LONDON,  England - I was not lucky enough to be in the room as Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic spy agency, gave his historic interview. It has only been about 15 years since the government has even officially acknowledged the existence of the agency. So MI5’s first newspaper interview in a century of existence is a big deal, even if the news Evans divulged was less than ground breaking. Still for those of us covering security, it is reassuring to be able to hang all those intelligence tips and accumulated research on cold, hard facts uttered by Britain’s chief spook. 

What is the single most important thing he said? His intelligence tells him the threat level can stay right where it is, at situation ‘severe’ but not crucially, a notch above at ‘critical.’

Why? Al Qaeda has not given birth to a British franchise. And, significantly, Evans says they have monitored fewer and fewer plots in “late-stage” attack mode.

The rest is all a bit academic, but let’s go through it anyway.

Evans describes the financial crisis as a “watershed moment” for security reasons, not economic ones. He points out that the power paradigm is shifting in meaningful ways; Western nations will lose financial leverage and that will have security implications. Bankrolling the bust will affect more than our financial wellbeing, you can count on it.

Evans also catalogues the latest chapter in what is known as ‘blowback’. The theory contends that violence in Muslim countries will eventually ‘blowback’ to countries like Britain, motivating attackers to seek revenge. Evans says there is no doubt the latest crisis in Gaza will be used as a new selling point to radicalize and recruit future attackers.

In terms of future attacks, Evans has shared some concrete insights. In terms of the likelihood of another al Qaeda inspired terror attack on Britain he says: “There is enough intelligence to show they have the intention to mount an attack here.”

Secondly he confirms what other authorities in Britain have asserted for years, far too many British young men are leaving for Pakistan, Afghanistan and even Somalia in search of terrorist training and indoctrination.

There is still plenty in what Evans said that you can lose sleep over, including the fact that MI5 will double its staff in the decade after 9/11. Still, although Britain’s spook-in-chief can’t and won’t say so bluntly, reading between his lines you can arguably conclude we are safer today than were the day after 9/11.

Am I wrong? We want to hear from you.

Two UK terror trials came to an end this week.

Al Qaeda operatives used invisible ink to write down key phone numbers. This pen was found by police during a house search

On Tuesday, a jury in London convicted Bilal Abdulla of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions. Abdulla was one of two people who tried to detonate car bombs in London and then, on a suicide mission, drove a jeep filled with gas canisters into Glasgow airport. His partner, Kafeel Ahmed, died in the second attack.

The trial rightly received plenty of coverage. But the case itself failed to open up much, if anything, in the way of links to Al Qaeda, or any other terrorist organisation. It was, it appears, a stand-alone operation.

Far more interesting, I think, was the result from Manchester this afternoon. For the first time in the UK, a jury convicted a man, Rangzieb Ahmed,  of directing terrorism. Not only that, they also convicted him, and his co-defendant, Habib Ahmed, no relation, of belonging to Al Qaeda.

We talk a great deal about people or plots being AQ-linked or AQ-inspired. Well here’s a case, according to Greater Manchester Police head of counterterrorism, Tony Porter, that’s indisputably AQ-core.

In many ways, the Manchester case was the polar opposite of the London one. It didn’t have any plot or planned attack per se, but it had links to all manner of interesting people and plots. 

Here’s a few:

Phone links between Rangzieb Ahmed and Yassin Omar, one of the failed London bombers.

Habib Ahmed named as a fellow traveller by Mohammed Junaid Babar, the supergrass whose testimony helped convict the fertiliser bomb plotters in May 2007.

Phone links with Abdul Rahman, who pled guilty last year to recruiting people in the UK to go and fight coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Habib Ahmed married by Omar Bakri Mohammad, founder of Al Muhajiroun, the UK’s highest profile organisation supporting bin Laden ideology.

Finally, there are the links with a man at one time credited with being bin Laden’s number three, Hamza Rabia.

The investigation itself included bugged conversations in Dubai, a luggage intercept at Amsterdam Schipol, and phone numbers written in invisible ink.

For a taster of the story, click here.

 LONDON, England – One day after Lord West’s ominous warning of one  ’great plot’ being monitored by UK security forces, there was a reminder today  of the terror threat at the other end of the scale.

 Nicky Reilly, a 22 year-old convert to Islam, admitted launching a failed  suicide bomb attack on a busy family restaurant.

 The attack was carried out not in London, or in any other of the UK’s major  cities, but in Exeter, a town of just over 100,000 people in the southwest of  England.

 Reilly had never travelled to Pakistan, for instance, to receive training; his  research was carried out on the Internet. Nor does it appear that he was part of  any cell - though more on that later.

The Old Bailey heard that Nicky Reilly entered the Giraffe restaurant in Exeter on a Thursday in late May carrying six bottle bombs, three containing caustic soda, three containing kerosene. He was also carrying nails packed around the devices to maximize the planned carnage.

CCTV footage shows plenty of people inside the restaurant as Reilly walked in, including a table of two women, one of whom is seen spoon-feeding her baby in a highchair.

Reilly made his way to the toilet cubicle to prepare his devices - which began to explode as he was doing so. He staggered out of the cubicle bearing serious facial injuries and was arrested by police.

Nicky Reilly was a convert to Islam who took the name Mohammad Abdulaziz Rashid Saeed-Alim The court heard he became a Muslim in his mid-teens and that over time he became drawn to violent action and the idea of himself becoming a martyr.

It’s well-established that converts are of particular interest to intelligence agencies. Security officials tracking the terror threat say one in ten of those they are concerned with were not born into Muslim families. In Reilly’s case, though, it’s only part of the story.

That’s because, in the words of his defence team, he has “rather simple characteristics.” When he was interviewed by police he was treated as a “vulnerable adult.” According to his mother he has a mental age of about ten and suffers from Asperger’s syndrome.

She believes he had been “brainwashed” into carrying out his attack. Police statements appear to back that up. They say he was “preyed upon, radicalized, and taken advantage of” by extremists in his home town of Plymouth.

Perhaps more worryingly he was also in frequent contact with two individuals over the Internet from whom he received encouragement and information about the attack.

One of the conversations included a discussion about the type of person to be targeted: public servants like the police, or ordinary citizens. In the end, the decision was to target the latter.

Police say they are still trying to trace Reilly’s Internet correspondents. It’s believed they do not live in Britain.

Reilly will be sentenced next month when the judge will have to weigh the significance of psychological and psychiatric reports promised by the defence. In doing so he will have to decide to what extent violent extremists are now deliberately targeting some of society’s most vulnerable individuals to carry out acts of terrorism.

LONDON, England — Paula Newton writes below on the British Government shelving plans to extend pre-charge detention limits for terrorism suspects from 28 to 42 days.

UK Security Minister Alan West.

As a follow-up, it’s worth noting comments today from the the country’s security minister, Alan West, about the nature of the threat facing Britain.

Now, West has “misspoken” in the past. He had to be rapped on the knuckles last year after he appeared to express a certain ambivalence towards the very counterterrorism legislation he was about to pilot through the House of Lords. (Something he clearly failed to do with the loss of the vote in the upper chamber yesterday.) But his latest comments are stark and give pause for thought.

“The threat is huge,” he said.

Yes, we’ve heard that sort of thing before. But it’s the next bit, albeit awkwardly worded, that’s more interesting.

“The threat dipped slightly and is now rising again with the context of severe, large complex plots, because we unraveled one the damage it caused to Al Qaeda actually faded slightly.

“They are now building up again. There is another great plot building up again and we are monitoring this.”

It’s the last bit that grabs my attention. Rather than the numbers game that MI5 has played in recent years, we have a reference, it seems, to one, great, specific plot.

The analysis about the ebb and flow of the threat is interesting as well and it tallies with something I heard from a senior figure in the UK counterterrorism firmament earlier this year.

His analysis at that time (May) was that there had been a pause in centrally directed Al Qaeda operations in the UK. There was still a huge amount of activity being monitored by police and the intelligence agencies, he said, but no big plots.

His assessment was that Al Qaeda had taken a bit of a beating in the UK with more than sixty terrorism convictions. He characterized it thus: “Somewhere someone [in Al Qaeda] has been saying, ‘we’ve taken losses in the UK, what do we do now?’”

That was then, this is now. And things really do appear to have changed.

Lord West’s comments follow hot on the heels of a security briefing from a “senior Whitehall source” that the current threat level is almost as high as it was immediately after 7/7. It’s not critical yet (the highest level), according to the “source,” but it is at “the severe end of severe.”