**Spies, strategies and missed opportunities: How the lessons of 9/11 are still being learnt**

Countless leaders have said over the decades that a government’s first duty is to protect its people. On 11 September 2001, the US plainly failed to do so. The intelligence existed, but tragically no one connected the dots in time.

9/11, as the attacks on the US became known, helped define — together with the response to them — a generation of foreign, security and intelligence policy across the first two decades of this century.

On 11 September 2001, as al-Qaeda’s suicide pilots flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, I was just finishing a deployment in our Middle East bureau. A Palestinian taxi driver was taking me through the pine-covered hills west of Jerusalem to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport when he suddenly turned up the car radio. “Something big has happened in America,” he said. He was not exaggerating. 2,977 victims died that day.

The attacks did not come from nowhere. For years before 2001, the CIA had known about the al-Qaeda network and its exiled Saudi leader, Osama Bin Laden. It even had a taskforce devoted to tracking him down.

Nine days after the 11 September attacks, then US President George W Bush declared the “War on Terror”.

Over the next 25 years, there were many intelligence successes as well as failures on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the successes were plots that were stopped, suspects arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned.

But what about the wider picture? How have intelligence gathering, counter-terrorism and strategic planning evolved in the 25 years since the worst terrorist attack in US history?

No one can dispute that 9/11 was a huge intelligence failure, or more precisely, a failure of imagination within the US intelligence community. At the time, both the CIA and the FBI held information that, if properly shared, could have prevented what happened.

The 9/11 Commission Report that followed blamed “failures of imagination, policy, capabilities and management” in the US government. It concluded that the CIA and FBI failed to properly assess intelligence, share information with each other and take enough steps to disrupt the plot.

That most basic lesson has since been largely — though not entirely — learned, and cooperation between Western intelligence agencies is vastly better than it was in 2001. The old rivalries between, for example, MI5 and Police Counter Terrorism have faded, first through regional “fusion centres” across the UK and now, most recently, through the creation of the high-security Counter Terrorism Operations Centre in London. There, MI5 intelligence officers may sit literally beside police officers whose role is to take the executive action needed to stop a terrorist plot. They may also sit next to a US federal agent from the FBI or a language specialist seconded from GCHQ.

Since 9/11, the US intelligence system has also been fundamentally reorganised, with the creation of a National Counter Terrorism Center just outside Washington DC and a Director of National Intelligence to make sure information is shared where needed among the 18 separate US intelligence agencies. The CIA’s relationship with its UK counterpart, the Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6, is perhaps the closest in the world. That is reinforced by the Five Eyes alliance, which shares intelligence among the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Even so, disastrous failures of intelligence, assessment and strategic planning have still happened since the planes struck the Twin Towers. In the build-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, MI6 unwisely allowed its intelligence to become politicised, leading to the organisation’s worst reputational blow since the betrayal by the double agent Kim Philby and other Soviet moles in the 1950s and 60s.

Under intense political pressure from Washington to produce evidence that Iraq, under President Saddam Hussein, still possessed “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMDs), MI6 provided Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government with intelligence that later proved flawed. Iraq had indeed possessed WMDs in the past, but they had all been destroyed after the 1991 Gulf War.

After the 2003 Iraq invasion, MI6 carried out a complete overhaul of how it assesses raw intelligence, known as CX, from agents in the field. Today there is a clear divide between agent runners — whose task is to gather intelligence from sources in places such as Iran, North Korea or inside proscribed terrorist groups like al-Qaeda — and the reports team, whose job is to test and challenge that intelligence, often sending it back for more substantiation.

“The [2003] Iraq war was based on deeply flawed intelligence,” says General Sir Richard Shirreff, who served in Iraq as a divisional commander. “Have we learnt from it? No, I think we’re bad at learning… It was so obvious as a Commander that we were heading for strategic failure”.

After the Iraq invasion, another inquiry followed, ending in the Butler Review. It found that the UK’s intelligence on Iraq’s alleged WMD programme “was seriously flawed and heavily reliant on unverified sources”.

MI5, the Security Service, has also had its own failures, alongside many unquestionable successes in disrupting terrorist plots. “After 9/11,” says Lord Jonathan Evans, who led MI5 from 2007-2013, “the assessment was that by far the most pressing security threat to the UK was the terrorist threat from al-Qaeda and associated individuals and groups”.

But with a database then containing more than 20,000 “Subjects of Interest” and many investigations running at once, MI5 faced — and still faces — the daily challenge of deciding which leads to prioritise. It has not always chosen correctly.

In 2005 it failed to stop the 7/7 London suicide bombings, which killed 52 people. The Security Service knew of Mohammed Sidique Khan, who turned out to be the ringleader, but it did not know what he was about to do. The Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 was another more recent failure.

Today, the terrorist threat has not disappeared but, Lord Evans says, “the picture has changed. Non-state terrorism remains a serious concern but state threats… have become increasingly serious and are at least as severe a national security concern as non-state terrorism. These threats come, in different forms, from Russia, Iran, their proxies and from China.”

It could also be argued that US President Donald Trump’s decision to join Israel in attacking Iran this year was another failure of intelligence imagination. All of America’s allies in the Gulf knew there was a serious risk that Iran would retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz. The warnings were there, yet Trump seemed to have no counter-strategy when Iran did exactly what it had threatened to do, causing major disruption in global energy markets.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was widespread fear that a second wave was coming. In fact, al-Qaeda itself promised “a swarm of planes” that would strike more buildings. In the rush to prevent such an attack, numerous human rights abuses were committed by the US and its allies. Suspects were seized in Afghanistan or Pakistan, often on the flimsiest of tips. Hundreds were flown, bound, blindfolded and wrapped in nappies, halfway around the world to a makeshift cage prison at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were held without trial.

Human rights groups condemned this as a stain on America’s moral conscience.

Scandals over prisoner abuse in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan later emerged, and some of those involved were held to account, but critics say more senior figures escaped consequences. Even so, the US still uses detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay, and when it deported more than 200 men from the US to El Salvador’s controversial Terrorism Confinement Centre in 2025.

Britain also had its own human rights stains in the immediate post-9/11 period. In 2004, MI6 was complicit in the abduction and rendition of a Libyan Islamist, Abdelhakim Belhaj, and his wife from Thailand to Libya. There he spent years in prison and was tortured by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. The case eventually became public and led to a full apology delivered to Parliament by the Attorney General in 2018. Today, in-house lawyers are said to be the fastest-growing department within the agencies.

“We spent the first 20 years of this century focussing almost entirely on counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency,” said Sir Alex Younger, who was Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service from 2014-2020. The late MI6 chief was speaking to me at a literary festival shortly after leaving the top job, adding: “We missed the rise of China as a military power and as a strategic challenge”.

Similarly, General Shirreff wrote the political thriller “War With Russia” in 2016, in which he predicted Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In the years after 9/11 and the ensuing “War on Terror” — while Western countries were occupied fighting the Taliban, ISIS or trying to manage the chaotic occupation of Iraq — Russia and China launched huge rearmament programmes with innovations such as hypersonic missiles, which have significantly reduced the military edge once enjoyed by Nato.

“The West’s mistake was not simply that it was distracted by counter-terrorism after 9/11,” agrees Sam Olsen, Chief Analyst at the security intelligence firm Sibylline. “It also misunderstood the nature of China’s rise, assuming that economic integration would lead to political convergence.”

China, like Iran, Russia and North Korea, is regarded as a “hard target” for intelligence gathering. In 2001, biometric data was still relatively new, but the later use of facial, iris and gait recognition has all added to the modern challenge of moving agents and agent runners across borders without being detected.

So how well — or poorly — does Western intelligence understand China?

Along with Russia, China is now a top intelligence target for MI6. “Western intelligence understands a great deal about China,” says Sam Olsen of Sibylline. “The bigger danger is that it sees the individual pieces without always understanding what they add up to. Chinese power is no longer just about ships, missiles and troops. It increasingly lies in semiconductors, critical minerals, batteries, ports, telecommunications and industrial capacity... So the problem is often less a failure of intelligence collection than a failure of strategic interpretation”.

Twenty-five years ago, on the day of the 9/11 attacks, US intelligence officers did have pieces of the puzzle — an analogy spies like to use — but together they failed to assemble them and see clearly what was coming. Great intelligence gathering is useless if it cannot be turned into strategic advantage.

The world of intelligence and counter-terrorism has clearly changed almost beyond recognition in the quarter-century since that cloudless blue September morning in New York. With the arrival of AI and quantum computing, it will keep changing, and in some areas at exponential speed.

But in a world full of competing narratives and interests, Western countries do not have a monopoly on intelligence failures, blind spots or strategic misjudgements. Other notable examples include Russia’s disastrous full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and what some have called Israel’s “own 9/11” — the Hamas-led raid from Gaza on 7 October 2023.

In the end, the biggest questions still concern major strategic national decisions. Was it right for Britain to join President Bush’s invasion of Iraq? Was it right to join the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and then abandon the country to the Taliban in a hurried exit two decades later? These, and many other questions, continue to echo.