Manchester Bombing: Inside UK’s Counterterrorism Failures

Tony Thorne, a former counterterrorism officer and advisor on the Apollo project, was shocked by the shortcomings he witnessed in Scotland. He described the process as incomplete and inadequate. Emails and internal memos from 2014 and 2015 further highlight the key issues encountered during the test run.

The system was plagued with problems, crashing regularly and timing out after just 10 minutes. Glitches were so severe that even simple tasks took significantly longer to complete. Basic searches often yielded results that were too broad, requiring officers to sift through documents manually. In some cases, the system would crash mid-search, and when officers logged back in, the search results would be different.

Another major difficulty faced by officers was the lack of seamless communication with other forces and agencies, which was one of the main goals of the National Counterterrorism Intelligence Agency (NCIA). Reports came in unreadable formats, and the inability to share intelligence with regions still using the old system was deemed a critical risk that could lead to intelligence failure.

The quality of intelligence that did make it onto the system was also a concern. The NCIA often received irrelevant information, while important intelligence sometimes failed to appear. Officers complained about the system automatically ingesting documents unrelated to terrorism without any resolution to the issue. The NCIA was built on the framework of the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System (HOLMES), which investigates past incidents. This caused difficulties in finding pertinent intelligence related to preventing future attacks.

A key feature borrowed from HOLMES was a search tool similar to Google, designed to help officers quickly retrieve documents. However, the tool was unreliable, producing different results for the same search term and unable to search for dates of birth. The presence of duplicated records on the NCIA further complicated the search process, as analysts were overwhelmed by the sheer number of duplicate files.

Despite these concerns, the NCIA rollout continued.