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.

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.”