Spy Masters too accommodating

Sympathy for the Spy-Masters: MI-5's Mission Impossible
By Aaron Mannes

Since the revelation that MI-5 had encountered Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leader of the cell that carried out the July 7, 2005 London subway bombings, but had not continued to track him, Britain's domestic intelligence agency has been subject to fierce criticism.

The future PM, Gordon Brown, is promising an agency shake-up and the opposition Tory party is also highlighting MI-5.

While this frustration is understandable, the 7/7 bombings are part of a long history of intelligence failures including Pearl Harbor, Israel's failure to anticipate the outbreak of the Yom Kippur war, and 9/11.

Time and again, intelligence agencies knew something was in the works but parsing out the substantial information from the massive quantity of background noise proved impossible. In retrospect, all of the necessary information was present, but was only clear in hindsight.

Co-blogger Lorenzo Vidino wrote that domestic intelligence agencies must have sufficient resources to cope with the threats they face. One possible outcome of MI-5 reforms might be increased resources. Co-blogger Olivier Guitta however points to the over-riding political problem, the U.K.'s history of accommodating Islamist radical activity.

The morning of the London bombings a pair of prominent terrorism experts on the radio stated that if British intelligence, with all of their counter-terror experience from dealing with the IRA could not stop an attack, no city was safe.

In response I wrote an article for National Review Online explaining that British authorities had been much too accepting of radical Islamist activity in Britain.

I concluded, "Considering the scale of Islamist activity in Britain and its role as America's leading ally in the world, the shock is not that the attack took place — but that it had not happened much sooner."

Read the rest:
http://counterterrorismblog.org/mt/pings.cgi/3943