Secrets, Lies and Videotapes

It's a long, long way from the desolation of the twin towers to the backstreets of Paris 60 years ago; from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to Noor Inayat Khan, a slip of an Indian girl operating her radio for Britain behind Nazi lines. The connection is there, though; irresistibly so.

Noor Inayat was brave beyond the call of any duty. She deserved her posthumous George Cross. But, as MRD Foot writes in his definitive history of the special operations executive in France: "With her, when she was captured, were not only the transmitter she had in her flat, but also ... a school exercise book in which she had recorded ... every message she had ever received or sent since reaching France."

Disaster. Those notes and records, once seized, were fatal for many others too. She shouldn't have kept them, a folly of youth and inexperience redeemed by her courage and resilience.

But where's parallel forgiveness for Mohammed, Osama's touted masterplanner of destruction? When the Pakistanis picked him up the other day, supposedly asleep in a quiet Rawalpindi suburb, they say - truth or tainted testimony - that they found a laptop and sundry numbers and addresses littering his bedroom. They could check his phone calls all over the world. And so the search for Bin Laden himself surges on - along with the most basic questions about al-Qaida.

Remember, this is the same Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who once told an al-Jazeera reporter that he and his "military committee" had designed September 11 to cause as many deaths as possible. "We were never short of potential martyrs. Indeed, we have a department called the department of martyrs." Nuclear targets? He was only setting them aside "for now" to concentrate on other things. The jargon sounds imposing enough, almost bureaucratic. But the reality is far different, almost pathetic. Both Mohammed and his mate Ramzi have been locked away. Both, long after Afghanistan, let alone 9/11, were still skulking in Pakistan. The "other things" they concentrated on before going nuclear included blowing up German tourists in a Tunisian synagogue, a target so soft as to shame their rhetoric.

Look at the facts and the record coldly. Try to wipe out so much of the surrounding hype. Mohammed was an amateur who did not take the most elementary precautions. Get me, get my contacts book. Beginner's night at the Pindi Palais.

And those mistakes aren't isolated ones. Bin Laden himself was first pinpointed because he kept using his mobile phone. The al-Qaida offices in Kabul were stuffed with material nobody, in their panic, had thought to destroy. The attacks mounted since - Bali, Tunisia, Mombasa, Yemen - have been no-brain, low-tech slaughter: car boots stuffed with TNT in hotel forecourts or tourist streets, gas tankers going pop. The ultimate image since 9/11 is of some inadequate trying to light the hidden explosives in his boots aboard a jumbo jet, but dropping the matches.

Where does proper, rational risk-assessment take us from here? To watchfulness, of course; to engaged intelligence and pursuit; to maximum effort and co-operation. Nobody sitting in a Mombasa hotel lobby wants inertia. Nobody guarding London hotel lobbies wants it either.

But what is that "proper" assessment? How do we stay "alert but not alarmed"? Tanks at Heathrow. What was that all about? A top cop says that military response was a blunt instrument - "more about the deterrent effect than catching anyone". Here he uncannily echoes George Tenet, CIA director. When you think something is being planned, but you don't know what, pull the yellow alert levers, says George, because that may make the terrorists think you're on to them.

I trawled that thesis before a government source and was brusquely told it was "a typical Guardian conspiracy theory". Well, maybe: except that the theory in question is cock-up, not conspiracy.

Al-Qaida, through the decade, has cocked up far more than it has delivered. September 11 was the exception, not the rule, rescued from failure by dozy data in FBI in-trays. And one cock-up inevitably begets another. Intelligence agencies that should have woken up earlier naturally stress the lethal menace of their enemy. Once bitten, twice shy. Politicians naturally have to take notice. A new industry naturally builds on such foundations.

The most ubiquitous reporting presence around is a soft-spoken man in a mauve tie called Frank Gardner - described, in BBC publicity, as "the only network TV journalist in Britain to be covering the war on terror full-time around the world". Our "security correspondent".

Frank had a particularly busy day last Thursday. Up on early morning Today duty scotching rumours that Osama had been captured. "My Whitehall sources have heard nothing of it..." Dampening euphoria that such capture, anyway, would mean the end of al-Qaida. It would be "ingenious" (sic) to suppose so, he said. Then patrolling from studio to studio through the next 13 hours before winding up on the 10 o'clock news to remind us that "Osama bin Laden isn't stupid".

I don't blame Gardner, a thoughtful Arabic specialist in earlier roles. But the job is a confection, haplessly designed to construct myths, not further understanding. Our insecurity correspondent: all of a piece with a "war against terror", which turns glibly to simple war.

We build them up; why don't we - surveying the shambles of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - let them down? Alert, you see, is the absolute opposite of alarmed.