The anti-terrorist raid on a house in East London to search for a chemical bomb now appears to be just another botched operation: a suspect shot in murky circumstances, conflicting accounts and unanswered questions.
In fact, the real story of this raid is that infighting between MI5 and the police may have endangered the chance of a breakthrough in gathering anti-terrorist intelligence.
Information is the life-blood of a security service. Unlike the characters in novels or in the popular TV series Spooks, real-life MI5 officers rely on the sordid but well-tried techniques of the informer, the ‘grass’, the intercepted letter, the telephone tap and the bribe, all mixed in with a dash of blackmail and coercion.
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