MARCH 22, 2017
LONDON, ENGLAND
2:20 P.M.
Another day in Europe’s third largest city, population about eight million.*
Tourists with jackets zipped all the way up walk onto Westminster Bridge. To their right stand the historic Houses of Parliament and London’s iconic timepiece, Big Ben. On the far side of the bridge, across the River Thames, the London Eye towers over the skyline, rising 443 feet in the air. The midafternoon sun is low on the horizon, giving a reflective golden shine to the river and Parliament’s windows. None of the fifty-seven tourists walking across the legendary span knows the precise number of closed-circuit surveillance cameras watching their every move. Americans Kurt and Melissa Cochran are photographed meandering slowly, “just being touristy,” in Melissa’s words, celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The couple from Utah arrived in London just three hours ago.
Westminster Bridge is more than 250 meters long, its seven arches painted the same deep green as the padded benches in the House of Commons. The tourists now making their way across it are from more than a dozen nations: America, South Korea, Romania, France, Portugal, and more. They walk in small clusters with their travel companions, taking in some of the most interesting sights in the world.
All feel relatively safe.
They are not.
Britain’s unique approach to fighting terrorism began with the Irish Republican Army, a group known worldwide as the IRA. For a century, efforts to gain Irish independence from Great Britain have involved acts of terror. Ireland became independent in 1923, but Northern Ireland still remains part of the United Kingdom. The IRA fight for an independent Northern Ireland is the reason for the security cameras and barbed wire surrounding England’s most iconic structures, reminding Londoners that mass murder could occur at any time. The IRA is why one-fourth of the world’s security devices are employed in the United Kingdom. In addition, Parliament has passed special laws allowing a terror suspect to be imprisoned for twenty-eight days without being charged. Unlike the United States, where such perceived violations of civil liberties often result in a public outcry, many decades of experiencing terror bombings means general acceptance of these measures in Britain. Also, in this country there is no need for official authorization when it comes to executing terrorists. Military groups like the Special Air Service, England’s version of the US Army Special Forces units, can legally assassinate on order.
Ireland’s battle against British imperialism dates to well before independence, but “the Troubles,” as the modern British terror war with the IRA is known, really began in 1969. Riots in Northern Ireland led to the deployment of troops into this disputed corner of the British Empire. Operation Banner, as the incursion was named, would support pro-British Protestant factions and local police—also known as the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
What began as an intervention became an occupation; British troops would not leave Northern Ireland until 2007, thirty-eight years later. The conflict quickly split along religious lines, with Protestants supporting the RUC and the British military, while Catholics were loyal to the IRA. That paramilitary organization dates back to 1919 and is dedicated to ending British rule in Ireland. Its primary tactics are raids, ambush, and sabotage.
In short, the IRA fights a guerrilla war. It also acts as a de facto police force, punishing child molesters and drug pushers with “kneecapping”—a bullet fired into that joint. Extreme cases will earn the “six-pack,” gunshots to the knees, elbows, and ankles that would cripple any human being.
But at least the targets live.
The same cannot be said for those who betray the IRA. Informants are abducted, severely tortured, driven to a remote location with a hood over their head, then shot in the back of the skull. Their bodies—often naked—are dumped in a public place.
The Troubles soon spread to England itself. In one brutal attack, an offshoot group known as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) killed and wounded more than two hundred in coordinated raids on British pubs in 1974.
Perhaps the most infamous day in the history of the Irish rebellion, in 1972, would be named “Bloody Sunday” for the enormity of the act—and this time, it wasn’t the IRA doing the killing. British troops massacred a group of unarmed civil rights protesters in the city of Derry, murdering fourteen. This brutality against civilians, in full view of the public, only intensified the division between British and Irish.*
In an act of revenge, PIRA members placed a fifty-pound bomb on board the fishing boat of British royal and World War II hero Earl Louis Mountbatten in the summer of 1979. The radio-controlled detonation took place as Mountbatten was piloting his craft out of the harbor in Mullaghmore, in the Republic of Ireland, site of his summer home. The blast immediately severed Mountbatten’s legs, but he was alive when pulled from the ocean. The seventy-nine-year-old died shortly afterward, along with three other passengers on the vessel. The murders shocked the world.
By the end of the British occupation, some three thousand civilians, six hundred soldiers, and three hundred police officers had died. In addition, an estimated thirty thousand Irish and British citizens were wounded. In the long history of Great Britain’s military, no campaign lasted longer.
The one positive to come out of the Troubles is the ability of the British government to predict terror attacks. Intelligence gathering and counterterrorism were clumsy in the first days of the Irish campaign, a direct result of a power dispute between the British Army and the RUC. But over the decades, the military, police, and MI5—British domestic security—learned to work together. Their methods of cultivating information and stopping attacks are still in use today.
And they are needed—because ISIS knows London is a prize to be attacked. Britain is home to more than two million Muslims, with almost half of that figure Pakistani. An additional sixteen percent are from Bangladesh, a Muslim nation to the east of India. Followers of Islam account for the majority of terror suspects in the United Kingdom. British authorities have “stop and search” power over anyone, so tension between police and the Muslim community is high.
It is 4:00 a.m. on July 7, 2005, a Thursday, as four “home-grown” Muslim extremists don backpacks laden with improvised explosive devices—homemade bombs more commonly called IEDs. Two of the terrorists pause to make a video explaining why they are about to kill people. Thirty-year-old Mohammad Sidique Khan is particularly expressive.
“I and thousands like me are forsaking everything for what we believe. Our drive and motivation doesn’t come from tangible commodities that this world has to offer. Our religion is Islam, obedience to the one true God and following the footsteps of the final prophet messenger,” says the slight man with the dark-black beard. “Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters.”
The would-be assassins travel by rented car from Leeds, four hours north of London. At the town of Luton, they transfer to a train heading into the city, arriving at the King’s Cross station at 8:23 a.m. Hundreds of thousands of commuters are using the underground rail system and city buses to get to work. People walk close together through crowded stations, then press tightly into standing-room-only railway cars, lost in their own thoughts.
At King’s Cross, the four terrorists split up, heading in different directions. Three board separate trains on the Tube, as the London Underground is also known. Hasib Hussain, eighteen, remains aboveground, waiting to board a double-decker bus. Each target has been preselected for the large number of passengers on board. The movements of these murderers will later be confirmed on closed-circuit television cameras.
The three subway bombs are all detonated at precisely 8:50 a.m. London panics. Survivors are stuck in railway cars, some breaking windows with umbrellas to escape. On the Circle Line train, where the explosion takes place between Liverpool Street and Aldgate, one London resident is partially blinded by a fragment of the bomber’s shinbone.
The entire Underground system is shut down by 9:50 a.m.
But not before teenage terrorist Hussain detonates his backpack on the double-decker. The Number 30 bus is traveling through Central London, a place where streets are bumper-to-bumper with vehicles. The sidewalks are also packed with pedestrians. Greek-born bus driver George Psaradakis has been forced to deviate from his normal route due to road closures caused by the Underground bombings. Thirty people got off the bus because of the change, drastically reducing the loss of life when the terror bomb explodes. Lisa French, an employee of a British telephone service, initially sits down next to Hasib Hussain, but there is not enough room for her to open her laptop, due to his large rucksack. So, she moves forward a few seats.
The blast breaks Ms. French’s teeth, knocks her unconscious, causes multiple deep cuts and bruises, and punctures her eardrums.
But she lives.
Thirteen other passengers, including Hussain, do not.
Many more would have died were it not for a random stroke of luck: the route change brought on by the bombings means that the double-decker explosion occurs directly in front of the British Medical Association. A conference is being held inside. At the sound of the explosion, dozens of doctors rush outside and immediately attend to victims, saving countless lives.
Still, fifty-two people are killed in the four bombings. More than seven hundred others are injured. This makes it the largest-ever terror attack on British soil. Images of stunned London commuters in their workday suits and dresses, faces bleeding and white bandages wrapped around their heads, shatter the illusion that Britain’s terror problems will end with the cease-fire in Ireland.
In fact, it feels like a new war is beginning.
Which it is.
Déjà vu.
Twelve years later, on the afternoon of March 22, 2017, Americans Kurt and Melissa Cochran are almost across the Westminster Bridge on their midafternoon tour of London. They have no idea a brand-new terrorist tactic is just about to be activated—and in a matter of seconds, their lives will never be the same.
Without warning, a rented Hyundai Tucson swerves out of the bus lane. But rather than enter the roadway, the SUV jumps the curb onto the sidewalk and continues accelerating, reaching more than seventy-five miles per hour. Kurt Cochran catches sight of the vehicle from the corner of his eye.
The next morning’s papers will call him a hero for what happens next. Instinctively, the fifty-two-year-old musician pushes his wife out of the way, taking the full brunt of the charging vehicle. He is thrown over the bridge’s parapet, onto concrete below. Paramedics arrive quickly, but not in time to save him.
Melissa is knocked unconscious. A leg and a rib are broken. The next thing she will remember is being “on the ground, with someone’s hand on my head.” Melissa Cochran spends a week in a London hospital and then returns to the United States.
Back on the bridge, the Hyundai continues speeding down the sidewalk, pedestrians flying into the air as they are struck. This is now a scene of carnage, with bodies strewn everywhere. In the span of just thirty seconds, more than fifty people are killed or hurt on the Westminster Bridge.
Retired window cleaner Leslie Rhodes, a seventy-five-year-old described by friends as a “lovely man,” dies instantly, as does forty-four-year-old Londoner Aysha Frade, a mother of two on her way to pick up her children.
Romanian tourist Andreea Cristea, thirty-one, who had recently taken a glamorous nighttime photo on the bridge with the Thames and London Eye as a backdrop, cannot get out of the way as the Hyundai barrels closer. Given no choice, Cristea leaps over the side, falling eighty feet into the swift, cold Thames. She is knocked unconscious as she strikes the water. And though the thirty-one-year-old tourist will be rescued from the current by a river cruise boat, she will die at the hospital.
And still the ISIS driver keeps going. The terrorist is using a technique known as “vehicle ramming.” That lethal action has become popular around the world for the ease and simplicity with which it can be executed. There is little chance of detection beforehand by law enforcement, no bomb or gun being required. This leads authorities to dub vehicle ramming as the “poor man’s weapon of mass destruction.” All that’s needed is a car, a crowd, and a terrorist unafraid to step on the gas and drive straight at other human beings for as long as he is able. Between 2014 and 2017 there are seventeen such terror attacks, leading to 173 fatalities and 667 injuries.*
The Hyundai’s driver is Khalid Masood, fifty-two, born in Britain as Adrian Elms. He converted to Islam and changed his name after being sent to prison for selling drugs, where he became radicalized. Masood has made a pilgrimage to Mecca and identifies with ISIS. He is old for a terrorist, most of whom are under thirty. Masood believes that he will die a martyr for his faith, feted as he arrives in paradise.
But while Masood’s life has been chaotic, filled with drugs and police altercations, his preparation for today’s terror attack has been meticulous. Two days ago, he performed reconnaissance on the bridge, walking his kill zone on foot. Mass murders are an act of jihad to Masood, done in accordance with the Koran as opposition to Western coalition forces fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
Eighty-two seconds after his murder spree begins, Masood is shot dead by London police. He has killed six. As he hoped, word of the heinous act travels around the world, enhancing the brutal reputation of ISIS.
The terror attack in London gains the attention of a very powerful person. “A great American, Kurt Cochran, was killed in the London terror attack,” the recently elected American president, Donald Trump, announces on Twitter. “My prayers and condolences are with his family and friends.”
Although ISIS sees the reaction, it does not process it realistically. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi still believes his terror organization is winning the jihad.
When London mayor Sadiq Khan says the deadly attacks “are part and parcel of living in a great global city,” President Trump returns to Twitter.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he types. The president’s statement infuriates his opponents, who accuse him of using the terror attacks for political gain.
And he may be. But there is no question the United States is changing how it will fight the war on terror.
There is, indeed, a new sheriff in town.