“Whatever damage we have done to Al Qaida, they continue to operate…. Whatever damage they are able to inflict, they will do so. We cannot be sure where or when they will strike. But we can be certain they will try.” David Blunkett, Home Secretary.
This country’s enormous apparatus of law enforcement has no greater single goal than the obstruction of mass murder by Islamic fascists. It has a higher priority than the old war against drugs or the new one against human trafficking, far bigger than the effort against paedophilia or fraud.
From the outside, looking in towards the screen of secrecy which conceals most of what is happening, it looks successful. More than two years after the massacre in the United States, there has been a frenzy of effort, there have been arrests and internments and expulsions and the simple fact is that no such crime has been committed in the United Kingdom. And yet the voices of those within this apparatus tell a different story.
Listen, for example, to the senior Special Branch detective, who has been running part of this operation: “If you imagine a giant set of scales and, on one side, you put all the weight of our political inertia, and then on the other side, I reckon you can put three thousand dead bodies which will finally tip the scales. That’s roughly how many people are going to have die in a terrorist incident in this country before we sort ourselves out…”
Or listen to the senior legal source with a special responsibility for organised crime: “There is no overarching strategy on terrorism….We are not operating at full capacity.” Or to the senior police source who says simply that the whole attack on all forms of organised crime relies on an incoherent muddle of agencies without the leadership or the understanding to unite them.
If this criticism were coming from outside the security apparatus, it would be easy to dismiss it as the cynicism of the ignorant. But the Guardian has spoken to people at one level or another of every agency involved in this country’s fight against serious and organised crime including terrorism and, over and over again, in amongst the hard work and honest effort, we have come across the urgent voices of insiders warning of defects in the defences. They say that:
* there are too many different agencies with too many different priorities cutting across each other;
* these agencies still too often treat each other as enemies, bickering and witholding intelligence from each other;
* a powerful call from HM Inspector of Constabulary for radical repair work “as a matter of urgency (for) the security of the nation” has been largely unheeded.
* there is a damaging lack of leadership and strategy from government.
At the heart of the problem lies what one insider called “the structure from hell”, a bizarre amalgam of overlapping and underlapping agencies which have grown up over the last one hundred years – MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the National Criminal Intelligence Service, the National Crime Squad, Customs and Excise, 55 local Special Branches scattered across the UK, the Anti Terrorist Branch, sundry civil servants including specialist investigators in Immigration, Transport and the Inland Revenue, as well as the international links of Interpol, Europol, Eurojust, CEPOL, OLAF and others. According to one central source: “Nobody is in charge, nobody is dictating terms. Nobody would ever choose to have a structure like this if they were actually planning it.”
Every single one of these agencies has a different set of targets, some of them unique to itself, some of them shared with others. Some of them have sole ownership of a target – like Customs with fiscal fraud or Immigration with illegal migrants – and then the problem is whether they will pass on information which is of no interest to them but crucial to other agencies. Some of them share targets – several have an interest in drugs, for example – and then the problem is which agency has ‘primacy’ and whether the others accept that and co-operate, or resent it and become obstructive. In any case, too often, according to those we have spoken to, these agencies fail to work in unison.
We were told, for example, that in the case of the 58 Chinese migrants who suffocated in the back of a tomato truck as they were smuggled from Holland to Dover in June 2000: MI5 had been looking at the traffickers, because they had links to Turkish heroin gangs and Kurdish nationalists; separately, Customs had been looking at their truck movements because they were suspected of drug smuggling; separately, the National Crime Squad were looking at another trafficker who was involved on the periphery of the gang; and separately the Dutch authorities were also aware of them. “But they never put the bits together. So: 58 dead people.”
This kind of data-inertia is particularly alarming in the case of counter-terrorism, which turns out to be a target for very few of these agencies. The National Crime Squad, for example, with its cutting edge surveillance technology, targets “serious and organised crime which crosses national and international borders” – unless it’s terrorism. The National Criminal Intelligence Service, with its vast database, gathers information from every police agency in the country on “threats to the UK from serious and organised crime” – but not terrorism. Customs and Excise run the biggest law enforcement agency in the country with a network of intelligence officers abroad and a special responsibility for guarding the borders – but not against terrorists.
And this makes a real difference if these agencies fail to see it as their business when they happen to come across evidence of terrorism. We were told, for example, about the Customs officers who intercepted a lorry with three tons of smuggled hand-rolling tobacco; who knew that the Real IRA had been raising funds by smuggling tobacco and diesel oil; who knew that their local Special Branch had asked to be informed if any such load was spotted; and who nevertheless seized the tobacco, released the driver and handed over the lorry to its owner without saying a word to Special Branch. Both the driver and the owner proved to be involved with the Real IRA but, by the time that Special Branch found out about them, both men were long gone and there was no chance of prosecuting them for smuggling or even simply using them as an intelligence lead.
Customs’ justification is simple: they don’t do terrorism. As Terry Byrne, the head of Customs’ law enforcement division, told the Northern Ireland Select Committee last year: “Customs has responsibility for tackling fiscal fraud, not for taking on paramilitaries. So we do not look for paramilitaries, we look for fraudsters.” One Special Branch officer told us he had come across Customs officers seizing Uzi sub-machine guns and simply releasing all those involved without telling the police because they were of no further interest from the point of view of fiscal fraud.
This particular problem with Customs has become so bad that police have raised it with ministers. Senior Customs managers insist they have now dealt with it. Their counterparts in Special Branch say “the problem has been acknowledged but definitely not solved.”
Some very senior figures in the security aparatus have been arguing passionately behind closed doors that the structural problem here is not merely the complexity of this muddle of agencies but the fault line which separates ’straight crime’ from terrorism. Just as the Real IRA use the smuggling of tobacco and diesel, so too ETA use bank robbery;the Provisional IRA used extortion and other serious crime; Al Qaida has been using credit-card fraud; and numerous terrorist groups have moved drugs.
Some say this split is simply a matter of history and inertia – different agencies have grown up with different jobs, and none of them is willing to promote change for fear of losing out. Others say the split is itself a reflection of a basic failure of intelligence gathering: “We know very well that there are links between terrorism and organised crime. But we don’t have any systematic analysis. We know enough to know it is a plausible link but what is really shocking is that we don’t even know how much of it is going on. We just don’t research it. So we can’t structure law enforcement or fund it or set targets. We don’t know what we are up against.”
There is a vigorous current debate within the security apparatus about whether these structural faults should be ironed out with a radical overhaul of the whole set-up; or whether they can be dealt with more effectively by having better management and systems. While those opinions are divided, there is virtual consensus on the fact that at the moment, the structural faults are being aggravated by operational failures – that, despite years of effort to get these agencies to work together, they still fail adequately to share information.
Each agency stores its own intelligence and, even though each of them has staff with the highest possible security clearance, even though all of them claim to be willing to work together, all of them try to keep their intelligence concealed. The two biggest databases of intelligence for domestic security belong to NCIS and MI5: NCIS say they won’t let MI5 look at theirs and that MI5 won’t let them look at most of theirs either. The borders are protected by three agencies: Customs, Immigration and Special Branch: Customs won’t let anybody else trawl their database; Special Branch and Immigration allow each other only limited access. The 55 local special branches do not even pool their intelligence on a national database but instead use MI5 as a clearing house. Thousands of reports do flow between the different agencies, but this relies on good will and efficiency in identifying and sharing the right intelligence. Who knows what fragments are lying unconnected?
In the case of terrorism, it is open to Special Branch and MI5 at least to tell NCIS of suspects they are targetting and of informers they are using, so that they can be warned if any other agency has an interest in them – but they won’t do it. Even though NCIS data-handlers have routine access to highly sensitive police information on informants and current operations, Special Branch and MI5 insist on treating them as untrustworthy. Beyond that, there are no systems in place for any of the secret intelligence agencies to market their intelligence needs to other agencies. HM Inspector last year found that, in some parts of the country, Special Branch were not even seeking intelligence effectively from their own colleagues in the same force.
These blockages are not simply the result of the structure. They are clearly being aggravated in some cases by genuine silliness of a kind which has always weakened these organisations but which is supposed to be a thing of the past. It is an eye-watering experience to listen to some of the most senior figures in law enforcement rehearse a short and well-worn speech on their new willingness to work with each other, before lapsing into traditional off-the-record back-stabbing.
Listen to the the chief constable who one minute inists on the importance of joined-up working between agencies and the next minute denounces Customs as a total fucking waste of time; listen to the provincial detective, who is supposed to provide reports for NCIS, complaining bitterly that NCIS have their own agenda and routinely obstruct law enforcement; or to the very senior figure in national policing who is supposed to be working with Customs, who asks: “Why have Customs moved into organised crime? They are not very good at it”; or to the senior Customs officers muttering bitterly about the intelligence agencies they are supposed to work with.
The two biggest law-enforcement agencies, National Crime Squad and Customs, insist that they now get on well together. Yet they squabble: Customs claim to be the lead agency on drugs and also the primary law enforcement agency for the UK; privately, crime squad officers dispute the first and deride the second. They can’t even agree whether to tackle drugs by prosecuting key offenders (the crime squad strategy) or by seizing consignments anywhere in the world without prosecuting (the Customs choice). In the past, they have had furious clashes when crime squad arrested UK dealers before Customs had a chance to seize their drugs; or when Customs seized drugs, thus removing the evidence which the crime squad needed for prosecution. Now, they have an agreed protocol to tell NCIS of all their work, so that NCIS can warn them if they are both chasing the same target, in which case one agency can then take charge. Yet, a senior Customs officer told us plainly that his officers engage in ‘tactical delays’: “There is an obligation to inform NCIS but it is not clear how quickly we need to do so. If we are worried about crime squad clashing with us, it might happen that we don’t tell NCIS too quickly what we are doing. And if they are worried about us, they might, er, experience a similar delay.”
The two biggest intelligence organisations for non-terrorist crime, NCIS and Customs, also have an agreed protocol and claim to work well together. But they don’t like each other. Talk to Customs people about NCIS and you are told: “We don’t get the service we need from them. In fact, NCIS is not a service at all. It is a player with its own agenda. We have a problem with NCIS.” Talk to NCIS people about Customs and you’ll be told Customs have no business in law enforcement at all and, with loud laughter: “They are supposed to be dealing with excise and the trade in bushmeat, aren’t they?” Customs are furious that NCIS set up their own international network of drugs liaison officers when Customs already had one; NCIS say they had no option because Customs would not share the intelligence from their network and, even now, insist on having their own officer based inside NCIS to control the Customs intelligence terminal.
Some of the results of these bad relations are alarming. For example, for years, the border agencies have been fretting at the sheer practical difficulties of screening the 200 million passengers a year whoflow through our 142 civil airports plus the 53 million others who pass through the 70 main sea ports. Finally, in 2000, Parliament inserted into the Terrorism Act a simple measure requiring all airlines and shipping companies to give advance copies of their passenger lists to the border agencies, so that they could start their search for suspect terrorists or serious criminals before the stampede of passengers swirled through the arrivals hall.
So the companies handed over the lists – to Customs, who then refused to hand them on to Special Branch or to Immigration on the grounds that that transaction was not covered by the new law and arguably would be a breach of the Data Protection Act. In the absence of an agreed legal gateway, Customs said each name on each passenger list would have to be individually considered – all 253 million of them. Special Branch officers complained bitterly to the Home Office, whose organised crime branch apparently agreed with them and called a meeting of all sides, but the Customs representative failed to turn up. Senior police say this is still “bunged up” so that, in spite of Parliament’s will, Special Branch and Immigration have no way of knowing who is about to arrive in the UK.
Indeed, as travellers pour through an arrival hall, the bad relations beween the border agencies can eat further holes in the security blanket. Immigration may stop travellers and record their names, but Special Branch say they are generally blocked from checking those names, because Immigration claim it would be a breach of the Data Protection Act to share them. If Special Branch independently spot somebody suspicious, they have powers to interview them – but only within the precincts of the port or airport. Once they are out on to the streets, it is up to Immigration to deal with them. They may interview them. They may check their finger prints with the NAFIS database (except that their computer sytems have proved to be incompatible)They may decide that the traveller is suspect, but their policy is to release them into the community while they make a decision on whether they can stay, which drives Special Branch crazy. “Immigration are frankly incompetent on investigation,” according to one senior police source.
Even at the heart of UK counter-terrorism – the link between MI5 and Special Branch – there are defects. A former MI5 officer told us his colleagues frequently identified ‘the common enemy’ as the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. And HM Inspector of Constabulary last year found that, although working relationships were often good, MI5 complained that Special Branch sent them too many unnecessary reports, while Special Branch complained that MI5 were too slow to respond, and both agencies occasionally squabbled about who owned a particular operation or informant.
Many of these weaknesses are known to government. Last year, an outspoken report on Special Branch by HM Inspector of Constabulary, found that:
* Some Special Branches were simply too small to be effective while others lost officers who were ‘routinely diverted’ to other police work by their chief constables, some of whom did not regard counter-terrorism as a priority or had even merged their Special Branch into other units;
* Nobody was in charge of co-ordinating the 55 special branches, and the whole national police effort against terrorism was being run through a committee of the chief constables’ union, ACPO;
* Special Branches had “no coherent IT policy” – no national database for their intelligence, no national links with each other, often no regional links, sometimes no link even to their own force, and some local offices were so short of computers that they had been “forced back to paper systems”.
* Officers at ports and airports were often compelled to work in offices which were “most unpleasant… abysmal; (with) inappropriate siting, insufficient space and lack of security” simply because operating companies wanted to use the best space for commercial profit.
HM Inspector urged the government to deal with the weakness of some local Special Branches by creating a new network of ten regional branches, warning: “There are significant weaknesses in the current structure of Special Branch… to the detriment of the branch’s ability to respond consistently to the current level of terrorist threat. The threatened use off chemical, biological, radioactive and nuclear devices by terrorists is now a reality requiring a concerted response, to which many smaller Special Branches would find it difficult to contribute.”
The Home Office took up the cause with the support of some senior police, but the Treasury blocked them simply by refusing to provide any new money to deal with HMI’s urgent warnings. The Home Office had some cash left in a central Special Branch pot and used it instead to set up a national co-ordinator, as HMI had suggested, with eight regional intelligence cells – but they are small, they have no surveillance capacity or operational support and, if they want any back-up, they have to go begging to local chief constables, competing with other priorities. Even with this very limited initiative, the Home Office were able to pay for only about 60% of the costs and have had to ask local forces to fund the rest. In an attempt to close the remaining gap in the counter-terrorist defence, the Home Office have applied for new money in the next spending round so that these regional cells can at least have their own surveillance teams.
With some special branches thus left severely undermanned, the government then considered their IT problems, which HMI said were “severely limiting the effectiveness of Special Branches and should be addressed urgently.” The offical response was to stick with existing plans for a Special Branch information network which is said to address some of the problems but will still leave branches unable to exchange intelligence with other forces and agencies.
Finally, the government looked at security facilities at ports and airports, including the lack of computer links to intelligence databases, which were said to be “wholly inadequate and seriously detrimental to the effectiveness of ports units… (because) the consequence of a missed identification are potentially disastrous”. Essentially, no action is to be taken, on the grounds that, as one senior source put it, “HMI over-egged the pudding”.
There is no doubt that, since the Al-Qaida attacks in the United States, the British government has moved with real speed and conviction to improve counter-terrorist defences. They gave the intelligence agencies £54 million of new money in each of the two years after the attacks; they have created two new units inside MI5 to analyse intelligence and to communicate with police forces; each force now has a counter-terrorism security advisor to find vulnerable targets and to advise on their protection; NCIS and Special Branch both have launched a drive to trace and freeze terrorist funds.
Even before the attacks, the agencies had tried to improve their joint working by seconding officers into each other’s ranks and setting up a series of special liaison committees to link agencies with common targets: CIDA for drugs, Reflex for human trafficking, CIFCA for money-laundering. But, despite these initiatives, it is clear that some of those who work most closely with this security apparatus remain fearful that the government has failed to do enough.
They say there is a hole in the heart of the operation – that there is no central strategy, that each agency is treading its own path, guessing or hoping that somehow or other their work will not overlap or underlap with the others, and that this reflects an underlying failure even to research systematically and analyse the problem of Islamic terrorism. “Nobody is in charge,” we were told.
An operational strategy is supposed to flow from regular meetings of the agencies in the Strategic Customers Group, but they are guided by the annual UK Threat Assessment which is produced by NCIS and which is almost universally derided by insiders on the grounds that it is too generalised to be any use; that it is out of date by the time it is produced; and that, while claiming to summarise “threats to the UK from serious and organised crime”, it has never once identified terrorism as a threat.
Similarly, an intelligence strategy is supposed to be produced by the annual UK Requirements and Priorities paper, produced by the Joint Intelligence Office and endorsed by one of Cabinet’s most powerful committees, made up of the Prime Minister, his deputy, the chancellor of the exchequer and the three secretaries of state for foreign, defence and home affairs. And yet, for some bizarre reason, this committee has a long history of simply failing to meet and, furthermore, of ignoring complaints about its failure. All through 2001 and 2002 it never held a single session. Indeed, when the UK Requirements paper in June 2001 suggested putting a higher priority on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, this committee had still not endorsed the plan when, three months later, Taliban allies started publicly murdering thousands of people in New York and Washington DC.
As an example of this general failure of leadership, insiders quote their problems with the data protection act. The former head of MI6, Sir David Spedding, reviewed the UK response to serious and organised crime and warned that the new law would cause blockages unless government found legal gateways for the agencies. Years later, senior sources tell us, nobody in government has produced a list of these gateways, and the Home Office unit which specialises in the exchange of intelligence has concentrated on finding gateways for local police to swap data with health and social services.
Occasionally, the lack of government direction becomes actively obstructive. There is real concern about the way that performance targets encourage agencies to pursue their own selfish goals at the expense of working with others: why would chief constables divert resources to special branch when the Home Office are leaning on them so heavily to deliver on burglary and car crime; why would chief constables work together on regional security when the Home Office are demanding that each of them should compete against the other to reach the top quartile of crime figures; why should Customs sacrifice its seizure targets to help the national crime squad hit its prosecution targets; why would any law-enforcement agencies jeopardise their performance targets to help secret intelligence agencies who have no such targets to hit; where is the joined-up thinking?
Similarly, the potential for joint operations between agencies is limited by Treasury rules on spending. They have allowed, for example, two payments of £54 million for counter-terrorist intelligence and a further £11.45 million for drugs intelligence, but the funds are all ring-fenced and cannot be spent flexibly according to operational need. Or, again, law enforcement agencies have been begging the Treasury to let them jointly fund JARIC, which produces intelligence from satellite images, but the Treasury insist that it must be funded entirely by the Ministry of Defence.
In July, the Prime Minister announced a review of the structure of agencies dealing with serious crime. Insiders suggest that it is likely to recommend the merger of the national crime squad with NCIS, but that it will fail to answer the wider structural questions: why do we have two separate domestic intelligence agencies in MI5 and NCIS; why do we have three separate border agencies; should Customs be involved in law enforcement at all; why do we divide the investigation of serious crime from counter-terrorism; who is in charge; who is going to devise a central strategy; and who will enforce it?
Real structural change is almost certainly necessary. But the big worry is that government will fall into the trap of imaginging that structural change alone will deliver success without addressing the problems of selfish management and lack of central leadership. As Sir David Spedding said when he completed his review of these agencies: “The existing structure may not be perfect, but this review leads us to caution against seeing structural change and a rejigging of agency boundaries as likely to make a major contribution to improved performance….. We regard efforts to achieve teamwork across existing boundaries as more constructive than a pursuit of some ideal set of boundaries.”
