Hit them before they hit us..it’s the only answer

SOME years ago I was operating in a Middle Eastern country where an al-qaeda cell was preparing attacks on a wide range of targets. Over many months they assembled the hardware to build improvised explosive devices. They cased targets. They made plans. Then nothing happened. The day before the attacks were to take place every member of the cell was arrested. Their devices were seized. Their plans foiled. No one died. No one was wounded. No lives were shattered. The public never knew a thing. All of this because one of the men at the table during every planning session was a CIA spy run by a close friend of mine. Every action they took, every decision the terrorists made, was reported to us before it was even disseminated within the cell. This is how it is supposed to work. This is what human intelligence does. It may be controversial. It may raise issues of civil rights and privacy. It is better than the alternative. The alternative is Manchester.

DANGER

In the wake of the attack the authorities are now doing the predictable – arresting everyone who had close contact with the bomber and hoping against hope they move fast enough to head off any follow-on attacks. Fifteen years after 9/11 this has become the pattern worldwide. It cannot continue. At intervals during this long war, people have tired of the struggle. We have tried to convince ourselves the threat is not so bad; the danger not so real. We have been tempted to accept that flowers and photographs memorialising victims can substitute for intelligence work and pre-emptive action. They cannot. Appeals to our common humanity will not win this war. We tell our children to sleep soundly because there are no monsters. It is a lie. There are monsters and if we sleep soundly it is because there are men and women prepared to hunt them down in the back alleys of the world before they strike. We cannot survive by waiting for the enemy. We can survive and win by penetrating Salman Abedi’s network, learning his intentions and hitting his associates before they hit us. Charles Faddis, ex-head of the CIA unit focused on weapons of mass destruction, took his team into Iraq ahead of the 2003 war.

PLEA Faddis says hope alone is not enough