He said last week’s bombers would not fit the stereotype of a fanatic from a village in Afghanistan or Algeria.
“They will be apparently ordinary British citizens; young men conservatively and cleanly dressed and probably with some higher education. Highly computer literate, they will have used the internet to research explosives. They are painstaking, cautious, clever and very sophisticated.”
Stevens said intelligence officers believed that up to 3,000 British-born or British-based people had passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps, some of whom returned home to become potential Islamic terrorists.
He said at least eight other separate terrorist attacks had been foiled in the past five years. At times up to 1,000 undercover officers had been working on one anti-terrorist operation.
Sometimes, for no apparent reason, someone believed to be planning an attack would simply disappear from the scene.
“Why? Where did they go? What happened? We might never find out. It could be incredibly draining,” he wrote in a column in the News of the World.
“It’s important to realise that there are not just the four terrorists who planted the bombs in this cell. There will be a support network of some sort behind them. They will have helped house and conceal the bombers, covered their tracks, helped in the manufacturing of the devices and in the repeated reconnaissance of the targets.”
The prime minister was warned last year that the war in Iraq might be responsible for thousands of young British Muslims turning to extremism.
The grim warning was contained in a personal briefing paper on “Young Muslims and Extremism”, which has been leaked to The Sunday Times.
The paper, part of a Whitehall-wide effort to combat home-grown terrorism, identifies the key grievances driving Muslims’ militancy as anger at Tony Blair’s decision to wage war in Iraq and resentment at the deprivation suffered by Muslim communities.
The research claims Al-Qaeda has “actively recruited” young Muslims in schools, universities and prisons. It reveals that the authorities have built up a clear picture of the “terrorist career path”, which may be behind last week’s attacks.
Sir John Gieve, permanent secretary at the Home Office, summarises two distinct types of terrorist in a letter to Sir Andrew Turnbull, outgoing head of the civil service.
“British Muslims who are most at risk of being drawn into extremism and terrorism fall into two groups: a) well educated, with degrees or technical/professional qualifications, typically targeted by extremist recruiters and organisations circulating on campuses; b) underachievers with few or no qualifications and often a non-terrorist criminal background — sometimes drawn to mosques where they may be targeted by extremist preachers and in other cases radicalised while in prison. ”
Saajid Badat, a former Gloucester grammar school pupil who planned to detonate a shoe bomb on an aeroplane, fits the description of the highly educated terrorist. He was “radicalised” while living as a student in London and travelled to Afghanistan to train as a terrorist. He was convicted of terrorism offences earlier this year.
Members of the second group of potential terrorists are poorer and far less educated. They are “targeted by extremist preachers” and are often drawn in by a charismatic person.
“Such individuals are encouraged to maintain a low profile for operational purposes and do not develop the network of associates or political doctrines common to many other extremist Islamists,” states the paper. Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber who was caught in 2001 on a flight to America, is in this group.
The report says potential terrorists range from “foreign nationals naturalised and resident in the UK mainly from north Africa and the Middle East” to “second and third generation British citizens whose forebears mainly originate from Pakistan or Kashmir”.
It also identifies a group from “liberal, non-religious Muslim backgrounds” who converted to Islam in adulthood: “These converts include white British nationals and those of West Indian extraction.”
The paper added that some young Muslims felt “isolated and alienated” as a result of “perceived Islamophobia” and they perceived “bias” in the way new counter-terrorism powers were being used by the police to stop, detain and arrest people.
Work has been carried out across Whitehall studying the socioeconomic disadvantage which blights Muslim communities. According to the data, Muslims are three times more likely to be unemployed than the population as a whole; 52% of them are economically inactive (the highest of any faith group) and 16% have never worked or are long-term unemployed. This is blamed on a lack of education: 43% of Muslims have no qualifications.
An analysis carried out by an official at the Department for Work and Pensions, and revealed in a related document, said: “The key to engaging this group (Muslims) in a positive way is, obviously, by reducing discrimination and promoting integration.” Officials also judged that some Muslims had difficulty in reconciling their “Islamic identity” to living in a multicultural society and regarded mainstream Muslim organisations as “sell-outs”.
The analysis of Muslim extremism was intended to find ways of averting terrorism and officials drew up a “hearts and minds strategy” designed to win over disaffected Muslims.
In a letter to senior Whitehall officials, first highlighted by The Sunday Times last year Turnbull, the cabinet secretary, wrote: “The first pillar of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, Contest, is prevention.”
Gieve replied in a letter marked “restricted policy”: “We need . . . to address the roots of the problem which include discrimination, disadvantage and exclusion.”
The plan included giving Muslims a greater role in public life, new legal rights and schemes targeted to help them out of poverty. Religious anti-discrimination laws have since been introduced, as have special Islamic mortgages and government-backed accreditation schemes for imams.
However, when the bombs exploded last Thursday the first pillar of the government’s terrorism plan collapsed. Officials are now wondering whether Operation Contest can be revived and what can be done to stop more young Muslims becoming the enemy within.
Full text of documents www.sunday-times.co.uk
