63. Terror Strikes London: What did MI5 know? (Ep 2)

The Rest Is Classified

Goalhanger

History

4.6 • 732 Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fifteen months before the London bombings, MI5 had seen them. They had names, photographs, and addresses. Two of the men who would carry out the 7/7 attacks had already appeared in surveillance. And then… they vanished back into the noise. In this second episode of our 7/7 series, 20 years on from the attacks, David and Gordon unravel one of the most haunting questions of the entire investigation: could the 7/7 bombings have been stopped? Through forgotten files, garbled intelligence, and missed opportunities, a chilling pattern emerges - one where small decisions, fractured systems, and scarce resources combined to let something slip through. Follow the threads of Operation Crevice, eavesdropped conversations, and badly cropped photographs. Watch as one name - Mohammad Sidique Khan - surfaces again and again, just beneath the surface. The dots were there. But no one connected them. ------------------- To sign up to The Declassified Club, go to www.therestisclassified.com. To sign up to the free newsletter, go to: ⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up⁠ ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restisclassified It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. ------------------- Order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Email: [email protected] Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@triclassified⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0:00.0	For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series,
0:09.0	first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books,
0:13.1	join the Declassified Club at the rest is classified.com. Breaking news are getting from the PA newswire that there's been reports of an explosion outside Liverpool Street station
0:36.2	Well there may be for telling you have to be a significant
0:38.3	office of us to think for us.
0:40.3	We're moving back please.
0:43.3	We're going to be.
0:46.3	Most Londoners actually are not going to be afraid by this.
0:53.3	I think they're going to continue their daily business.
0:56.0	We considered the attack last week on British soil, an attack on the civilized world.
1:02.0	And what we are confronting here is an evil ideology.
1:07.0	It is not a clash of civilizations or civilized people.
1:13.7	Muslim or other feel revulsion at it.
1:17.9	Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.
1:25.5	It might be argued by some that MI5 should put everyone they came across under surveillance,
1:27.7	gathering intelligence on them until they were sure they did not pose a threat. Had MI5 put unidentified men, C, D, and E, under surveillance for the
1:36.3	next 15 months, it is very possible that they would have heard them talking about their plan to bomb
1:41.1	London, and they could have stopped them. Well, welcome to the rest is
1:46.0	classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrara. And that was a quote from a 2009
1:51.5	report by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament called Could 7-7 have been prevented.
1:58.8	And that, Gordon, is exactly the question we are going to look at in this episode.
2:03.4	So last time, just to refresh our dear listeners' memories, last time we looked at what happened
	...

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