Don't Ignore Al-Qaeda's Wake-Up Call

Sunday Times, The Times January 3, 2010

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Minette Marrin

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No one would pretend it is easy fighting the intelligence war against Al-Qaeda. With its loosely affiliated franchises, its dedicated core of jihadists and its ruthless obsession with blowing planes out of the sky, it is a formidable adversary. Like all effective terrorist organisations, it adapts quickly to every measure designed to thwart its malign intentions. Worse, its adherents are prepared — indeed happy — to die for its cause.

Yet despite knowing Al-Qaeda had brought down the twin towers, flown a plane into the Pentagon and perpetrated numerous other acts of violence, the West seems curiously complacent. We may search old ladies and infants at airports, removing their bottles of water, but we let a Nigerian Muslim extremist board a plane to America with his underpants stuffed with explosives, a syringe in his pocket, a ticket bought with $3,000 in cash and only hand baggage.

On top of this, his father, a distinguished banker, had tried to warn the CIA about his son’s radicalism, but it did not take the warning seriously and gave it insufficient priority. Now it emerges that America’s National Security Agency (NSA) had listened into conversations in Yemen during which terrorists discussed using a Nigerian in an operation. Hindsight is a fine thing, but this litany of missed opportunities smacks not just of complacency but also of incompetence.

The reputation of intelligence agencies has taken a battering ever since they stuck doggedly to their unfounded belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, their inability to locate, let alone catch, Osama Bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist, merely reaffirms that they are far from all-knowing.

To be fair, useful information has been swapped between the West’s intelligence agencies and we should acknowledge their successes in preventing attacks such as the conspiracy to blow up several planes flying to the United States. But as the IRA used to boast, bombers only have to be lucky once; the security services have to be lucky all the time. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, it seems entirely predictable that this war with AlQaeda will lead to more attempted terrorist outrages. And inevitably they will get lucky.

One consequence of the failure to detect the 9/11 attacks was an injection by the United States of billions of dollars into intelligence gathering and the setting up in 2004 of the National Counterterrorism Center. This was meant to co-ordinate all intelligence reports; in other words to do exactly what it signally failed to do on Christmas Day above Detroit.

The CIA sat on its warning from the bomber’s father and did not share it with other agencies. So did the NSA with its interception of the talk of “the Nigerian”. The clues were there but nobody had the wit to put them together. If they had, at the very least Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber, could have been searched more thoroughly. Better still, he could have been banned from flying.

The one bright spark is that Al-Qaeda’s technical shortcomings meant no one died. So we got this wake-up call for free and would be foolish not to heed it. That means finding out why agencies did not communicate better and ensuring they do so in future. It also means taking airline security even more seriously. That will lead to yet more delays and airport tedium, but it is necessary. It also means using scanning machines that can detect hidden explosives. That may be unpleasant, but it is a small price to pay to avert mass murder.

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