‘An honorary Muslim’: The police #spycops who monitored London's mosques in plain sight

One morning shortly after 9/11, with the remains of the Twin Towers still smouldering, thousands dead and missing and the world slowly accepting that many old certainties had vanished, two police officers met in a cafe across the road from London’s police headquarters at New Scotland Yard.

Both men were detectives with Special Branch - as the intelligence-gathering sections of British police forces are known - and both are said to have had long experience of counter-terrorism operations.

The al-Qaeda attacks had entirely dwarfed any plots that these men had encountered, however, and they must have realised that some of their previous investigations were looking somewhat trivial.

As they drank their coffees, the two men began to discuss plans to map London’s Muslim communities and organisations in a way that would enable them to gather intelligence about al-Qaeda’s influence within the city, and the risks that it posed. 

At this time, Scotland Yard’s Special Branch was facing its own threat. Having already lost the lead role in tackling Irish republican militancy to the UK’s domestic security service, MI5, it was facing what amounted to a hostile takeover by the Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch, a unit which it had regarded as a rival for decades.

In the new, post-9/11 world of policing, Special Branch needed to find a role for itself.
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‘An honorary Muslim’: The police spy who monitored London's mosques in plain sight: