Читать книгу Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe - Ian Shircore - Страница 25

The two ‘alternative narratives’ of what happened on 7/7 that attracted most attention were both centred on conspiracies involving Britain’s secret services.

The more complicated and outlandish scenario had the men arriving in London with their rucksacks, thinking they were either delivering drugs or taking part in a training drill, with no thought of killing on their minds. But in this version they had been tricked, by MI5 or another agency, into behaving exactly as bombers would behave and becoming the fall guys in a ‘false flag’ terror operation, designed to justify clampdowns or attacks on Muslims at home and abroad.

When three bombs went off under the tube trains, the suspects recognised they were in mortal danger and hurried to give their story to the press to put themselves in the spotlight, so that they could not be killed off so easily. They got as far as Docklands, the spooks caught up with them and they were shot dead.

This bizarre Hollywood scenario had some convinced supporters and was the subject of several YouTube ‘exposés’. Apart from the lack of witnesses or evidence, other than second-hand hearsay and contradictory emails, this story had a lot of other objections to overcome.

Leaving aside questions about whether such an outrage could ever happen in Britain, this hypothesis had trouble accounting for Hasib Hussain on the number 30 bus, DNA evidence from the blast sites, Khan and Tanweer’s suicide videos and even, ironically, the lack of CCTV footage of the men progressing towards Canary Wharf.

For those who were happy to assume that police, doctors and ambulance crews, train passengers, forensic scientists, transport staff, office workers in buildings at Canary Wharf and everybody else were all in on one gigantic conspiracy, no scenario was impossible. Most people, however – even those with doubts about the official story – believed this was an imaginative leap too far.

In the same way, relatively few people were prepared, without some concrete proof, to believe that the four bombers had blown themselves up as part of an MI5, CIA or Mossad plot.

What was harder to disbelieve was the idea that the security services might have had some warning – or even specific foreknowledge – of the attacks and somehow failed to stop the bombers and protect the public.

Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer had come to the notice of police and security agencies several times before. But they were seen as fringe hangers-on, rather than potential terrorists.

Khan and Tanweer had both been watched, filmed and photographed by MI5 and police attached to Operation Crevice, the operation to stop planned fertiliser-bomb attacks on the Bluewater Shopping Centre and London’s Ministry of Sound nightclub. They had been observed and tailed home when they met fertiliser-bomb-plot ringleader Omar Khyam in February and March 2004. MI5 agents had twice followed Khan’s Honda back from Crawley, in West Sussex, to West Yorkshire, a distance of 230 miles. On one occasion, this was after a Crevice gang meeting with bomb maker Momin Khawaja, who had just flown in from Canada.

The MI5 transcript of one long, fragmented conversation between Omar Khyam and Mohammad Sidique Khan, sitting with Tanweer in Khyam’s bugged car, threw interesting light on the 7/7 bomber’s concerns in February 2004. There was a lot of talk about how to get £20,000 or so by ripping off credit card issuers, about Khan’s preparations to take a ‘one-way ticket’ to fight in Afghanistan and about Khyam’s plan to start the fertiliser bombings in the next few weeks.

KHAN: ‘Are you really a terrorist?’

OMAR KHYAM: ‘They’re working with us.’

KHAN: ‘You’re serious. You are, basically?’

OMAR KHYAM: ‘I’m not a terrorist, but they’re working through us.’

KHAN: ‘Who are? There’s no one higher than you.’

Omar Khyam did not mention Bluewater or the other targets, but he made it clear his group of bombers was ready to go.

OMAR KHYAM: ‘I don’t even live in Crawley any more. I moved out, yeah, because in the next month they’re going to start raiding big time all over the UK.’

It was after this conversation, on 2 February 2004, that Khan and Tanweer were tailed back from Sussex to Yorkshire for the first time. It was always said that one of the intelligence failures that led to the 7/7 atrocities was the fact that MI5 did not contact the police about this connection. It has now been revealed that there were ten ‘clusters’ of secure emails between MI5 and West Yorkshire Police referring to Khan3. The communication happened but the chance to follow up and save more than 50 lives was missed.

Ever since 2005, there has been a great deal of misleading nonsense written about a terror simulation exercise in London, scheduled for 7 July, starting at 9.30am and run by a well-connected security company called Visor Consultants.

When Visor’s MD, Peter Power, was interviewed that day on radio and TV news, he said he had run this exercise for a firm with 1,000 staff in Central London. This was quickly misquoted as being a 1,000-person exercise, supposedly involving actors, employees and security personnel spread out across the capital. The drill was actually run for Reed Elsevier, publisher of Farmer’s Weekly, New Scientist and Variety magazine, which has a total of 1,000 staff in London. It involved just six people – the publisher’s designated crisis-management team – sitting in a room and reacting to events, including firebombs on tube trains, outlined in a set of PowerPoint slides. The exercise was ‘a table-top walkthrough’ and the scenario also envisaged a bomb outside the offices of the Jewish Chronicle.

As Power said in 2009, Deutsche Bank had run a similar session a week earlier, and the 7 July exercise even started off with fictitious news clips about a terrorist attack from an old BBC Panorama programme. You couldn’t blame Peter Power for taking the opportunity to plug his firm and its crisis-planning services, while pointing out the real need for large organisations to devise contingency plans. But, as far as the tragic events of the day were concerned, this was a red herring.