THE 17 days since London fell victim to its worst peacetime atrocity have not only been among the most traumatic faced by that city's beleaguered citizens; they have also exposed the best - and the catastrophic worst - of Britain's intelligence service.
Once seen as the envy of the world, the reputation of that service was dealt a blow by the failure
to notice the threat posed by the terrorist quartet which killed 52 people two weeks ago, and they have been furiously busy in the intervening peri
od trying to make up for that failure.
The early successes in the days immediately after the July 7 attacks, when police and MI5 identified the bombers and began to track backwards into a conspiracy in their home city of Leeds, have been followed by a series of further, critical disclosures.
The tentacles of the plot have been traced across the UK and out into the wider world, into Pakistan, Canada and the United States. Within the first 10 days, with the help of colleagues overseas, British intelligence was able to reconstruct the bombers' journey into radicalism, and ultimately to establish a clear link with al-Qaeda.
Scotland on Sunday has established that MI5 has spent much of the past two weeks revisiting previous investigations of Muslim extremists originally dismissed as dangerous mavericks.
"We need to establish a number of things," said Peter Clarke, head of the anti-terrorist branch of Scotland Yard. "Who actually committed the attack? Who supported them? Who financed them? Who trained them? Who encouraged them?"
The resolution of his questions has been aided by 21st-century forensic technology, but the most significant breakthroughs have been achieved through the time-honoured techniques that made the reputation of British intelligence in the first place: observation, contacts and old-fashioned leg-work.
"I worked with MI5 and I worked with special branch for many years," said Steve Pomerantz, former chief of counter-terrorism with the FBI. "Their law enforcement capabilities and their intelligence gathering capabilities are really outstanding."
Not outstanding enough, however, to prevent another attempted terrorist assault on London on Thursday.
This second failure of intelligence, warns Mike Smith, an intelligence expert at King's College, London, underlines a longer-term inability to come to terms with the threat posed by Islamist terrorism in this country.
"Even if the intelligence community did not have day-to-day information pointing to a specific threat, they should have been aware of where the risk was coming from," he said. "There have been enough warnings. I am surprised that this second group was as far off the radar as the first."
"I think it's also fair to say that they [the UK] have a problem that goes deeper than ours," US-based Pomerantz said. "The jihadists are more established in Europe. They have been there longer. They've had more time to build up networks. And, yes, the British may not have been as aggressive as they need to be in excluding these people."
In the past three days it has become clear that while Scotland Yard was convinced that there were more home-grown terrorist cells out there who were prepared to follow the Leeds unit into bloody action, it simply had no idea of who, where or when.
Like 7/7, then, Thursday demonstrated the limitations of intelligence in predicting an attack - but the investigation into the four failed bombers again showed that British officials excel in examining offences once they have been committed. Within 24 hours, Scotland Yard had presented clear images of all four suspects.
Security expert Bob Schultheiss said:
"The wave of arrests and home searches leads me to believe that there were pretty good sources of information. They probably did not know of the specific plan, but knew where to look in the aftermath."
Scotland Yard sources confirmed that over 200 officers worked through Thursday night sifting through the copious amounts of information delivered to them by the series of botched bombings.
Ironically, one hoped-for "breakthrough" might turn out to be the worst police foul-up in this case. Officers working on a tip-off in Stockwell followed the man who was shot dead as he tried to get on a tube train on Friday - yesterday it was revealed he was not connected to the inquiry. A man reported to be the would-be bus bomber was also arrested in the area.
The most valuable gift to investigators, however, was the survival of the explosives used in all the abortive attacks - described as "like forensic El Dorado" by one official close to the Scotland Yard inquiry. Scotland on Sunday understands that officers have already linked them directly to the material used in the first London attacks.
They believe a centralised "distribution point" delivered the explosive material to both cells. Each had a bombmaker who was then expected to construct devices according to prior training and instruction from sources, including the internet.
It appears that London may have been saved further bloodshed by mere incompetence on the part of the second bombmaker - and it is now the responsibility of the intelligence services to ensure that their own failings do not offer further attackers the opportunity to get it right next time.
The full article contains 893 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
