MI5 had a duty to work with overseas agencies to counter 'imminent' al-Qaida threat, says Jonathan Evans
The head of MI5 broke cover last night to defend the service's foreign intelligence links with countries accused of torturing detainees, saying British lives had been saved as a direct result.
Speaking for the first time about charges of MI5 complicity in abuse, the director-general, Jonathan Evans, said Britain needed overseas help in the years following the 9/11 attacks in the United States because its knowledge and understanding of al-Qaida was inadequate at that time. Had Britain not done so, al-Qaida might have hit again "imminently", he said at a private event at Bristol University to mark MI5's centenary.
Evans said MI5 would have been "derelict in our duty" if it had not worked with foreign agencies in countering the threat from al-Qaida.
He acknowledged that contacts with agencies in countries with standards and practices "very far from our own" had posed "a real dilemma" for the service, but insisted he had "every confidence" in the way his officers dealt with them.
His comments come at a time when MI5 is facing a series of claims through civil courts that it colluded in the mistreatment of suspects held overseas, as well as an unprecedented investigation by the Metropolitan police.
Human rights groups have expressed concern about Britain's intelligence links with countries where detainees are at risk of torture or other abuse and apparently held in a secret US system of detention and transfers.
In one high-profile case, British secret agents were accused of colluding in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident released from Guantánamo Bay earlier this year after nearly seven years in detention in several countries, including Pakistan.
Evans said he could not comment directly on the allegations, but insisted it was "a very clear and long-established principle" that MI5 did not collude in torture or solicit others to torture on its behalf.
However he said events in the aftermath of 9/11 had to been seen in the context of the times, when the UK and other western countries faced a terrorist threat that was "indiscriminate, global and massive".
"Now, eight years on, we have a better understanding of the nature and scope of al-Qaida's capabilities but we did not have that understanding in the period immediately after 9/11," he said.
"We had seen nearly 3,000 people killed in the United States, 67 of them British. We were aware that 9/11 was not the summit of al-Qaida's ambitions. And there was a real possibility that similar attacks were being planned, possibly imminently.
"Our intelligence resources were not adequate to the situation we faced and the root of the terrorist problem was in parts of the world where the standards and practices of the local security apparatus were very far removed from our own."
The dilemma MI5 faced was whether to work with those security services which had experience of dealing with al-Qaida on their own territory, or risk cutting off a potentially vital source of information that could prevent attacks on the west.
"In my view we would have been derelict in our duty if we had not worked, circumspectly, with overseas liaisons who were in a position to provide intelligence that could safeguard this country from attack," Evans said.
He stressed that it was not "just a theoretical issue" as al-Qaida had actually laid plans for further terrorist outrages in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York.
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