Copyright © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press.
Opinion |
Partnership and Continuous Improvement in Countering Twenty-First Century Terrorism
* Former Director General of the M15
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, is the former Director General of MI5. This article was written shortly before she retired from the intelligence services after a career spanning three decades.
I will shortly be retiring as Director General of the Security Service (M15), responsible for protecting the UK's national security from terrorism as well as other threats. My successor will inherit huge challenges, many of which will be shared with the Police Service.
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The terrorist threat today |
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 Top The terrorist threat today Some thoughts on responding...Conclusion |
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The terrorist landscape has changed very markedly in the 5 years since I became Director General. The threat from Irish terrorism has continued to decline. But at the same time the threat from Al Qaida (AQ) and related terrorist groups has grown enormously and now presents the overwhelmingly greater challenge. It is the specific focus of this article.
The terrorist threat from AQ and related groups is, quite simply, unprecedented in scale, ambition and ruthlessness: they have a global reach, and they are willing to carry out mass casualty attacks, including suicide attacks, without warning. It remains a very real possibility that they may, some time, somewhere, attempt a chemical, biological, radiological or even nuclear attack.
The UK is a centre of intense activity. As I told an audience at Queen Mary, University of London, in November 2006, my Service is aware of more than 200 networks or groupings which are actively engaged in terrorist plotting here. Of these, approximately thirty are believed to be engaged in plotting attacks; and, whilst some of these attack plots are only aspirational at this stage, others are significantly more fully formed. The remainder of the networks or groupings are believed to be engaged in facilitational activities such as fund raising and acquisition of false travel documents.
The extremists who make up these networks are scattered across much of the country. Whilst there is, of course, a concentration in some of our major urban centres, the threat can manifest itself anywhere; the AQ shoe bomber Sajid Badat, for instance, came from Gloucester. Typically, the individuals in these networks are young males, often they are still in their teens, and, in many cases, their radicalization, from first exposure, to extremism, to active participation in terrorist plotting, has been rapid.
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Some thoughts on responding to the challenge |
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TopThe terrorist threat todaySome thoughts on responding...Conclusion |
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In addition to these 200-plus networks and groupings now identified, there are sure to be others at large, which we have yet to uncover. It is an enormous challenge for the Security Service and the Police Service to try to spot unknown potential terrorists when they can crop up anywhere, at such a young age, having been radicalized so fast, and all the more so of course because, in the nature of their business, they try desperately to keep their activities secret.
Secret intelligence gives us one of the best chances of uncovering these unknown networks before they are able to carry out attacks. Accordingly, the Security Service is continuing to increase its intelligence collection effort. But we cannot do it alone. The other UK secret intelligence agencies, SIS and GCHQ, are busy internationally, and we are plugged into a wide network of foreign security and intelligence agencies. In parallel, there is a pressing demand for more and better secret intelligence at the local level in the UK. The Police Service, through Special Branches or their equivalents, is often best placed to meet this demand, through recruitment of covert human intelligence sources and through the deployment of other covert capabilities such as mobile surveillance. This secret intelligence needs to be fused with information derived from overt engagement with the community, where once again the police role is key.
The resulting increase in our collective intelligence gathering effort is already producing more cases in which there is a prospect of arrests. Converting intelligence into evidence which will stand up in court is rarely a straightforward endeavour; there will continue to be occasions when we will have to act on credible threat intelligence but no charges will follow, and we need to accept, and educate the public to accept that this is an unavoidable consequence of the current threat. But partnership again holds the key, and there are well-established arrangements between the Security Service and Police Service for managing cases which are moving into an executive phase. These arrangements have been tried and tested down the years against Irish terrorism, and they are continuing to serve us well with the new threat: at the time of writing, there are about 100 individuals awaiting trial in UK courts for terrorist and related offences in about forty separate cases.
We cannot afford, however, to be complacent, not least because, as more cases pass through the courts, so inevitably the terrorists will gain a greater understanding of our capabilities, including secret intelligence collection techniques, and will seek to adapt their own modi operandi accordingly. So we need to continue to improve. The Security Service aims for example, to continue to expand its regional presence alongside police Counter Terrorism Units and Regional Intelligence Cells, to ensure the closest possible collaboration with the Police Service at the regional level. (This includes a new relationship with the Police Service of Northern Ireland with the transfer, later this year, of the national security intelligence lead there.) We must also continue to pursue smarter and more efficient ways of working together; this will include better information technology, not least the quest for next-generation secure connectivity between the Security Service and relevant parts of the Police Service.
But there needs to be a sense of realism, too. Though the Security Service and Police Service have been largely successful so far, it is inevitable that some terrorist plots will escape our combined attention. Even if we have the numbers of personnel engaged in looking at our own citizens as, say, the KGB or the Stasi did during the Cold War, and with the same authoritarian powers, some things would still slip under the radar. And those kinds of numbers and methods would of course be unacceptable to all of us. So we need to help the critical national infrastructure and other vulnerable sites to protect themselves against terrorist attack by providing them with the best possible protective security advice. Both the Security Service and the Police Service have important complementary roles to play here. We need, too, to prepare to manage the consequences of a terrorist attack, including further training and exercising together; I welcome the recent establishment of the National Policing Improvement Agency as one vehicle by which to take this forward.
There is a wider challenge too. This is to do with changing fundamentally the attitudes that lead some of our young people to become terrorists. It is to government that this challenge principally falls, and many initiatives are already in train. But there are ways in which both the Security Service, and more so perhaps, the Police Service can contribute. For the Police Service, community engagement is quite properly an important part of the response to this wider challenge. But inevitably of course, there will be times when intelligence-based activity targeted at a specific element within the community, a tiny minority, of course, will rub up uncomfortably against initiatives to engage with the community more broadly. This is likely to be a recurring theme in counter-terrorist work in the UK in the years ahead. We will need to continue to invest effort in explaining our actions, to ensure that we retain public confidence. But it cannot and must not be allowed to deflect the Police Service, nor the Security Service, from continuing the intelligence work which is necessary and proportionate to match the terrorist threat.
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Conclusion |
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TopThe terrorist threat todaySome thoughts on responding...Conclusion |
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As I prepare to leave my post, I am immensely proud of what we have collectively achieved so far in frustrating the terrorists' ambitions in the UK. The partnership between the Security Service and Police Service, with our complementary capabilities, has been key; in my view, it is unmatched anywhere in the world. It will remain crucial, and we must continue to work at improving it. This means true partnership with occasional disagreement, perhaps, but always supportive and open and honest. It may mean new partnerships too, links that may initially feel awkward or uncomfortable, but from which, over time, new strengths can develop. I have high confidence that we can continue to raise our collective game in the years to come, to enable us to keep the UK public as safe as we can from the terrorist threat.
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