The Defence of the Realm (147 page)

Labour's landslide election victory on 1 May 1997 was quickly followed by a new political initiative. The new SOSNI, Mo Mowlam, whose forcefully frank negotiating style and ability to win Republican trust (at the inevitable cost of provoking Unionist distrust) made her a crucial part of that initiative, greeted the DG at their first meeting with the question: ‘Why should I believe a word you say?' She quickly came to do so.
¹⁵⁴
On 19 July PIRA announced an ‘unequivocal' restoration of the August 1994 ceasefire from noon on the following day. Despite what seemed to be Tony Blair's general lack of interest in the intelligence community on taking office,
¹⁵⁵
the Security Service noted that he appeared to pay ‘close attention' to its Northern Ireland Intelligence Reports (NIIRs).
¹⁵⁶
In 1997–8 the Service's Whitehall and Northern Ireland customers judged 80 per cent of NIIR reporting ‘very valuable' or ‘exceptionally valuable'.
¹⁵⁷
Lander was able to tell the Prime Minister at a meeting on 30 October 1997 that, while he could not rule out the possibility of a further PIRA surprise attack such as that on Canary Wharf, intelligence on the thinking and plans of the Provisional leadership had improved. Though a meeting earlier in the month of the General Army Convention, which represented PIRA rank and file, had led to some resignations by hardliners, the overall outcome had ‘boosted the leadership's confidence': ‘Some key figures . . . probably see the ceasefire as a genuine opportunity to reach a settlement. Both
intelligence and overt reporting indicate that they are prepared to consider a settlement which stops short of a united Ireland.'
¹⁵⁸

By January 1998 it was clear that the only settlement on offer by London and Dublin was one which balanced British and Irish constitutional change: a Northern Ireland assembly, a new Anglo-Irish agreement, a British–Irish Council linking the Assembly to other UK bodies, and North–South structures. Parts of the final Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement were, unsurprisingly and perhaps creatively, ambiguous. The core of the Agreement, however, was unambiguous. Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom as long as it was supported by a majority of its people. In return Unionists were required to accept power-sharing and cross-border co-operation – and to allow Sinn Fein a ‘soft landing' into the political arena. The issues of the release of Republican prisoners and, still more, of decommissioning the large PIRA arsenal inevitably remained contentious. The Security Service reported before the referendum on the Agreement: ‘Whilst many members of PIRA were initially sceptical about the Agreement, the long-held assumption by volunteers that PIRA would return to violence in May appears to have diminished.'
¹⁵⁹
The referendum on 22 May produced the highest turnout in Northern Ireland since 1921, with a 71.1 per cent majority in favour – substantially higher, according to opinion polls, among the nationalist community than among the Unionists.
¹⁶⁰
The large nationalist majority in favour increased its acceptability to Republicans.

President Bill Clinton had declared after the signing of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement: ‘Peace is no longer a dream, it is a reality.'
¹⁶¹
More than a decade later, despite the manifold travails of the peace process, it remains so.

¹
When P Branch, founded by Duff in 1987 to review internal organization and procedures, was wound up in 1990, its policy and planning function was transferred to H Branch. See
Appendix 3
, p. 000.

2

Holy Terror

Like thousands of other foreign Muslims, Usama bin Laden (UBL), son of a Saudi billionaire and the most dangerous religious extremist in the history of contemporary terrorism, travelled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to take part in the victorious jihad
¹
against Soviet occupying forces. ‘In our religion,' he later told
Time
magazine, ‘there is a special place in the hereafter for those who participate in jihad. One day in Afghanistan was like 1,000 days of praying in an ordinary mosque.'
¹
In 1988 he established Al Qaida (‘The Base') to continue jihad outside Afghanistan when the war was over.
²
UBL first came to the notice of the Security Service in January 1993 in connection with the attempted assassination a month earlier of a member of the Politburo of the Marxist Yemeni Socialist Party (regarded by UBL as apostates) and bomb attacks aimed at US servicemen in two Aden hotels. The attacks were bungled, killing an Australian tourist and a Yemeni hotel worker but no Americans or Yemeni Marxists. The perpetrators were caught and confessed that the operations had been organized by the Egyptian terrorist group Islamic Jihad led by Ayman al Zawahiri (later UBL's deputy) and financed by Bin Laden.
³
As yet, however, both Bin Laden and the Yemen attacks attracted little attention from intelligence communities on either side of the Atlantic.
⁴
Though the Security Service was receiving reports on Bin Laden from early in 1993, a permanent file was not opened until two years later.

A wide-ranging internal Security Service study on ‘The Origins of Terrorism' commissioned in 1994 still saw no serious threat from the transnational Islamist terrorism which was to preoccupy the Service in the first decade of the twenty-first century. ‘Religious terrorism', the study concluded, became a ‘potent' force only when allied to national interests.
⁵
For most of the 1990s the Service believed that the principal non-Irish
terrorist threat came from Middle Eastern state-sponsored terrorism.
⁶
The main practitioner of state terrorism in Britain during the 1990s was believed to be the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Within Europe MOIS's most frequent targets were Iranian Kurdish dissidents, of whom at least seventeen were assassinated between 1989 and 1997. The highest-profile victim of MOIS foreign operations, assassinated in Paris in 1991, was the Shah's last Prime Minister, Shahpur Bakhtiar, an outspoken critic of the Islamic Republic established by the Ayatollah Khomeini twelve years before.
⁷
The fact that none of the killings took place in the UK
⁸
probably owed much to successful Security Service and Special Branch surveillance and periodic disruption of MOIS operations against dissidents.

The main target of MOIS UK operations during the 1990s, some of them assisted by its Lebanese Shia ally, Hizballah (‘Party of God'),
⁹
was one of Britain's best-known writers, the Indian-born Salman Rushdie, author of the novel
The Satanic Verses
, whose title referred to the medieval legend (deeply insulting to most Muslims), retold by Rushdie, that some of the Quran's original verses originated with Satan and were later deleted by Muhammad. In February 1989, four months before his death, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa condemning Rushdie and his publishers to death for blasphemy: ‘I call on zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult Islam again.' Faced with ‘the loudest death-threat in history', Rushdie was forced to go into hiding, protected by the Special Branch. A few days after the issue of the fatwa, he watched on television as he was burned in effigy at a demonstration in Pakistan attended by tens of thousands of chanting protesters.
¹⁰
Protests among British Muslims had begun even before the fatwa but increased greatly afterwards. An estimated 20,000 protesters from across Britain took part in an anti-Rushdie demonstration in London on 27 May 1989. There were several arson attacks on bookshops selling
The Satanic Verses
, but the amateurish devices used in the attacks indicated that no established terrorist group was involved.
¹¹
The hate campaign against Rushdie, though its significance was not fully grasped at the time, began the radicalization of a minority of young British Muslims.

The main threat to Rushdie's life, however, came not from extremist British Muslims but from MOIS operations.
¹²
The deadly seriousness of the threat was demonstrated by the stabbing in 1991 of both the Japanese translator of
The Satanic Verses
, who was killed, and the Italian translator, who survived. In 1993 the Norwegian publisher was injured in a gun attack.
¹³
The Security Service learned in May 1992 that Mehdi Seyed
Sadighi of the MOIS London station was tasked with collecting operational intelligence on Rushdie. Sadighi was expelled,
¹⁴
as was a second MOIS officer who operated under student cover. Over the next few months there was a series of MOIS-inspired operations to target Rushdie.
¹⁵
Others continued more intermittently for the rest of the decade.
¹⁶
The fact that none succeeded, despite MOIS's success in carrying out assassinations on the continent, was probably due mainly to a combination of expert protection and good intelligence.

Stella Rimington declared during the Dimbleby Lecture in June 1994: ‘The threat to British interests from terrorism of international origin is lower than it was in the 1980s.' Among the first terrorist bomb attacks in Britain after the Cold War not mounted by Irish Republicans were the car-bombings of the Israeli embassy and a London Jewish charity in July, only a month after Rimington's lecture.
¹⁷
Suspicion initially fell on Hizballah, which had already planned one attack on the Israeli embassy, successfully disrupted by the Security Service.
¹⁸
Subsequent intelligence, however, indicated that, though Hizballah had indeed been planning another attack, it had been both surprised and annoyed to be upstaged by a secular Palestinian group which struck first.
¹⁹
Two members of the group were later sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment.
²⁰

While continuing to warn of the threat from Iranian state-sponsored terrorism, the Service told the heads of special branches in December 1995 that transnational Islamist terrorism was much less of a problem:

Suggestions in the press of a world-wide Islamic extremist network poised to launch terrorist attacks against the West are greatly exaggerated . . . The contact between Islamic extremists in various countries appears to be largely opportunistic at present and seems unlikely to result in the emergence of a potent trans-national force.
²¹

The Security Service saw Usama bin Laden chiefly as a terrorist financier rather than as the emerging leader of ‘a potent trans-national force'. Throughout the 1990s it regarded the source of his wealth as a ‘mystery': ‘He owns construction companies etc. but these do not appear to be sufficiently large to provide the scale of income needed to fund his organisation.' The Service was sceptical of reports that he received money from ‘the rest of the Bin Laden clan', noting contrary claims, of which it was also sceptical, ‘that the family were planning to assassinate him'.
²²
The Service's decision to open a permanent file on UBL in 1995 reflected the increasing number of references to him in intelligence reports. It noted in September: ‘No matter where you look in studying Islamic Extremism from Kashmir to Algeria, the name Bin Laden seems to crop up. He is clearly an important
figure and we are intensifying our efforts to discover what influence he has over individuals and groups in this country . . .'
²³

Though a new section was created in 1995 to investigate the Islamist threat, its main initial priority was not UBL but Algerian extremists in Britain connected to the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) which was believed to be responsible for bomb attacks in France which killed seven and wounded 180.
²⁴
A Service investigation, prompted by requests for assistance from the French DST and supported by MPSB and the Met's Anti-Terrorist Branch, led to the arrest in December 1995 of six Algerian militants in London, one of whom was helping to finance a terrorist campaign in France. Another operation, in conjunction with the French and other foreign services, led to the arrest of the UK-based co-ordinator of GIA arms procurement in Europe.
²⁵
Records found in one GIA militant's home showed that he had received funding from UBL's headquarters, then in Khartoum.
²⁶
Bin Laden was also reported to be financing Mujahedin groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as al Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad, but as yet the Service had no intelligence ‘that Bin Laden is personally involved in planning or carrying out terrorist attacks':
²⁷
‘Should Bin Laden come to the UK we do not believe he would instigate acts of terrorism here or use Britain as a base for organising terrorism. However, there is little doubt he would take the opportunity to encourage Islamic extremist groups in the UK to continue their activities.'
²⁸

Late in 1995 there was a probably erroneous (though prophetic) intelligence report that ‘Bin Laden is involved in a plot to mount a suicide bomb attack in the UK.'
²⁹
On the recommendation of the Security Service, in January 1996 the Home Secretary signed an exclusion order prohibiting UBL from entering the UK in the interests of national security.
³⁰
The Service was bemused by continuing reports in the media and even from some foreign intelligence agencies that Bin Laden had visited, or was about to visit, Britain.
³¹
It dismissed as ‘risible' reports by the US television channel NBC and the
Evening Standard
that Bin Laden regularly flew in and out of London by private jet.
³²
The Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Yossef Bodansky, later claimed, however, that in the mid-1990s Bin Laden ‘settled in the London suburb of Wembley', where ‘he purchased property'.
³³
Since Bin Laden was then, at an estimated 6 foot 7 inches, probably the world's tallest leading terrorist, had a long beard and dressed in flowing robes, it is unlikely that he would have passed unnoticed in Wembley.