The final report of the public inquiry into the Manchester Arena attack in May 2017, which left 22 people dead, offers revealing insights into how the bomber, Salman Abedi, ended up as a violent jihadist; and how the security services lost chances to prevent him from carrying out the deadly blast. Sir John Saunders, the inquiry’s chairman, paints a quietly devastating portrait of wrong calls and serious misjudgments. The conclusion of the 226-page report is that there had been a “significant missed opportunity” by MI5 that might have stopped the carnage. Sir John found it had failed to act on two key pieces of intelligence, rejecting earlier claims by the agency that the information was related to “non‑terrorist criminality”. The apology from MI5’s director general, Ken McCallum, was necessary. The agency had to acknowledge its mistake. But it does not ease the pain felt by bereaved families.
MI5’s defence of the realm in the modern age has been as a counter-terrorist agency. Until 1989, it operated in a legal and political grey area, without statutory authority. The report shows that even today, the service largely runs under its own rules, operating with the trust of senior British politicians – themselves a small group. Sir John’s report is not the whole picture. Another document, which covers evidence heard in private, will never be made public on the grounds of national security. This is likely to raise more unanswered questions. A lawyer for the families could have signed the Official Secrets Act and been given access to a redacted version of this file. It seems wrong that this did not happen. That might have helped those mourning loved ones find some closure.
Levels of secrecy that go beyond MI5’s operational needs damage public confidence and breed conspiracy theories. Sir John was able to pierce the veil drawn by the security service in previous inquiries by interviewing MI5 officers rather than taking at face value the corporate position of the agency. It is hard not to conclude from this report that spies were less than helpful to both the parliamentary committee meant to oversee MI5 and the review led by David Anderson KC when they looked at the Arena attack. MPs, on parliament’s intelligence and security committee, who will see Sir John’s unpublished evidence must keep this in mind.
The backdrop to these events was Britain’s 2011 intervention in Libya, where the Abedi family came from. Britain’s air force was deployed with no proper intelligence analysis, and the mission drifted into an unannounced goal of regime change. The violent chaos that enveloped the country following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi was down to Britain in part shirking its moral responsibility to rebuild Libya. It was in this cauldron that the teenage Abedi became radicalised. The report contradicted MI5’s assessment that “no one other than” the bomber and his brother, Hashem Abedi, were behind the attack. Instead, Sir John thought it believable that both became religious fanatics in Libya and gained weapons training, adding “it is more likely than not” others were knowingly involved in the bomb plot.
Dick Heuer, one of the CIA’s most respected analysts, wrote that “major intelligence failures are usually caused by failures of analysis, not failures of collection. Relevant information is discounted, misinterpreted, ignored, rejected, or overlooked because it fails to fit a prevailing mental model”. Without proper oversight and democratic challenge, whether Britain’s spies are in the grip of faulty mindset – or not – remains a state secret.
