If anyone in the police or MI5 seriously believed that when the Crevice trial ended the press would concentrate on their success in foiling the plot, they were naïve.  For nearly two years journalists had known the Crevice plotters met two of the July 7 bombers, and that the bombers had been filmed, photographed, followed and recorded by undercover officers from MI5.  Yet the men were never treated as a priority  and more than a year later went on to detonate the London bombs, killing 52 people, and injuring a further 700.  

Contempt laws meant the British public and more crucially the families of victims of 7/7 were not allowed to know what journalists, lawyers and the security services knew.  Having sat on the story for so long the press wasn’t simply going to write and broadcast about the thwarted Crevice plot: they would inevitably focus on how MI5 failed to stop one of Britain’s worst terrorist outrages even though its ringleader had been under surveillance.

The debate about whether the press was right to focus on failure rather than success masks another important issue for both the security services and journalists.  The press coverage of Crevice was about the Al Qaeda of four years ago.  The coverage of  MI5’s failure to stop the July 7 attacks is rooted in the activities of the Al Qaeda of two years ago (and for that matter the MI5 of two years ago).  Little can be told to the British public about the threat from al Qaeda now, in 2007, because the media are in effect prevented from doing so.   

Journalists would like people to know about cases waiting to go through the courts because these cases would shed light on the current threat.   In a rare example of common cause the security services would also like this to be the case. However as the law stands it’s impossible for journalists to write about these cases without being seen to prejudice the trials.  The effect of the contempt laws is to prevent the public getting up to date information which would help them assess how great the threat of terrorism is, and how far they should allow politicians to pass new laws and curb civil liberties to tackle it.

In a major speech in April Peter Clarke, head of the police Counter-Terrorism Command, hinted at his frustration. He suggested modern juries could be mature enough to work out for themselves what’s prejudicial and what’s not.  “I understand the difficulties in this” he said, “but I just wonder if we could be bolder and, dare I say it, trust juries to distinguish the prejudicial from the probative”.

A senior security source close to the investigation recently told me, “We’re not interested in what the media think about us. It’s whether or not the public understand.”  Unless the public believes in the seriousness of the threat, he explained, those tackling terrorism fear information won’t be passed to them and they won’t be able to recruit the people they need and get the information they need from the wider community. 

If it had not been for the contempt laws the fact MI5 had come across the 7/7 bombers would have become public much earlier. It would not have overshadowed the Crevice trial; the success of the police and MI5 in stopping that plot would have dominated coverage at the end of the trial. More importantly the public would not once again be questioning how much they can trust the security services – for have no doubt the delayed revelations about the 7/7 bombers have shaken public confidence as to how much they’re told is true.

On the morning of July 7, 2005 when I witnessed the horrific events unfolding outside Edgware Road tube station, my first impression was of how well organised the response was. But now time has passed, one aspect in what followed seems perhaps too well organised. Within days of the attacks ministers were saying the bombers were “clean skins” – people unknown to the security services. In retrospect many people will wonder why they were so quick to say this, and what evidence they had to hand.

For nearly two years these ministerial pronouncements were to the forefront of most people’s understanding of 7/7.  Many people continued to believe the initial statements that the bombers were ‘clean skins’.  When it came, the revelation that this wasn’t the case was to many deeply shocking, and corrosive to trust.

“Why didn’t MI5 stop July 7th?” asked the front page of the Daily Mail when the story finally broke. “British Bombers and the Lost Links to 7/7” announced the Times. For three days MI5 found itself under the most intense public scrutiny.    

The Security Service went to unprecedented lengths to give its views on its website, but some of the key information was ambiguous.  In turn this led to more confusion, and risked further erosion of public confidence. 

This is what I’ve since established as fact. In 2004, MI5 officers were carrying out a covert surveillance operation – codenamed Operation Crevice - on suspects planning fertiliser bomb attacks. During that surveillance they photographed the 7/7 cell leader Mohammad Sidique Khan and his accomplice Shehzad Tanweer several times with members of the Crevice cell, but did not identify them. They also recorded Khan’s voice discussing plans to go to Pakistan for terrorist training. And they identified someone named Sidique Khan as the owner of a vehicle they had been watching. They had these three separate pieces of information but they never linked them all with one and the same person.

Neither Khan nor Tanweer appeared involved in the Crevice plot which anti-terrorist officers feared was drawing close to fruition, so they were not regarded as a priority. They were put on a list of people to be followed up at a later date. However it takes up to 60 people to carry out 24 hour surveillance on one suspect. MI5 focussed their resources on other priorities – until it was too late.

Of course with hindsight it was a tragic miss. But a security source close to the investigation insisted to me, “It’s a red herring. It does not matter if Mohammad Sidique Khan was identified in our terms, because he wasn’t assessed to be a terrorist, he didn’t pose an immediate risk to public safety. With hindsight it was the wrong decision. But it wasn’t the wrong decision at the time. Given the same resources, the same intelligence and the same competing priorities, we’d make the same decision today”. 

Very soon after 7/7 the security services realised the bombers were not ‘clean skins’, and that they’d had them on their radar.  Journalists picked up whispers. Just two days after the attacks, on July 9 2005, the Attorney General, citing the contempt laws, warned editors against speculation linking the bombers to terrorist suspects already under arrest. 

On January 13 2006, the Judge in the Crevice case issued a court order banning mention of any link between the 7/7 bombers and the Crevice suspects who were by then finally about to be tried.  He was correct to do so - under British law the jurors were not allowed to hear anything which could prejudice their view or undermine the rights of the suspects before them, to a fair, unbiased trial.  

The result of all this was the British public was kept in the dark about the truth for almost two years - which brings us full circle back to the contempt laws. 

 If public trust in what the security services say about the Al Qaeda threat is to be re-established either the speed at which trials are heard needs to be vastly increased (unlikely) or Britain has to change its contempt laws.    At the moment the press struggles  to write about how the reorganised Al Qaeda of 2007 operates in the UK, because the cases which would illustrate this won’t emerge into court for another two years. 

We all understand why we have contempt laws. Yet juries aren’t stupid. If we can trust them to find someone guilty of a charge that will condemn them to life in prison should we not, as Peter Clarke suggests, also trust them to follow evidence they hear in court, rather than press accounts?   After all, many countries – including the US – have very different laws in this area.

Even Shami Chakrabati, Director of the human rights group Liberty, thinks there is room for investigating a cautious loosening of the laws, although she warns, “There’s a balance to be struck between keeping people in the loop in order to retain public confidence, and ensuring cases aren’t tried in the media on rumour and gossip rather than on evidence in court”.   

MI5’s failure to stop the 7/7 plot will always be remembered. But the awkward truth is that if they’d diverted people to monitor Mohammad Sidique Khan back in 2004, we might be bewailing the fact they didn’t stop other attacks. Take the alleged plot to bomb trans-Atlantic aircraft  - if that had succeeded intelligence officers claim thousands of people could have been killed.  “Instead”, my security source explains, “thousands of lives have been saved by our work, and that’s truly amazing”.

In 2004 MI5 had a staff of 2,000. By next year they’ll have 3,500, with eight new regional stations outside of London. However the UK  Then MI5 were following some 50 networks. Now they say they’re tracking 200. In July 2005 they were aware of 800 people they wanted to track – that number is now 1,600.   appears no safer now than in 2004.

Peter Clarke has warned, ‘I think it is no exaggeration to say that the lack of public trust in intelligence is in danger of infecting the relationship between the police and the communities we serve….We must maintain that trust’. 

He faces a tough struggle.  As the delay in revealing the truth about the 7/7 bombers illustrates,  we have the British Public kept in the dark but being told the threat is as bad as ever. We have enraged victims who believe they’ve been short changed because they discover vital facts have been kept from them. And we have the police and MI5 frustrated that when rumour and speculation does get out, they can’t answer back or comment.