Spies, strategies and missed opportunities: How the lessons of 9/11 are still being learnt
Twenty-five years on, the attacks have come to define a generation of foreign, security and intelligence policy, the BBC's security correspondent writes.
The first duty of a government, countless leaders over the decades have said, is to safeguard its population. On 11 September 2001 the US manifestly failed to do that. The intelligence was there, yet tragically, nobody joined up the dots in time.
9/11, as the attacks on the US became known, came to define – along with the response – a generation of foreign, security and intelligence policy for the first two decades of this century.
On 11 September 2001, as al-Qaeda's suicide pilots flew those hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, I was just finishing a deployment in our Middle East bureau. As a Palestinian taxi driver drove me through the pine-clad hills west of Jerusalem to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport he suddenly turned up the car's radio. "Something big has happened in America," he said. He wasn't exaggerating. 2,977 victims died that day.
The Security Service, MI5, has also had its own failures, amid numerous undoubted successes, in foiling terrorist plots. "After 9/11," says Lord Jonathan Evans, who ran 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".