The London attacks of 7 July 2005 were a watershed for counter-terrorism. Although UK citizens had been involved in terrorist activity outside Britain and had been arrested for planning terrorist acts inside the country, the suicide bombings by four young British citizens, killing themselves and 52 others, put an exclamation mark on the threat. The murders triggered considerable soul-searching within the UK and hurried and ill-considered responses by the government of Tony Blair.
The concern wasn’t just felt in London. After 9/11, the Bush administration, searching for vulnerabilities in American security, had focused on Middle Eastern countries. After all, that is where the 9/11 hijackers came from. Middle Eastern countries and entered the US legally indicated a problem with American borders.
But what if the terrorists were not in countries with various degrees of hostility toward the US? What if they lived amongst America’s friends and allies? Richard Reid, a British citizen, had already tried to bring down a US airliner with a shoe bomb in December 2001. Now the 7/7 attacks offered a scenario in which these British citizens might choose to blow themselves up, not only on the London transportation network but on that of New York or Washington, D.C. In 2009, Barack Obama was allegedly warned by the CIA that British terrorists were the top threat to the US.
We now know through WikiLeaks that in August 2006, in the aftermath of arrests around the plot to use gels to get explosives on planes, the US Embassy in London showed a lack of confidence in the Blair Government’s ability to get a handle on the problem. “Since 7/7,” the embassy wrote Washington, “HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] has invested considerable time and resources in engaging the British Muslim community. The current tensions demonstrate just how little progress has been made.”
So what did Washington do about the perceived British threat to its security? Part of the story is already public. In May 2007, Michael Chertoff, the Director of Homeland Security, visited London to discuss security issues. The British media reported at the time that one of the issues Chertoff raised was the possibility of terrorist attacks by British citizens within the US.
Chertoff floated the idea of special visa requirements for British citizens of Pakistani background, a profile that fit three of the four 7/7 attackers. He was apparently rebuffed by the Blair government.
In April 2008, according to another cable released by Wikileaks, the US Embassy sought State Department funds to employ an academic to study deradicalization in the UK, looking at individuals who had moved away from extremism. If the “Reverse Radicalism Project” could not be allotted funding, then the embassy wanted to put money into a British “Ramadan Festival".
Rumours of other activity abound. The Daily Telegraph reported, in a story that should be treated with a great deal of skepticism, that there has been “a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5".
From a practical point of view, the idea that the CIA could simply move in and recruit informers in British communities is far-fetched. It also would be extremely bad form for the intelligence relationship between Britain and America. Nevertheless, I have been told of Americans, representing “private interests”, turning up at UK events and expressing interest about the radicalisation of British Muslims.
The likely scenario is one with echoes of the Cold War in which US Government money is being routed through numerous channels to address the perceived UK security threat. If WikiLeaks doesn't do the job, perhaps a historian will discover in a dusty archive the true extent of American participation in the UK’s domestic War on Terror.
Steve Hewitt is Senior Lecturer in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham and author of Snitch: A History of the Modern Intelligence Informer and The British War on Terror: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism on the Home Front since 9/11