Britain foils many terror plots, but missed one

Britain's security services were put on the defensive Tuesday after it became apparent that they hadn't captured two of the July 7 mass-transit bombers, who were being tracked on the fringes of another jihadi group successfully prosecuted for a major terrorist plot Monday.

Amid fresh calls for a public inquiry into whether the 2005 attacks could have been prevented, terrorism experts acknowledged weaknesses in Britain's counterterrorism strategy but pointed to significant progress in its ability to thwart the rising proliferation of home-grown, Al Qaeda-backed terrorist cells.

"What is remarkable is that the British police and security services have managed to foil so many plots with the limited resources they have," says M.J. Gohel, a terrorism expert with the Asia-Pacific Foundation think tank. "If they had not, the reality is that Britain would have been hit over and over again."

MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence agency, has in the last three years taken steps to double its head count, boost recruitment of ethnic minorities, and spread its operations nationwide. Much better focused, according to experts, on British radicals' Al Qaeda connections, MI5 has identified as many as 30 plots and succeeded in foiling at least half a dozen high-profile plots, resulting in charges being brought against dozens of individuals. A string of trials and cases are now pending.

The biggest so far culminated Monday with the conviction of five men for planning fertilizer bomb attacks in southeast England. Security services were broadly praised for their biggest success yet against home-grown Islamic jihadis. But the trial produced awkward evidence that MI5 overlooked two associates of the gang – Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer – who would go on to perpetrate the 7/7 attacks.

"They did make mistakes, there is no question about that," says Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King's College London. "They didn't have the resources back then and had to prioritize certain people. Most of the time they get it right. This time they got it wrong. They should have looked at these people."

Government ministers and security chiefs stress that they can't guarantee total success against terrorism. They repeat the old IRA-era mantra: We need to be lucky all the time; they only need to get lucky once. MI5 chief Jonathan Evans says the number of violence-minded young radicals has increased "substantially" since 2005.

As many as 2,000 radicals, loosely grouped into around 200 networks, are actively involved in dozens of terror plots, counterterrorism officials believe. They can't all be tracked all of the time: MI5 is doubling its head count to 3,500, but even that will not be enough to keep tabs on everyone. Experts say it takes at least 15 men, and possibly 40 or 50 to provide long-term, round-the-clock surveillance on a high-priority target. The numbers don't add up.

Given this, Mr. Gohel says security services should be judged on the attacks they manage to thwart, not the ones that get through. He notes that the security apparatus has spread its structure nationwide "gleaning intelligence right across the country instead of just in London."

"They established regional centres in order to stay in contact at the grass-roots level," he notes. Significantly, an alleged plot earlier this year to abduct and execute a British Muslim soldier revolved around a succession of arrests in Birmingham, a regional center.

Two key counterterror weaknesses

But Charles Shoebridge, a former counterterrorism intelligence officer, says two important strands of counterterrorism are still lacking. The failure to pass on intelligence about Mr. Khan to local police in his area demonstrates that "the supply of information to the security services is something of a one-way street. This is a situation that could certainly be improved."

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