In the world of espionage, many of the best spies are volunteers, people who offer their services to the other side. Experience in the past has shown that, surprisingly, members of terrorist organisations do volunteer to act as sources of information for the security authorities. Though it seems on the face of it less likely that members of al Qaeda will do so, given that they appear to be motivated by such intense ideological or religious fervour, I have no doubt at all that some will.
But when you have your human source your difficulties are just beginning. Sources must be directed, to get themselves into a position where they can find out what you need to know, without themselves committing terrorist acts. That involves communication and meetings, not always an easy matter in the places where terrorists operate. But no source will be effective if he never meets his case officer and if he cannot communicate, he cannot provide the intelligence.
Counter-terrorist intelligence from a human source is not only difficult to acquire, it is often difficult to use. A source is a traitor to the terrorists, his life in danger: once his information is used, the danger to him becomes worse. He may have revealed something that is known only to a very few people and unless it is acted on with great caution, he may come under suspicion. If what he has revealed is an imminent terrorist attack, very considerable ingenuity may be needed to get the balance right between taking action to preserve the lives of the public and not putting the life of the source at risk. Ultimately he may have to be withdrawn, given a new identity and looked after for the rest of his life, and future intelligence from him sacrificed. But extracting him may in itself be extremely difficult if he is in a hostile environment.
Essential though they are, human sources on their own are not enough. They must be supplemented by technical intelligence. The capacity to gather information in this way is now very sophisticated and many of the techniques that were relied on in the Cold War would look very old fashioned today. But terrorists, like spies, have also become sophisticated and security conscious. There is much information available to them in the public domain about the vulnerability to interception of mobile phones, the internet and other means of communication and about what satellites and other surveillance techniques can do. But they do have to talk to each other, communicate over distances and move around and that makes them vulnerable to technical intelligence gathering.
Human and technical intelligence gathering must be backed up by long term investigation and assessment, to understand the terrorist organisation, its people its plans and its methods. The putting together of all the pieces of information however small that come in from all sources, the following up of leads, all the classic spy-catching techniques are also necessary against terrorist targets. It appears, looking at it from the outside, that this sort of investigation may not have been done sufficiently thoroughly before September 11th. The nature and extent of the al Qaeda network seems to have escaped observation. Perhaps there were no leads to investigate, though there appear to have been indications of planned activity, however vague, which should have been followed up. But it is easy to be wise after the event.
Detailed investigation of terrorist organisations is much more difficult than counter-espionage work. In the days of the Cold War our targets, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries, had embassies and intelligence centres in Western capitals. However good their protective security, much valuable information could be learned by close observation, by telephone and mail interception and by following them around. Terrorists’ command centres, if they have them, are likely to be in a country difficult of access and difficult to monitor. Al Qaeda, with its structure of some sort of central organisation, but many small cells free to organise and carry out then-own operations, will be particularly difficult to investigate and penetrate.
In the years since the Cold War, investigation has been made even more difficult by the abolition of monitoring of international frontiers. Travel is increasingly free, particularly in Europe, and it is comparatively easy nowadays to hide among the vast numbers of people who move unchecked legally and illegally around the world.
If they are to carry out thorough investigations, security agencies must have adequate powers. Of course democracies need safeguards to ensure that those powers will be used responsibly but if the security authorities lack those powers, as they do in some countries, those who plot in secret are likely to get away with it. Terrorists, like spies, know the countries where the protections are weakest, where the security regime is lax and the authorities have inadequate powers to investigate.
Since September 11th, Britain has been accused by some countries of running a lax regime, of harbouring Islamic extremists and allowing certain mosques to be used as recruiting grounds for terrorist trainees. Governments in democracies have constantly to balance the citizens’ right to live their lives in freedom, with minimum interference with their privacy from the security agencies, against their responsibility to protect their citizens from harm. We in the UK hold certain freedoms sacred – freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of religious belief, freedom from intrusion into our private lives.
Understandably, unless faced with clear evidence of a present danger, British governments of whatever political colour will lean towards providing maximum civil liberty. To behave differently is to let terrorism win its war against democracy before the first shot is fired.
But after an event such as September 11th, we see the balance begin to swing gradually the other way, to give more emphasis to our safety than our civil liberties. It becomes more acceptable for the government, as it has since September 11th, to take more powers, for example to detain or deport those suspected of plotting terrorism in other countries. Before September 11th there was greater concern about the quality of the evidence and the nature of the regime alleging terrorist involvement. Before September 11th, it would have been regarded as politically unacceptable for the Security Service to regard mosques as a legitimate target for investigation, now it is not so unthinkable. The same people who would have led an outcry had such activities been revealed are quick to criticise a lack of intelligence after the event. The United States has imposed new border controls, is fingerprinting those from certain countries and has given the FBI investigative powers which were previously regarded as unacceptable, for example, the power to monitor suspected terrorists without prior evidence of criminal activity. Thus rolling back restrictions imposed twenty-five years ago to curb anti-Communist hysteria. The balance of liberty and safety has changed.
Intelligence on its own cannot provide all the answers to terrorism, however much resource is put into it. Hand in hand with intelligence must go protective security measures, based on the indications of targeting and method which intelligence provides and, very importantly, continuously reviewed as the intelligence changes. If it is true that the FBI had some intelligence, however vague, that a remarkable number of Islamic students were taking courses at US flying schools, amongst other things, security measures at US internal airports should have been reviewed. It is most important that protective security measures result from intelligence, so that it is the things which are genuinely vulnerable which are being protected.