A government's first duty

Leaders have said for decades that protecting the population comes first. On 11 September 2001, the United States failed at it in full view of the world.

The dots were already there

The intelligence existed before the planes took off. Nobody joined it up in time, and 2,977 people died that day.

“The intelligence was there, yet tragically, nobody joined up the dots in time.”

Something big has happened

BBC correspondent Frank Gardner heard it first from a Palestinian taxi driver outside Jerusalem, who turned up the car radio on the road to Ben Gurion airport.

“Something big has happened in America.”

Not out of nowhere

The CIA had tracked al-Qaeda and its exiled Saudi leader Osama Bin Laden for years. It even ran a taskforce dedicated to hunting him down.

Nine days to a war

George W Bush declared the War on Terror on 20 September 2001. That response, as much as the attack, shaped two decades of foreign and security policy.

A failure of imagination

The 9/11 Commission blamed failures of imagination, policy, capabilities and management. The CIA and FBI held pieces of the plot and never shared them properly.

“failures of imagination, policy, capabilities and management”

Sitting side by side now

Old turf wars between MI5 and police counter-terrorism dissolved into regional fusion centres and now London's Counter Terrorism Operations Centre.

America rewired itself

A National Counter Terrorism Center and a Director of National Intelligence were created to force sharing across 18 US agencies, backed by Five Eyes and the CIA-MI6 link.

Iraq broke the trust

Under political pressure from Washington, MI6 let its intelligence be politicised and handed Tony Blair flawed evidence of Iraqi WMDs. The stockpiles had been destroyed after 1991.

Check and challenge

MI6 split the job in two after 2003: agent runners gather the raw reporting, a separate reports team interrogates it and sends it back for more proof.

“The [2003] Iraq war was based on deeply flawed intelligence.”

Too many leads

MI5 tracked over 20,000 subjects of interest and had to choose which to chase. It missed 7/7 in 2005, which killed 52 people, and the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017.

States, not just cells

Former MI5 chief Lord Evans says the picture flipped. Threats from Russia, Iran, their proxies and China now rank at least as high as non-state terrorism.

“State threats… have become increasingly serious.”

Hormuz was telegraphed

Every Gulf ally warned Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz if attacked. When it did, Trump appeared to have no counter-strategy and energy markets took the hit.

Guantanamo and nappies

Fearing a second wave, the US swept up suspects on thin tip-offs and flew them bound and blindfolded to a cage prison in Cuba, held without trial. Some still are.

Britain's own stain

MI6 helped abduct Libyan Islamist Abdelhakim Belhaj and his wife to Gaddafi's prisons in 2004, where he was tortured. The Attorney General apologised to Parliament in 2018.

The rise they missed

Former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger was blunt about the cost of two decades spent almost entirely on counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency.

“We missed the rise of China as a military power and as a strategic challenge.”

Rearming while we fought

While the West was stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia and China built hypersonic missiles and eroded the military edge Nato once took for granted.

Power is in the supply chain

Analyst Sam Olsen argues Chinese power now sits in semiconductors, critical minerals, batteries, ports and telecoms, and the West reads the pieces without adding them up.

“The problem is often less a failure of intelligence collection than a failure of strategic interpretation.”

The questions still reverberate

Everyone gets this wrong, from Russia in Ukraine to Israel on 7 October. Was Iraq right? Was abandoning Afghanistan? Nobody has settled it.

“It is no good having great intelligence gathering if you can't apply it for strategic gain.”