Outnumbered

Sum

mer has come early to London this year. The city's parks are parched, its riverside pubs and cafés packed. Londoners are enjoying the weather, but some detect in its unusual generosity the hidden curse of global warming. A similar pessimism greeted the life sentences handed out on the last day of April in a sticky courtroom to five British-raised terrorists for their involvement in a conspiracy to commit mass murder. The branch of the U.K.'s security service known as MI5 foiled the plot before any blood was spilled, but its success cloaks a tragic failure. That, at least, is the judgment of Britain's media.

Omar Khyam, the ringleader of the plot, planned with his accomplices to detonate fertilizer bombs in the London area. In an intensive surveillance operation, code-named Crevice, investigators listened to 3,500 hours of their targets chatting, watched them as they contacted sympathizers and sometimes even photographed their meetings.

"With regards to the babe, I am debating whether or not to say goodbye and so forth," Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of these sympathizers, told Khyam in a conversation recorded in February 2004. Khan was referring to his daughter, who would be born in May of that year and from whom he would take his leave on July 7, 2005, when he detonated a bomb on London's Underground, killing himself and six other passengers. That morning, 52 died as three other members of the cell carried out suicide bombings during rush hour. As it turned out, another of their number also had links to the Crevice plotters.

So why couldn't the July 2005 bombings have been stopped? MI5 has broken its tradition of secrecy to explain the reasons on its website. The detailed exposition boils down to one issue: resources. In Britain today, the security services suspect 1,600 people of involvement in terrorism. They cannot all be kept under watch, all the time. And so the London trial exposed a calculation that nations all over the world fear. Jihadists are able to recruit new members to their ranks faster than security services can keep track of them. As London basked in spring sunshine, its peace depended on quiet defenders who know that one day another terrorist will escape their notice.