropped. It's not entirely clear why. I mean, maybe for security reasons, they didn't want to show where they'd taken the surveillance photograph or how, and so they'd cropped it because you're showing it to someone abroad. But it does seem like a mistake.
- [26:02]
David McCloskey
Defeats the purpose of putting the photo in front of the Jihadist in US.
- [26:05]
Gordon Carrera
Custody if it's badly cropped. So he doesn't spot from these pictures, and he's actually shown a better picture again in August 2004. But again, he doesn't spot that Mohammed Sidi Khan is one of the people he's been talking about. And it is significant because, you know, this is a training camp in Pakistan where people are being trained to carry out attacks. There's an attempt to identify him, but Junaid Baba doesn't identify Ibrahim as Mohamed Sidi Khan, even though he's shown the photograph. Now, there is an interesting fact because after 7 7, he's shown a photograph of Mohamed Sid Khan. He goes, oh, yeah, that's the guy. And I think that is one of the interesting questions is, is it because he's now seeing a better quality photo after 77 or was he withholding the fact that he did know who it was beforehand and now he's dead because he's dead in a bombing after 7. 7. He's like, it doesn't matter if I kind of give him up. Yeah, that's another one of the leads. There's other leads as well. Don't want to get again.
- [26:59]
David McCloskey
So that's sort of a missed opportunity here, though, because I guess at this point MI5 doesn't have. Oh, we've got this guy, MSK Common City Kahn, who was in a car.
- [27:11]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [27:11]
David McCloskey
With the crevice plotters who are planning attack. Who are planning an attack in the uk. And, oh, by the way, he's also gone to a training camp in Pakistan where.
- [27:21]
Gordon Carrera
Where we know people. Because if you have both of those.
- [27:23]
David McCloskey
Things, he probably goes way up on your priority list.
- [27:26]
Gordon Carrera
He goes up your list. And there's other leads as well. MI5 in the start of 2005, get some more intelligence that someone by the name of Sadiq, but the surname isn't Khan, from Batley in West Yorkshire, had been trained in Afghanistan in the late 90s and was an extremist and had been to the gym and they traveled to Pakistan in 2001. And it's odd because the reports say no investigative steps were taken for what MI5 would say are good reasons, which can't be disclosed in open court. Find that odd. Maybe some other person is identified, but, you know, that's another strand which is there.
- [28:00]
David McCloskey
I should say that the names, the spellings, the transliteration, it's, I think, impossible to overstate how complex that may. Just searching databases for individuals. Right. Because you think about it, if you're in MI5, if you're at the FBI, if you're at CIA and you're trying to search for an individual.
- [28:19]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [28:19]
David McCloskey
Oftentimes the same person's name could be entered three, four or five different ways.
- [28:24]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [28:25]
David McCloskey
In systems, it can be misspelled.
- [28:27]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, we.
- [28:27]
David McCloskey
Mistranslated. Mistransliterated. So it's like. It's a really complicated process if you're taking Pakistani names or Syrian names or Iraqi names to be sure that you're talking about same person.
- [28:40]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [28:40]
David McCloskey
And it's a. It's an administrative, bureaucratic thing.
- [28:43]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [28:44]
David McCloskey
But it's so critical to being able to match up. It's about like the dot connecting. Right, exactly. Able to do that with the same name.
- [28:50]
Gordon Carrera
And I think that happens a lot here with Sadiq Siddiq, you know, Sadiq. Lots of different spellings. There are Other strands of intelligence as well. There's a group of 40 men in 2001 observed by police at a training camp in the UK. Stills are produced from it. They're shown to sources. Nine of the 40 are identified, but one who wasn't was Mohammed Sadiq Khan. There's also some intelligence linked to a bookshop which was a meeting place for extremists. You know, another extremist is being followed and he seemed to give a lift in a car registered to a Sadiq Khan. But that contact is only for three minutes and it wasn't considered significant at the time. So you've got all these other little references which after the fact will be clear. They were all about M. Mohammed Sidi Khan, but at the time, they're not put together. And so what you do have is you've got MI5 having multiple hits for the same guy in the systems, but effectively under different names or under no names or as an identified male. And it's not clear that they're all about the same person. Now, if they'd had the resources and the time, it's a bit like your courier point with bin Laden. Eventually you could probably resolve those and work out it is the same person and connect.
- [30:03]
David McCloskey
You could do anything with more resources and more time. Right.
- [30:06]
Gordon Carrera
You know, I think it's worth saying there are some structural failings. You know, I don't think MI5 had enough local coverage at the time. It's building up regional stations at this point, but it's not really embedded in local communities. It's relying on local police forces. And here the relationship was not as joined up as it should be. While they've got quite a good relationship with Scotland Yard in London, with local police forces, there's a process called task and complete. So they send a task out to West Yorkshire Police saying, look up this name. You know, tell us if you find anything. But they're not telling West Yorkshire Police the context.
- [30:42]
David McCloskey
Right. And I'm sure the West Yorkshire Police loved getting those requests from MI5.
- [30:47]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [30:47]
David McCloskey
You can imagine what it's like.
- [30:49]
Gordon Carrera
MI5 want this and they're not telling us why. They want the context is right. And they want it right now. So you're just. They're just told, you know, have a look at this house, in this car. And so you do get this sense of a lot of leads but not being put together.
- [31:03]
David McCloskey
Yeah.
- [31:03]
Gordon Carrera
And so there is a criticism from the judge in one of the inquests, which is that you have got someone who is associating with attack Planners who is talking about going to Pakistan for extremist activity. You know, these are worrying indicators, but they never quite reach the threshold for MI5 of this is someone who we know is planning an attack in the UK and therefore should be pushed up the list. Now you can question whether they should have been pushed higher based on those fragments and whether if they'd resolved all those little pieces of intelligence, they'd have worked out. Hang on a sec. This guy is interesting. He's at the center of lots of little webs and different groups. I think that is the question that.
- [31:45]
David McCloskey
Is part of the problem. Right. Is that he is on, I guess, at this point in 2004, he actually appears from MI5's perspective to be sort of on the fringes.
- [31:53]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [31:54]
David McCloskey
Of a bunch of interesting groups, but not at the center of anything they're looking at. And so I guess you could almost have this perspective of like, there's like faint dots here and there. But it is hard, I think, to judge in retrospect whether should they have been connected? It feels maybe unfair to say oh definitively. The cropping of the photos feels like an obvious.
- [32:17]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, there were definitely mistakes.
- [32:19]
David McCloskey
Yeah, right. Definitely clear mistake.
- [32:21]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, yeah. And I think the interesting thing is, if you had put him under surveillance in 2004, what would you have seen? Mohammed Sidi Khan. You might have seen someone who's an extremist, but you wouldn't at that point have seen someone planning an attack in the UK. Reason being that he wasn't at that point in 2004. Crucially, he's going to go to Pakistan November 2004. Now, after 77 police are actually going to find a video where he says goodbye to his daughter before departing for Pakistan, making clear he doesn't think he's coming back attack. So even if you'd seen him under surveillance at that point, you'd have thought, well, this is a guy who's going out to maybe fight and die in Pakistan or Afghanistan.
- [33:02]
David McCloskey
And then you have a separate question, which is, can MI5 get that information to SIS?
- [33:06]
Gordon Carrera
But through 2004, at this point, there isn't the sign yet that he is planning an attack in the uk, because it doesn't look like he is. So the crucial thing is what happens in Pakistan, because that is where the transition is going to be made for someone who was a jihadist but wasn't planning an attack in the uk, to someone who then decides they're going to be a suicide bomber and attack the uk.
- [33:31]
David McCloskey
And so maybe there, Gordon, with Pakistan set up as this crucible for Mohammed Sidi Khan's calculations about when and where he will conduct an attack. Let's end and when we come back next time, we will look into that issue of the role that Al Qaeda played.
- [33:48]
Gordon Carrera
And just a reminder, of course, that if you want to hear the whole of this series on 7 7, as well as bonus episodes including material related to it, you can sign up@therealstisclassified.com for the declassified Club. But for everyone else, we'll see you next time.
- [34:04]
David McCloskey
We'll see you next time.
- [34:11]
Gary Lineker
Hello everyone, it's Gary Lineker here from the Rest Is Football. Just a quick message to tell you all about the Club World cup tournament that's taking place in the US at the moment, it's 32 of the best teams from all around the world battling it out to be crowned the best side on the planet. We've reached the knockout stages of the competition, which means all the big guns will be going head to head. Manchester City, Real Madrid, psg, Chelsea and Bayern Munich are just some of the sides vying to lift the trophy. Join myself, Alan Shearer, Micah Richards, and our expert out in America, Alex Aljo, as we guide you through the explosive final stages of the tournament. To make things even better, if you're watching the video version of the show on Spotify or YouTube, you can also watch all the goals and the best bits of the action as we discuss the games. A first for podcasting. Just search the Rest Is Football Wherever you get your podcasts.